Not much has happened for several years now, after all. Terrorism deaths never came close to equalling deaths from drunk driving, industrial accidents related to safety violations, medical errors, AIDS.
Not even in 2001. Economically, corporate fraud is a far bigger problem than terrorism.
The US has dealt with the problem. bin Laden was at one point Minister of Defense of Afghanistan.
Right before the US crushed that government flat.
No country is going to tolerate "terrorist training camps" aimed at the US for years to come.
So lighten up already. Yes, there will be incidents in future. But they'll probably come from some completely different direction, like the Oklahoma City bombing, which was done by 100% Americans. We'll have to deal with that when it comes.
With all these Orange Alerts recently ("They're going to attack on Xmas - no, New Years - in Rapahannock County - no, LA - no, Vegas") it's beginning to look like al Queda is down to a couple of guys mouthing off to get attention.
Early thinking about digital broadcast radio was to put a spread-spectrum overlay over the whole FM band. The industry was terrified of that, because it would allow new radio stations. Many, many new radio stations. So they came up with this sideband hack, which uses up the sidebands of the broadcast signal for a digital signal. This protects the incumbent broadcasters.
iBiquity is quite upfront about this. Their big investors are Clear Channel and Viacom.
So is the Bush administration, which has explicitly identified "incumbent broadcaster protection" as an FCC priority. Viacom and Clear Channel will, of course, be expected to reciprocate come election time.
Why does telephony have to be 8-bit 8KHz audio in the VoIP era? If it doesn't have to go through the
64Kb/s phone system, the audio could be far better.
anti-slash.org is back. But the student at the University of Illinois at Champlain-Urbania who runs the anti-slash website probably isn't the one who posted the plagarized post. I didn't even find that post in their database of my posts.
Major spammers begin sentence
Three major spammers began their sentences today at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary at Allenwood, Pennsylvania. Their Romania-based operation had created several well-known viruses to assist in sending spam by breaking into the computers of others. Each was initially charged with 12,346,000 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The leader was also charged with operating an ongoing criminal enterprise. FBI and Homeland Security investigators located the spammers, and the U.S. Department of State arranged for their extradition to the US for trial. All pled guilty to reduced charges after being convinced that they could be put away for life. The leader will serve 25 years, and his assistants will serve 15 years each.
National Security Agency releases major enhancements to NSA Secure Linux Over the last several years, NSA has quietly been enhancing NSA Secure Linux, and has now released a secure Linux distribution for general use by U.S. Government sites. In this system, information coming in from the Internet is automatically held at a low level of trust, and cannot corrupt other information on the machine. A compatible secure browser, mail server, web server, and DNS server are provided.
Free, open source copies of this code are available.
Microsoft loses software liability case
New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer announces a $12.6 billion verdict against Microsoft in the "Blaster VIII" case. The court held that Microsoft violated New York's "reckless endangerment" law by distributing web browsers which automatically opened content that might contain viruses, resulting in the distribution of the "Blaster VIII" worm to over 200 million computers worldwide.
Dell recalls 1.2 million computers. Dell today announced the recall of 1.2 million computers for a security flaw. Fear of a liability lawsuit prompted the move.
Return ticket not guaranteed now
on
Dreams of the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you go to a space station now, there's no guarantee that the return flight won't be months late. People have been stuck on both Mir and the ISS due to budget cuts.
The above post is a forgery. There have been several such forgeries in recent days. There is no "Jim Stevens" associated with Team Overbot.
I offer a $100 reward for the identity (full name and address) of the person responsible for the above posting. If you have such information, please call Team Overbot at (650) 326-3529.
Thank you.
It's been tried. Remember Packard-Bell? e-machines?
Consider this: Design a Linux-based home PC targeted at Wal-Mart customers and their kids.
The "no nonsense, no excuses" PC for America.
Preload it with all the software a Wal-Mart customer typically needs. Good media players, a good browser, OpenOffice.
Partition the disk with a read-only system backup partition, a system partition, and a user file partition. Provide a boot loader that can recover the initial state of the machine without wiping out the user files. Use the most reliable file system available. Run NSA Secure Linux and put the browser in a jail, so that nothing that comes in from the outside world can mess up the system.
Provide a backup to DVD capability and have the software encourage people to use it now and then.
Clean up the aesthetics of your Linux distro. Get some good looking icons designed. Fix the rough spots in the interface. Remove features if necessary. Bring in Susan Kare.
No user serviceable parts inside. The user can't easily open the box, and if they do, it voids the warranty. Everything is soldered onto the motherboard. No slots. Conformal-coat the board, so if the kiddies spill Coke into the thing, it's unharmed. Test the thing over a wide temperature and voltage range, put it on a shake table, find the weak points, and fix the design. It's cheap to make it rugged in the design stage.
User test. Bring in families with kids and have them take it out of the box, set up the system,
surf the web, write and print a school essay, and play some music. Without opening a manual. Videotape this. Watch the tapes. Fix everything that gave them problems. Repeat until over 95% of testers have a seamless startup experience.
Find an offshore supplier to make the thing. Manufacturing cost should be low; it's one board, a hard drive, a DVD drive, a power supply, and a case. Make sure the power supply is UL approved.
Get a bid from Flextronics and go down from there.
Offer an optional equipment replacement program, like cell phones. Any customer can get a new unit any time they want one, up to two per year, no matter what happens.
Head down to Bentonville, Arkansas and the Corridor of Doom. Convince Wal-Mart to stock the thing.
China doesn't currently appear to be "manipulating their currency". The yuan is pegged to the dollar, but it's freely convertable both ways. If there were a serious imbalance, speculators would be draining billions out of the Chinese government by buying yuan, while Beijing frantically had to tighten their money supply to keep the yuan up. Governments and contries have gone broke trying to do things like that. It's not happening here. The U.S. Treasury agrees. Bush has been trying to blame the recession on China for political reasons, but that's bogus. Bush's deficits have far more to do with it. The dollar has declined about 30% against the Euro in the last two years.
The amusing thing is that the US has historically encouraged countries to maintain fixed exchange rates. That's what Bretton Woods was all about.
When China pegged the yuan to the dollar, Heiritage Foundation cheered.
China manipulates their labor force, not their currency. But the Bush administration doesn't like to talk about labor standards. It upsets Bush's contributor base.
1982, Joel, A.E., "A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System, Switching Technology 1925-1975", Bell Telephone Laboratories,
ISBN 0-932764-02-9. Chapter 7 covers #5 Crossbar.
The rate at which people signed up for the do-not-call list scared Congress and the direct marketing industry. The DMA had figured it to be a minor nuisance, like the do-not-call list they maintain. They weren't expecting fifty million people to sign up in advance. Which is what happened.
Not only is the FTC now required to study a do-not-email list, there's even talk of the DMA's worst fear - a do-not-mail list for paper mail.
Bills have already been introduced in New York and Massachusetts.
This is the year to go for a do-not-email list with teeth as sharp as the do-not-call list. It worked for fax. It worked for phones. It can work for e-mail. And it's an election year. Keep pushing on your elected officials and the FTC.
Push the FTC to implement a do-not-email list. Insist that it include domain-wide opt-out.
And yes, it will work if the law goes after where the money goes. Any competent cop and prosecutor can find out where those Viagra orders get fulfilled and who collects the money. It just takes some routine police work and a few court orders.
There are two pre-electronics technologies that anyone designing reliable systems should understand in some detail - railroad signalling and telephone switching. Both were designed to be more reliable than their components. In the relay era, that was essential, because component reliability was mediocre by modern standards.
The references you need to read are obscure, but exist. For railroad signalling, the technology was mature by 1930. An understanding of either General Railroad Signal or Union Switch and Signal relay-era technology is useful. Both companies produced good books describing their technologies in 1924. There's also "NXSYS", a simulator down to the relay level of New York City subway signalling technology. The key idea to take away from railroad signalling is what "fail-safe" really means and how it is consistently implemented.
Telephony in the relay era is best understood by studying its most advanced form, Number 5 Crossbar. There are descriptions of the technology in "A Technical History of the Bell System". #5 Crossbar is a transaction-oriented system, in which units of different types do quick transactions to get the job done. Resources of a given type are interchangeable, so losing one unit just reduces call capacity. Resources include originating registers, markers, senders, trunks, translators, billing punches, and trouble recorders. The switch fabric itself is dumb; all the smarts are in the resources. Resources are never tied up for the duration of a call; they're seized from a pool, used for a fraction of a second to a few seconds, and released. That architecture is extremely reliable; no Bell System central office in the relay era was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. The key idea to take away from telephony is how interchangeable resources were used to build up a system.
In Gulf War 1, the US had three carriers in the Persian Gulf. Those things are big, fat targets. Carrier strategy assumes the carrier has control of the airspace for some distance around, and battles are fought well away from the ship. If somebody with a truck-mounted missile can take potshots at the carrier from 200+ miles away, getting within 200 miles of a hostile shore is a bad idea.
The Brahmos is an anti-ship missile, with a terminal guidance system that can actually hit a target. It's not like a Scud, which has trouble reliably hitting large cities.
The US may have to take the battleships out of mothballs again. After an Exocet took out HMS Sheffield, someone asked the captain of the USS Iowa what he would do if a missile hit his ship. "Tell off a detail to chip and paint", he said.
Its straightforward in the since the you log onto your phone so your number follows you whereever you are.
Huh?
The point of having a static IP address is that there's nobody in the middle that you have to log onto. Nobody who gets to send you a bill, other than your ISP. Nobody who can raise your phone rate. Are you getting this yet?
The solution to this is to strictly enforce some laws we have, like the California law that makes it a criminal offense to accept a credit card number online from a California resident without first disclosing the actual business name and address of the business. If every spammer who violated that law did the required six months in the county jail, we'd have far fewer spammers.
I rather like QNX messaging, which is a good, low-level mechanism, and one that's much faster than most of the alternatives.
QNX messaging reliably passes an arbitrary-length string of bytes from a client to a server, waits for a response, and returns another arbitrary-length string of bytes from the server.
This is the basic primitive of the QNX operating system. Everything, including I/O, uses it. It's integrated with scheduling, so if you do a MsgSend to another process that's waiting in a MsgReceive, it takes only one process switch, and that process switch happens immediately.
Messaging works across the network, but local messaging isn't held down by running it through some elaborate "object broker". So local performance is so good that messaging can be used freely.
Other mechanisms can be built on top of this. But this is what you need at the bottom: a discrite message system, not a stream system like sockets. There's an inherent inefficiency with running messages through a stream system.
For most other operating systems, messaging is an afterthought and sluggish. In the Windows world, it's bad enough that objects are often placed in the same address space to avoid overhead.
In the Linux world, there are about five different versions of messaging, all incompatible.
And then there's SOAP, a great way to use up CPU time.
Please mod the above forged post down to -1. Thanks.
I am the author of the original post, which some bozo has copied and reprinted under another name.
John Nagle
The real issues Grand Challenge competitors face
on
DARPA Robot Contest Update
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The real things competitors are complaining about are these:
This is turning into a breadcrumb-following exercise. DARPA provides a "waypoint file" on CD-ROM two hours before the race. For each segment between waypoints, there's an allowed path width, indicating the area in which the vehicle must stay or be disqualified.
Originally, the vehicles were supposed to be truly autonomous, with the DARPA-supplied waypoint data providing only general corridors.
That's what made this interesting. Then DARPA said they would provide about 1000 GPS waypoints. Now they're saying it will be about 5000 GPS waypoints. With 25 waypoints per mile, it may be possible to do this on GPS alone, blindly driving from waypoint to waypoint, with some minimal obstacle detection and avoidance. That's not "autonomous". That's preprogrammed, like the old Milton Bradley Big Trak toy.
Some teams are using a "semi-autonomous approach". In the two hours between the release of the waypoint file and the start of the race, large numbers of people at remote sites will manually plan out each segment of the trip, using aerial photographs and maps. The trip segments will be combined, downloaded to the vehicle, and used to drive it. DARPA has approved this approach.
That's not "autonomous", either.
Government funding of entries has been a big issue. Caltech is using the "Perceptor" software
package, which fuses overhead and ground imagery.
Perceptor was developed with DARPA funds at JPL, and is not available outside JPL/Caltech. The Caltech team formally asked DARPA if this was OK, and DARPA said yes. Other teams complained.
The head of the CMU team is currently a principal investigator on NASA's Hyperion robot program, which raises some red flags about Government funding. DARPA is now requiring teams to provide a "certification of self-sufficiency" statement, with lines like "If the hardware and software is proprietary to my team, it was not developed or purchased using U.S. Government funding either directly... or indirectly". CMU has received Government funding for robotics work for decades, and it's not at all clear if any of that crept into their entry.
We're hearing rumors that the 2004 event might be the last one, even if nobody wins. This is apparently an internal issue within DARPA, and we haven't heard details. DARPA's officially stated position is that the event will be held "approximately annually" until someone wins through at least 2007, when the Congressional funding runs out.
The selection process wasn't hard for anyone who had a clue. DARPA was evaluating papers for months, and you could resubmit as many times as you wanted. DARPA warned entrants in the rules that it might take several turnarounds to get a paper through. The people whining about rejection submitted papers at the last minute.
If everyone had static IP addresses, deploying voice over IP would be straightforward. You'd buy a box, plug it in, and start telling people your number. No "service", other than a network connection, required. There would be directories, and DNS, but they'd be optional.
NAT prevents this straightforward implementation, which must make telcos very happy.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has dealt with the problem. bin Laden was at one point Minister of Defense of Afghanistan. Right before the US crushed that government flat. No country is going to tolerate "terrorist training camps" aimed at the US for years to come.
So lighten up already. Yes, there will be incidents in future. But they'll probably come from some completely different direction, like the Oklahoma City bombing, which was done by 100% Americans. We'll have to deal with that when it comes.
With all these Orange Alerts recently ("They're going to attack on Xmas - no, New Years - in Rapahannock County - no, LA - no, Vegas") it's beginning to look like al Queda is down to a couple of guys mouthing off to get attention.
iBiquity is quite upfront about this. Their big investors are Clear Channel and Viacom.
So is the Bush administration, which has explicitly identified "incumbent broadcaster protection" as an FCC priority. Viacom and Clear Channel will, of course, be expected to reciprocate come election time.
Why does telephony have to be 8-bit 8KHz audio in the VoIP era? If it doesn't have to go through the 64Kb/s phone system, the audio could be far better.
Thanks anyway.
"anti-slash.org" is an empty Apache web server run by a student at the University of Illinois. Is that the right domain?
Three major spammers began their sentences today at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary at Allenwood, Pennsylvania. Their Romania-based operation had created several well-known viruses to assist in sending spam by breaking into the computers of others. Each was initially charged with 12,346,000 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The leader was also charged with operating an ongoing criminal enterprise. FBI and Homeland Security investigators located the spammers, and the U.S. Department of State arranged for their extradition to the US for trial. All pled guilty to reduced charges after being convinced that they could be put away for life. The leader will serve 25 years, and his assistants will serve 15 years each.
Over the last several years, NSA has quietly been enhancing NSA Secure Linux, and has now released a secure Linux distribution for general use by U.S. Government sites. In this system, information coming in from the Internet is automatically held at a low level of trust, and cannot corrupt other information on the machine. A compatible secure browser, mail server, web server, and DNS server are provided. Free, open source copies of this code are available.
New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer announces a $12.6 billion verdict against Microsoft in the "Blaster VIII" case. The court held that Microsoft violated New York's "reckless endangerment" law by distributing web browsers which automatically opened content that might contain viruses, resulting in the distribution of the "Blaster VIII" worm to over 200 million computers worldwide.
Dell today announced the recall of 1.2 million computers for a security flaw. Fear of a liability lawsuit prompted the move.
If you go to a space station now, there's no guarantee that the return flight won't be months late. People have been stuck on both Mir and the ISS due to budget cuts.
I offer a $100 reward for the identity (full name and address) of the person responsible for the above posting. If you have such information, please call Team Overbot at (650) 326-3529. Thank you.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
And how many million will this cost? Several. Maybe 0.1% of what VA Linux blew.
Consider this: Design a Linux-based home PC targeted at Wal-Mart customers and their kids. The "no nonsense, no excuses" PC for America.
The amusing thing is that the US has historically encouraged countries to maintain fixed exchange rates. That's what Bretton Woods was all about. When China pegged the yuan to the dollar, Heiritage Foundation cheered.
China manipulates their labor force, not their currency. But the Bush administration doesn't like to talk about labor standards. It upsets Bush's contributor base.
All DVD players are now made in China, so there's no "Made in the U.S.A." option.
1982, Joel, A.E., "A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System, Switching Technology 1925-1975", Bell Telephone Laboratories, ISBN 0-932764-02-9. Chapter 7 covers #5 Crossbar.
Not only is the FTC now required to study a do-not-email list, there's even talk of the DMA's worst fear - a do-not-mail list for paper mail. Bills have already been introduced in New York and Massachusetts.
This is the year to go for a do-not-email list with teeth as sharp as the do-not-call list. It worked for fax. It worked for phones. It can work for e-mail. And it's an election year. Keep pushing on your elected officials and the FTC. Push the FTC to implement a do-not-email list. Insist that it include domain-wide opt-out.
And yes, it will work if the law goes after where the money goes. Any competent cop and prosecutor can find out where those Viagra orders get fulfilled and who collects the money. It just takes some routine police work and a few court orders.
The references you need to read are obscure, but exist. For railroad signalling, the technology was mature by 1930. An understanding of either General Railroad Signal or Union Switch and Signal relay-era technology is useful. Both companies produced good books describing their technologies in 1924. There's also "NXSYS", a simulator down to the relay level of New York City subway signalling technology. The key idea to take away from railroad signalling is what "fail-safe" really means and how it is consistently implemented.
Telephony in the relay era is best understood by studying its most advanced form, Number 5 Crossbar. There are descriptions of the technology in "A Technical History of the Bell System". #5 Crossbar is a transaction-oriented system, in which units of different types do quick transactions to get the job done. Resources of a given type are interchangeable, so losing one unit just reduces call capacity. Resources include originating registers, markers, senders, trunks, translators, billing punches, and trouble recorders. The switch fabric itself is dumb; all the smarts are in the resources. Resources are never tied up for the duration of a call; they're seized from a pool, used for a fraction of a second to a few seconds, and released. That architecture is extremely reliable; no Bell System central office in the relay era was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. The key idea to take away from telephony is how interchangeable resources were used to build up a system.
The Brahmos is an anti-ship missile, with a terminal guidance system that can actually hit a target. It's not like a Scud, which has trouble reliably hitting large cities.
The US may have to take the battleships out of mothballs again. After an Exocet took out HMS Sheffield, someone asked the captain of the USS Iowa what he would do if a missile hit his ship. "Tell off a detail to chip and paint", he said.
The point of having a static IP address is that there's nobody in the middle that you have to log onto. Nobody who gets to send you a bill, other than your ISP. Nobody who can raise your phone rate. Are you getting this yet?
The solution to this is to strictly enforce some laws we have, like the California law that makes it a criminal offense to accept a credit card number online from a California resident without first disclosing the actual business name and address of the business. If every spammer who violated that law did the required six months in the county jail, we'd have far fewer spammers.
QNX messaging reliably passes an arbitrary-length string of bytes from a client to a server, waits for a response, and returns another arbitrary-length string of bytes from the server. This is the basic primitive of the QNX operating system. Everything, including I/O, uses it. It's integrated with scheduling, so if you do a MsgSend to another process that's waiting in a MsgReceive, it takes only one process switch, and that process switch happens immediately.
Messaging works across the network, but local messaging isn't held down by running it through some elaborate "object broker". So local performance is so good that messaging can be used freely.
Other mechanisms can be built on top of this. But this is what you need at the bottom: a discrite message system, not a stream system like sockets. There's an inherent inefficiency with running messages through a stream system.
For most other operating systems, messaging is an afterthought and sluggish. In the Windows world, it's bad enough that objects are often placed in the same address space to avoid overhead. In the Linux world, there are about five different versions of messaging, all incompatible. And then there's SOAP, a great way to use up CPU time.
I am the author of the original post, which some bozo has copied and reprinted under another name.
John Nagle
The selection process wasn't hard for anyone who had a clue. DARPA was evaluating papers for months, and you could resubmit as many times as you wanted. DARPA warned entrants in the rules that it might take several turnarounds to get a paper through. The people whining about rejection submitted papers at the last minute.
We'll be in Fontana in March.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
John Nagle
That's Blockbuster management. Sex films bad, slasher films good.
Once those things are sold in quantity, sending U.S. Navy carriers to trouble spots will become much riskier.
NAT prevents this straightforward implementation, which must make telcos very happy.