Fort Myer, at Arlington National Cemetery, is primarily a ceremonial post. "The Army's Showcase in the National Capitol Region". They provide support for military funerals, housing for some Pentagon staff, and military museum space. They house the Army Band and the Army's remaining horse unit. This isn't a mission-critical organization.
Here's what comparable numbers look like for QNX:
QNX.
For a 200MHz Pentium (this is an old review),
the testers tried sending one billion interrupts with a latency check. When they required 8 microsecond latency, they missed one interrupt in a billion. When they only needed 10ms latency, they didn't lose any.
Comparable figures are available for various real-time Linux systems. Note that these figures are for a 650MHz CPU. The times are slightly better than for QNX, but the CPU is 3x faster.
Bear in mind that "RTLinux" programs aren't running under Linux. They're running below Linux. They can't make most system calls, for example. QNX programs are ordinary programs, and can make system calls.
The Linux 2.6 kernel isn't bad, though. Running real-time with millisecond response as high-priority Linux threads can actually work
in 2.6. In 2.4, no way. You have to be very careful not to load any high-latency drivers, though.
There have been xerographic printers with speeds like this for many years. A Xerox DocuColor is faster. But this is a smaller technology.
Brother's press
press release shows what they're doing. The slow version still has a moving print head, but they hope to reach the point where there's one big print head covering the entire width of the paper. That eliminates the scanning mechanism and makes large ink tanks possible, since the ink tanks
don't have to move.
Nothing yet from Brother on how much the print head will cost.
The article is really an ad for Proofpoint, which offers (of course) e-mail monitoring tools.
Proofpoint has the lamest web site I've seen this year. They run an large piece of javascript called "sniffer2.js", which tries to figure out what browser you're using in great detail. I'm running Mozilla on a QNX system, which puts their "sniffer" in an infinite page reload loop.
If you really want to annoy Black Box Hosting, sign up a new account every two weeks using a different prepaid credit card and upload a mirror of a Falun Gong web site in Chinese.
Will this include major China-based spammer services like Black Box Hosting? "Our offshore bullet proof web hosting plans allow bulk email hosting, spam friendly
web hosting and bulletproof host."
Distribution is not the problem. Crappy content is the problem. There just isn't that much good amateur video around. In SF, you can go see this stuff at film festivals, and most of it is awful. Bay Aree Video Coalition and Artists Television Access have been providing facilities for making and editing video for decades now, and most of it still sucks.
It is not a technology problem. It's a creative problem.
There are already sites that will host your video for free, and cheap commercial hosting services that don't charge for bandwidth. If your stuff has any merit at all, it's not hard to get it hosted. Unless it's porno, you probably won't get that many viewers.
The Internet Archive has vast amounts of video, but few people watch it.
Bittorrent only works well because many of the users are pirating the same stuff, yielding economies of scale.
Of course. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. Ask any Marine. If you can't accept that, you shouldn't be in the arms business. Entering the DARPA Grand Challenge is being in the arms business.
The x86 models won't be available until 2006.
So retail sales drop for a year, and Apple misses the 2005 holiday season and the 2005 back-to-school season. Terrible timing. They should have announced this in January with July shipment.
Here are some things to lobby for that might be within reach.
TRIPS as both floor and ceiling on length of copyright The TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement establishes 50 years as the minimum duration of copyright for WTO countries. 50 years should also be the maximum, and the TRIPS agreement should be amended accordingly. Countries, such as the US, which go beyond 50 years should be brought into compliance with international norms. This is a proper WTO issue, since the TRIPS Agreement is an annex to the agreement establishing the WTO. This change encourages the creation of new works.
A stronger definition of "obviousness" for patents.
It's possible to get very narrow patents without much trouble. This is usually pointless, but if the patent covers a de-facto standard way of doing something, it's a way of creating a monopoly. The "obviousness" criterion should be broadened so that if there is demonstrably a technically equivalent but incompatible way to do something, the patent is invalid for obviousness. This change reduces trade friction by enhancing interoperability.
International standards override patents.
When a standard is submitted for international standarization via the ISO process, patentholders should be given an opportunity to object to the standard during an opposition period. Once that period has expired, no patent infringement claim can thereafter be made for the subject matter of the standard. This change also reduces trade friction by enhancing interoperability.
Actually exists. It's a video cell phone application from Hong Kong.
The virtual girlfriend is high-maintenance. She needs to be called frequently, expects her text messages to be answered, and wants to be bought gifts, for real money. Otherwise she gets annoyed.
Here's one. "zaptastic_evil.".
Clicking on the above link will install hostile, hard to remove code on unpatched Mac OS X Tiger systems by exploiting a hole in the Safari browser and the MacOS X "dashboard".
Other operating systems will be unaffected.
Apple made Dumb Security Mistake #1 here: they put in an implicit autoinstaller for downloaded programs. Just like Microsoft did with Active-X.
If you're going to have auto-install, the installed software must run in a jail. Java appplets are one approach. BSD jails are another. LOMAC and NSA Secure Linux offer a third. This problem can be solved. Apple blew it.
The main reason there aren't more MacOS viruses seems to be lack of market share, not lack of opportunity.
Mac Cowhand-A. "Mac/Cowhand-A is a proxy Trojan for the Mac OS X platform.
The Trojan may copy itself to the user's Preferences folder. In order to run itself on startup, the Trojan may add itself to the user's Startup Items.
The Mac/Cowhand-A Trojan horse allows remote hackers to use an infected computer as a proxy to connect to the internet. By using the Trojan hackers can disguise their real location because the connection can only be traced back to the infected computer." Appeared in April 2005.
MP3Virus.Gen
"Dubbed MP3Concept (MP3Virus.Gen), the Trojan horse exploits a weakness in Mac OS X where applications can appear to be other types of files, according to the company. Intego told MacCentral today that the code is hidden in the ID3 tag of the MP3 file. The code will only activate when clicked, but once it is, Intego warns the Trojan horse has the potential to delete all of a user's personal files; send an e-mail message containing a copy of itself to other users; and infect other MP3, JPEG, GIF or QuickTime files." Appeared in 2004.
Note that these viruses exploit some of the same classes of vulnerabilities seen under Windows. The first one relies on a MacOS X hole that allows any unprivileged program to specify that a program should be run at startup. The second comes from implicit script execution. The third is a file type spoof. Those are all very similar to Windows attacks.
Note that these are all "Mac features", not "UNIX features". Apple put in "ease of use" features without considering security, just like Microsoft.
Second, the "self replication", as the paper puts it, consists of making a baseplate in an fused-deposition modelling machine and depositing some metal on it, to make a very low density circuit board. That's all. This is an expensive way to make a crappy single-sided PC board. It's a giant step backwards from the photoetching processes used now to make both PCs and ICs.
Not only is it nowhere near "self replication", it's not even a step in that direction.
Finally, the web site has the tag line "Wealth without money...", which sounds like something from a stock scam.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about
manufacturing that pervades enthusiasts for computer-controlled one-off manufacturing. It's that most manufactured goods are made by some process that involves a "master" or "mould" or "die", and that those processes are incredibly cheap. There are about a hundred such processes in common use, from injection moulding to photolithography. And they work quite well.
That's what you're competing with. Making single parts in bulk just isn't that expensive.
In the 1960s, the USAF thought that the next generation of air combat was going to be in space.
After all, they already had airplanes that could just barely make it into space for a short period.
So they had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program,
the Dyna-Soar program, and the USAF Space School.
None of those survived the 1960s, although they were all good, workable ideas. The MOL incorporated the Gemini spacecraft, the best space flying machine to come out of NASA. (Mercury was the "man in a can" capsule, and Apollo was less maneuverable.)
Computers built for industrial temperature ranges are routinely underclocked. We have three underclocked Pentium 4 systems in the Overbot
No, they don't have "25 million megabytes" of RAM
on
Simulated Universe
·
· Score: 1
That's how much log file data they kept, not how much RAM they have.
That's just a few hundred disk drives. Any medium sized hosting facility has more disk than that.
25TB isn't that much any more.
Here's
100TB in one rack at the Internet Archive. With servers. Draws 6 kilowatts. Put together by some people I know.
Apple had a terrible time with the 68K->PPC transition. That's when their market share really tanked, dropping from around 20% to 5%.
The 680x0 emulator wasn't all that fast, and much of the operating system was running in emulation mode for years.
Early PPC chips didn't have enough cache to contain the translation tables of the emulator, which resulted in cache trashing. And the change in floating point formats (the 68x00 floating point units could do 80-bit arithmetic, but the PPC only had 64 bits) broke all the engineering applications. Many of them never bothered to convert to PPC, and Apple exited the engineering market.
This sounds more like open sourcing of abandonware at its end of life. After all, that's what they did with Netscape.
Does this mean Freeamp can start using its own name again? AOL made them change their name to Zinf or something like that, and they were never heard from again.
Especially since one of those directory spammers took over their "freeamp" domains, and AOL did nothing about that.
WildBiz does not require registration; the other two do. Just enter the forums and look under "Proxy Lists".
Typical ads:
"Hello everybody here...
First of all Hi to all of my seniorshooters here..
Having good collection of fresh Proxies and got DM ["Dark Mailer".. ed] Latest Version (Full Version) at really cheap rate.
DM Latest version (Full) for $49
Fresh Proxies $50 for 500 proxies dmandproxies@iamdns.com
Today's Fresh Proxies
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218.208.247.81:3128@TUNNEL$GOOD$15219$Malaysia
219.144.194.74:1080@SOCKS4$GOOD$1125$China
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We provide Hourly Updated Fresh Proxy Lists, which can be used for bulk mailing... standard port proxies and non-standard port proxies are both provided, become our members, and download fresh proxy lists hourly. USD 50 per month, then you can access our proxies database . proxies updated from every 15 minutes to 30 minutes . For more infomation, please contact proxylists@iamdns.com
That's how you market a botnet.
Yes, these operations are addressed to wannabe spammers. But the fact that they're advertised openly indicates how weak enforcement is.
Slashdot Mirror
Only someone clueless would break into Fort Myer.
For a 200MHz Pentium (this is an old review), the testers tried sending one billion interrupts with a latency check. When they required 8 microsecond latency, they missed one interrupt in a billion. When they only needed 10ms latency, they didn't lose any.
Comparable figures are available for various real-time Linux systems. Note that these figures are for a 650MHz CPU. The times are slightly better than for QNX, but the CPU is 3x faster.
Bear in mind that "RTLinux" programs aren't running under Linux. They're running below Linux. They can't make most system calls, for example. QNX programs are ordinary programs, and can make system calls.
The Linux 2.6 kernel isn't bad, though. Running real-time with millisecond response as high-priority Linux threads can actually work in 2.6. In 2.4, no way. You have to be very careful not to load any high-latency drivers, though.
Brother's press press release shows what they're doing. The slow version still has a moving print head, but they hope to reach the point where there's one big print head covering the entire width of the paper. That eliminates the scanning mechanism and makes large ink tanks possible, since the ink tanks don't have to move.
Nothing yet from Brother on how much the print head will cost.
Proofpoint has the lamest web site I've seen this year. They run an large piece of javascript called "sniffer2.js", which tries to figure out what browser you're using in great detail. I'm running Mozilla on a QNX system, which puts their "sniffer" in an infinite page reload loop.
If you really want to annoy Black Box Hosting, sign up a new account every two weeks using a different prepaid credit card and upload a mirror of a Falun Gong web site in Chinese.
Will this include major China-based spammer services like Black Box Hosting? "Our offshore bullet proof web hosting plans allow bulk email hosting, spam friendly web hosting and bulletproof host."
CMU tried that last year. Crashed three times in eight miles.
I've met the Team Dad people. I'm very impressed.
There are already sites that will host your video for free, and cheap commercial hosting services that don't charge for bandwidth. If your stuff has any merit at all, it's not hard to get it hosted. Unless it's porno, you probably won't get that many viewers. The Internet Archive has vast amounts of video, but few people watch it.
Bittorrent only works well because many of the users are pirating the same stuff, yielding economies of scale.
Of course. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. Ask any Marine. If you can't accept that, you shouldn't be in the arms business. Entering the DARPA Grand Challenge is being in the arms business.
The x86 models won't be available until 2006. So retail sales drop for a year, and Apple misses the 2005 holiday season and the 2005 back-to-school season. Terrible timing. They should have announced this in January with July shipment.
The TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement establishes 50 years as the minimum duration of copyright for WTO countries. 50 years should also be the maximum, and the TRIPS agreement should be amended accordingly. Countries, such as the US, which go beyond 50 years should be brought into compliance with international norms. This is a proper WTO issue, since the TRIPS Agreement is an annex to the agreement establishing the WTO. This change encourages the creation of new works.
It's possible to get very narrow patents without much trouble. This is usually pointless, but if the patent covers a de-facto standard way of doing something, it's a way of creating a monopoly. The "obviousness" criterion should be broadened so that if there is demonstrably a technically equivalent but incompatible way to do something, the patent is invalid for obviousness. This change reduces trade friction by enhancing interoperability.
When a standard is submitted for international standarization via the ISO process, patentholders should be given an opportunity to object to the standard during an opposition period. Once that period has expired, no patent infringement claim can thereafter be made for the subject matter of the standard. This change also reduces trade friction by enhancing interoperability.
The virtual girlfriend is high-maintenance. She needs to be called frequently, expects her text messages to be answered, and wants to be bought gifts, for real money. Otherwise she gets annoyed.
Apple made Dumb Security Mistake #1 here: they put in an implicit autoinstaller for downloaded programs. Just like Microsoft did with Active-X.
If you're going to have auto-install, the installed software must run in a jail. Java appplets are one approach. BSD jails are another. LOMAC and NSA Secure Linux offer a third. This problem can be solved. Apple blew it.
The main reason there aren't more MacOS viruses seems to be lack of market share, not lack of opportunity.
"Mac/Cowhand-A is a proxy Trojan for the Mac OS X platform. The Trojan may copy itself to the user's Preferences folder. In order to run itself on startup, the Trojan may add itself to the user's Startup Items. The Mac/Cowhand-A Trojan horse allows remote hackers to use an infected computer as a proxy to connect to the internet. By using the Trojan hackers can disguise their real location because the connection can only be traced back to the infected computer." Appeared in April 2005.
"AplS/Fromr-A is an OS X AppleScript Trojan that attempts to delete all files recursively in the user's home directory." Appeared in 2004.
"Dubbed MP3Concept (MP3Virus.Gen), the Trojan horse exploits a weakness in Mac OS X where applications can appear to be other types of files, according to the company. Intego told MacCentral today that the code is hidden in the ID3 tag of the MP3 file. The code will only activate when clicked, but once it is, Intego warns the Trojan horse has the potential to delete all of a user's personal files; send an e-mail message containing a copy of itself to other users; and infect other MP3, JPEG, GIF or QuickTime files." Appeared in 2004.
Note that these viruses exploit some of the same classes of vulnerabilities seen under Windows. The first one relies on a MacOS X hole that allows any unprivileged program to specify that a program should be run at startup. The second comes from implicit script execution. The third is a file type spoof. Those are all very similar to Windows attacks.
Note that these are all "Mac features", not "UNIX features". Apple put in "ease of use" features without considering security, just like Microsoft.
First, it's been on Slashdot before.
Second, the "self replication", as the paper puts it, consists of making a baseplate in an fused-deposition modelling machine and depositing some metal on it, to make a very low density circuit board. That's all. This is an expensive way to make a crappy single-sided PC board. It's a giant step backwards from the photoetching processes used now to make both PCs and ICs. Not only is it nowhere near "self replication", it's not even a step in that direction.
Finally, the web site has the tag line "Wealth without money...", which sounds like something from a stock scam.
Actually, the cutting edge work in this area is not fake "self-replication", but using deposition-type fabricators to make 3D objects with complicated internal structure, including combinations of flexible and rigid materials and moving parts.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about manufacturing that pervades enthusiasts for computer-controlled one-off manufacturing. It's that most manufactured goods are made by some process that involves a "master" or "mould" or "die", and that those processes are incredibly cheap. There are about a hundred such processes in common use, from injection moulding to photolithography. And they work quite well. That's what you're competing with. Making single parts in bulk just isn't that expensive.
So they had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, the Dyna-Soar program, and the USAF Space School. None of those survived the 1960s, although they were all good, workable ideas. The MOL incorporated the Gemini spacecraft, the best space flying machine to come out of NASA. (Mercury was the "man in a can" capsule, and Apollo was less maneuverable.)
As for the blue MH-7 suit, there's one of those on display at Wright-Patterson AFB.
Computers built for industrial temperature ranges are routinely underclocked. We have three underclocked Pentium 4 systems in the Overbot
That's just a few hundred disk drives. Any medium sized hosting facility has more disk than that. 25TB isn't that much any more. Here's 100TB in one rack at the Internet Archive. With servers. Draws 6 kilowatts. Put together by some people I know.
The 680x0 emulator wasn't all that fast, and much of the operating system was running in emulation mode for years. Early PPC chips didn't have enough cache to contain the translation tables of the emulator, which resulted in cache trashing. And the change in floating point formats (the 68x00 floating point units could do 80-bit arithmetic, but the PPC only had 64 bits) broke all the engineering applications. Many of them never bothered to convert to PPC, and Apple exited the engineering market.
And that time, they didn't face an endian change.
Does this mean Freeamp can start using its own name again? AOL made them change their name to Zinf or something like that, and they were never heard from again. Especially since one of those directory spammers took over their "freeamp" domains, and AOL did nothing about that.
SpamForum
SpecialHam
And the new WildBiz.
WildBiz does not require registration; the other two do. Just enter the forums and look under "Proxy Lists". Typical ads:
First of all Hi to all of my seniorshooters here..
Having good collection of fresh Proxies and got DM ["Dark Mailer"
DM Latest version (Full) for $49
Fresh Proxies $50 for 500 proxies
dmandproxies@iamdns.com
61.246.226.69:3128@TUNNEL$GOOD$20297$Australia
81.33.4.70:3128@TUNNEL$GOOD$2953$Spain
61.246.226.69:3128@TUNNEL$GOOD$20297$Australia
218.208.247.81:3128@TUNNEL$GOOD$15219$Malaysia
219.144.194.74:1080@SOCKS4$GOOD$1125$China
66.154.54.215:80@TUNNEL$GOOD$4157$United States
66.154.54.224:80@TUNNEL$GOOD$1266$United States
We provide Hourly Updated Fresh Proxy Lists, which can be used for bulk mailing
That's how you market a botnet.
Yes, these operations are addressed to wannabe spammers. But the fact that they're advertised openly indicates how weak enforcement is.
This will be useful in preliminary interrogation.
Who picked the article title?
That was on Groklaw days ago.