This already has hit ABC News, CBS News, Business Week, Forbes, CNN, Fortune, Bloomberg, Fox News, The Register, Computerworld...
Reporters care about this stuff. If they're at risk because someone passed them some info, or they bought something from an informant, that gets their attention.
We went through all this in Steve Jackson Games, in the very early days of the EFF. The Secret Service lost in court. Now, the feds are very careful about searching journalists, for fear of violating the Privacy Protection Act. "Federal law enforcement searches that implicate the PPA must be pre-approved by a Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division."
The affidavit used to obtain the search warrant is going to be very important. If Apple initiated it, and they omitted the fact that the target was a journalist, they're in big trouble. That's a material omission.
2000aa. Searches and seizures by government officers and employees in connection with investigation or prosecution of criminal offenses
(a) Work product materials
Notwithstanding any other law, it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce; but this provision shall not impair or affect the ability of any government officer or employee, pursuant to otherwise applicable law, to search for or seize such materials, if--
(1) there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate: Provided, however, That a government officer or employee may not search for or seize such materials under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein (but such a search or seizure may be conducted under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense consists of the receipt, possession, or communication of information relating to the national defense, classified information, or restricted data under the provisions of section 793, 794, 797, or 798 of title 18, or section 2274, 2275, or 2277 of this title, or section 783 of title 50, or if the offense involves the production, possession, receipt, mailing, sale, distribution, shipment, or transportation of child pornography, the sexual exploitation of children, or the sale or purchase of children under section 2251, 2251A, 2252, or 2252A of title 18); or
(2) there is reason to believe that the immediate seizure of such materials is necessary to prevent the death of, or serious bodily injury to, a human being.
Re SiteTruth complaints: (We have a blog for that.)
Non-commercial web sites aren't rated at all. However, the presence of an ad link marks a site as "commercial", as does being in ".com". Our "commercial intent" detection is rather simplistic. We really should have a classifier system doing that. Yahoo search R&D, back when they had search R&D, built one of those, but never did much with it. We've been reluctant to use machine learning techniques, though, because they reduce the transparency of the system. At present, SiteTruth doesn't rely on "security by obscurity". Adding a classifier system would change that.
Credit rating information is useful because, for businesses, you can get business size information. Annual sales and number of employees are worth knowing, and displaying to the user in search results. (We'll be doing something in that area soon.)
There's a guy in Brooklyn, NY, who took pictures of camera stores that advertise on line or for mail order. There are companies with giant warehouses and loading docks, and there are, well, "marginal locations". It's very funny. Search engines need info like that.
As for specific sites:
Glaxosmithkline: We give them a yellow "?", which means we think they're legit, but don't have third-party verification that the domain is tied to the company. In our hard-ass view, that's an OK rating. SSL certs and BBBonline links provide such third-party verification. They did match our database. We weren't able to parse "Registered office: 980 Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex, TW8 9GS, United Kingdom.", unfortunately; we only recognize multi-line postal addresses, usable on an envelope, at present.
Vodaphone All the country sites have SSL certs, but the main ".com" site does not. It does have the address "Vodafone Group Plc / Vodafone House / The Connection / Newbury / Berkshire / RG14 2FN / England" on multiple lines, which we pulled out of the source HTML as a possible address, but did not parse successfully. Still, they got a yellow "?", and were matched to the UK business database.
Oxfam gets a green checkmark, and the system was able to pull four business addresses from their web site.
If anything, the embarrassing thing about the leak is that the product isn't changing much. The corner bevel radius is changing. Big deal. Two cameras, one on front, one on back. That's new. Camera flash - yawn. Noise cancellation mic - finally. Those are all routine, minor product improvements, and they're all already available on competing products.
That's what may scare Jobs - he makes a big announcement, and everybody yawns. Headlines read "Apple plays catch-up with Sony Ericsson". Jobs looks like a loser.
We noticed another attack against a hosting provider recently, but it wasn't GoDaddy; it was ThePlanet, or at least someone who uses their IP block. A number of phishing sites suddenly appeared on our list, and we noticed they all mapped to the same server. Multiple domains on the same server were all hosting the same phishing attack.
Annoyingly, the domain registration for the server's main domain ("websitewelcome.com") was "private". That's actually part of HostGator's system; there's no reason it should have "private registration". It just makes it harder to find the responsible party.
LinkedIn is useful for business purposes. LinkedIn offers a big hammer that discourages spammers. If someone tries to "friend" you, and you don't know them, you click "I don't know this person". After a few rejections, the annoying user loses the ability to "friend" people. The same goes for "questions"; if someone puts up a question that looks like spam, and it's flagged, they soon lose the ability to post "questions". As a result, there are people on LinkedIn worth talking to. However, a big fraction of the users are "consultants" trolling for work. Lots of lawyers, but, after all, lawyers are consultants trolling for work.
I used to enjoy Tribe, which was fun and useful if you're near SF, because many of the people doing interesting art things in SF were on Tribe. But they have near zero traffic now. A few years back, they went "Web 2.0", and they broke their system so badly that "Tribe bug reports" became the most active group. Then they decided to crack down on "adult" topics to please their advertisers, and a big chunk of their user base left. Then they annoyed their main developer, and he left. After those mistakes, I think they're down to about three employees.
Facebook shouldn't be storing your Facebook passsword, just an hash of it. That's how login systems have worked for thirty years.
Doesn't anybody there have a clue about security?
These guys are doing good work, but really, all they're doing is checking for some specific types of black-hat SEO. This is inherently a losing battle, because there's active opposition. It's a "negative file" approach - making a list of the bad guys.
Credit cards once worked that way; merchants were sent daily lists of canceled or stolen credit cards. Back then, getting a
credit card was tough; the customer had to be a good customer of the bank. Not until credit card transactions were validated remotely against a "positive file" that checked the actual account could everyone have one. Web search is still in the "negative file" era.
As I point out occasionally, the main search engines have very low standards for business legitimacy. It's an ongoing, and losing, battle to filter out the totally bogus sites. But if you insist on some minimal standard of business legitimacy for a commercial web site, you kick out most of the "bottom feeders" with no business address, and along with them, most of the total phonies. We do this at SiteTruth, which exists to demonstrate that it's possible. SiteTruth tries to find some indication that a domain maps to a real-world business. If it can't, the site is moved down in search engine position. That's enough to move most "bottom feeder" downward, below the legit ones. It's not always successful in finding the business behind the site, but it looks harder than the average user would, looking through the site's "About", "Help", "Contact", etc. pages for a mailing address. If a search engine takes a hard line on this, the junk sites can be kicked out.
Once you have a business address for a web site, there are extensive resources for finding out more about the business. It's easy to get annual sales and number of employees if you know what database to buy.
Corporate registration information and D/B/A name information is available. Business credit rating info is available in bulk for a fee. Crank that info into search engine positioning and you've got hard data driving search. Rating web sites by looking only at the web is a process easy to manipulate. Use info from the real world, and it's much harder.
Phony mailing addresses do show up, but that's usually associated with phishing sites. Not showing a business address is a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions, but common. Using the address of another business is felony fraud and identity theft. That gets law enforcement attention. So only outright criminals try that. To catch that, we fetch the entire PhishTank database every few hours and blacklist the entire domain for a single phishing entry. That's draconian, but if you're running a site that lets users upload entire pages, it's your job to kick the phishers off. Most of the innocent victims there are free hosting services with weak abuse departments. If you're in the free hosting business or the URL redirection business, you need a strong abuse department, or you will be pwned. Right now, "t35.com" is getting hit hard. By now, most free hosting sites with a clue automatically check PhishTank and the APWG list to see if they're on it. "t35.com" is still doing it by hand, and they're losing the battle.
So why doesn't Google do this? Google's business model depends on those ad-heavy "bottom feeder" sites. About 36% of Google's "content network" domains are "bottom feeders". When organic search takes you to the right place on the first try, Google doesn't make any money. But if you're led through an ad-heavy site, the Google cash register clicks. Google's business model thus takes them to the dark side. Google would take a big financial hit if they did even some basic legitimacy checking on their advertisers. Search Google for "craigslist auto posting tool", which brings up five Google ads for companies offering to spam Craigs
That's the way international ordering used to work. You had to order stuff through some import company or freight forwarder, which had business relationships with foreign suppliers. You paid the import company, they ordered, handled the shipping, and sold the item to you with a markup. That's how it worked back in the days of sailing ships.
Note that this Ugandan company doesn't have a posted price list. You have to ask for a quote before they tell you how much they're going to mark up your Amazon.com order. So they're probably expensive.
Shutting down most of Europe's airspace was entirely the right decision. All it would take is one flight through an unexpected dust cloud to produce a near-disaster, if not a crash. That's happened at least five times in the past. Read Boeing's advisory on volcanic ash.
Read Branson's autobiography? Several times in his life, he's been involved in adventure vacations that left someone else dead. This is not someone you want making risk management decisions for others.
The big problem now is that the airlines are botching the logistics of getting people back where they're supposed to be. There are people being told they can't get a flight until mid-May, because they booked a flight using frequent-flyer miles or via some discount deal that has a low priority. They can't get the airline on the phone, and they get hit with heavy roaming charges while on hold. This is really tough on people in transit running out of money.
So that's what the JASONs were doing back then. All that stuff on "residual arithmetic", because they apparently thought that N-bit multiplication required O(N) cycles. By the late 1960s, high-end mainframes (CDC 6600, STRETCH, LARC, etc.) had multipliers that could beat O(N), by adding up the partial products pairwise as a tree. That approach is O(log N). This report was written in the mid-1980s, by which time that technology had filtered down to most larger CPUs. Today, of course, every serious microprocessor has it. "Residual arithmetic" just isn't needed. Most of the advantages of that approach were achieved, but by more straightforward means.
However, division using table lookup is widespread. Modern dividers have sizable hard-wired tables. See "Pentium Floating Point Bug" for details.
Data flow machines did catch on. They're just invisible. Inside the Pentium Pro/II/III and later machines is a data flow engine. That's part of how superscalar machines work. But, again, it wasn't necessary to export that painful paradigm to the programmer-visible level. (GPUs, though, are close to data flow machines.)
The paper on "automated programming" is amusing. This was written just when the "expert systems" fad was tanking, as it was becoming clear that "expert systems" just didn't do very much. The "AI Winter" followed.
I recognize too many names on the distribution lists for those reports.
China will probably cut over to IPv6 first. They started in 2000, and the 2008 Olympics was all IPv6. It was clear long ago that
China alone needed more address space than IPv4 could provide. The government also likes the "everybody has a permanent IP address" concept, for control purposes.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if China went all IPv6 domestically, with any translation to IPv4 at the "Great Firewall".
All mobile devices should have been on IPv6 by now.
What we're seeing with these "data platforms" is that you can do some restricted things with the data, but you can't just get the data and work on it yourself. Compare, say, Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The entire data set is downloadable for free. (I have an application downloading the updates every night.. So do many Wall Street services.) Don't expect that kind of access from Twitter.
Companies hate to make that data freely available. Even most WHOIS access is throttled, and that's supposed to be public data.
It's not about data volume any more, now that terabyte drives are in the bargain bin at the computer store. It's about control.
"Data platforms" with such restrictive access are really just another form of "digital rights management".
That message just means that, due to some problem, the power grid as currently configured was one failure away from having to drop 11MW of load. This occurs when a line in the transmission system is out of service, and the remaining lines are carrying the load, but there's no redundancy. So orders are issued to close certain switches and open others, or to start up additional generators, so that the system is reconfigured to again allow for any single failure. PJM's control center is announcing, as a warning, who potentially gets dumped if they lose another resource. The area mentioned is not necessarily the cause of the problem.
Actual load dumps are very rare; I think the last one in the PJM control areas was in 1997.
For Slashdot readers, it's like bringing a replacement disk on line when a RAID disk system loses a disk. The RAID system is still working, but there's now a single point of failure until a new drive is switched in.
Residential systems usually don't have heat storage, but larger systems, with chilled water, often do. Some even make ice at night when power is cheap, to be melted during the day. It would be helpful to have a few hours advance notice of a hot period, so that the system could chill down an insulated water tank for use later.
Power companies generally have a load curve planned a day ahead. That info is available; here's PJM's dashboard, which tells you far more than you ever wanted to know about the power grid for the northeastern United States. (Load right now: 55,292 megawatts. 1,896 megawatts of that is wind power. Spinning reserves are 2,274 MW. Current trouble report: "As of 09:30 hours, a Non-Market Post Contingency Local Load Relief Warning of 11 MW in the Rachel Hill area of FE (PN) has been issued for Transmission Contingency Control. Post Contingency Switching: Open Roxbury at Shadegap, Close Threesprings at Shadegap, open Curryville at Claysburg, open Snakespring at Bedford North." Tomorrow's estimated peak is around 71 gigawatts, expected at 17:30 hours.) The estimation system uses historical data and weather reports, plus bid info from really big users. So one can plan a day ahead if your HVAC system has heat storage.
Routine control is exercised by financial means - all the players submit bids, which have a time range, a low output and price, a high output and price, and a ramp value. The control center crunches on these and decides who generates how much power. Large power buyers can bid, too; they have the option of saying how much they'll cut their load as the price rises. A big data center might choose to be a market player. When there are troubles, the control center can take "non-market actions", like the one above, but most of the time, the outstanding bids determine who does what.
California went too far in deregulation, and had electricity auctions every half hour at one point. There were brokers and dealers who were pure speculators, and this affected live power operations in real time. That caused so much churn that there were blackouts. So now, bids are for a day ahead, and the matching of supply and demand is algorithmic. All this data is public, to keep the markets honest. That's why PJM offers such detailed data about their power grid.
That's nothing. The Adept robot is in production. Here's what's working in the lab. Watch the fingered robot hand tie knots in a rope, dribble balls, and throw a cell phone in the air and catch it in a different grip, all at about 5x human speed or better. This system has 1ms visual reaction time.
Working at very high speed has advantages. Once the reaction time of the systems is faster than movement caused by gravity and
other disturbances, flexible objects like ropes and cloth can be manipulated in a straightforward way.
When Australia switched to the new plastic money, we changed over from old $100 to new $100 (for example) in a short space of time.
Foreign holders of US currency would panic if the US did that. There's about $575 billion of US currency in circulation, or about $1200 for each person, including children, in the United States. Obviously most of that is held outside the US. When the US Treasury changes the currency, they do a big outreach program stressing that the old bills aren't becoming obsolete. They don't want all that currency coming back to be exchanged into yuan or euros.
Facebook does a good job of being a "social network" for keeping up with your real-world friends. But if that's all you use it for, Facebook doesn't make any money. It's all that "casual gaming" and "fanning" that brings in the revenue.
Connecting up with a game or becoming a "fan" of some commercial content sucks all your private data into some game operator's system.
Google conquered a similar problem. Organic search makes Google no money. Google's business is being an ad agency.
Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules.
Yes. It's one of the few things on the Internet that really is still "peer to peer".
There are still useful forums for Python, MySQL, the C and C++ standards committees, and such. It's useful, for example, that Oracle doesn't control "comp.databases.mysql".
It's also much easier to deal with a large number of Usenet groups than a large number of random forums systems.
Computerworld reports that McAfee has reacted to user complaints by shutting down their support forum. The forum seems to be back up now.
That was an extremely dumb move to pull after the story was already in the New York Times, Business Week, and on TV.
Many frantic users in the forum. The big losers are the enterprise users who bought into McAfee's premium services, with automatic corporate-wide updating. There's no fully automatic, reliable fix yet for systems already damaged.
In some cases, it's apparently necessary to bring in a new copy of "svchost.exe"; the one in quarantine is bad.
This points up a major risk to US computer infrastructure. Any program with remote update is potentially capable of taking down vast numbers of systems. Ones like McAfee or Windows Update, which deploy updates to all targets simultaneously, can cause widespread damage quickly. Remote updating by vendors may need to be regulated, as a public policy issue.
The story just hit ABC News, via the Associated Press: "McAfee Antivirus Program Goes Berserk, Reboots PCs" There are stories on the Huffington Post and NextGov. The story just broke into mainstream news in the last hour. It just hit the New York Times.
There's nothing on McAfee's home page about this yet. No items in their "News" or "Threat Center" or "Breaking Advisory" sections. There's supposedly a McAfee Knowledge Base article, "False positive detection of w32/wecorl.a in 5958 DAT", but their knowledge base site is overloaded. When it eventually loads, there's a download link to a patch. But there's nothing like an apology. All they say is "Problem:
Blue screen or DCOM error, followed by shutdown messages after updating to the 5958 DAT on April 21, 2010."
McAfee has botched their damage control. They should be out there apologizing. Meanwhile, you can watch McAfee stock drop.
It's important to pull Islam's chain. Frequently. Some branches of Islam has a tendency to go off in total nutcase directions, especially in countries where Islam has a big role in government. Even someMoslemsthink so. Most of the Islamic countries are dysfunctional. Islamic educational systems are a joke; they provide brainwashing, not an education. It's not a money issue; most doctorates issued in Saudi Arabia are in "Islamic Studies".
Religions with no sense of humor are vulnerable to ridicule. South Park is fighting the good fight, and, even though I'm not a Fox News fan, I applaud Fox News for backing them up. We give too much respect to religion. Sometimes, religious practices need a good belly-laugh.
The Catholic Church used to have that kind of power. That was a long time ago. Centuries ago they lost their temporal power, and recently, they've lost their moral authority. There are calls for the Pope to resign over child abuse coverups, people calling for his arrest if he visits Britain, and a group working to deny the Vatican diplomatic recognition. (The US didn't recognize the Vatican until the Reagan administration - Reagan needed Catholic votes.) At this point, nobody is afraid of the Catholic church, except maybe little boys being molested. Islam needs to be taken down a few notches like that.
There's surprising similarity between the nuttier branches of the major Western religions. Extreme-right Christian groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, and militant Islamic mullahs have more in common than any of them do with the rest of the world. They're all into oppressing women, ODing on prayer, dumbing down education, and whining for Government subsidies. (Their leaders also seem to be old guys with beards wearing black, looking like ZZ Top). Laughing at them can only help.
The real question for games is not whether they're art, but whether they are "stories". A game with too much story becomes a "track ride", as you're forced from scene to scene along a predetermined plot track. Movie-licensed games generally suffer from this. Games with more free play are a place that you go, not a story. GTA is the best known example. GTA has subplots, but no overarching story arc. The GTA developers have the sense to realize that a GTA movie would be a bad idea, and have refused movie deals. A movie would produce pressure to lock the player onto a plot track, which would ruin the game.
MMORPGs have little story, and the extreme case, Second Life, has no story at all. It truly is just a place that you go. Yet Second Life is about art, fashion, and design. Second Life even has fashion magazines. Good ones. Runway was spectacular while it lasted.
Slashdot Mirror
This already has hit ABC News, CBS News, Business Week, Forbes, CNN, Fortune, Bloomberg, Fox News, The Register, Computerworld...
Reporters care about this stuff. If they're at risk because someone passed them some info, or they bought something from an informant, that gets their attention.
We went through all this in Steve Jackson Games, in the very early days of the EFF. The Secret Service lost in court. Now, the feds are very careful about searching journalists, for fear of violating the Privacy Protection Act. "Federal law enforcement searches that implicate the PPA must be pre-approved by a Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division."
The affidavit used to obtain the search warrant is going to be very important. If Apple initiated it, and they omitted the fact that the target was a journalist, they're in big trouble. That's a material omission.
US Code - TITLE 42 > CHAPTER 21A > SUBCHAPTER I > Part A > 2000aa:
2000aa. Searches and seizures by government officers and employees in connection with investigation or prosecution of criminal offenses
Notwithstanding any other law, it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce; but this provision shall not impair or affect the ability of any government officer or employee, pursuant to otherwise applicable law, to search for or seize such materials, if--
Re SiteTruth complaints: (We have a blog for that.)
Non-commercial web sites aren't rated at all. However, the presence of an ad link marks a site as "commercial", as does being in ".com". Our "commercial intent" detection is rather simplistic. We really should have a classifier system doing that. Yahoo search R&D, back when they had search R&D, built one of those, but never did much with it. We've been reluctant to use machine learning techniques, though, because they reduce the transparency of the system. At present, SiteTruth doesn't rely on "security by obscurity". Adding a classifier system would change that.
Credit rating information is useful because, for businesses, you can get business size information. Annual sales and number of employees are worth knowing, and displaying to the user in search results. (We'll be doing something in that area soon.) There's a guy in Brooklyn, NY, who took pictures of camera stores that advertise on line or for mail order. There are companies with giant warehouses and loading docks, and there are, well, "marginal locations". It's very funny. Search engines need info like that.
As for specific sites:
If anything, the embarrassing thing about the leak is that the product isn't changing much. The corner bevel radius is changing. Big deal. Two cameras, one on front, one on back. That's new. Camera flash - yawn. Noise cancellation mic - finally. Those are all routine, minor product improvements, and they're all already available on competing products.
That's what may scare Jobs - he makes a big announcement, and everybody yawns. Headlines read "Apple plays catch-up with Sony Ericsson". Jobs looks like a loser.
We noticed another attack against a hosting provider recently, but it wasn't GoDaddy; it was ThePlanet, or at least someone who uses their IP block. A number of phishing sites suddenly appeared on our list, and we noticed they all mapped to the same server. Multiple domains on the same server were all hosting the same phishing attack.
Annoyingly, the domain registration for the server's main domain ("websitewelcome.com") was "private". That's actually part of HostGator's system; there's no reason it should have "private registration". It just makes it harder to find the responsible party.
LinkedIn is useful for business purposes. LinkedIn offers a big hammer that discourages spammers. If someone tries to "friend" you, and you don't know them, you click "I don't know this person". After a few rejections, the annoying user loses the ability to "friend" people. The same goes for "questions"; if someone puts up a question that looks like spam, and it's flagged, they soon lose the ability to post "questions". As a result, there are people on LinkedIn worth talking to. However, a big fraction of the users are "consultants" trolling for work. Lots of lawyers, but, after all, lawyers are consultants trolling for work.
I used to enjoy Tribe, which was fun and useful if you're near SF, because many of the people doing interesting art things in SF were on Tribe. But they have near zero traffic now. A few years back, they went "Web 2.0", and they broke their system so badly that "Tribe bug reports" became the most active group. Then they decided to crack down on "adult" topics to please their advertisers, and a big chunk of their user base left. Then they annoyed their main developer, and he left. After those mistakes, I think they're down to about three employees.
Facebook shouldn't be storing your Facebook passsword, just an hash of it. That's how login systems have worked for thirty years. Doesn't anybody there have a clue about security?
These guys are doing good work, but really, all they're doing is checking for some specific types of black-hat SEO. This is inherently a losing battle, because there's active opposition. It's a "negative file" approach - making a list of the bad guys. Credit cards once worked that way; merchants were sent daily lists of canceled or stolen credit cards. Back then, getting a credit card was tough; the customer had to be a good customer of the bank. Not until credit card transactions were validated remotely against a "positive file" that checked the actual account could everyone have one. Web search is still in the "negative file" era.
As I point out occasionally, the main search engines have very low standards for business legitimacy. It's an ongoing, and losing, battle to filter out the totally bogus sites. But if you insist on some minimal standard of business legitimacy for a commercial web site, you kick out most of the "bottom feeders" with no business address, and along with them, most of the total phonies. We do this at SiteTruth, which exists to demonstrate that it's possible. SiteTruth tries to find some indication that a domain maps to a real-world business. If it can't, the site is moved down in search engine position. That's enough to move most "bottom feeder" downward, below the legit ones. It's not always successful in finding the business behind the site, but it looks harder than the average user would, looking through the site's "About", "Help", "Contact", etc. pages for a mailing address. If a search engine takes a hard line on this, the junk sites can be kicked out.
Once you have a business address for a web site, there are extensive resources for finding out more about the business. It's easy to get annual sales and number of employees if you know what database to buy. Corporate registration information and D/B/A name information is available. Business credit rating info is available in bulk for a fee. Crank that info into search engine positioning and you've got hard data driving search. Rating web sites by looking only at the web is a process easy to manipulate. Use info from the real world, and it's much harder.
Phony mailing addresses do show up, but that's usually associated with phishing sites. Not showing a business address is a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions, but common. Using the address of another business is felony fraud and identity theft. That gets law enforcement attention. So only outright criminals try that. To catch that, we fetch the entire PhishTank database every few hours and blacklist the entire domain for a single phishing entry. That's draconian, but if you're running a site that lets users upload entire pages, it's your job to kick the phishers off. Most of the innocent victims there are free hosting services with weak abuse departments. If you're in the free hosting business or the URL redirection business, you need a strong abuse department, or you will be pwned. Right now, "t35.com" is getting hit hard. By now, most free hosting sites with a clue automatically check PhishTank and the APWG list to see if they're on it. "t35.com" is still doing it by hand, and they're losing the battle.
So why doesn't Google do this? Google's business model depends on those ad-heavy "bottom feeder" sites. About 36% of Google's "content network" domains are "bottom feeders". When organic search takes you to the right place on the first try, Google doesn't make any money. But if you're led through an ad-heavy site, the Google cash register clicks. Google's business model thus takes them to the dark side. Google would take a big financial hit if they did even some basic legitimacy checking on their advertisers. Search Google for "craigslist auto posting tool", which brings up five Google ads for companies offering to spam Craigs
That's the way international ordering used to work. You had to order stuff through some import company or freight forwarder, which had business relationships with foreign suppliers. You paid the import company, they ordered, handled the shipping, and sold the item to you with a markup. That's how it worked back in the days of sailing ships.
Note that this Ugandan company doesn't have a posted price list. You have to ask for a quote before they tell you how much they're going to mark up your Amazon.com order. So they're probably expensive.
Shutting down most of Europe's airspace was entirely the right decision. All it would take is one flight through an unexpected dust cloud to produce a near-disaster, if not a crash. That's happened at least five times in the past. Read Boeing's advisory on volcanic ash.
Read Branson's autobiography? Several times in his life, he's been involved in adventure vacations that left someone else dead. This is not someone you want making risk management decisions for others.
The big problem now is that the airlines are botching the logistics of getting people back where they're supposed to be. There are people being told they can't get a flight until mid-May, because they booked a flight using frequent-flyer miles or via some discount deal that has a low priority. They can't get the airline on the phone, and they get hit with heavy roaming charges while on hold. This is really tough on people in transit running out of money.
So that's what the JASONs were doing back then. All that stuff on "residual arithmetic", because they apparently thought that N-bit multiplication required O(N) cycles. By the late 1960s, high-end mainframes (CDC 6600, STRETCH, LARC, etc.) had multipliers that could beat O(N), by adding up the partial products pairwise as a tree. That approach is O(log N). This report was written in the mid-1980s, by which time that technology had filtered down to most larger CPUs. Today, of course, every serious microprocessor has it. "Residual arithmetic" just isn't needed. Most of the advantages of that approach were achieved, but by more straightforward means.
However, division using table lookup is widespread. Modern dividers have sizable hard-wired tables. See "Pentium Floating Point Bug" for details.
Data flow machines did catch on. They're just invisible. Inside the Pentium Pro/II/III and later machines is a data flow engine. That's part of how superscalar machines work. But, again, it wasn't necessary to export that painful paradigm to the programmer-visible level. (GPUs, though, are close to data flow machines.)
The paper on "automated programming" is amusing. This was written just when the "expert systems" fad was tanking, as it was becoming clear that "expert systems" just didn't do very much. The "AI Winter" followed.
I recognize too many names on the distribution lists for those reports.
China will probably cut over to IPv6 first. They started in 2000, and the 2008 Olympics was all IPv6. It was clear long ago that China alone needed more address space than IPv4 could provide. The government also likes the "everybody has a permanent IP address" concept, for control purposes.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if China went all IPv6 domestically, with any translation to IPv4 at the "Great Firewall".
All mobile devices should have been on IPv6 by now.
What we're seeing with these "data platforms" is that you can do some restricted things with the data, but you can't just get the data and work on it yourself. Compare, say, Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The entire data set is downloadable for free. (I have an application downloading the updates every night.. So do many Wall Street services.) Don't expect that kind of access from Twitter.
Companies hate to make that data freely available. Even most WHOIS access is throttled, and that's supposed to be public data. It's not about data volume any more, now that terabyte drives are in the bargain bin at the computer store. It's about control.
"Data platforms" with such restrictive access are really just another form of "digital rights management".
That message just means that, due to some problem, the power grid as currently configured was one failure away from having to drop 11MW of load. This occurs when a line in the transmission system is out of service, and the remaining lines are carrying the load, but there's no redundancy. So orders are issued to close certain switches and open others, or to start up additional generators, so that the system is reconfigured to again allow for any single failure. PJM's control center is announcing, as a warning, who potentially gets dumped if they lose another resource. The area mentioned is not necessarily the cause of the problem. Actual load dumps are very rare; I think the last one in the PJM control areas was in 1997.
For Slashdot readers, it's like bringing a replacement disk on line when a RAID disk system loses a disk. The RAID system is still working, but there's now a single point of failure until a new drive is switched in.
Residential systems usually don't have heat storage, but larger systems, with chilled water, often do. Some even make ice at night when power is cheap, to be melted during the day. It would be helpful to have a few hours advance notice of a hot period, so that the system could chill down an insulated water tank for use later.
Power companies generally have a load curve planned a day ahead. That info is available; here's PJM's dashboard, which tells you far more than you ever wanted to know about the power grid for the northeastern United States. (Load right now: 55,292 megawatts. 1,896 megawatts of that is wind power. Spinning reserves are 2,274 MW. Current trouble report: "As of 09:30 hours, a Non-Market Post Contingency Local Load Relief Warning of 11 MW in the Rachel Hill area of FE (PN) has been issued for Transmission Contingency Control. Post Contingency Switching: Open Roxbury at Shadegap, Close Threesprings at Shadegap, open Curryville at Claysburg, open Snakespring at Bedford North." Tomorrow's estimated peak is around 71 gigawatts, expected at 17:30 hours.) The estimation system uses historical data and weather reports, plus bid info from really big users. So one can plan a day ahead if your HVAC system has heat storage.
Routine control is exercised by financial means - all the players submit bids, which have a time range, a low output and price, a high output and price, and a ramp value. The control center crunches on these and decides who generates how much power. Large power buyers can bid, too; they have the option of saying how much they'll cut their load as the price rises. A big data center might choose to be a market player. When there are troubles, the control center can take "non-market actions", like the one above, but most of the time, the outstanding bids determine who does what.
California went too far in deregulation, and had electricity auctions every half hour at one point. There were brokers and dealers who were pure speculators, and this affected live power operations in real time. That caused so much churn that there were blackouts. So now, bids are for a day ahead, and the matching of supply and demand is algorithmic. All this data is public, to keep the markets honest. That's why PJM offers such detailed data about their power grid.
That's nothing. The Adept robot is in production. Here's what's working in the lab. Watch the fingered robot hand tie knots in a rope, dribble balls, and throw a cell phone in the air and catch it in a different grip, all at about 5x human speed or better. This system has 1ms visual reaction time.
Working at very high speed has advantages. Once the reaction time of the systems is faster than movement caused by gravity and other disturbances, flexible objects like ropes and cloth can be manipulated in a straightforward way.
When Australia switched to the new plastic money, we changed over from old $100 to new $100 (for example) in a short space of time.
Foreign holders of US currency would panic if the US did that. There's about $575 billion of US currency in circulation, or about $1200 for each person, including children, in the United States. Obviously most of that is held outside the US. When the US Treasury changes the currency, they do a big outreach program stressing that the old bills aren't becoming obsolete. They don't want all that currency coming back to be exchanged into yuan or euros.
Facebook does a good job of being a "social network" for keeping up with your real-world friends. But if that's all you use it for, Facebook doesn't make any money. It's all that "casual gaming" and "fanning" that brings in the revenue. Connecting up with a game or becoming a "fan" of some commercial content sucks all your private data into some game operator's system.
Google conquered a similar problem. Organic search makes Google no money. Google's business is being an ad agency.
Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules.
Yes. It's one of the few things on the Internet that really is still "peer to peer".
There are still useful forums for Python, MySQL, the C and C++ standards committees, and such. It's useful, for example, that Oracle doesn't control "comp.databases.mysql".
It's also much easier to deal with a large number of Usenet groups than a large number of random forums systems.
Computerworld reports that McAfee has reacted to user complaints by shutting down their support forum. The forum seems to be back up now. That was an extremely dumb move to pull after the story was already in the New York Times, Business Week, and on TV.
Many frantic users in the forum. The big losers are the enterprise users who bought into McAfee's premium services, with automatic corporate-wide updating. There's no fully automatic, reliable fix yet for systems already damaged. In some cases, it's apparently necessary to bring in a new copy of "svchost.exe"; the one in quarantine is bad.
This points up a major risk to US computer infrastructure. Any program with remote update is potentially capable of taking down vast numbers of systems. Ones like McAfee or Windows Update, which deploy updates to all targets simultaneously, can cause widespread damage quickly. Remote updating by vendors may need to be regulated, as a public policy issue.
The story just hit ABC News, via the Associated Press: "McAfee Antivirus Program Goes Berserk, Reboots PCs" There are stories on the Huffington Post and NextGov. The story just broke into mainstream news in the last hour. It just hit the New York Times.
There's nothing on McAfee's home page about this yet. No items in their "News" or "Threat Center" or "Breaking Advisory" sections. There's supposedly a McAfee Knowledge Base article, "False positive detection of w32/wecorl.a in 5958 DAT", but their knowledge base site is overloaded. When it eventually loads, there's a download link to a patch. But there's nothing like an apology. All they say is "Problem: Blue screen or DCOM error, followed by shutdown messages after updating to the 5958 DAT on April 21, 2010."
McAfee has botched their damage control. They should be out there apologizing. Meanwhile, you can watch McAfee stock drop.
It's important to pull Islam's chain. Frequently. Some branches of Islam has a tendency to go off in total nutcase directions, especially in countries where Islam has a big role in government. Even some Moslems think so. Most of the Islamic countries are dysfunctional. Islamic educational systems are a joke; they provide brainwashing, not an education. It's not a money issue; most doctorates issued in Saudi Arabia are in "Islamic Studies".
Religions with no sense of humor are vulnerable to ridicule. South Park is fighting the good fight, and, even though I'm not a Fox News fan, I applaud Fox News for backing them up. We give too much respect to religion. Sometimes, religious practices need a good belly-laugh.
The Catholic Church used to have that kind of power. That was a long time ago. Centuries ago they lost their temporal power, and recently, they've lost their moral authority. There are calls for the Pope to resign over child abuse coverups, people calling for his arrest if he visits Britain, and a group working to deny the Vatican diplomatic recognition. (The US didn't recognize the Vatican until the Reagan administration - Reagan needed Catholic votes.) At this point, nobody is afraid of the Catholic church, except maybe little boys being molested. Islam needs to be taken down a few notches like that.
There's surprising similarity between the nuttier branches of the major Western religions. Extreme-right Christian groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, and militant Islamic mullahs have more in common than any of them do with the rest of the world. They're all into oppressing women, ODing on prayer, dumbing down education, and whining for Government subsidies. (Their leaders also seem to be old guys with beards wearing black, looking like ZZ Top). Laughing at them can only help.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Sounds like Steve Ballmer.
Ebert is getting old and cranky. Last week, he pronounced "Kick-Ass" "morally reprehensible".
The real question for games is not whether they're art, but whether they are "stories". A game with too much story becomes a "track ride", as you're forced from scene to scene along a predetermined plot track. Movie-licensed games generally suffer from this. Games with more free play are a place that you go, not a story. GTA is the best known example. GTA has subplots, but no overarching story arc. The GTA developers have the sense to realize that a GTA movie would be a bad idea, and have refused movie deals. A movie would produce pressure to lock the player onto a plot track, which would ruin the game.
MMORPGs have little story, and the extreme case, Second Life, has no story at all. It truly is just a place that you go. Yet Second Life is about art, fashion, and design. Second Life even has fashion magazines. Good ones. Runway was spectacular while it lasted.