This is for single-connection use of wide-bandwidth channels with long latency. If you're synchronizing two servers across a considerable distance and have more than 1Gb/s or so available, it might be useful. For anything less, don't bother.
For local connections, you don't have many packets in flight, so you don't need this. For slower connections, you don't have the bandwidth to get that useful many packets in flight, so it doesn't help there either. It's not going to help your web browsing.
The question is whether this is effectively a keylogger. If the device does something like compute an MD5 of the last N mouse and keyboard events, readable by the game, that's fine. If it keeps the whole event stream and makes it accessible to any application, that's a major security hole.
Not that it really matters. The future of commercial gaming is consoles and mobile devices, not PCs.
The article uses the terms "piracy" and "illegal". That may be libel. It's an explicit accusation of criminal activity where there is none. See SCC vs. Lexmark. As the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled,
Generally speaking, "lock-out" codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression
side of the copyright line. Manufacturers of interoperable devices such as computers and software, game
consoles and video games, printers and toner cartridges, or automobiles and replacement parts may employ
a security system to bar the use of unauthorized components. To "unlock" and permit operation of the
primary device (i.e., the computer, the game console, the printer, the car), the component must contain either
a certain code sequence or be able to respond appropriately to an authentication process. To the extent
compatibility requires that a particular code sequence be included in the component device to permit its use,
the merger and scènes à faire doctrines generally preclude the code sequence from obtaining copyright.
The key concept here is that you can't copyright a working part. Lexmark lost on this one, and third party printer cartridges are thus legal. In fact, Lexmark is facing an antitrust case over this.
Apple's lack of support for 64-bit machines is embarrassing. After all, their PowerPC line was 64-bit, so all their own software should have been 64-bit compatible. Then they went to 32-bit IA-32 architecture for their own machines, even though 64-bit Intel CPUs were available. It was late in the IA-32 life cycle to do that. Now they're not supporting 64-bit hardware under either MacOS X or Windows, let alone Linux. That's kind of retro.
Users shouldn't need a computer to use an iPhone, anyway. The thing has an Internet connection of its own, after all.
I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...
No, that's the World Wide Web. Newsgroups are where technical stuff gets done. Very little spam, mostly on-topic posts, people who know what they're talking about, and no advertising.
"The Buildings That Used To Be Record Stores" are getting to be a problem. There's a big Tower Records near here that was the anchor store of its mall. (The drugstore there closed when a much bigger one opened in a mall across the street.) The whole mall may go under. There's nothing left that generates traffic.
In the late 1990s, somebody was selling a "bar code everything in your home" kit. You could print bar code stickers, and there was a wand for scanning them. If you loaned a hammer to a neighbor, you could check it out and get follow up messages if they didn't bring it back. Really. Didn't sell.
This is roughly the same idea.
Much of the "Internet of things" is silly.
There's not much utility of putting sensors in everything where there are no actuators to act on the data. If we had lots of robots running around, it would make sense; all those sensors would alert them to rugs that needed cleaning, shoes that needed to be put away, and supplies that needed to be restocked. But just sending the data to a web page or a phone is pointless.
Collecting data from devices that need maintenance makes sense. One of the more useful applications is to have commercial air conditioning gear communicate with a maintenance center, so that excessive crud in the chilled water or low compressor pressure is detected early and units can be fixed before they fail completely. But those systems have lots of actuators; they can switch compressors, open and close valves, adjust dampers, and work around some problems while calling for repair service.
But the ability to talk to things so dumb they can't do anything is sort of pointless.
This article is 1) dumb, and 2) so ad-heavy that, even with full ad blocking, only about 10% of the page is content. How did this make it onto Slashdot?
Going down the list, aligning multiple projectors is a marginal idea. That's something you do only when you can't get a single projector that will do the job. When there's content available for 2K x 4K projectors, somebody will make them. Not that many people can tell the difference between 1K x 2K and 2K x 4K, anyway. Raising the frame rate is more useful. Getting movies up to IMAX frame rates would do more than increasing the resolution. Existing hardware can go 75FPS with no problem; it's storing the data that's the bottleneck. Another 10x over BluRay and we're there.
Midair mice are not all that useful. If you want one, get a GyroMouse. Hold your arm straight out for ten minutes to practice, first.
Unclear what a "home quantum computer" would do. The author just likes the word "quantum". Sounds cool.
Do we really need BitTorrent in the router? Live events of great popularity can be multicast, which is already being done. Stored data of great popularity can be cached, which is what Akamai does. If you're synchronizing your calendar, it hardly needs to be in a huge number of locations. And Usenet solved the problem of moving data over each link only once, many years ago. The whole "p2p" thing is driven by piracy; it's a terrible way to move data around. The entire daily output of the RIAA could be distributed efficiently over Usenet and it would barely create a blip in bandwidth.
(Maybe Google will just buy out the music industry, which is much smaller than Google, and put the content up in an ad-supported form.)
Emulating the brain at the neuron level is a research tool. If those guys ever get it figured out, there will be better ways to implement it. And as I've pointed out to AI researchers for years, there's enough compute power around to do low-level mammal brains, so do a good mouse that works as well as a real one. (Rod Brooks once told me "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." His one-step-to-human-AI project, Cog, was a flop.) It's not that we can't build the hardware; it's that we still have no clue how to organize it.
One would think Microsoft technical support would have...
One would think that if they were going to build a fanless device that can easily overheat, they would have put in better overtemperature shutdown. The thing actually has overtemp detection, but it's set so high that visible board damage can occur before it shuts down. Probably because if they set it to a reasonable threshold, a sizable fraction of the units would be cycling on and off all the time.
It doesn't really matter. Retail price maintenance was an issue when manufacturers were big and retailers were little. Today, it's the other way round. Wal-Mart can dictate prices to manufacturers.
Might matter for some luxury goods, like the iPhone, but that's about it.
He probably has the thing in a hot spot, like on top of a big CRT monitor, in
an enclosed space, in a location with air vents blocked, or next to a hot air vent. We know the XBox 360 has marginal cooling.
Cuba's "terrorism" activities consisted mostly of stuff from the 1960s (Castro supported some of the more militant "black power" movements, and one of them was gearing up to blow up the Statue of Liberty), and Castro's support of various pro-Communist movements in Latin America, which stopped about fifteen years ago when the USSR tanked. Even the Congressional Research Service report doesn't point to any concrete instances of terrorist activities out of Cuba in recent years.
The US boycott of Cuba is mostly about getting votes from Cuban exiles in South Florida.
Yes. SGI had a huge building boom in the late 1990s, overexpanded, bought at the top of the market, and made some terrible real estate deals. Details are in SGI's bankruptcy filings.
That's actually a bad article about a real issue. A better article is here.
Intel's AMT technology puts special purpose hardware in the network controller which recognizes UDP and TCP packets on ports 16992, 16993, 16994, and 16995. This is completely independent of the operating system. Various system administration functions can be performed. Anybody can inventory the machine and read its ID. Other functions, like power off/on, reboot, user disable (disables keyboard/mouse/on-off switch) and remote disk I/O require a password or crypto key.
This has been around for a while; the previous version was called IPMI, Intelligent Platform Management Interface. It talked UDP only. AMT also talks TCP and HTTP; there's a whole protocol stack in the network controller now just for this. This was originally a server farm management system, but now it's on desktops, too.
If HTTP mode is enabled, you can control the machine from a web browser via port 16692.
It even works while the computer is "turned off"; it's part of "wake on LAN" functionality.
Supposedly, there is no valid default password or key, and the feature is supposedly off by default. But if any software ever enables this, you're 0wned.
The computer manufacturer can preload management keys. "An OEM may supply platforms with a PID-PPS pair already written to the Intel AMT Flash memory.", according to Intel. If a vendor does that, they 0wn your computer. Something to watch for. AMT can also be enabled from the Intel Management BIOS extension screen. (Password: "admin", it says in the manual.)
The normal way AMT keys get loaded in a corporate environment is that you plug in a USB key with a special file ("setup.bin") and power cycle the machine. The machine then tries to connect to the mothership on port 9971, doing a DNS lookup for "ProvisionServer" if no IP address was specified.
If you don't want AMT enabled, here's how to disable it:, "Intel AMT is returned to Factory Mode by selecting the Unprovision option on the BIOS Extension menu or by disabling Intel AMT from the BIOS extension Manageability Feature Selection."
The whole AMT system is reasonably designed; it even has Kerberos authentication. But it's so powerful and so hidden that if it's ever enabled, it's worse than a root kit.
Even reinstalling the OS won't help.
Yawn at Palo Alto Apple store
on
All Things iPhone
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I just went past the Apple store in Palo Alto. Nobody waiting in line. Not even much traffic. Big mockup iPhone displays in store windows playing canned demo.
People here aren't buying into the hype. And this is a place where people can afford the thing.
The line for the iPhone hasn't quite started here in Palo Alto yet. I saw three girls standing in front of the closed Apple store on University Avenue last night, and asked if they were in line for the iPhone launch. But no, they were just waiting for their ride.
People are already lining up in New York, though, according to press reports. People will stand in line for stuff in New York. Here, they usually go elsewhere.
What makes the open plan office thing tolerable at Google is a very large number of modest-sized, well-equipped conference rooms.
Google does go overboard on on-site services designed to keep people at work. I'm surprised they didn't go all the way and build dorms. Some large Japanese companies do that. But the real feel of Google is "overfunded dot-com". Yes, they're profitable. But the profitable part, search, was built some time ago. Most of the technical people in Mountain View are working on Google's money-losing sidelines, like desktop apps.
Those are the labor-intensive parts of the business.
Remember that Google is really an ad agency. That's how the money is made. Much of their newer hiring is sales reps for ads. The days when the ad sales just ran on autopilot are over; now Google has to push their ad products. In time, the ad agency people may take over. That will be an interesting culture change.
Google's campus used to be SGI's campus. Most Google buildings are former SGI buildings. So if you've been in the Valley for a while, there's always that reminder that a company can go from #1 to zero in just a few years.
Compare Intel in Santa Clara. Intel looks like Dilbertland. Intel is where cubicle culture began. Intel has built buildings from the ground up with single rooms covering about two acres, full of tiny cubicles. The cubicles are so small that only one chair will physically fit in them; they look like library study carrels. These aren't for call center employees; these are the people who design Intel CPUs.
I just read through the filing. The RIAA is in big trouble here.
Most of the facts in the case have already been litigated, and the RIAA lost.
The counterclaims arise from facts already on the record. The RIAA's actions are a matter of public record. And they did a whole range of things ranging from really dumb to possibly criminal.
First, their investigation unit, SafeNet/MediaSentry, isn't a licensed private investigator. So they don't have any of the immunities a private investigator does. Normally, law firms use licensed private investigators for their investigations, but the RIAA didn't bother. Bad move.
Second, there's a clear case for fraudulent debt collection. It's already been established in court that the RIAA's claims were false, and that they knew they were false, yet they continued collection efforts.
On the harassment front, the RIAA's representatives apparently attempted to contact a 10 year old child's elementary school under false pretenses, pretending to be a grandparent. The court had to issue a protective order prohibiting the RIAA from contacting the kid. That's going to be tough to explain to a jury.
There's more, but the RIAA is going to have a very tough time in court on this one.
Some years ago I went to Vegas to exhibit at Comdex, and was stuck at some minor hotel off the Strip that catered to the slots crowd. It was depressing to watch. The buses pull up, and people get out. I thought they'd check in, take a shower, change their clothes, see what entertainment was in town, maybe have a meal. No. They head straight for the slot machines, right from the buses. That's addictive behavior.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They open, they get some cool people, if they're successful they get more cool people and become the place to go, they get greedy and let too many people in, they become uncool and fall out of favor, they limp along in obscurity for quite a while, and finally they close. Formerly-cool social networking sites include AOL, the Well, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Tribe, and Friendster. Myspace hasn't grown in a year, and Facebook is still on the way up.
See the relevant Alexa traffic ratings.
As the article points out, the early adopters tend to be in the 20-30 age range, and over time, usage of sites filters down to college and then high school students. The article points out that this happened for Myspace and is happening to Facebook. But they see this as a "class" thing, not a life-cycle thing, because they didn't look at enough sites and their history.
The next generation of social networking will probably be phone-based.
Helio, the expensive "don't call it a phone" device with Myspace integration, should have Facebook integration instead. Look for an iPhone-based social networking system.
Somebody is going to do phone-based social networking well and make billions.
The DIA guidelines on "combating the insider threat" refer to people with security clearances of at least SECRET. That's a standard list, and goes back to at least the 1950s. The article doesn't make a connection with it being applied to universities.
What's puzzling about this is that it's totally out of touch with reality. The USSR was interested in American R&D, but that's because they had an industrial base and weapons plants that could use R&D. No enemy of the US today has anything like that. (North Korea and Iran, maybe, but they're mostly trying to do things the superpowers did in the 1950s.) Al-Queda consists of loosely affiliated small groups that use off the shelf weaponry. This seems a mis-aimed effort, which isn't unusual for the current administration.
Slashdot Mirror
This is for single-connection use of wide-bandwidth channels with long latency. If you're synchronizing two servers across a considerable distance and have more than 1Gb/s or so available, it might be useful. For anything less, don't bother.
For local connections, you don't have many packets in flight, so you don't need this. For slower connections, you don't have the bandwidth to get that useful many packets in flight, so it doesn't help there either. It's not going to help your web browsing.
The question is whether this is effectively a keylogger. If the device does something like compute an MD5 of the last N mouse and keyboard events, readable by the game, that's fine. If it keeps the whole event stream and makes it accessible to any application, that's a major security hole.
Not that it really matters. The future of commercial gaming is consoles and mobile devices, not PCs.
The article uses the terms "piracy" and "illegal". That may be libel. It's an explicit accusation of criminal activity where there is none. See SCC vs. Lexmark. As the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled,
Generally speaking, "lock-out" codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression side of the copyright line. Manufacturers of interoperable devices such as computers and software, game consoles and video games, printers and toner cartridges, or automobiles and replacement parts may employ a security system to bar the use of unauthorized components. To "unlock" and permit operation of the primary device (i.e., the computer, the game console, the printer, the car), the component must contain either a certain code sequence or be able to respond appropriately to an authentication process. To the extent compatibility requires that a particular code sequence be included in the component device to permit its use, the merger and scènes à faire doctrines generally preclude the code sequence from obtaining copyright.
The key concept here is that you can't copyright a working part. Lexmark lost on this one, and third party printer cartridges are thus legal. In fact, Lexmark is facing an antitrust case over this.
Apple's lack of support for 64-bit machines is embarrassing. After all, their PowerPC line was 64-bit, so all their own software should have been 64-bit compatible. Then they went to 32-bit IA-32 architecture for their own machines, even though 64-bit Intel CPUs were available. It was late in the IA-32 life cycle to do that. Now they're not supporting 64-bit hardware under either MacOS X or Windows, let alone Linux. That's kind of retro.
Users shouldn't need a computer to use an iPhone, anyway. The thing has an Internet connection of its own, after all.
Sounds like Apple is favoring its own stores over shipping product to AT&T outlets. Don't blame AT&T for that.
I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...
No, that's the World Wide Web. Newsgroups are where technical stuff gets done. Very little spam, mostly on-topic posts, people who know what they're talking about, and no advertising.
"The Buildings That Used To Be Record Stores" are getting to be a problem. There's a big Tower Records near here that was the anchor store of its mall. (The drugstore there closed when a much bigger one opened in a mall across the street.) The whole mall may go under. There's nothing left that generates traffic.
In the late 1990s, somebody was selling a "bar code everything in your home" kit. You could print bar code stickers, and there was a wand for scanning them. If you loaned a hammer to a neighbor, you could check it out and get follow up messages if they didn't bring it back. Really. Didn't sell.
This is roughly the same idea.
Much of the "Internet of things" is silly. There's not much utility of putting sensors in everything where there are no actuators to act on the data. If we had lots of robots running around, it would make sense; all those sensors would alert them to rugs that needed cleaning, shoes that needed to be put away, and supplies that needed to be restocked. But just sending the data to a web page or a phone is pointless.
Collecting data from devices that need maintenance makes sense. One of the more useful applications is to have commercial air conditioning gear communicate with a maintenance center, so that excessive crud in the chilled water or low compressor pressure is detected early and units can be fixed before they fail completely. But those systems have lots of actuators; they can switch compressors, open and close valves, adjust dampers, and work around some problems while calling for repair service.
But the ability to talk to things so dumb they can't do anything is sort of pointless.
This article is 1) dumb, and 2) so ad-heavy that, even with full ad blocking, only about 10% of the page is content. How did this make it onto Slashdot?
Going down the list, aligning multiple projectors is a marginal idea. That's something you do only when you can't get a single projector that will do the job. When there's content available for 2K x 4K projectors, somebody will make them. Not that many people can tell the difference between 1K x 2K and 2K x 4K, anyway. Raising the frame rate is more useful. Getting movies up to IMAX frame rates would do more than increasing the resolution. Existing hardware can go 75FPS with no problem; it's storing the data that's the bottleneck. Another 10x over BluRay and we're there.
Midair mice are not all that useful. If you want one, get a GyroMouse. Hold your arm straight out for ten minutes to practice, first.
Unclear what a "home quantum computer" would do. The author just likes the word "quantum". Sounds cool.
Do we really need BitTorrent in the router? Live events of great popularity can be multicast, which is already being done. Stored data of great popularity can be cached, which is what Akamai does. If you're synchronizing your calendar, it hardly needs to be in a huge number of locations. And Usenet solved the problem of moving data over each link only once, many years ago. The whole "p2p" thing is driven by piracy; it's a terrible way to move data around. The entire daily output of the RIAA could be distributed efficiently over Usenet and it would barely create a blip in bandwidth. (Maybe Google will just buy out the music industry, which is much smaller than Google, and put the content up in an ad-supported form.)
Emulating the brain at the neuron level is a research tool. If those guys ever get it figured out, there will be better ways to implement it. And as I've pointed out to AI researchers for years, there's enough compute power around to do low-level mammal brains, so do a good mouse that works as well as a real one. (Rod Brooks once told me "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." His one-step-to-human-AI project, Cog, was a flop.) It's not that we can't build the hardware; it's that we still have no clue how to organize it.
One would think Microsoft technical support would have...
One would think that if they were going to build a fanless device that can easily overheat, they would have put in better overtemperature shutdown. The thing actually has overtemp detection, but it's set so high that visible board damage can occur before it shuts down. Probably because if they set it to a reasonable threshold, a sizable fraction of the units would be cycling on and off all the time.
It doesn't really matter. Retail price maintenance was an issue when manufacturers were big and retailers were little. Today, it's the other way round. Wal-Mart can dictate prices to manufacturers.
Might matter for some luxury goods, like the iPhone, but that's about it.
He probably has the thing in a hot spot, like on top of a big CRT monitor, in an enclosed space, in a location with air vents blocked, or next to a hot air vent. We know the XBox 360 has marginal cooling.
Cuba's "terrorism" activities consisted mostly of stuff from the 1960s (Castro supported some of the more militant "black power" movements, and one of them was gearing up to blow up the Statue of Liberty), and Castro's support of various pro-Communist movements in Latin America, which stopped about fifteen years ago when the USSR tanked. Even the Congressional Research Service report doesn't point to any concrete instances of terrorist activities out of Cuba in recent years.
The US boycott of Cuba is mostly about getting votes from Cuban exiles in South Florida.
Google's campus used to be SGI's campus.
Ouch!
Yes. SGI had a huge building boom in the late 1990s, overexpanded, bought at the top of the market, and made some terrible real estate deals. Details are in SGI's bankruptcy filings.
That's actually a bad article about a real issue. A better article is here.
Intel's AMT technology puts special purpose hardware in the network controller which recognizes UDP and TCP packets on ports 16992, 16993, 16994, and 16995. This is completely independent of the operating system. Various system administration functions can be performed. Anybody can inventory the machine and read its ID. Other functions, like power off/on, reboot, user disable (disables keyboard/mouse/on-off switch) and remote disk I/O require a password or crypto key.
This has been around for a while; the previous version was called IPMI, Intelligent Platform Management Interface. It talked UDP only. AMT also talks TCP and HTTP; there's a whole protocol stack in the network controller now just for this. This was originally a server farm management system, but now it's on desktops, too. If HTTP mode is enabled, you can control the machine from a web browser via port 16692.
It even works while the computer is "turned off"; it's part of "wake on LAN" functionality.
Supposedly, there is no valid default password or key, and the feature is supposedly off by default. But if any software ever enables this, you're 0wned.
The computer manufacturer can preload management keys. "An OEM may supply platforms with a PID-PPS pair already written to the Intel AMT Flash memory.", according to Intel. If a vendor does that, they 0wn your computer. Something to watch for. AMT can also be enabled from the Intel Management BIOS extension screen. (Password: "admin", it says in the manual.)
The normal way AMT keys get loaded in a corporate environment is that you plug in a USB key with a special file ("setup.bin") and power cycle the machine. The machine then tries to connect to the mothership on port 9971, doing a DNS lookup for "ProvisionServer" if no IP address was specified.
If you don't want AMT enabled, here's how to disable it:, "Intel AMT is returned to Factory Mode by selecting the Unprovision option on the BIOS Extension menu or by disabling Intel AMT from the BIOS extension Manageability Feature Selection."
The whole AMT system is reasonably designed; it even has Kerberos authentication. But it's so powerful and so hidden that if it's ever enabled, it's worse than a root kit. Even reinstalling the OS won't help.
Here's Intel's technical info about AMT.
Ah, the Apple fanboys or flacks are on duty.
I just went past the Apple store in Palo Alto. Nobody waiting in line. Not even much traffic. Big mockup iPhone displays in store windows playing canned demo.
People here aren't buying into the hype. And this is a place where people can afford the thing.
The line for the iPhone hasn't quite started here in Palo Alto yet. I saw three girls standing in front of the closed Apple store on University Avenue last night, and asked if they were in line for the iPhone launch. But no, they were just waiting for their ride.
People are already lining up in New York, though, according to press reports. People will stand in line for stuff in New York. Here, they usually go elsewhere.
What makes the open plan office thing tolerable at Google is a very large number of modest-sized, well-equipped conference rooms.
Google does go overboard on on-site services designed to keep people at work. I'm surprised they didn't go all the way and build dorms. Some large Japanese companies do that. But the real feel of Google is "overfunded dot-com". Yes, they're profitable. But the profitable part, search, was built some time ago. Most of the technical people in Mountain View are working on Google's money-losing sidelines, like desktop apps. Those are the labor-intensive parts of the business.
Remember that Google is really an ad agency. That's how the money is made. Much of their newer hiring is sales reps for ads. The days when the ad sales just ran on autopilot are over; now Google has to push their ad products. In time, the ad agency people may take over. That will be an interesting culture change.
Google's campus used to be SGI's campus. Most Google buildings are former SGI buildings. So if you've been in the Valley for a while, there's always that reminder that a company can go from #1 to zero in just a few years.
Compare Intel in Santa Clara. Intel looks like Dilbertland. Intel is where cubicle culture began. Intel has built buildings from the ground up with single rooms covering about two acres, full of tiny cubicles. The cubicles are so small that only one chair will physically fit in them; they look like library study carrels. These aren't for call center employees; these are the people who design Intel CPUs.
They already tried intimidation. Not only didn't it work, now there's a protective order. If they try that again, someone goes to jail for contempt.
I just read through the filing. The RIAA is in big trouble here.
Most of the facts in the case have already been litigated, and the RIAA lost. The counterclaims arise from facts already on the record. The RIAA's actions are a matter of public record. And they did a whole range of things ranging from really dumb to possibly criminal.
First, their investigation unit, SafeNet/MediaSentry, isn't a licensed private investigator. So they don't have any of the immunities a private investigator does. Normally, law firms use licensed private investigators for their investigations, but the RIAA didn't bother. Bad move.
Second, there's a clear case for fraudulent debt collection. It's already been established in court that the RIAA's claims were false, and that they knew they were false, yet they continued collection efforts.
On the harassment front, the RIAA's representatives apparently attempted to contact a 10 year old child's elementary school under false pretenses, pretending to be a grandparent. The court had to issue a protective order prohibiting the RIAA from contacting the kid. That's going to be tough to explain to a jury.
There's more, but the RIAA is going to have a very tough time in court on this one.
Some years ago I went to Vegas to exhibit at Comdex, and was stuck at some minor hotel off the Strip that catered to the slots crowd. It was depressing to watch. The buses pull up, and people get out. I thought they'd check in, take a shower, change their clothes, see what entertainment was in town, maybe have a meal. No. They head straight for the slot machines, right from the buses. That's addictive behavior.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They open, they get some cool people, if they're successful they get more cool people and become the place to go, they get greedy and let too many people in, they become uncool and fall out of favor, they limp along in obscurity for quite a while, and finally they close. Formerly-cool social networking sites include AOL, the Well, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Tribe, and Friendster. Myspace hasn't grown in a year, and Facebook is still on the way up. See the relevant Alexa traffic ratings.
As the article points out, the early adopters tend to be in the 20-30 age range, and over time, usage of sites filters down to college and then high school students. The article points out that this happened for Myspace and is happening to Facebook. But they see this as a "class" thing, not a life-cycle thing, because they didn't look at enough sites and their history.
The next generation of social networking will probably be phone-based. Helio, the expensive "don't call it a phone" device with Myspace integration, should have Facebook integration instead. Look for an iPhone-based social networking system.
Somebody is going to do phone-based social networking well and make billions.
SB 362. "A person shall not require, coerce, or compel any other individual to undergo the subcutaneous implanting of an identification device."
The DIA guidelines on "combating the insider threat" refer to people with security clearances of at least SECRET. That's a standard list, and goes back to at least the 1950s. The article doesn't make a connection with it being applied to universities.
What's puzzling about this is that it's totally out of touch with reality. The USSR was interested in American R&D, but that's because they had an industrial base and weapons plants that could use R&D. No enemy of the US today has anything like that. (North Korea and Iran, maybe, but they're mostly trying to do things the superpowers did in the 1950s.) Al-Queda consists of loosely affiliated small groups that use off the shelf weaponry. This seems a mis-aimed effort, which isn't unusual for the current administration.