And as for "intellegent" devices... SCSI... it's here... it's been here forever... it's just most people are too much into cost and not into quality. Yep they cost more, but they're generally faster (because they represent the high-end of disk drives) and better constructed (again, better margins means they can spend more on parts to build them).
SCSI drives cost way more than IDE drives. Do you really think it costs that much more to make them? It doesn't.
The drive manufacturers like having IDE around. They could produce SCSI drives at nearly the same price but they don't want to. It's better for them to sell IDE to the masses and have expensive SCSI disks around so they can get more money out of the businesses who need servers.
Put simply, it's not a matter of how much the drives cost, it's how much people are willing to pay.
I know this sounds like a big conspiracy (and it is) but it's really not uncommon... For example, Intel selling the Celeron cheaper than the P-II even though they cost the same to produce, or going farther back the 486SX vs. 486DX. Businesses like to have a low-end line where they can make money in volume and a high-end line where they can gouge the people who can afford to be gouged.
It is already possible to get direct rendering using Openprojects/Utah GLX. This works with XFree86 3.3.5 using the Matrox G200/G400 or ATI Rage Pro. It is seperate from the DRI that will be included in XFree86 4.0 but AFAIK offers the same performance benefits. It certainly makes Q3A run nicely, though I haven't attempted Unreal.
Anyway, as with the trial, they said in order for the gentlemen to have reverse engineered Xing, they would of had to click through an agreement saying that they cannot.
Indeed. But if I remember correctly from the previous articles, there were lots of people named as defendants. Surely only a handful of them could actually have been involved in the reverse engineering?
It's all bogus of course. (Mind you, I'm not a lawyer.)
Show me a general-purpose UNIX/PC box that's been up for 2 years and I'll show you a box full of unpatched security holes.
The vast majority of exploits used to gain access to a system happen in userland, and can be fixed in userland. No rebooting required, high uptime maintained.
The vast majority of exploits in the kernel are denial of service bugs, which cause the system to reboot and/or hang. In my experience the main problem is oddly formed packets crashing the TCP/IP stack. In the case of these high-uptime boxes, obviously they have some sort of firewall protecting them from bad packets, or they would simply not have the uptime that they do.
So your assumption that long-uptime boxes are swiss cheese is not necessarily true.
That said, I'd bet none of the really high uptime machines are running as shell servers for hostile users / script kiddies. That's the ultimate test of the quality of the sysadmin(s) and OS.
Does anyone remember Netrek? The same problem happened with that game. The solution is to cryptographically bless binaries that don't have cheats, and allow people to configure their servers to reject all "non-blessed" clients.
But doesn't that defeat the whole point of releasing the Quake source? I mean, how many people are going to make really cool Quake modifications if they have to jump through hoops to get their code signed so that it can actually be used?
I don't know if cheating is really such a big problem... Does anyone really know? It seems to me that there's no point to playing the game if you're going to cheat. It is, after all, just a game. "You're only cheating yourself". I doubt there's much prestige in the title "World's Best Quake Player When Cheating". And if you get used to cheats, you'll just suck all the more when you play at LAN parties where your cheats are unavailable.
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
This, along with the 'beautiful and smart' argument, is the most commonly cited problem we'll face with genegeneering. But ask yourself this: how many people reading Katz' essay would be willing to splice 'compliance' into their sprogs? Not many.
How many people read Katz' essay? It's beside the point.
If you doubt there is a demand for compliant children, I have one word for you: Ritalin.
What percentage of the world's population were born into a world where their parents could take advantage of the latest medical technology?
The technology will surely get cheaper as time goes on. And as these "good" genes become more prevalent they can be duplicated the natural way. (I wonder... With patents on genes, does someone with those genes have to buy additional licenses to legally reproduce?)
One could also argue that the people of the wealthy nations are the only ones that really matter, because that's where the power is.
1. The US gov't declares encryption a munition 2. The US gov't bans export of encryption as it bans export of other munitions 3. [missing link] 4. The US gov't now says it's OK to export this or that type of encryption.
One should always be cynical of these crypto liberalization announcements, but I think the chances of the NSA being able to break 128-bit crypto are slim.
The "missing link" you refer to above is usually not secret. We've seen lots of crypto liberalization announcements and they've always had strings attached (more like steel cables). In the case of this old 1997 announcement I think the string was that you had to be a bank, which would mean you have to make all transactions available to the feds anyway.
Other strings that we've seen attached:
Must include key recovery (Clipper, Fortezza, etc).
Must send all but 40 bits of the key to the NSA (Lotus Notes)
Subject to "one time review". (This is the latest one. It usually means "NO! And don't ask again!", or if you're lucky "Yes, but you must be my bitch.").
People who say the NSA are way ahead of the civilian state-of-the-art in cryptography are usually using old examples. Just look at Skipjack. The algorithm was made public and after just a couple of weeks of analysis it was hanging by a thread. Not a large margin of security at all.
What we're dangerously short of in this country is people who believe strongly about things who can keep from making themselves appear the fool. [snip] It was because when they finally asked him a question he didn't have a good answer for, his reaction was to tell his heartbreaking story of his failure to integrate with normal society and his spiritual rebirth in the desert badlands. He sounded like a complete kook. People walked out. I was one of them. What's heartbreaking is that the people who really care about an issue somehow can't keep their pants on in public, most of them at least.
f1r57 p057!:-/
Seriously though, I agree with what you're saying, but I'd like to make a counterpoint.
By now you've probably heard the music of Rage Against The Machine. They have become totally mainstream, even though their causes would be considered by most people to be on the fringe. They shout their messages on the radio and TV all the time. Nobody calls them paranoid, but I think anyone else who said the things they say probably would be.
I've been trying to figure out why they get lots of airtime while other people get funny looks for saying less.
I've come to the conclusion that the average american doesn't actually listen to the message. They like the sound and the rebelious image but don't really hear the message behind the lyrics.
So here we have a group of people with a "radical" political message who haven't made fools of themselves. Everyone hears them yet it seems to me that they can still only really preach to the choir.
If the mainstream public thought Rage was paranoid, they'd at least understand the message behind all that shouting.
So I think it's really a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't sort of situation. You can appear crazy and have people understand that you're saying something different, or look sane and have people think it's business as usual.
Either way people will hear and believe whatever least disrupts their view of the world.
In short the USA is NOT the world and please dont do the rest of us the injustice to consider that it is.
I don't mean to imply that it is. But I do strongly feel it serves as a wonderful model for others to look at.
And that's all they can do: look. The rest of the world will never live the way americans (and Westerners in general) do today.
Western countries, especially the U. S. of A. consume a huge portion of the world's resources. There just isn't enough to go around.
Case in point: The automobile. This machine has been largely responsible for the industrial/economic success of the United States. In the US there is roughly one car for every man, woman and child in the country. In China, there are over 1.2 billion people and only four or five million cars. Can you imagine what China would be like if there were one car per person? Never mind the pollution (not enough fossil fuels anyway); with four or five times the population density of the US there probably wouldn't be enough space for the cars (space is a limited resource). Can you imagine what the world would be like if there were one car for each of the six billion people?
And that's just the automobile. Don't get me started on landfills, industrial waste, etc.
And with everyone living the American Way, where would you get the cheap labour to produce the cheap goods required for those people to live the American Way?
The American way of life does not scale. No amount of trade can change that.
Excercise for the reader: Every time you buy something, take a few seconds to think about where it came from and where it's going to end up. Then multiply that by the number of items you buy in a month, times the number of months in your life, times the number of consumers like you.
Everyone can get and use a strong and legal copy of PGP or GnuPG, etc. That people don't do it doesn't relate to the US export restrictions. So they can not prevent anyone from using strong encryption (who thinks he needs it).
I still maintain that export restrictions have stopped people from using crypto.
Export restrictions prevent strong crypto from being integrated with most common software applications. By forcing encryption software to be a seperate product, it makes encryption more difficult to use. Also, because export restrictions have prevented encryption from being installed by default on most computers, there are few people to exchange ciphertext with and therefor little incentive for people to install and learn the encryption software that does exist.
The end result is that export restrictions have prevented the critical mass / network effect required for strong encryption to become widespread.
I think the main mistake the American Government is making is that they assume they can prevent anyone from using strong encryption. Actually they cant.
Actually, they can, and have.
There is a difference between "preventing anyone from using strong encryption" and "preventing everyone...". They can't stop everyone from using crypto but they can stop some people.
In fact, they've stopped most people from using strong encryption. Most people don't have crypto-aware email software. Most people continue to use "export-grade" web browsers. Less than one percent of internet traffic is strongly encrypted. Cellphones are still using weak crypto or none at all. Landline phone traffic is almost completely unencrypted.
The mess of government regulations has successfully slowed the spread of strong encryption. Promises about lifting those regulations have been used repeatedly to keep the industry from forming an effective opposition (why actively oppose something which will go away on its own "RSN").
Don't be fooled into thinking that we've won. That's exactly what they want us to think.
Given the immense computational power quantum computers will possess, it is only a matter of time before algorithm and systems breakthroughs allow them to far surpass human analytical faculties. Perhaps they will even become self-aware.
Only a matter of time. And it may not even require quantum computation, though QC would probably help. Do our brains depend on quantum computation? I doubt it.
The real issue is whether this new life form, which will very quickly evolve far ahead of humans, will be recognized and respected as life.
Um, if it "evolves far ahead of humans", the real issue is, will it recognize and respect us as life.
Its funny how most zealots forget the whole idea of this spy system. It's to protect the people.
Yes. When the feds spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, it was to protect people.
When the NSA broke into the Watergate hotel to bug the DNC, it was to protect people too.
When the FBI delivers their files on Republicans to Bill Clinton, that too is to protect people.
Most people won't really catch the eye of Big Brother. It's only important people, people who really are bad, and a few false positives who have to worry. Most people can go about their day to day lives without ever being touched by Big Brother, because most people are insignificant.
So go do your little business as usual. You'll be fine.
Don't worry that the government is corrupt. They're after some other guy, not you.
Don't worry that what you say might make them angry. You don't have anything to say that matters.
Move along people.
There's nothing to see here.
(The above has high sarcasm content, in case you haven't noticed.)
but my K6-2 300 with a Matrox G200 is unplayable. About one fps.
The only time I've seen it go that slow is using software rendering.
You need 3D hardware with drivers to run Q3 at a reasonable speed.
Try GLX. I've been playing Q3Test on my 450 MHz Celeron 300A, 64MB, G200 8MB. I've turned much of the detail down to max the framrate, as multiplayer shooters are best in go-fast-but-look-ugly mode. The limiting factor for internet play is definately my 33.6 modem.
Modems suck. I'll have to leave it running overnight to download the Q3Demo. But it's worth it.
since people have spend the big $$$s they do not want to (usually) spend more so they use programs for functions that they shouldn't have been used for in the first place. (ex. Office Suites ala Office 2000 for everything because you can't afford a new application after paying $369 dollars for the professional edition with your current pay check)
Yes, I noticed this recently, and it was a significant revelation to me.
I was helping a Windows user with her computer. She didn't multitask. Instead, when she wanted to do something different, she would shut down her program and start up another (in this case an image editing program). Because these things are monolithic it takes a while. So long that these programs even have little "title screen" windows that show up in the middle of the screen while the program loads. Once the program was loaded, she made a few small changes to an image, saved, and exited. Most of the time was spent waiting for the program to load. Then, she restarted the program she was working on before, which also took several seconds to start.
The right thing to do would be to leave your programs open and just switch between windows. But these things are so bloated, they take too much memory to leave them open.
As you noted, this is all caused by the way "commercial, off the shelf" (sometimes called "COTS") software is designed. It is the desktop PC paradigm.
When you have to spend $$$ on a program, you want to get the most for your $$$, so you get some monolithic thing with features you will probably never use but want anyway just in case you do need them later. After all, if you buy the program without that little feature, and later discover that you need that feature, you'd have to buy a whole new program just for that one little feature.
This all means that the software manufacturers have to build extra bloat in their programs. The side-by-side feature comparison really does control the industry. And with the pressure for new features, reliability and efficiency fall by the wayside. They aren't things that can be easily quantified for placement in an advertisment.
And worst of all, people think it's all great, because the only alternative they have ever known is not using a computer at all. This is why MS can call themselves "innovative" and have people actually believe them.
Simple - people won't use it. If my fridge can get hacked, I won't buy it. The average consumer may be a moron, but s/he is also pretty demanding. Furnaces that can be hacked simply won't sell unless a model is worked out so that they _aren't_ hacked.
Most answering machines have a feature where you can call home, enter a code, and hear/erase your messages. In many cases these things are easy to hack. For one thing it's usually only a three-digit code, and also they aren't very smart about the way they reject codes.
I don't think security concernes ever affected answering machine sales. Most people don't know or care about such things.
The anonymity would be of great value, though most people don't know (or care) how much their privacy is invaded.
It provides anonymity for the caller only, as the called person has to be at a real phone number in order to be reached.
Also, it would probably be very easy to identify who owns a disposable phone by keeping a log of what numbers they dial, assuming the phones are each used at least several times. Everyone has their own individual calling patterns.
If you really want anonymity there's always payphones.
The article says it only does outgoing calls. This certainly won't replace the non-disposable variety.
It might be useful for non-cellphone owners who just want something handy in case of emergency, but with regular cellphones getting so cheap I doubt it'll really take off.
I am completely opposed to this approach for a variety of reasons. First off, cpu power is cheap. Period.
Yes, but most CPUs are sitting idle most of the time. If we instead had a bunch of CPUs being shared by legions of terminals we wouldn't need as many CPUs total, thus CPU power would in effect be even cheaper. Waste not, want not.
Secondly, by centralizing such mundane tasks as word processing and office products (as Sun plans to do), the chances of needing to do a simple task and having it unavailable increases exponentially. Even the best ISPs have some downtime on services.
By keeping stuff on your own computer you have the same problems. Even the best techies have downtime on their PCs/workstations.
With a whole bunch of users screaming at them, you can bet ASPs would fix any problems real quick. And with economies of scale ASPs can afford hardware that is much more reliable than what we seen in todays cheap PCs.
For the average user who can't even reinstall Windows this would all mean more reliability, not less.
Why should I use a centralized (or heaven forbid, web) interface if I just want to type up a report when I can get it done easily and safely on my own?
Why buy an expensive new PC just to type up a report when you can easily and safely get it done on a sub-$200 network appliance, and be able to access it from any terminal you want?
Personally, I like having real computer power on my desk, as probably a lot of slashdot folks do. It gives us a great deal of control over our digital work space. But for J. Random User, the pain of maintaining a desktop PC is just not worth it.
At this point, be sure to wear some good safety glasses as parts will fly at high velocities. Drop an old integrated circuit between the two plates and watch it explode. Great fun to show off as it makes the loudest bangs while pelting everyone with the flying pieces.
I've heard that similar (maybe less powerful) pyrotechnics can be seen by incorrectly connecting an ordinary AT power supply.
It was either connecting the pair of power connecter to the motherboard the wrong way (black wires on the outside, rather than together on the inside) or by connecting the power supply to the power switch in the wrong way. I can't remember which.
I've never seen it myself so take this with a grain of salt.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's really very simple.
People are afraid of change.
SCSI drives cost way more than IDE drives. Do you really think it costs that much more to make them? It doesn't.
The drive manufacturers like having IDE around. They could produce SCSI drives at nearly the same price but they don't want to. It's better for them to sell IDE to the masses and have expensive SCSI disks around so they can get more money out of the businesses who need servers.
Put simply, it's not a matter of how much the drives cost, it's how much people are willing to pay.
I know this sounds like a big conspiracy (and it is) but it's really not uncommon... For example, Intel selling the Celeron cheaper than the P-II even though they cost the same to produce, or going farther back the 486SX vs. 486DX. Businesses like to have a low-end line where they can make money in volume and a high-end line where they can gouge the people who can afford to be gouged.
It is already possible to get direct rendering using Openprojects/Utah GLX. This works with XFree86 3.3.5 using the Matrox G200/G400 or ATI Rage Pro. It is seperate from the DRI that will be included in XFree86 4.0 but AFAIK offers the same performance benefits. It certainly makes Q3A run nicely, though I haven't attempted Unreal.
Indeed. But if I remember correctly from the previous articles, there were lots of people named as defendants. Surely only a handful of them could actually have been involved in the reverse engineering?
It's all bogus of course. (Mind you, I'm not a lawyer.)
The vast majority of exploits used to gain access to a system happen in userland, and can be fixed in userland. No rebooting required, high uptime maintained.
The vast majority of exploits in the kernel are denial of service bugs, which cause the system to reboot and/or hang. In my experience the main problem is oddly formed packets crashing the TCP/IP stack. In the case of these high-uptime boxes, obviously they have some sort of firewall protecting them from bad packets, or they would simply not have the uptime that they do.
So your assumption that long-uptime boxes are swiss cheese is not necessarily true.
That said, I'd bet none of the really high uptime machines are running as shell servers for hostile users / script kiddies. That's the ultimate test of the quality of the sysadmin(s) and OS.
But doesn't that defeat the whole point of releasing the Quake source? I mean, how many people are going to make really cool Quake modifications if they have to jump through hoops to get their code signed so that it can actually be used?
I don't know if cheating is really such a big problem... Does anyone really know? It seems to me that there's no point to playing the game if you're going to cheat. It is, after all, just a game. "You're only cheating yourself". I doubt there's much prestige in the title "World's Best Quake Player When Cheating". And if you get used to cheats, you'll just suck all the more when you play at LAN parties where your cheats are unavailable.
How many people read Katz' essay? It's beside the point.
If you doubt there is a demand for compliant children, I have one word for you: Ritalin.
The technology will surely get cheaper as time goes on. And as these "good" genes become more prevalent they can be duplicated the natural way. (I wonder... With patents on genes, does someone with those genes have to buy additional licenses to legally reproduce?)
One could also argue that the people of the wealthy nations are the only ones that really matter, because that's where the power is.
I can't help but think of those GAP commercials frequenting the airwaves lately:
Everyone the same.
One should always be cynical of these crypto liberalization announcements, but I think the chances of the NSA being able to break 128-bit crypto are slim.
The "missing link" you refer to above is usually not secret. We've seen lots of crypto liberalization announcements and they've always had strings attached (more like steel cables). In the case of this old 1997 announcement I think the string was that you had to be a bank, which would mean you have to make all transactions available to the feds anyway.
Other strings that we've seen attached:
People who say the NSA are way ahead of the civilian state-of-the-art in cryptography are usually using old examples. Just look at Skipjack. The algorithm was made public and after just a couple of weeks of analysis it was hanging by a thread. Not a large margin of security at all.
f1r57 p057! :-/
Seriously though, I agree with what you're saying, but I'd like to make a counterpoint.
By now you've probably heard the music of Rage Against The Machine. They have become totally mainstream, even though their causes would be considered by most people to be on the fringe. They shout their messages on the radio and TV all the time. Nobody calls them paranoid, but I think anyone else who said the things they say probably would be.
I've been trying to figure out why they get lots of airtime while other people get funny looks for saying less.
I've come to the conclusion that the average american doesn't actually listen to the message. They like the sound and the rebelious image but don't really hear the message behind the lyrics.
So here we have a group of people with a "radical" political message who haven't made fools of themselves. Everyone hears them yet it seems to me that they can still only really preach to the choir.
If the mainstream public thought Rage was paranoid, they'd at least understand the message behind all that shouting.
So I think it's really a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't sort of situation. You can appear crazy and have people understand that you're saying something different, or look sane and have people think it's business as usual.
Either way people will hear and believe whatever least disrupts their view of the world.
And that's all they can do: look. The rest of the world will never live the way americans (and Westerners in general) do today.
Western countries, especially the U. S. of A. consume a huge portion of the world's resources. There just isn't enough to go around.
Case in point: The automobile. This machine has been largely responsible for the industrial/economic success of the United States. In the US there is roughly one car for every man, woman and child in the country. In China, there are over 1.2 billion people and only four or five million cars. Can you imagine what China would be like if there were one car per person? Never mind the pollution (not enough fossil fuels anyway); with four or five times the population density of the US there probably wouldn't be enough space for the cars (space is a limited resource). Can you imagine what the world would be like if there were one car for each of the six billion people?
And that's just the automobile. Don't get me started on landfills, industrial waste, etc.
And with everyone living the American Way, where would you get the cheap labour to produce the cheap goods required for those people to live the American Way?
The American way of life does not scale. No amount of trade can change that.
Excercise for the reader:
Every time you buy something, take a few seconds to think about where it came from and where it's going to end up. Then multiply that by the number of items you buy in a month, times the number of months in your life, times the number of consumers like you.
I still maintain that export restrictions have stopped people from using crypto.
Export restrictions prevent strong crypto from being integrated with most common software applications. By forcing encryption software to be a seperate product, it makes encryption more difficult to use. Also, because export restrictions have prevented encryption from being installed by default on most computers, there are few people to exchange ciphertext with and therefor little incentive for people to install and learn the encryption software that does exist.
The end result is that export restrictions have prevented the critical mass / network effect required for strong encryption to become widespread.
What's wrong with just sticking the libs in /compat/linux and running whatever binaries?
Already works with Netscape, RealPlayer, Quake 3, etc.
Am I missing something here???
Actually, they can, and have.
There is a difference between "preventing anyone from using strong encryption" and "preventing everyone...". They can't stop everyone from using crypto but they can stop some people.
In fact, they've stopped most people from using strong encryption. Most people don't have crypto-aware email software. Most people continue to use "export-grade" web browsers. Less than one percent of internet traffic is strongly encrypted. Cellphones are still using weak crypto or none at all. Landline phone traffic is almost completely unencrypted.
The mess of government regulations has successfully slowed the spread of strong encryption. Promises about lifting those regulations have been used repeatedly to keep the industry from forming an effective opposition (why actively oppose something which will go away on its own "RSN").
Don't be fooled into thinking that we've won. That's exactly what they want us to think.
Only a matter of time. And it may not even require quantum computation, though QC would probably help. Do our brains depend on quantum computation? I doubt it.
Um, if it "evolves far ahead of humans", the real issue is, will it recognize and respect us as life.
Yes. When the feds spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, it was to protect people.
When the NSA broke into the Watergate hotel to bug the DNC, it was to protect people too.
When the FBI delivers their files on Republicans to Bill Clinton, that too is to protect people.
Most people won't really catch the eye of Big Brother. It's only important people, people who really are bad, and a few false positives who have to worry. Most people can go about their day to day lives without ever being touched by Big Brother, because most people are insignificant.
So go do your little business as usual. You'll be fine.
Don't worry that the government is corrupt. They're after some other guy, not you.
Don't worry that what you say might make them angry. You don't have anything to say that matters.
Move along people.
There's nothing to see here.
(The above has high sarcasm content, in case you haven't noticed.)
I knew I forgot something... check URLs...
The correct URL for the opensource GLX project is http://glx.on.openprojects.NET
The only time I've seen it go that slow is using software rendering.
You need 3D hardware with drivers to run Q3 at a reasonable speed.
Try GLX. I've been playing Q3Test on my 450 MHz Celeron 300A, 64MB, G200 8MB. I've turned much of the detail down to max the framrate, as multiplayer shooters are best in go-fast-but-look-ugly mode. The limiting factor for internet play is definately my 33.6 modem.
Modems suck. I'll have to leave it running overnight to download the Q3Demo. But it's worth it.
Yes, I noticed this recently, and it was a significant revelation to me.
I was helping a Windows user with her computer. She didn't multitask. Instead, when she wanted to do something different, she would shut down her program and start up another (in this case an image editing program). Because these things are monolithic it takes a while. So long that these programs even have little "title screen" windows that show up in the middle of the screen while the program loads. Once the program was loaded, she made a few small changes to an image, saved, and exited. Most of the time was spent waiting for the program to load. Then, she restarted the program she was working on before, which also took several seconds to start.
The right thing to do would be to leave your programs open and just switch between windows. But these things are so bloated, they take too much memory to leave them open.
As you noted, this is all caused by the way "commercial, off the shelf" (sometimes called "COTS") software is designed. It is the desktop PC paradigm.
When you have to spend $$$ on a program, you want to get the most for your $$$, so you get some monolithic thing with features you will probably never use but want anyway just in case you do need them later. After all, if you buy the program without that little feature, and later discover that you need that feature, you'd have to buy a whole new program just for that one little feature.
This all means that the software manufacturers have to build extra bloat in their programs. The side-by-side feature comparison really does control the industry. And with the pressure for new features, reliability and efficiency fall by the wayside. They aren't things that can be easily quantified for placement in an advertisment.
And worst of all, people think it's all great, because the only alternative they have ever known is not using a computer at all. This is why MS can call themselves "innovative" and have people actually believe them.
Free Software == Real Computing
This is very bad, but I don't think we should be suprised.
One of the *BSD project leaders said after the 4.9.? remote exploit that he doesn't trust the BIND code.
It's possible to run the name server in a chroot jail as a non-root user. That won't solve the DoS problems, but at least you won't get "owned".
Hmm... I had a URL with instructions but now I can't find it... Anyone have a link?
Most answering machines have a feature where you can call home, enter a code, and hear/erase your messages. In many cases these things are easy to hack. For one thing it's usually only a three-digit code, and also they aren't very smart about the way they reject codes.
I don't think security concernes ever affected answering machine sales. Most people don't know or care about such things.
It provides anonymity for the caller only, as the called person has to be at a real phone number in order to be reached.
Also, it would probably be very easy to identify who owns a disposable phone by keeping a log of what numbers they dial, assuming the phones are each used at least several times. Everyone has their own individual calling patterns.
If you really want anonymity there's always payphones.
The article says it only does outgoing calls. This certainly won't replace the non-disposable variety.
It might be useful for non-cellphone owners who just want something handy in case of emergency, but with regular cellphones getting so cheap I doubt it'll really take off.
Yes, but most CPUs are sitting idle most of the time. If we instead had a bunch of CPUs being shared by legions of terminals we wouldn't need as many CPUs total, thus CPU power would in effect be even cheaper. Waste not, want not.
By keeping stuff on your own computer you have the same problems. Even the best techies have downtime on their PCs/workstations.
With a whole bunch of users screaming at them, you can bet ASPs would fix any problems real quick. And with economies of scale ASPs can afford hardware that is much more reliable than what we seen in todays cheap PCs.
For the average user who can't even reinstall Windows this would all mean more reliability, not less.
Why buy an expensive new PC just to type up a report when you can easily and safely get it done on a sub-$200 network appliance, and be able to access it from any terminal you want?
Personally, I like having real computer power on my desk, as probably a lot of slashdot folks do. It gives us a great deal of control over our digital work space. But for J. Random User, the pain of maintaining a desktop PC is just not worth it.
I've heard that similar (maybe less powerful) pyrotechnics can be seen by incorrectly connecting an ordinary AT power supply.
It was either connecting the pair of power connecter to the motherboard the wrong way (black wires on the outside, rather than together on the inside) or by connecting the power supply to the power switch in the wrong way. I can't remember which.
I've never seen it myself so take this with a grain of salt.