I am actually developing the software that a major (non-disclosure, ugh, but there aren't many major DSL providers left who can shell out the seven figures for development of this software so...) DSL provider is going to be using to determine where to put DSLAM's. A DSLAM allows people more than 20,000' form a CO to get DSL, basically like a little outpost CO.
Anyway, the rules for what DSL can cross are rather picky. DSL cannot cross a crossconnect, so if you are 500' from a CO and there is a crossconnect between you and the CO, no luck. It cannot cross a copper-fiber bridge, another, you can be 500', don't matter. There are more oddities, but it works out to - if you don't have a straight line of copper going to the CO, you are SOL.
OTOH this company currently recalculates who can and cannot get cable every night (using more of our software, yummy) and updates their db. INterestingly enough more often than new people being able to get DSL, people lose the ability to get DSL - though this usually signals the phone company to send a crew out to run some copper around the x-connect they put in yesterday, while you wait on hold asking for tech support.
The defense of the MS business model is very simple: We make shitloads of money. Shitloads. Our ROI is one of the best, not just in the industry, but in the whole world.
As has been said several million times, here on/. and elswhere, MS is not in the business of making software, they are in the business of making money. If you want to find someone in the business of making software look for things with a BSD license.
Okay, there is technically a rat's chance in the cat pen at the pound that this is the guy's real name, but I suspect someone snuck a message in under the reporter's nose.
The information systems analyst is named Guy Montag. Go Ray Bradbury!
I don't believe he snuck that past both the reporter and editors.
I figure I need to protect my rights, so I came up with a first draft of a new.signature.
It bothers me a great deal that this signature is not a joke.
Please do not mod this as "Funny." It is not.
Anyway, as i thought it might be useful to some of you all, here is my new.signature
------------
License Agreement
You must agree to this license agreement in order to read the main body of this email. If you do not agree with the terms of this license agreement you must not read the body of this email.
Because of blatant intellectual property theft embodied in the Microsoft Passport Terms of Use (http://www.passport.com/Consumer/TermsOfUse.asp) I am forced to copyright and include this licensing agreement in every email I send. I apologize for bandwidth wasted on these bits.
All rights to ideas and text contained within this email, or any subportion thereof, belong solely to Brian McCallister. Receipt or SMTP based retransmission of this email do not grant you any rights, general or specific, in regards to the content of this email.
Permission is specifically denied to post, read, or transmit the contents, or any part thereof, of this email to or over Microsoft Passport Services or Affiliated Services or Programs.
Permission is specificaly denied for anyone affiliated with Microsoft Passport to read or possess a copy of this message. Permission is specifically denied for Microsoft, or any Passport Business Affiliate to use information or ideas presented in this message, or any part thereof.
If you know of or suspect any violations of this agreement please contact the Electronic Freedom Foundation at http://www.eff.org
I wonder if the DMCA can be used to protect my email?
Sounds like _War of the Rats_ by David Robbins
on
Enemy At The Gates
·
· Score: 1
This sounds like a highly bastardized moview version of David L. Robbins' excellent War of the Rats novel. The characters are definately identical from reading Kat's description of them.
It is sad that the director/screenwriter (adapter) chose to focus more on the love/romance than the brilliant duel the novel evokes. Because it is an adaptation of the novel (which I loved, in case you haven't gotten that idea yet) I may go see this. Sounds like a dud in comparison though.
Not that Theoretical - Mitnick did just this
on
Security Hole In TCP
·
· Score: 3
Unfortunately I do not have my source, but if I remember right Mitnick did a smurf just like this to execute a blind man in the middle attack.
It was a case of IP spoofing against Shimomura. While he couldn't see results (IP spoof after all) the ability to guess ISN's allowed him to play the role of one of the computers involved in the transaction.
Swing OTOH, is a bit of a bloaty pig, layering far too much code on top of the underlying (native) GUI.
Umh, Swing is a lightweight GUI. The old AWT was the nightmare that built on top of native GUI's. Swing does away with the native GUI for 99% of its widgets. In fact, the only native widget it uses is a frame so that it can open a non-contained frame. That can be avoided for everything except the main frame of the application if you don't mind contained frames for dialogs.
I've not worked with Qt before, but IMHO Swing rocks for GUI construction. Now if we could just find a Java 1.3 native compiler I would be ectstatic.
Here is a really silly thought, but Usenet Archives would be a great tool for people looking for Prior Art to fight patents. If it is tech. related it has seen life on Usenet.
Not that this will ever get modde dup once there are 150 2 or higher replies though. Ah well. More wisdom thrown into tht ebottomless ether of/.
I'm going to step on a (admittedly wide) limb here and say that sci-fi goes back to the early roots of literature. Some of the earliest recorded work, say Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the book I cannot rememebr but written by the Popul Vu people of South America with a section generally referred to as "The Wooden People" all can be considered Sci-Fi in that they base their stories around extrapolations of the currently understood functioning of the world. The term "science" as it is presently use had really been invented yet, but the infatuation with speculative, extrapolative, fiction was at the core of much work. Gilgamesh and the Popul Vu both predate such nice things and famous writers as Aristotle.
Speaking of Snow Crash and fact becoming fiction. Both that work, and Vinge's True names, and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier are regular required reading in CS Phd programs. Snow Crash in particular I know for a fact is required by one professor at Georgia tech.
It is a nifty idea, but you'll lose money. Any time I, or any of the various geeks I work with, is tired of reading docs online we use these cool things that come attached to our computers called printers.
For some reason system support seems to think everyone in software development needs LaserJets. Their print quality is as high as almost any bound book, and we don't have to pay a penny.
A lot of the performance hit (granted very small in practice) with gnu C++ stems from stack issues because gcc converts to C.
What happens in a non C-stack compiler? The only one I am remotely familiar with is Stackless Python, which is, obviously, impossible to validly compare to gcc, but avoids the C stack. By allowing frame changes the way it does (cannot remember the term the devs using it like for changing execution point between frames, grrr, it should in theory allow much more efficient virtual method calls.
Ah well, this is all one more reason to go back to grad school again and build better compilers:)
All the publishing industry needs to do is apply paper-ware licenses to books. The license can allow you to give the book away, but forbids re-sale of the book. This would quite happily kill off the beautiful thing called the used book store, but it would get their point across:)
This would, after all, simply be taking a cue from the industry that has made Amazon so, umh, sucessful.
This is painfully true. The GPL does not st code free, but merely gives it a prettier prison. If it were FREE there would be no restrictions on how it is used.
Case in point: If Linux were actually free software, not locked in GPL, MSFT could cull whatthey desired fromit to include in Windows without having to open Windows up.
There is the critical distinction: Free, as long as you do.... means it IS NOT FREE. It has a price, therefore it is not free.
Now, I am not talking free as in beer, but free as in first amendment (which we no longer even have in the states as long as I cannot call the state capitol and tell them I have planted 2000lbs f eplosives there and have it be legal).
No one wants freedom, we don't trust it. We all want to call our desires freedom because it sounds nice, and it might be a prettier prison, but they are very rarely, if ever, actually desires for freedom.
The GPL is a actually a much more restrive, if prettier, prison than regular proprietary source code. The reason being that with proprietary code the potential exists for it to become actually, truly free. With the GPL it is locked into the GPL in perpetuity. It is like releasing someone in the US from jail, telling them they are free, and letting em walk away. They look, feel, and think they are free, but if they try to exercise that freedom, by say smoking some bud, beating up and old lady, or calling the white house and claiming to be a sniper looking at the door at that very moment, then they find out how little freedom they have. You cannot do what you want, you are not free. You merely have a more comfy, better disguised enclosure.
The news that halving your caloric intake will drastically extend your lifespan has been known for a long time. This has been tested on many different animals, and informally tested on humans (by observation that lifespans into the 120's have been observed, but only in cultures/geographies that tend towards very low food resources).
The important news in this article is the finding of the gene that will cause the metabolism to do this automatically! In the words of a doctor whose name I cannot remember, ~"when good food is in front of you, it is damn hard to not eat it if you are hungry." Halving caloric input, unless through some tricking of the metabolism via keytone production ala the Atkins diet (nightmare) will make you hungry. Obviously 98% of the population in the world, not just the US, lacks the willpower to not eat when they are A) hungry and B) yummy food is in front of them. It just appears Americans have worse willpower because we tend to have more yummy food in front of us than almost anyone else in the world (when i first moved to the States from Scotland I noticed portions at restaurants are about 2.5x as large).
In all likelihood a parallel gene will be found in humans, and while tweaking it will have weird side effects, it will be done in the lidetime of the average/. reader. If means are found to reverse or slow the gravity aging effects then the world will become really interesting. Right now, though, this would just result in more frail, stooped, old people running around:)
java.lang.System.out.println would be the proper package, but you are right, it is not static so the better solution would be:
import java.lang.system.*;
out.println("This does work.");
Frankly, I pretty much never work with system.out as I usually declare my own input/output streams connected to various other sources like sockets and StringWriters as the concept of being able to see the console just doesn't happen much.
easy to fix
import System.out.println;
println("wow this is easy. Stop bitching about a truly object oriented function. Now you can redefine println whever you want in anothe rpackage and not have to deal with it being a reserved word like in B&M languages. Ever try to redefine printf? Bugger off until you learn the language.");
Actually, the protocol Zix uses may be even worse than you all have been pointing out. Even assuming it was fixed to upload and download from SecureMail (and Yahoo if you are using them to access ZixMail) the signature encryption algorithm they are using seems to be a security through obscurity scheme.
About three weeks ago I contaced Zix through a series of e-mails asking for detailed information on their protocol and algorithms. They, impressively, sent me back a marketingese "white paper" (I only put it in quotes because it was more brochure than real technology white paper) within two hours. They started out on good footing, customer service has a quick turnaround.
Upon examination of this "white paper" I sent back a few more questions looking at glaring holes in thge paper - what hash algorithm they use for signing all of the data going back and forth from securewhatever.com while establishing the session key for the Triple-DES encrypted message (running on memory of their protocol here as I threw out their white paper at the end of this).
Anyway, I shot that (easiest answer) and a couple others (the plaintext over http as many people have pointed out) questions back figuring I misunderstood something, and they again replied right away.
They sent me yet another copy of their marketing "white paper" and didn't answer any questions. I replied once more, stating in clear terms my questions were not answered in that white paper, and were vaild questions to ask before entrusting my data to their service. No reply that time.
It downright scares me when they won't tell you what algorithm they use for anything other than their primary body encryption (triple-des). It seems their protocol can be attacked fairly easily to spoof messages, and in fact relying on the one server (though a standard pki solution as well) that is under their control and, er, not that I would ever test this, but have "heard" from people, looks to have some unpatched holes in certain daemons allowing for buffer overflow attacks, and probably is quite suscepable to DDoS attacks, well. Anyway.
On a completely different note - why anyone would bother with a fancy, fallible, protocol in order to support a session based key for symmetric encryption is beyond me when the encryption decryption process instead of using something like ElGamal (now free! woot!) and using private/public key authentification is beyond me. Their clients are not going to be major corporations sending large documents, but rather many many individuals sending small documents. Message size (plaintext*2) and encrypt decrypt speed (*(10..100) depending on implementation) are still not enough hassle for e-mail sized documents that it seems silly to me. Ah well. It just leaves the door open for when i finally put SecureJMail up on sourceforge.
When talking about holding data hostage there may be a problem with using encryption software with standard encryption algorithms.
For instance, say I encrypt a bunch of my data with a piece of software that implements standard (old style) 128k DES encryption using a known key (I chose the key). Let's say the company that created this software is called WeEncrypt.com.
Well, say our records grow and grow, and WeEncrypt doesn't and it turns out they implemented the (open) DES algorithm really poorly so it encrypts/decrypts at about 1/1000th optimal speed (common problem). If you then move to another company, say SuperSecurity.com that uses the exact same encryption algorithm (vanilla DES straight from the IBM whitepapers way back) are you allowed to use that to decrypt the data encrypted by WeEncrypt's software? I suspect under DMCA, no. Even worse, the DMCA may well make it illegal for both companies to encrypt and decrypt data to the same format (DES).
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the rules for what DSL can cross are rather picky. DSL cannot cross a crossconnect, so if you are 500' from a CO and there is a crossconnect between you and the CO, no luck. It cannot cross a copper-fiber bridge, another, you can be 500', don't matter. There are more oddities, but it works out to - if you don't have a straight line of copper going to the CO, you are SOL.
OTOH this company currently recalculates who can and cannot get cable every night (using more of our software, yummy) and updates their db. INterestingly enough more often than new people being able to get DSL, people lose the ability to get DSL - though this usually signals the phone company to send a crew out to run some copper around the x-connect they put in yesterday, while you wait on hold asking for tech support.
And you trust Verisign certs?
Except for Challenger we quite possibly would :P
The defense of the MS business model is very simple: We make shitloads of money. Shitloads. Our ROI is one of the best, not just in the industry, but in the whole world.
As has been said several million times, here on /. and elswhere, MS is not in the business of making software, they are in the business of making money. If you want to find someone in the business of making software look for things with a BSD license.
Okay, there is technically a rat's chance in the cat pen at the pound that this is the guy's real name, but I suspect someone snuck a message in under the reporter's nose.
The information systems analyst is named Guy Montag. Go Ray Bradbury!
I don't believe he snuck that past both the reporter and editors.
-FrumsI figure I need to protect my rights, so I came up with a first draft of a new .signature.
It bothers me a great deal that this signature is not a joke.
Please do not mod this as "Funny." It is not.
Anyway, as i thought it might be useful to some of you all, here is my new .signature
------------License Agreement
You must agree to this license agreement in order to read the main body of this email. If you do not agree with the terms of this license agreement you must not read the body of this email.
Because of blatant intellectual property theft embodied in the Microsoft Passport Terms of Use (http://www.passport.com/Consumer/TermsOfUse.asp) I am forced to copyright and include this licensing agreement in every email I send. I apologize for bandwidth wasted on these bits.
All rights to ideas and text contained within this email, or any subportion thereof, belong solely to Brian McCallister. Receipt or SMTP based retransmission of this email do not grant you any rights, general or specific, in regards to the content of this email.
Permission is specifically denied to post, read, or transmit the contents, or any part thereof, of this email to or over Microsoft Passport Services or Affiliated Services or Programs.
Permission is specificaly denied for anyone affiliated with Microsoft Passport to read or possess a copy of this message. Permission is specifically denied for Microsoft, or any Passport Business Affiliate to use information or ideas presented in this message, or any part thereof.
If you know of or suspect any violations of this agreement please contact the Electronic Freedom Foundation at http://www.eff.org
I wonder if the DMCA can be used to protect my email?
It is sad that the director/screenwriter (adapter) chose to focus more on the love/romance than the brilliant duel the novel evokes. Because it is an adaptation of the novel (which I loved, in case you haven't gotten that idea yet) I may go see this. Sounds like a dud in comparison though.
It was a case of IP spoofing against Shimomura. While he couldn't see results (IP spoof after all) the ability to guess ISN's allowed him to play the role of one of the computers involved in the transaction.
Not my original source, but it does make mention of the story
Umh, Swing is a lightweight GUI. The old AWT was the nightmare that built on top of native GUI's. Swing does away with the native GUI for 99% of its widgets. In fact, the only native widget it uses is a frame so that it can open a non-contained frame. That can be avoided for everything except the main frame of the application if you don't mind contained frames for dialogs.
I've not worked with Qt before, but IMHO Swing rocks for GUI construction. Now if we could just find a Java 1.3 native compiler I would be ectstatic.
Here is a really silly thought, but Usenet Archives would be a great tool for people looking for Prior Art to fight patents. If it is tech. related it has seen life on Usenet.
Not that this will ever get modde dup once there are 150 2 or higher replies though. Ah well. More wisdom thrown into tht ebottomless ether of /.
I'm going to step on a (admittedly wide) limb here and say that sci-fi goes back to the early roots of literature. Some of the earliest recorded work, say Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the book I cannot rememebr but written by the Popul Vu people of South America with a section generally referred to as "The Wooden People" all can be considered Sci-Fi in that they base their stories around extrapolations of the currently understood functioning of the world. The term "science" as it is presently use had really been invented yet, but the infatuation with speculative, extrapolative, fiction was at the core of much work. Gilgamesh and the Popul Vu both predate such nice things and famous writers as Aristotle.
Speaking of Snow Crash and fact becoming fiction. Both that work, and Vinge's True names, and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier are regular required reading in CS Phd programs. Snow Crash in particular I know for a fact is required by one professor at Georgia tech.
Frums
Scary part is we know what those last names are.
For some reason system support seems to think everyone in software development needs LaserJets. Their print quality is as high as almost any bound book, and we don't have to pay a penny.
What happens in a non C-stack compiler? The only one I am remotely familiar with is Stackless Python, which is, obviously, impossible to validly compare to gcc, but avoids the C stack. By allowing frame changes the way it does (cannot remember the term the devs using it like for changing execution point between frames, grrr, it should in theory allow much more efficient virtual method calls.
Ah well, this is all one more reason to go back to grad school again and build better compilers :)
Frums
Frums
This would, after all, simply be taking a cue from the industry that has made Amazon so, umh, sucessful.
Case in point: If Linux were actually free software, not locked in GPL, MSFT could cull whatthey desired fromit to include in Windows without having to open Windows up.
There is the critical distinction: Free, as long as you do .... means it IS NOT FREE. It has a price, therefore it is not free.
Now, I am not talking free as in beer, but free as in first amendment (which we no longer even have in the states as long as I cannot call the state capitol and tell them I have planted 2000lbs f eplosives there and have it be legal).
No one wants freedom, we don't trust it. We all want to call our desires freedom because it sounds nice, and it might be a prettier prison, but they are very rarely, if ever, actually desires for freedom.
The GPL is a actually a much more restrive, if prettier, prison than regular proprietary source code. The reason being that with proprietary code the potential exists for it to become actually, truly free. With the GPL it is locked into the GPL in perpetuity. It is like releasing someone in the US from jail, telling them they are free, and letting em walk away. They look, feel, and think they are free, but if they try to exercise that freedom, by say smoking some bud, beating up and old lady, or calling the white house and claiming to be a sniper looking at the door at that very moment, then they find out how little freedom they have. You cannot do what you want, you are not free. You merely have a more comfy, better disguised enclosure.
Frums
The important news in this article is the finding of the gene that will cause the metabolism to do this automatically! In the words of a doctor whose name I cannot remember, ~"when good food is in front of you, it is damn hard to not eat it if you are hungry." Halving caloric input, unless through some tricking of the metabolism via keytone production ala the Atkins diet (nightmare) will make you hungry. Obviously 98% of the population in the world, not just the US, lacks the willpower to not eat when they are A) hungry and B) yummy food is in front of them. It just appears Americans have worse willpower because we tend to have more yummy food in front of us than almost anyone else in the world (when i first moved to the States from Scotland I noticed portions at restaurants are about 2.5x as large).
In all likelihood a parallel gene will be found in humans, and while tweaking it will have weird side effects, it will be done in the lidetime of the average /. reader. If means are found to reverse or slow the gravity aging effects then the world will become really interesting. Right now, though, this would just result in more frail, stooped, old people running around :)
Frums
import java.lang.system.*;
out.println("This does work.");
Frankly, I pretty much never work with system.out as I usually declare my own input/output streams connected to various other sources like sockets and StringWriters as the concept of being able to see the console just doesn't happen much.
Frums
easy to fix import System.out.println; println("wow this is easy. Stop bitching about a truly object oriented function. Now you can redefine println whever you want in anothe rpackage and not have to deal with it being a reserved word like in B&M languages. Ever try to redefine printf? Bugger off until you learn the language.");
About three weeks ago I contaced Zix through a series of e-mails asking for detailed information on their protocol and algorithms. They, impressively, sent me back a marketingese "white paper" (I only put it in quotes because it was more brochure than real technology white paper) within two hours. They started out on good footing, customer service has a quick turnaround.
Upon examination of this "white paper" I sent back a few more questions looking at glaring holes in thge paper - what hash algorithm they use for signing all of the data going back and forth from securewhatever.com while establishing the session key for the Triple-DES encrypted message (running on memory of their protocol here as I threw out their white paper at the end of this).
Anyway, I shot that (easiest answer) and a couple others (the plaintext over http as many people have pointed out) questions back figuring I misunderstood something, and they again replied right away.
They sent me yet another copy of their marketing "white paper" and didn't answer any questions. I replied once more, stating in clear terms my questions were not answered in that white paper, and were vaild questions to ask before entrusting my data to their service. No reply that time.
It downright scares me when they won't tell you what algorithm they use for anything other than their primary body encryption (triple-des). It seems their protocol can be attacked fairly easily to spoof messages, and in fact relying on the one server (though a standard pki solution as well) that is under their control and, er, not that I would ever test this, but have "heard" from people, looks to have some unpatched holes in certain daemons allowing for buffer overflow attacks, and probably is quite suscepable to DDoS attacks, well. Anyway.
On a completely different note - why anyone would bother with a fancy, fallible, protocol in order to support a session based key for symmetric encryption is beyond me when the encryption decryption process instead of using something like ElGamal (now free! woot!) and using private/public key authentification is beyond me. Their clients are not going to be major corporations sending large documents, but rather many many individuals sending small documents. Message size (plaintext*2) and encrypt decrypt speed (*(10..100) depending on implementation) are still not enough hassle for e-mail sized documents that it seems silly to me. Ah well. It just leaves the door open for when i finally put SecureJMail up on sourceforge.
Frums
Programming Perl is one of the better O'Reilly books ever written, IMHO, and that is saying a lot. If you want to use Perl, get it, Love it.
Frums
Well, say our records grow and grow, and WeEncrypt doesn't and it turns out they implemented the (open) DES algorithm really poorly so it encrypts/decrypts at about 1/1000th optimal speed (common problem). If you then move to another company, say SuperSecurity.com that uses the exact same encryption algorithm (vanilla DES straight from the IBM whitepapers way back) are you allowed to use that to decrypt the data encrypted by WeEncrypt's software? I suspect under DMCA, no. Even worse, the DMCA may well make it illegal for both companies to encrypt and decrypt data to the same format (DES).
Frums