This was the guy's chance, probably his only chance,
to acknowledge that Maureen O'Gara's stuff was beyond
the pale, to say sorry for it and renew readers' faith
in the quality of his publications.
Instead he chose to use his time to pick nits about
whether bloggers are reporters and whether the telephone
numbers which were published were business or personal.
And then he launched into a lengthy diatribe about how
his websites were being DOSed by "fanatics" and how
people were complaining to his advertisers.
The "DOS" was most likely just a slashdotting. I know for a fact that Groklaw suffered load related problems when the "Intimidation" and followup articles were posted. Groklaw hit some kind of resource limit on comments on the "Intimidation" article, and I was seeing PHP error messages
too. If Mr Kircaali saw a much higher flow of traffic
than usual, for several days afterward, that would be
because he didn't pull all of the Maureen O'Gara stories
off his websites, contrary to his promise. There were reports that some stories had remained and my impression
is that it took a few days before they were all gone.
Of course people are going to reload the site
frequently during this time - those who care whether
SYS-CON.COM keeps its promise, and those who care
whether any Maureen O'Gara stories remain.
And as for the second horn of Mr Kircaali's contention,
that people were unjustly contacting his advertisers, my
understanding is that the continued presence of Maureen
O'Gara at SYS-CON.COM had been an issue for 6 months and Mr Kircaali had refused to terminate her for that
length of time. If something's an issue for that long, of course somebody
is going to escalate it. And the advertisers are ultimately
Mr Kircaali's boss.
Mr Kircaali defends the practice of running Microsoft
advertisements on a Linux website by asserting the
absurdity of refusing to run Microsoft advertisements
on a Microsoft website. This is a straw man argument;
few people would complain about seeing Microsoft advertisements on a.NET website. But Microsoft is
the enemy of Linux specifically and Free Software
in general, so it is rather disturbing that an OSS
advocacy site should run their advertisements (this
includes Slashdot).
Finally Mr Kircaali closes with some choice weasel words on
the issue of privacy, an unsubtle insult to Groklaw's
readers ("if the majority of Ms. Jones' readers are the same people whom we dealt with this week, now I understand better why she may want to remain anonymous") and a
bit of bignoting themselves as the victim: a media company who became a victim of perhaps the biggest cyber attack in history.
My opinion is, whatever the merits of Mr Kircaali's arguments, he chose exactly the wrong way to close off
the matter. I doubt he has endeared himself to anybody
except Microsoft, who believe they benefit by painting
Linux supporters as vigilante zealots.
In that document the authors make the erroneous claim that:
"The total number of electronic records produced on the
planet is expected to double every 60 minutes over a
10-year period."
That would mean that one hour from now, the number of electronic
records created has doubled, in two hours it's 4 times, in 3 hours
its 8 times, and so on, for the next 10 years.
2 to the power of 87600 (number of hours in 10 years) is a decimal
number with 26,371 digits. Contrast this to one estimate of the
count of the number of atoms in the observable universe (a number
with 79 digits). The claim is clearly nonsensical.
The quote is attributed to:
"1 Rich Lysakowski & Zahava Leibowitz, Titanic 2020 - A Call To Action."
I checked out that paper and the original authors say something
quote different. They say:
"At the current rate, the number of records will double in 5
years, and double again less than 3 years later. If the number
of records continues to grow at the same rate of growth as that
of the human population, the numbers are staggering; simple math
tells us that within 10 years, the number of records produced
on the planet could be doubling every 60 minutes."
The authors are referring to a decrease in the amount of time
required for the number of records on earth to increase. So
eventually (within 10 years) they expect the rate to increase
to a point where eventually the number will double after only 60
minutes. This may be possible, but such a rate clearly cannot be
maintained for very long.
In that case, why would any manufacturer in their right mind produce anything under such terms? That would just be insane
Don't we have the same situation currently with DVDs? That each player model contains a player key, and upon the compromise of any player key, future discs can be written which do not enable that player key?
I agree it's insane but this has been going on for 5+ years already and I'm not aware that this power has ever been used. Although the reason for that might be that we have cracked ALL the player keys.
Dude, you are not the network's customer. Advertisers are.
Yes, but the network is the customer of the studio which created the episode. Studios can gain additional revenue by opening up a new distribution channel for each new episode, and for their back-catalogue.
Link to Online Poker instead, you miserable failures.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually I thought it was a bad interview.
There are times where typing can be heard in
the background, plus paper shuffling, and who knows
what else. Knuth comes across as a little incoherent.
The interviewer sounds like they've been pasted over
the top of background noise of Knuth's life, and when he
says something we don't know whether it's "inline" with Knuth (i.e. a question for him to answer) or offline commentary.
He seems to be a perfectionist to the point of having it interfere with his daily life.
You missed the point here. Knuth is telling us that he thinks deeply about every aspect of his life, but it is not an obsession - it is amusing for him to think about that. There's no reason for a person to not consider an efficient way of brushing their teeth, and as another poster commented, you're awake when you brush your teeth so you might as well use your brain for something useful while you are doing it.
How does Darl get away with it and how can a board of directors that pay him actually be THAT stupid?
It's like this. The chairman of SCO has enriched himself by many millions of dollars in options and bonuses. Many people think it is likely that the SCOvsIBM lawsuit is part of this enrichment strategy. See Groklaw.
Actually the masking thing probably lessens security a fair bit. It would be possible to iterate through just one of these masking packets to find potential passwords. If the password were english text you could apply letter analysis to quickly find synonyms - words which "could" be the password because they fit the random data supplied.
Then if you had another masking packet, you can check all
your first words against the second masking packet and eliminate 99% of the incorrect words.
Basically these masking packets permit the attacker to verify correctness of password guesses themselves - and if I had to guess, I'd say that was very, very bad for security. That's probably easier to crack than DES.
I don't know much about crypto but this paper strikes me as both original and insightful - the insightful parts are not original, and the original parts are not insightful.
First of all, we already have protection in protocols such as SSH and SSL against man-in-the-middle attacks. Thus, the paper's whole reason for existence disappears.
Secondly, the security of this "masking" technique depends upon the randomness of the numbers chosen by the server (and, by implication, any man-in-the-middle). I could send a packet containing all zeroes and it would guarantee to sum to zero after applying any mask at all. How does the receiver judge whether the numbers passed are sufficiently random?
The problem with RSS is that if you subscribe to a few
feeds, then you'll get the same news multiple times,
from different sources.
For example, that story about Saturn's pole being
unexpectedly warm was carried on (at least) slashdot,
space.com and "Yahoo News: Science". The more feeds
you subscribe to, the more duplicates of the same story
you will receive. The only way out is to only subscribe
to feeds which do NOT report other peoples' news.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead he chose to use his time to pick nits about whether bloggers are reporters and whether the telephone numbers which were published were business or personal.
And then he launched into a lengthy diatribe about how his websites were being DOSed by "fanatics" and how people were complaining to his advertisers.
The "DOS" was most likely just a slashdotting. I know for a fact that Groklaw suffered load related problems when the "Intimidation" and followup articles were posted. Groklaw hit some kind of resource limit on comments on the "Intimidation" article, and I was seeing PHP error messages too. If Mr Kircaali saw a much higher flow of traffic than usual, for several days afterward, that would be because he didn't pull all of the Maureen O'Gara stories off his websites, contrary to his promise. There were reports that some stories had remained and my impression is that it took a few days before they were all gone. Of course people are going to reload the site frequently during this time - those who care whether SYS-CON.COM keeps its promise, and those who care whether any Maureen O'Gara stories remain.
And as for the second horn of Mr Kircaali's contention, that people were unjustly contacting his advertisers, my understanding is that the continued presence of Maureen O'Gara at SYS-CON.COM had been an issue for 6 months and Mr Kircaali had refused to terminate her for that length of time. If something's an issue for that long, of course somebody is going to escalate it. And the advertisers are ultimately Mr Kircaali's boss.
Mr Kircaali defends the practice of running Microsoft advertisements on a Linux website by asserting the absurdity of refusing to run Microsoft advertisements on a Microsoft website. This is a straw man argument; few people would complain about seeing Microsoft advertisements on a .NET website. But Microsoft is
the enemy of Linux specifically and Free Software
in general, so it is rather disturbing that an OSS
advocacy site should run their advertisements (this
includes Slashdot).
Finally Mr Kircaali closes with some choice weasel words on the issue of privacy, an unsubtle insult to Groklaw's readers ("if the majority of Ms. Jones' readers are the same people whom we dealt with this week, now I understand better why she may want to remain anonymous") and a bit of bignoting themselves as the victim: a media company who became a victim of perhaps the biggest cyber attack in history.
My opinion is, whatever the merits of Mr Kircaali's arguments, he chose exactly the wrong way to close off the matter. I doubt he has endeared himself to anybody except Microsoft, who believe they benefit by painting Linux supporters as vigilante zealots.
Secure Startup will eventually stop people running non-Microsoft OSs on computers.
That would mean that one hour from now, the number of electronic records created has doubled, in two hours it's 4 times, in 3 hours its 8 times, and so on, for the next 10 years.
2 to the power of 87600 (number of hours in 10 years) is a decimal number with 26,371 digits. Contrast this to one estimate of the count of the number of atoms in the observable universe (a number with 79 digits). The claim is clearly nonsensical.
The quote is attributed to:
I checked out that paper and the original authors say something quote different. They say:
The authors are referring to a decrease in the amount of time required for the number of records on earth to increase. So eventually (within 10 years) they expect the rate to increase to a point where eventually the number will double after only 60 minutes. This may be possible, but such a rate clearly cannot be maintained for very long.
Don't we have the same situation currently with DVDs? That each player model contains a player key, and upon the compromise of any player key, future discs can be written which do not enable that player key?
I agree it's insane but this has been going on for 5+ years already and I'm not aware that this power has ever been used. Although the reason for that might be that we have cracked ALL the player keys.
Yes, but the network is the customer of the studio which created the episode. Studios can gain additional revenue by opening up a new distribution channel for each new episode, and for their back-catalogue.
Fire
Hazard.
Pay me big $$ and I'll happily report that Verisign should not be permitted to keep .com and .net. And I'll finish that report in world-record time!
The relevant original links:
Here and Here.
If your data needs more protection than that, consider removing the disk drive prior to sale and either keeping it (the HDD) or destroying it.
Algis Budrys,
Frank Herbert
and Harlan Ellison.
They can add Harlan once he's dead; we don't need him to have a bigger ego.
SUBSCRIBE
I want to know whether the Fortran 95 code will compile and/or run faster than C++ using GCC 4.0 :-)
Link to Online Poker instead, you miserable failures.
There are times where typing can be heard in the background, plus paper shuffling, and who knows what else. Knuth comes across as a little incoherent. The interviewer sounds like they've been pasted over the top of background noise of Knuth's life, and when he says something we don't know whether it's "inline" with Knuth (i.e. a question for him to answer) or offline commentary.
You missed the point here. Knuth is telling us that he thinks deeply about every aspect of his life, but it is not an obsession - it is amusing for him to think about that. There's no reason for a person to not consider an efficient way of brushing their teeth, and as another poster commented, you're awake when you brush your teeth so you might as well use your brain for something useful while you are doing it.
My eyes are still bleeding from the atrocious spelling in the "Dual Core" story.
They didn't explain how many volkswagons per metric second.
It's like this. The chairman of SCO has enriched himself by many millions of dollars in options and bonuses. Many people think it is likely that the SCOvsIBM lawsuit is part of this enrichment strategy. See Groklaw.
Then if you had another masking packet, you can check all your first words against the second masking packet and eliminate 99% of the incorrect words.
Basically these masking packets permit the attacker to verify correctness of password guesses themselves - and if I had to guess, I'd say that was very, very bad for security. That's probably easier to crack than DES.
First of all, we already have protection in protocols such as SSH and SSL against man-in-the-middle attacks. Thus, the paper's whole reason for existence disappears.
Secondly, the security of this "masking" technique depends upon the randomness of the numbers chosen by the server (and, by implication, any man-in-the-middle). I could send a packet containing all zeroes and it would guarantee to sum to zero after applying any mask at all. How does the receiver judge whether the numbers passed are sufficiently random?
Hi! What's your name and what do you do?
Hello. I'm Al, Chemist.
For example, that story about Saturn's pole being unexpectedly warm was carried on (at least) slashdot, space.com and "Yahoo News: Science". The more feeds you subscribe to, the more duplicates of the same story you will receive. The only way out is to only subscribe to feeds which do NOT report other peoples' news.
Where can I get one of tohse?
If there's no server doing a listen on any port, there's no way to get into the box.
2004 just called, and it wishes to point out that information is no longer scarce, nor costly to disseminate.