In some ways, it's encouraging. Until recently, 90% of the advanced degrees awarded in Saudi universities are in "religious studies". Most useful work is done by foreigners, and the country has a 25-30% youth unemployment rate.
About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem.
KAUST is part of this. The university is still being built and has no students yet;
opening is scheduled for September 2009. It's a graduate school only, and is
intended to have about 275 faculty members. Faculty will not be tenured; they'll be
contract employees.
Presumably somebody thought that having a big supercomputer would help with recruiting or image. There are no research programs underway yet to use it. The logical
application for that would be seismic processing for oil exploration, a classic supercomputer application, but that's
moving to GPUs.
"Highrollerslounge.com" is currently registered to "Commonwealth of Kentucky Justice Cabinet" and not currently resolving. The registrar was eNom, a favorite registrar of bottom-feeders. Enom is behind "Club Drop", with dozens of dummy registrars to pick up expiring domain names; they're a bulk registrar. Since Enom deals with many slimeballs, their policy is "If we are sued or threatened with lawsuit in connection with Service(s) provided to you, we may turn to you to indemnify us and to hold us harmless from the claims and expenses (including attorney's fees and court costs). Under such circumstances, you agree that you will, upon demand, obtain a performance bond with a reputable bonding company or, if you are unable to obtain a performance bond, that you will deposit money with us to pay for our reasonably anticipated expenses in relation to the matter for the coming year." So, unsurprisingly, that domain was transferred to Kentucky.
On the other hand, "Bugsyclub.com" is still connected to a gambling site. Their registrar is "Fabulous.com PTY LTD." "One of the leading domain monetization programs". "Fabulous.com" tries to be anonymous on their web site, but they're incorporated in Brisbane, Australia, and hosted in Santa Clara, CA. They used to be "Domain Intellect Pty Ltd", in Melbourne.
"sportsbook.com", once a major gambling site run from the UK, now a lesser site run out of Malta, is still up, and registered with Network Solutions. Sportsbook had some previous problems with the state of New Jersey over similar issues.
I have a Sprint PCS phone, made by Samsung, with a camera, GPS, voice dialing, and web browser. All those features suck.
The camera has a max resolution of 640x480, which is tolerable, but that's not
the default resolution. The default is 120x80, and the phone resets to the default when powered off, and sometimes when connected to a charger. So taking a picture isn't a casual affair; I have to plow through menus to reset the resolution, or risk getting a dinky picture.
The GPS isn't enabled, because Sprint requires I buy a package with tons of stuff I don't want to enable it.
Voice dialing has very slow response. My previous Motorola phone was much faster, and that was five years ago.
The web browser blows up on many sites, and connecting to Sprint's network interface usually takes at least 30 seconds of "connecting".
So I just use it for voice calls, and take an occasional picture.
Look at the
LHC cyro status for sector 3-4. Average magnet temperature is now at 70K, and
slowly creeping up to room temperature. Notice the expanded vertical scale on the graph.
Compare with the other sectors, holding with liquid helium at 1.9K.
Warmup is slow. Cooldown is slower. Several kilometers of pipe and a hundred or so magnets are involved.
It's not that bad, though. It looks like they won't have to take magnets out of
the tunnel for rewinding. That's a huge job. This is just a slow one.
They can warm up or chill down sector 3-4 during the shutdown period. The rest of the system would normally be cooled during shutdown anyway.
Fortunately, the end of analog TV is scheduled for mid-winter, so the underclasses won't riot successfully.
Millions of screaming kids. Most of the room-temp IQ people angry. It's going to be a fun day.
Read "The Plug-In Drug".
Firefox should come with a minimal PDF reader
on
PDF Exploits On the Rise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Firefox should ship with some minimal PDF reader instead of Adobe's. There's an incredible amount of junk in Adobe's PDF reader, which adds both vulnerabilities and load time. Has anyone ever used the WebBuy feature of Adobe PDF Reader?
When player prices fall below $100, it will happen
on
Bad Signs For Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
What do the manufacturers want, instant gratification? They only got the standards issue settled a few months ago. Get the player price down below $100, and over time,
people will buy players with Blu-Ray capability.
Meanwhile, the $99 DVD players with image rescaling to 1020p and HDMI output are pretty good. There's a significant improvement in image quality to big LCD screens when the analog cabling is eliminated. All the ringing and vertical edge blurring goes away. Compare HDMI DVD and HDMI Blu-Ray, and the differences aren't that big until you get quite close to the display.
This is a life-cycle thing. So five servers survived seven months. First year failure rates could be as high as 3% and they wouldn't have noticed. Let's see them run that thing for five years.
Corrosion is cumulative. It's not that useful to observe that something didn't fail from corrosion in seven months.
They really just want to sell hardware and software: "There is a possible benefit in having servers fail, in that this failure forces obsolescence and ensures timely decommissioning of servers." That's so Microsoft. They have to force their big customers onto Software Assurance, so they can't just keep running an OS with a perpetual license, like Windows 2000 Server, forever.
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
No. That was the conventional wisdom when we (SiteTruth) started putting out that report.
We originally thought that thousands of domains might be on that list.
But no. The number of well-known domains (and we're using Open Directory, which is 1.4 million or so domains, to define "well known") being exploited stays around 50 ± 25,
and as previously mentioned, only 11 of them have been on the list for more than three months. It's necessary to apply a clue stick to only a small number of webmasters to fix the problem.
Some problems can actually be solved. This is one of them.
If you're serious about blocking phishing sites, you have to accept some collateral damage.
Blocking by URL stopped working last year; most attacks have unique URLs now. Many have unique subdomains. So you have to block at the second-level domain level to be effective.
On the other hand, "tinyurl.com", which used to be popular with phishers, has been able to get off the blacklist by cracking down on misuse of their service. It's possible to do redirection competently.
When we started our list last year, it had about 175 exploited domains. After some serious nagging and an article in The Register, we're down to 46. And only 11 have been on the list for more than three months; the others come and go as exploits are reported and holes plugged.
So this is a problem that can be solved.
I'm glad to see Google taking a hard line on this. It's necessary that sites that do redirection feel the pain when they accept redirects to hostile sites. Google can apply much more pain that we can. Few sites will want to be on Google's blacklist for long.
The obvious next step is to make your profile a promotional tool. The "high achiever profile"
may be the next big thing. You addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce. You working
on a political campaign. You being interviewed on TV.
Soon, this will be a routine part of getting into college, and there will be services to do this for you.
What failed, apparently, was a non-cryogenic high-current electrical connection in one of the magnets. They didn't have a magnet winding failure, which is much worse; the whole magnet would probably have to be removed from the tunnel for repairs if that happened. To fix the current problem, they're going to have to bring some magnets up to room temperature, lose vacuum, fix the thing, and chill everything down again. It's a slow process, but not too bad.
Even though the statements from CERN are relatively terse, you can watch the LHC cyro status on line, which gives a good idea of what's being worked on.
You can look at much LHC status online, including detailed cyro status. (I'm not giving the URL, so as not to Slashdot that server. You can find it if you really care.) Sector 34 of the LHC is at sector 34 at 4.5K-20K, instead of down below 4.5K where it should be. One of the magnets quenched and went normal, and much of the energy in the magnet is dumped as heat. Then the liquid helium boils to a gas and blows out through relief valves. But the sector hasn't been brought up to room temperature, so they apparently think they can fix the problem without major work on the magnet.
Some of the cyrogenic magnets gave serious trouble last year, but apparently it's not as bad this time.
To pull this back on topic, the above tends to support the traditional military medicine model for treating "shell shock" and "battle fatigue" (as PTSD was know for the past century) by exposure, ie. "return to the battlefield as soon as possible". Just as with electroshock therapy, much as I dislike the fact the numbers show it to be effective.
It's different in prolonged low-intensity combat situations. The WWII observation was that most troops were likely to develop debilitating PTSD after about 200 days of the stress of combat, but most soldiers could tolerate 100 days. In the big wars, most units didn't spend that much time in combat; when they did, it was intense, but most of the time, most units were not in contact with the enemy. Anybody who spent 200 days in actual combat in WWII was unlikely to survive.
In wars with no rear areas, like Iraq, soldiers are at risk for the entire time they're in theater. So, while the odds of getting killed are lower than in the big wars, PTSD type problems, like hyper-alert paranoia, are more likely. Having to watch your back for months on end messes up the minds of most people.
Tours are longer than in the Vietnam era, too. Few soldiers were in Vietnam for more than 6 months unless they wanted to be. The standard tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is now 12-18 months, and many soldiers have been ordered back for additional tours. So more soldiers are being pushed to their limit.
That's what Wikia is for - to hold all the fancruft. Wikia hosts the Star [Wars|Gate|Trek|Craft] fancruft. It's almost all popular culture. It's become Wikipedia's slush pile.
Wikia takes advertising, but since its demographic lives in their parents' basement, the ads aren't worth much.
Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it. Wikipedia is worse at movies than IMDB. It's worse at music than Gracenote. It's worse at fancruft than Wikia. Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
China may well do this right, the 1950s Collier's space program way. Just mass produce and launch medium-sized rockets until there's a real space station in orbit. The problem with NASA has always been that they don't do anything in volume, so their costs are too high.
I asked a moderately hard Perl question (there's a problem in Date::Manip that seems to be configuration dependent), and within two minutes, I had a wrong answer. No useful replies yet.
IPv6 will happen when China demands it. China's growing need for IP address space will drive the issue. China needs at least a billion IP addresses.
Especially since the Chinese government would like a system where each device has a permanent IP address.
Wikipedia already does reasonably well at this. The Wikipedia verifiability and reliable source rules tend to force partisan articles to contain criticism sections, cites to critics, and verifiable negative information. Any cult that's had legal problems will have those prominently mentioned. It's hard to keep a hype article in Wikipedia, although some people keep trying.
Business reliability can be addressed. We do that at SiteTruth. That works because business cannot legallybe anonymous. Businesses have a trail of records behind them - corporate filings, credit ratings, criminal records, regulatory filings. Legitimate business sites can be tied back to that information to find out who's behind the business. As for less legitimate business sites, we just move them to the bottom of search results.
Reputation on the Web is a difficult issue. Slashdot has "karma", which helps. The problem on the Web is that not only can one be anonymous, one can create a large number of anonymous identities. (Mostly this is used for spamming; on Wikipedia, it's called "sockpuppetry").
An inter-site karma system, where a single signon accumulated karma from multiple sites, might be useful. It helps if there's some consequence for being a jerk.
So a modest level of web reputation can easily be added to the Web as it exists. Some reasonable solutions are already working, and just need to be deployed more widely.
This is no big deal. The "Foreign Broadcast Information Service" was a pre-Internet version of Google News, run by the CIA. It was a bunch of people listening to the public radio broadcasts of foreign countries. (Imagine listening to Radio Albania during the Cold War, taking notes, as a full time job.) Once in a while, something important might be mentioned. It wasn't secret, and transcripts were provided to the US press on request. It was a cheap way of finding out what
other countries said they were doing.
I have something that actually does anonymize IP data. I need a roughly unique identifier for web sites for load balancing and queuing purposes, but don't need to identify the remote site. So I run the IP address through MD5, the cryptographic hash, then take the absolute value, then reduce mod 1,000,000. So the world of IP addresses is mapped into 0..999999. About 4000 IP addresses map to each number, but they're spread pseudorandomly across IP space.
So there's no real problem doing this if you just need enough info to make your server farm run smoothly. Of course, Google wants more.
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways, it's encouraging. Until recently, 90% of the advanced degrees awarded in Saudi universities are in "religious studies". Most useful work is done by foreigners, and the country has a 25-30% youth unemployment rate. About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem. KAUST is part of this. The university is still being built and has no students yet; opening is scheduled for September 2009. It's a graduate school only, and is intended to have about 275 faculty members. Faculty will not be tenured; they'll be contract employees.
Presumably somebody thought that having a big supercomputer would help with recruiting or image. There are no research programs underway yet to use it. The logical application for that would be seismic processing for oil exploration, a classic supercomputer application, but that's moving to GPUs.
"goldencasino.com" tries to install "goldencasino.exe". That can't be good.
"Highrollerslounge.com" is currently registered to "Commonwealth of Kentucky Justice Cabinet" and not currently resolving. The registrar was eNom, a favorite registrar of bottom-feeders. Enom is behind "Club Drop", with dozens of dummy registrars to pick up expiring domain names; they're a bulk registrar. Since Enom deals with many slimeballs, their policy is "If we are sued or threatened with lawsuit in connection with Service(s) provided to you, we may turn to you to indemnify us and to hold us harmless from the claims and expenses (including attorney's fees and court costs). Under such circumstances, you agree that you will, upon demand, obtain a performance bond with a reputable bonding company or, if you are unable to obtain a performance bond, that you will deposit money with us to pay for our reasonably anticipated expenses in relation to the matter for the coming year." So, unsurprisingly, that domain was transferred to Kentucky.
On the other hand, "Bugsyclub.com" is still connected to a gambling site. Their registrar is "Fabulous.com PTY LTD." "One of the leading domain monetization programs". "Fabulous.com" tries to be anonymous on their web site, but they're incorporated in Brisbane, Australia, and hosted in Santa Clara, CA. They used to be "Domain Intellect Pty Ltd", in Melbourne.
"sportsbook.com", once a major gambling site run from the UK, now a lesser site run out of Malta, is still up, and registered with Network Solutions. Sportsbook had some previous problems with the state of New Jersey over similar issues.
I have a Sprint PCS phone, made by Samsung, with a camera, GPS, voice dialing, and web browser. All those features suck.
The camera has a max resolution of 640x480, which is tolerable, but that's not the default resolution. The default is 120x80, and the phone resets to the default when powered off, and sometimes when connected to a charger. So taking a picture isn't a casual affair; I have to plow through menus to reset the resolution, or risk getting a dinky picture.
The GPS isn't enabled, because Sprint requires I buy a package with tons of stuff I don't want to enable it.
Voice dialing has very slow response. My previous Motorola phone was much faster, and that was five years ago.
The web browser blows up on many sites, and connecting to Sprint's network interface usually takes at least 30 seconds of "connecting".
So I just use it for voice calls, and take an occasional picture.
Look at the LHC cyro status for sector 3-4. Average magnet temperature is now at 70K, and slowly creeping up to room temperature. Notice the expanded vertical scale on the graph. Compare with the other sectors, holding with liquid helium at 1.9K.
Warmup is slow. Cooldown is slower. Several kilometers of pipe and a hundred or so magnets are involved.
It's not that bad, though. It looks like they won't have to take magnets out of the tunnel for rewinding. That's a huge job. This is just a slow one.
They can warm up or chill down sector 3-4 during the shutdown period. The rest of the system would normally be cooled during shutdown anyway.
Fortunately, the end of analog TV is scheduled for mid-winter, so the underclasses won't riot successfully.
Millions of screaming kids. Most of the room-temp IQ people angry. It's going to be a fun day.
Read "The Plug-In Drug".
Firefox should ship with some minimal PDF reader instead of Adobe's. There's an incredible amount of junk in Adobe's PDF reader, which adds both vulnerabilities and load time. Has anyone ever used the WebBuy feature of Adobe PDF Reader?
What do the manufacturers want, instant gratification? They only got the standards issue settled a few months ago. Get the player price down below $100, and over time, people will buy players with Blu-Ray capability.
Meanwhile, the $99 DVD players with image rescaling to 1020p and HDMI output are pretty good. There's a significant improvement in image quality to big LCD screens when the analog cabling is eliminated. All the ringing and vertical edge blurring goes away. Compare HDMI DVD and HDMI Blu-Ray, and the differences aren't that big until you get quite close to the display.
This is a life-cycle thing. So five servers survived seven months. First year failure rates could be as high as 3% and they wouldn't have noticed. Let's see them run that thing for five years.
Corrosion is cumulative. It's not that useful to observe that something didn't fail from corrosion in seven months.
They really just want to sell hardware and software: "There is a possible benefit in having servers fail, in that this failure forces obsolescence and ensures timely decommissioning of servers." That's so Microsoft. They have to force their big customers onto Software Assurance, so they can't just keep running an OS with a perpetual license, like Windows 2000 Server, forever.
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
No. That was the conventional wisdom when we (SiteTruth) started putting out that report. We originally thought that thousands of domains might be on that list. But no. The number of well-known domains (and we're using Open Directory, which is 1.4 million or so domains, to define "well known") being exploited stays around 50 ± 25, and as previously mentioned, only 11 of them have been on the list for more than three months. It's necessary to apply a clue stick to only a small number of webmasters to fix the problem.
Some problems can actually be solved. This is one of them.
If you're serious about blocking phishing sites, you have to accept some collateral damage. Blocking by URL stopped working last year; most attacks have unique URLs now. Many have unique subdomains. So you have to block at the second-level domain level to be effective.
We publish a list of major domains being exploited by phishing scams. Today, there are 46 domains listed. eBay, for example, is on the list, because eBay has an open redirector exploit. Click on that URL. It says "ebay.com", right? It looks like eBay, right? It's not.
On the other hand, "tinyurl.com", which used to be popular with phishers, has been able to get off the blacklist by cracking down on misuse of their service. It's possible to do redirection competently.
When we started our list last year, it had about 175 exploited domains. After some serious nagging and an article in The Register, we're down to 46. And only 11 have been on the list for more than three months; the others come and go as exploits are reported and holes plugged. So this is a problem that can be solved.
I'm glad to see Google taking a hard line on this. It's necessary that sites that do redirection feel the pain when they accept redirects to hostile sites. Google can apply much more pain that we can. Few sites will want to be on Google's blacklist for long.
getting accepted someplace famous isn't important.
It gives you a significant edge in later life. Leaf through Who's Who and notice people's colleges.
The obvious next step is to make your profile a promotional tool. The "high achiever profile" may be the next big thing. You addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce. You working on a political campaign. You being interviewed on TV.
Soon, this will be a routine part of getting into college, and there will be services to do this for you.
What failed, apparently, was a non-cryogenic high-current electrical connection in one of the magnets. They didn't have a magnet winding failure, which is much worse; the whole magnet would probably have to be removed from the tunnel for repairs if that happened. To fix the current problem, they're going to have to bring some magnets up to room temperature, lose vacuum, fix the thing, and chill everything down again. It's a slow process, but not too bad.
Even though the statements from CERN are relatively terse, you can watch the LHC cyro status on line, which gives a good idea of what's being worked on.
You can look at much LHC status online, including detailed cyro status. (I'm not giving the URL, so as not to Slashdot that server. You can find it if you really care.) Sector 34 of the LHC is at sector 34 at 4.5K-20K, instead of down below 4.5K where it should be. One of the magnets quenched and went normal, and much of the energy in the magnet is dumped as heat. Then the liquid helium boils to a gas and blows out through relief valves. But the sector hasn't been brought up to room temperature, so they apparently think they can fix the problem without major work on the magnet.
Some of the cyrogenic magnets gave serious trouble last year, but apparently it's not as bad this time.
To pull this back on topic, the above tends to support the traditional military medicine model for treating "shell shock" and "battle fatigue" (as PTSD was know for the past century) by exposure, ie. "return to the battlefield as soon as possible". Just as with electroshock therapy, much as I dislike the fact the numbers show it to be effective.
It's different in prolonged low-intensity combat situations. The WWII observation was that most troops were likely to develop debilitating PTSD after about 200 days of the stress of combat, but most soldiers could tolerate 100 days. In the big wars, most units didn't spend that much time in combat; when they did, it was intense, but most of the time, most units were not in contact with the enemy. Anybody who spent 200 days in actual combat in WWII was unlikely to survive.
In wars with no rear areas, like Iraq, soldiers are at risk for the entire time they're in theater. So, while the odds of getting killed are lower than in the big wars, PTSD type problems, like hyper-alert paranoia, are more likely. Having to watch your back for months on end messes up the minds of most people.
Tours are longer than in the Vietnam era, too. Few soldiers were in Vietnam for more than 6 months unless they wanted to be. The standard tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is now 12-18 months, and many soldiers have been ordered back for additional tours. So more soldiers are being pushed to their limit.
That's what Wikia is for - to hold all the fancruft. Wikia hosts the Star [Wars|Gate|Trek|Craft] fancruft. It's almost all popular culture. It's become Wikipedia's slush pile. Wikia takes advertising, but since its demographic lives in their parents' basement, the ads aren't worth much.
Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it. Wikipedia is worse at movies than IMDB. It's worse at music than Gracenote. It's worse at fancruft than Wikia. Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
Good for them.
China may well do this right, the 1950s Collier's space program way. Just mass produce and launch medium-sized rockets until there's a real space station in orbit. The problem with NASA has always been that they don't do anything in volume, so their costs are too high.
Someone else said, jokingly, that China should just have one NAT router for the whole country.
That just might happen, with connections converted from IPv6 to IPv4 at the Great Firewall of China.
I asked a moderately hard Perl question (there's a problem in Date::Manip that seems to be configuration dependent), and within two minutes, I had a wrong answer. No useful replies yet.
"to linebreak use 2 spaces at end"
Who ordered that? That's a huge headache if you want to paste in something.
IPv6 will happen when China demands it. China's growing need for IP address space will drive the issue. China needs at least a billion IP addresses. Especially since the Chinese government would like a system where each device has a permanent IP address.
Wikipedia already does reasonably well at this. The Wikipedia verifiability and reliable source rules tend to force partisan articles to contain criticism sections, cites to critics, and verifiable negative information. Any cult that's had legal problems will have those prominently mentioned. It's hard to keep a hype article in Wikipedia, although some people keep trying.
Business reliability can be addressed. We do that at SiteTruth. That works because business cannot legally be anonymous. Businesses have a trail of records behind them - corporate filings, credit ratings, criminal records, regulatory filings. Legitimate business sites can be tied back to that information to find out who's behind the business. As for less legitimate business sites, we just move them to the bottom of search results.
Reputation on the Web is a difficult issue. Slashdot has "karma", which helps. The problem on the Web is that not only can one be anonymous, one can create a large number of anonymous identities. (Mostly this is used for spamming; on Wikipedia, it's called "sockpuppetry"). An inter-site karma system, where a single signon accumulated karma from multiple sites, might be useful. It helps if there's some consequence for being a jerk.
So a modest level of web reputation can easily be added to the Web as it exists. Some reasonable solutions are already working, and just need to be deployed more widely.
This is no big deal. The "Foreign Broadcast Information Service" was a pre-Internet version of Google News, run by the CIA. It was a bunch of people listening to the public radio broadcasts of foreign countries. (Imagine listening to Radio Albania during the Cold War, taking notes, as a full time job.) Once in a while, something important might be mentioned. It wasn't secret, and transcripts were provided to the US press on request. It was a cheap way of finding out what other countries said they were doing.
I have something that actually does anonymize IP data. I need a roughly unique identifier for web sites for load balancing and queuing purposes, but don't need to identify the remote site. So I run the IP address through MD5, the cryptographic hash, then take the absolute value, then reduce mod 1,000,000. So the world of IP addresses is mapped into 0..999999. About 4000 IP addresses map to each number, but they're spread pseudorandomly across IP space.
So there's no real problem doing this if you just need enough info to make your server farm run smoothly. Of course, Google wants more.