While David may have attempted to build a breeder reactor, he certainly didn't succeed. Even if you don't get past the first page of the article you'll notice a synopsis: "When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor."
What really tells are his own words:
"Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."(page 11 of the Harper's article)
And he was talking about a device he built like this:
"David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil. What were once the neutron sources for his guns became a makeshift "core" for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a "blanket" composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape."
This doesn't approach "building a nuclear reactor" by a long shot.
Good lord, why not? Themes.org and Sourceforge aren't exactly conveying information of vital importance to anyone. Their cracking isn't going to affect the markets, political battles, holy wars, sickness, or starvation anywhere in the world.
Why not reward the hacker by posting their conquest on Slashdot? Especially since they've proved their talent in such a benign way. And, of course, they've done the community a service by exposing vunerable security holes... which will hopefully be patched before some site of actual significance is hacked, sending the world into economic depression.
(I sure wish someone had cracked the Florida electoral system beforehand...)
Deutsche Telekom really came across a great idea when they decided to link "phone cards" with MicroPayment CC Numbers.
For those of you who think these are like American prepaid long-distance cards, or prepaid cellular cards, these are very different. Phone cards that can be used in public phones in Germany are thin plastic cards with a magnetic strip on one side. The closest I've seen in the states are NYC Bus/Subway cards. You buy them at a News Stand, and you generally *always* keep one with you. Even if you have a cellphone. The German ones are especially nice, because they tend to decorate them as many countries decorate their postage stamps. (I know people who have collections of used ones)
The great idea about it all is they have
1. a product that's already accepted by the public
2. built-in anonymity
3. a huge distribution network.
I see this method becoming a standard in Europe rather quickly. Now if only DT would exert more influence over VoiceStream in the US...
I never had any trouble finding them in Europe. I could even hand-tune my 80cm from Astra cluster to EutelSat cluster depending on whether I wanted to watch BBC or Sky news.
Sat mags from the uk include dozens of sets of coordinates for free-to-air analog and *digital* too. (free digital satellite, not a concept too many Americans would ever believe.)
But where are these resources in the US? I haven't found anything I could point at from Boston worth the investment in a receiver.
I've noticed that Region 2 DVDs (aside from being PAL) include many subtitles, and frequently more audio tracks. I have been quite upset by many of the region 1 DVDs I get from NetFlix because they don't have English subtitles, or even closed captioning. (yes, I turn on English subtitles even when the language is English. You'd be surprised how much more you can get out of a film this way.)
It's unfortunate that even with legal threats from countries like Australia, nothing will be done about region encoding.
I can just hope that compression gets better and pipes get fatter so I can move to a different way of getting my moves. (too bad so many DivX;-) users out there strip out all but the tracks they want. hopefully that will change too.)
TeleGlobe happens to be the primary connection to the Internet for some COUNTRIES in this world.
From their marketing propaganda (which is to be believed) "Teleglobe's Internet customer base represents 15 percent of the world's Internet routes."
I can't believe it's true that TeleGlobe as a whole subscribes to the MAPS RBL as Jamie states above.
While I might believe that they offer it as a service to some of their customers, I just can't see one of the world's top five IP carriers refusing to route any part of the Internet.
If you look at the author list, they're all from MITRE or JPL. (read Defense Department sponsored.)
This is likely as important and visionary as (Rand Corporation) Paul Baran's 1964 "On Distributed Communications" series, and I would take it as a look at the near future.
Forget the Internet phones and the rental office space. If you have a laptop with you, head for the nearest "pay-fax." Have a look underneath the table it sets on and you'll see the fax is plugged into a normal RJ-11 jack. Plug in your laptop, dial into a convenient 800# (I use AT&T Worldnet while on the road) and you're set.
Having done this at several US airports, I know it works. (anwhere else in the world just plug the damn thing into your GSM phone [I use Nokia 6150] and forget payphones.)
Of course the above hints are for email. If you just have to synch your a.b.p.e.slashgeeks, you might need the bandwidth these services offer.:-)
but not generally by the good guys. bad guys find it quite easy to knock off someone stuck in traffic from a sport bike, which can of course run between traffic and over sidewalks, etc.
There is a nice little trick that http 1.1 allows called listening for host headers.
This trick can be used to not serve a document to a request with an invalid host header. Or to redirect the request. Or to do any number of things, for example, point the request to slashdot, which is hopefully listening for invalid host headers and redirecting those requests to trolldot.
It's really not a big deal. Even IIS includes the ability to do this.
This whole lawsuit is clueless, and hopefully the judge hasn't been bought and will throw it out immediately upon learning that Ford had options other than a lawsuit.
1. you can prove some Jewishness
2. you agree with the politics of the state of Israel
3. you don't mind working in a war zone
4. you don't mind taking a pay cut
I imagine a fair number of/. readers fit #1. Click the url for more information.
We don't want people with funny accents in the USA. We do however want to promote the McDonaldization of the world by spreading our ranks throughout the world under the guise of IT.
A woman was famous for amazing sculptures of light, which everyone assumed to be her creations. During a showing of art (actually created by one of her robots) a technician from US Robotics (creators of the robot) noticed that the one of her robots was behaving strangely. Thinking he was doing the woman a favor, he took it upon himself to "fix" the robot.
The fix caused the robot to lose it's creative abilities.
There were several strong messages going on here.
1. The woman claiming something not her own (setting up the possibility of #2)
2. The man "fixing" a robot without permission of the owner
3. The adjustment from abnormal to normal destroying creativity.
Wish I had the story handy... I'd be inclined to read it again.
This sounds exactly like what a company I worked for in 95-96 was doing in Kansas... except the 56k lines were 128k ISDN. (Still have an Ascend Pipe 50 in my basement)
They even got creative and hopped latas with cleverly placed pops to avoid long distance charges. With 128k ISDN unmetered from Southwestern Bell @ $105/month, it was cheap way to provide access to little towns.
This was also my first introduction to i386 *nix - bandregg, ksteph, and kleo the cat had Linux, SCO, and some variant of BSD running mail, news, and web, while an NT box did FTP and another https.
(wonder if you're reading guys... sure you were assholes, it was cool anyway.)
However, the fact that the company has to put in place regional barriers means that this is a Bad Thing.
Anonymous proxies can get around any regional/ip-specific service barriers.
. The Internet is (or at least, was meant to be) all about inclusion of peoples, freedom to access content wherever it is located, and sharing.
As for your point about the Internet and the inclusion of all peoples... you have some reading to do. Do the words "Nuclear War, Rand Corporation, or Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency" mean anything to you?
Sorry if I come off grumpy.:-)
The below quote is completely irresponsible, and untrue.
"Of course, "IBM plans to develop failproof servers" is a bit like "Ford Plans to develop fuel-sipping flying cars," but the more intelligence built into machines, perhaps the better overall."
Does Timothy not know of IBM's mainframes, which have been hitting Microsoft's goal of "five nines" for years?
The only way in the past to keep a network from acquiring devices like rouge computers or routers was to only allow certain mac addresses... university I went to did this, and my cablemodem provider does it now.
Of course that method is quite useless now, as the LinkSys Cable Router I bought has built-in mac address spoofing.
It's damn hard to keep a wireless access point off your network. I'd say at any company a user bringing one in should be fired.
"The US Air Force is already flying remote spy planes over the Balkans. The "Predator" is flown via remote, and can go over the horizon by use of satelites to send and recieve transmissions. May issue of Air & Space has an article on them. The pilots who get the duty are none too happy, as they don't accumulate flight time while doing this, but typically will be rewarded when their tour is up with the duty of their choice."
Considering his propensity for long, wordy, story-like copy, what would David Ogilvy think of a campaign that doesn't even mention the (agency) customer? This is the guy who brought us "The man in the Hathaway shirt."
And his opposition to outdoor advertising was famous. He put billboards in a book chapter entitled "What's wrong with Advertising?" and said "I cannot believe that the free-enterprise system would be irreparable damaged if they were abolished."
It was telling when I met a girl at a party in NYC last month who was working for Ogilvy and had never even read "Ogilvy on Advertising." Didn't even own a copy.
Any country that sends the majority of their traffic to the outside world through one connection is vunerable. That would be most countries with state-run telcos.
For example, the vast majority of traffic in and out of Poland goes through through one link out of Teleglobe's NY pop. That's a country of 40 million people, at least 10% of whom use the Internet through the state telco. (almost everyone uses the state telco for Internet) Lose a router and 4 million people are disconnected from the net.
(by the way, if anyone wants to enlighten me of any recent changes in this situation, I'd be willing to listen, but still skeptical)
Slashdot Mirror
While David may have attempted to build a breeder reactor, he certainly didn't succeed. Even if you don't get past the first page of the article you'll notice a synopsis: "When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor."
What really tells are his own words:
"Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."(page 11 of the Harper's article)
And he was talking about a device he built like this:
"David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil. What were once the neutron sources for his guns became a makeshift "core" for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a "blanket" composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape."
This doesn't approach "building a nuclear reactor" by a long shot.
Good lord, why not? Themes.org and Sourceforge aren't exactly conveying information of vital importance to anyone. Their cracking isn't going to affect the markets, political battles, holy wars, sickness, or starvation anywhere in the world.
Why not reward the hacker by posting their conquest on Slashdot? Especially since they've proved their talent in such a benign way. And, of course, they've done the community a service by exposing vunerable security holes... which will hopefully be patched before some site of actual significance is hacked, sending the world into economic depression.
(I sure wish someone had cracked the Florida electoral system beforehand...)
Deutsche Telekom really came across a great idea when they decided to link "phone cards" with MicroPayment CC Numbers.
For those of you who think these are like American prepaid long-distance cards, or prepaid cellular cards, these are very different. Phone cards that can be used in public phones in Germany are thin plastic cards with a magnetic strip on one side. The closest I've seen in the states are NYC Bus/Subway cards. You buy them at a News Stand, and you generally *always* keep one with you. Even if you have a cellphone. The German ones are especially nice, because they tend to decorate them as many countries decorate their postage stamps. (I know people who have collections of used ones)
The great idea about it all is they have
1. a product that's already accepted by the public
2. built-in anonymity
3. a huge distribution network.
I see this method becoming a standard in Europe rather quickly. Now if only DT would exert more influence over VoiceStream in the US...
I wonder how much the /. community thinks about Echelon. I mentioned Echelon in regards to the "NSA Tapping Underwater Fibre" post on Wednesday, and was noticed only by an AC.
good lord, I remember using EMWACS on NT 3.5.
I never had any trouble finding them in Europe. I could even hand-tune my 80cm from Astra cluster to EutelSat cluster depending on whether I wanted to watch BBC or Sky news.
Sat mags from the uk include dozens of sets of coordinates for free-to-air analog and *digital* too. (free digital satellite, not a concept too many Americans would ever believe.)
But where are these resources in the US? I haven't found anything I could point at from Boston worth the investment in a receiver.
and powered by batteries.
I've noticed that Region 2 DVDs (aside from being PAL) include many subtitles, and frequently more audio tracks. I have been quite upset by many of the region 1 DVDs I get from NetFlix because they don't have English subtitles, or even closed captioning. (yes, I turn on English subtitles even when the language is English. You'd be surprised how much more you can get out of a film this way.)
It's unfortunate that even with legal threats from countries like Australia, nothing will be done about region encoding.
I can just hope that compression gets better and pipes get fatter so I can move to a different way of getting my moves. (too bad so many DivX;-) users out there strip out all but the tracks they want. hopefully that will change too.)
This would be Echelon.
Funny they didn't mention it in the article. (but then again they rarely do.)
Read more at cryptome.org.
TeleGlobe happens to be the primary connection to the Internet for some COUNTRIES in this world.
From their marketing propaganda (which is to be believed) "Teleglobe's Internet customer base represents 15 percent of the world's Internet routes."
I can't believe it's true that TeleGlobe as a whole subscribes to the MAPS RBL as Jamie states above.
While I might believe that they offer it as a service to some of their customers, I just can't see one of the world's top five IP carriers refusing to route any part of the Internet.
If you look at the author list, they're all from MITRE or JPL. (read Defense Department sponsored.)
This is likely as important and visionary as (Rand Corporation) Paul Baran's 1964 "On Distributed Communications" series, and I would take it as a look at the near future.
Forget the Internet phones and the rental office space. If you have a laptop with you, head for the nearest "pay-fax." Have a look underneath the table it sets on and you'll see the fax is plugged into a normal RJ-11 jack. Plug in your laptop, dial into a convenient 800# (I use AT&T Worldnet while on the road) and you're set.
:-)
Having done this at several US airports, I know it works. (anwhere else in the world just plug the damn thing into your GSM phone [I use Nokia 6150] and forget payphones.)
Of course the above hints are for email. If you just have to synch your a.b.p.e.slashgeeks, you might need the bandwidth these services offer.
but not generally by the good guys. bad guys find it quite easy to knock off someone stuck in traffic from a sport bike, which can of course run between traffic and over sidewalks, etc.
There is a nice little trick that http 1.1 allows called listening for host headers.
This trick can be used to not serve a document to a request with an invalid host header. Or to redirect the request. Or to do any number of things, for example, point the request to slashdot, which is hopefully listening for invalid host headers and redirecting those requests to trolldot.
It's really not a big deal. Even IIS includes the ability to do this.
This whole lawsuit is clueless, and hopefully the judge hasn't been bought and will throw it out immediately upon learning that Ford had options other than a lawsuit.
There's always Israel, with some ifs...
/. readers fit #1. Click the url for more information.
1. you can prove some Jewishness
2. you agree with the politics of the state of Israel
3. you don't mind working in a war zone
4. you don't mind taking a pay cut
I imagine a fair number of
http://www.rosok-law.com/memo5.htm
I could work in Israel, but I don't.
I have worked in Eastern Europe, but don't anymore.
At some point I'd like to try NZ or Denmark.
(just random, slightly relevent thoughts.)
We don't want people with funny accents in the USA. We do however want to promote the McDonaldization of the world by spreading our ranks throughout the world under the guise of IT.
It was a terribly sad story.
A woman was famous for amazing sculptures of light, which everyone assumed to be her creations. During a showing of art (actually created by one of her robots) a technician from US Robotics (creators of the robot) noticed that the one of her robots was behaving strangely. Thinking he was doing the woman a favor, he took it upon himself to "fix" the robot.
The fix caused the robot to lose it's creative abilities.
There were several strong messages going on here.
1. The woman claiming something not her own (setting up the possibility of #2)
2. The man "fixing" a robot without permission of the owner
3. The adjustment from abnormal to normal destroying creativity.
Wish I had the story handy... I'd be inclined to read it again.
but doesn't it fall upon the prescribing doctor to couple Zantac with an appropriate antibiotic?
Pharmas make drugs, they don't treat patients. That's what doctors are for.
This sounds exactly like what a company I worked for in 95-96 was doing in Kansas... except the 56k lines were 128k ISDN. (Still have an Ascend Pipe 50 in my basement)
They even got creative and hopped latas with cleverly placed pops to avoid long distance charges. With 128k ISDN unmetered from Southwestern Bell @ $105/month, it was cheap way to provide access to little towns.
This was also my first introduction to i386 *nix - bandregg, ksteph, and kleo the cat had Linux, SCO, and some variant of BSD running mail, news, and web, while an NT box did FTP and another https.
(wonder if you're reading guys... sure you were assholes, it was cool anyway.)
Anonymous proxies can get around any regional/ip-specific service barriers.
As for your point about the Internet and the inclusion of all peoples... you have some reading to do. Do the words "Nuclear War, Rand Corporation, or Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency" mean anything to you? Sorry if I come off grumpy.The below quote is completely irresponsible, and untrue.
Does Timothy not know of IBM's mainframes, which have been hitting Microsoft's goal of "five nines" for years?
What a troll!
The only way in the past to keep a network from acquiring devices like rouge computers or routers was to only allow certain mac addresses... university I went to did this, and my cablemodem provider does it now.
Of course that method is quite useless now, as the LinkSys Cable Router I bought has built-in mac address spoofing.
It's damn hard to keep a wireless access point off your network. I'd say at any company a user bringing one in should be fired.
http://www.airspacemag.com/ASM/Mag/Index/2001/AM/p redator.html
Considering his propensity for long, wordy, story-like copy, what would David Ogilvy think of a campaign that doesn't even mention the (agency) customer? This is the guy who brought us "The man in the Hathaway shirt."
And his opposition to outdoor advertising was famous. He put billboards in a book chapter entitled "What's wrong with Advertising?" and said "I cannot believe that the free-enterprise system would be irreparable damaged if they were abolished."
It was telling when I met a girl at a party in NYC last month who was working for Ogilvy and had never even read "Ogilvy on Advertising." Didn't even own a copy.
What's the world coming to?
Any country that sends the majority of their traffic to the outside world through one connection is vunerable. That would be most countries with state-run telcos.
For example, the vast majority of traffic in and out of Poland goes through through one link out of Teleglobe's NY pop. That's a country of 40 million people, at least 10% of whom use the Internet through the state telco. (almost everyone uses the state telco for Internet) Lose a router and 4 million people are disconnected from the net.
(by the way, if anyone wants to enlighten me of any recent changes in this situation, I'd be willing to listen, but still skeptical)