The ADL is one of the biggest hate groups around. They spread hate and intolerance towards people who hate other people. Talk about being hypocritical.
1) 128-bit keys are hard to brute-force, but the NSA isn't objecting strenuously to the export of RSA, which implies they have solved the problem of finding the prime factors of large numbers. If that -is- the case, then RSA is useless, as the NSA can read any encrypted message effectively instantly.
How do you know the NSA doesn't strenuously object to the export of RSA? Care to point to some NSA press releases? In any event, it's the Commerce department, specifically the Buereau of Export Administration (BXA) that controls export. They have relaxed controls because everyone is screaming at them and they know it's a lost cause anyway (genie is out of the bottle). There is no indication that the NSA has any extraordinary factoring capability or has built working quantum computers large enough to factor typical public keys.
DES is trivial to break.
DES is NOT trivial to break. 56-bit keys are trivial to break. There are no practical attacks to DES that are faster than complete trial and error. That's why triple-DES is currently the most trusted cipher around.
IDEA isn't much better. There are a lot of weaknesses known for it.
This is utter nonsense. Care to point to some references? The only really damning thing about IDEA is the patent issue. That's why it's not an AES contender.
Actually, breaking a 128-bit key is probably irrelevent, as DES uses 56-bits.
Not irrelevant, as DES has been proven to be a group. So 3-key EDE triple-DES has an effective keylength of 168-bits. All good encryption software supports triple-DES. Nobody seriously uses single-DES anymore.
It's much quicker to ignore the 128-bit encryption, and derive the key by cracking the message. By doing so, you've reduced a slow, 128-bit cypher to a fast 56-bit one.
More nonsense. You are also confusing symmetric block ciphers with asymmetric ciphers, which have totally different security properties and key length requirements.
By using multiple algorithms, though, you can't do that. You don't know how long the key is, therefore you don't know where the message is. This means you =HAVE= to break the header. You don't get the choice. No shortcuts, anymore.
Anyone who knows anything at all about crypto and security in general knows that "Security through obscurity is no security at all." All good cryptosystems are designed under the assumption that the attacker has complete details to the system and the only thing secret is the key. A properly designed system can withstand this assumption and has no need for obscurity. You don't really get 4 more bits under that assumption and 4 bits isn't worth much anyway.
What they do is setup giant antennas (dishes) in close proximity to the phone company's, pointing at the same satellites. They receive the same signals as the telcos.
The difference is that the NSA's dishes are surrounded by electrified fences and guards armed with automatic weapons.
If you control a Linux box that sits on the net, go right now and get FreeS/WAN and install it. This is a free, open-source implementation of the IP/SEC protocols. Funded by John Gilmore (of Sun, Cygnus, EFF, and DEEP-CRACK fame), this software gives you secure Virtual Private Network support in Linux.
Set it up and create secure connections between your peers. Very soon it will support automatic keying using DNS-SEC (public keys kept in the DNS database).
Echelon makes little difference if everyone is using end-to-end transport level strong encryption.
Burris
The beauty is NOT skin deep.
on
MacOS X DP3
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· Score: 5
You can make GNOME look something like OS-X, but the beauty would still only be skin deep. You say that it is "just a NeXT" but the NeXT does have by far the most advanced development environment of ANY operating system. I'm not talking about fancy IDE's, which make little real impact on development time. I'm talking about the API's. The Cocoa API's are very elegant, powerful, and quite mature. It's light years ahead of Win32, the old Mac Toolbox, GNOME, KDE, whatever. The fact is, it's much easier to write applications on the Cocoa API than any other.
Take a look at this, for instance, it's the Text System Overview for OS-X. Read that and then come back and tell me that OS-X/Aqua/Cocoa is nothing special, and with the proper skins GNOME provides the exact same thing to developers.
That is just the beginning. There is EOF, which is the most advanced, high level, database independent access framework available. It's so far beyond ODBC, JDBC, and the frameworks available in commercial appservers like Dynamo and WebLogic that it really isn't even funny.
After 11 years, InterfaceBuilder is still without peer. It doesn't generate code. Nobody else seems to get it.
The fact is, Mac OS-X has the most powerful object-oriented API that has been under development and constant refinement for over 12 years. It has been shipping since 1989. It's been through four major revisions since then.
You may be able to make GNOME look something like Aqua, but it's still going to be a pain in the ass to write applications with a decent UI for it. I use GNOME every day and even the cut and paste support totally sucks. It's been 16 years since the Mac came out, you'd think that every GNOME app would have real cut and paste. I use Navigator, GNOME Terminal, and XChat every day. Only Navigator actually has "cut" in the menu. A quick survey of other GNOME apps that come with my system reveals that only a few have cut and paste support (GEdit comes to mind). Of course, Navigator's clipboard only works within Navigator. The others apps use something that vaguely resembles cut and past but isn't even close (middle clicking causing pasting of the selection does NOT count as real cut and paste). You guys really have no idea what you're missing here....
Some comments: tcsh isn't running on MacOS. Remember that Mac OS-X is essentially OpenStep 6.0 (the NeXT operating system). Rhapsody was akin to OpenStep 5.0. It really is a NeXT, with Mac compatibility (Carbon and Classic) and Java.
Most BSD source will port pretty easily. The biggest gotcha I've found is that the HFS+ filesystem isn't case sensitive. Like NTFS, it preserves case but you cannot have two files with the same name differing only in case (i.e. you can't have "README" and "readme" and "ReaDMe" in the same directory). Prepare to hack some makefiles.
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
The "sheets" functionality is way cool. Modal dialogs like save panels are attached to specific document windows and do not affect other documents. They scroll down from the title bar and cover part of the window. However, they are translucent so you can still see some of the document behind it.
Another new thing are "drawers" which are sub-windows that scroll out when you activate a control. For instance, in the Mail application, hitting the "Mailboxes" menu item causes a "drawer" containing your list of mailboxes to slide out from the side of your mail reading window.
The finder has plug-in support for document previewing... I was quite surprised to select WAV and AIFF sound files and find that I could play them from within the finder. Writing your own plugins is not that difficult.
Mac OS-X really is going to be the coolest operating system around. I've been waiting years for it...
Switching to Dvorak made a much larger difference for me than any keyboard has. Given that it is optimized for typing in English, it is the logical choice. When temporarily using QWERTY it becomes painfully obvious to me that the standard layout is extremely suboptimal.
Given that every operating system is easily switched back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak, there is little excuse not to make the switch. It isn't nearly as hard as learning qwerty the first time. The only way to switch is to go "Cold Turkey" (get some overlays for your current keyboard). You'll be very slow at first, but you'll rapidly get faster and you should back to your previous qwerty speed in two weeks.
I've been doing it since Oct '93 and am very happy. Like I said, it's hard to know just how awful qwerty is until you have used something else (i.e. masturbation seems like the greatest thing in the world until you have real sex). My hands do not trouble me anymore (despite typing just as much as I always have). The few friends that I have been able to convince to switch to Dvorak agree with me: it's far superior to qwerty!
Forget DeCSS. I would like to see someone create a device driver for Windows that fool software into thinking the encrypted.vob files (and whatever else off the DVD disk) sitting on your hard-drive is actually a physical DVD disk. That way you can use real, licensed, DVD player software to decrypt and play pirated movies you downloaded off the net.
By demonstrating that pirating over the internet can be done with any licensed software player the judges might be convinced that DeCSS really is about playback freedom for unsupported platforms.
Perhaps you don't think much of OOP because you have never used a very good OOP environment. Try Cocoa on Mac OS-X (the Frameworks Formerly Known As OpenStep, Formerly Known as NeXTStep).
The main reason most people don't think much of OOP is because the most popular OOP environments are based on C++, which is about the worst OOP language ever (if you can even call it OOP).
I've been using python for about 5 years now and I have converted some extremely zealous Perl addicts. There are many interesting things about Python that people don't know about.
There are several different implementations of Python, but the most notable are CPython (Original Python) and JPython. JPython is an implementation of Python in 100% pure Java. Python scripts run anywhere there is a JVM (though you need the JPython jar and probably the Python class library). Furthermore you get complete access to Java from within Python. You can instantate and send messages to any Java class. You can even subclass Java classes in Python. You can use the Python interactive mode to interactively manipulate Java classes. It's way cool! In my opinion, it is the best way to deal with Java. Python becomes a higher level langauge on top of Java.
Anyone who is forced to use Java (which is becoming more and more politically correct every day) would be wise to check out JPython.
Many people complain about Python's use of relative indentation but those people typically don't use python. It really is a complete non-issue for people that use Python. Let's face it, cutting and pasting code when using an Object Oriented language is Bad Form.
Note that it is indeed possible to defeat the indentation if necessary. Check out this implementation of a CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode Karn cipher in Python (using MD5 for the hash function). The key and IV are crunched with MD5 before usage, so they can be of arbitrary length and density.
There is an implementation of Python in ocaml, believe it or not. It has true garbage collection and possibly "proper" closures. There are also other features...
Well, I think the Slashdotters got through as now the URL says that the article has been pulled due to "Flagrant inaccuracies." The editor even apologized saying that sometimes articles like that "slip through."
As an anonymous coward indicated, perhaps the FBI is doing this intentionally precisely so they can come in and "save the day." That sure would make them look good just as Congress is going to start mulling over the hundreds of millions of dollars in the proposed budget earmarked for CALEA implementation. The FBI has been trying for years to get CALEA funded. This conspiracy is a little too good to pass up.
In case you don't know, CALEA is the "Communications Access to Law Enforcement Act" they got passed in '94. It requires that all manufacturers of telecommunications equipment (does that include Cisco?) make their products "Wiretap Ready." Wiretap Ready means the equipment must be able to provide plaintext for 1% of the maximum call/connection capacity at the whim of the FBI (subject to "Lawful Authorization" of course). Despite the act being passed, it was never funded (the Gov't is supposed to foot the bill for all the wiretaps). The newly proposed budget is going to fund this act.
Another option to turn off is the attachment of scripts to buttons on the tool bar. The "Back" button should ALWAYS take you back. NEVER should it execute a script that takes you to yet another pr0n site. Sometimes I wonder what the browser designers at Netscape and M$ have been smoking.
The nice thing is the stupidity and kowtowing to big money interests practiced by the biggies (AOL/Netscape and M$) creates a niche for alternative browsers that do things like filter banner ads, disable portions of javascript, and don't have annoying "Shop" buttons and bookmarks to their partners that you cannot remove. Navigator and IE will never have banner ad filtering.
In Navigator you can stop animations once the page is loaded, using the ESC key.
> Encryption may have become more POPULAR lately... > but some VERY strong algorithms have existed for 10 years or more.
The Vigenere Cipher has been around since 1913 or so and when used with a truly random key is absolutely unbreakable (proven by Claude Shannon in the 1940's).
DES has been around since the mid-1970's and has no practical attacks that are better than complete-trial-and-error (since the key size is only 56-bits). Now that DES has been proven not to be a group (early 1990's), certain variants of triple DES are the most trusted block ciphers in the open crypto community today.
PGP-2 came out in mid '91 and uses IDEA, which doesn't have any serious flaws that would allow the FBI to compromise Kevin's data if PGP-2 were used (IDEA is not an AES contender because of patents).
I learned about PGP-2 at HoHoCon (a cracker/phreaker convention in Texas organized by LoD folks) in December 1991 where John Draper, a.k.a. Captain Crunch, was busy telling everyone who would listen about it. So it was definitely well known in the cracker community by 1994.
Summary: There was plenty of strong crypto available to Kevin and he probably used it. Strong encryption has been available to anyone who bothered to do their homework for a while now. Most commercial crypto is written by people who are just plain ignorant.
Nope. Macs will most likely always have one button mice. Mac users have gotten along just fine with a single button for 16 years. Trust Uncle Steve.
The NeXT had a two button mouse, but the second button was only to pop up the menu (which would give you access to the Edit menu, and subsequently the pasteboard functions, which we all like). That's why the NeXTies joked about it being the "only one button mouse with two buttons" Don't count on this feature making it into Mac OS-X.
The hockypuck mouse is a compromise intended to be used by children and adults (and be cheap!). It was not intedned to be the end-all-be-all of mice (as if such a thing were possible, considering how much people's tastes differ). If you don't like it then get another mouse. It's not as if mice are expensive or difficult to install.
Mac OS-X is based on unix, but only for the guts. It's windowing system internally does not bear any resemblence to X-Windows or any X window managers whatsoever.
Ever hear of a little band call the Grateful Dead? That band allowed fans to record their concerts and trade them freely and rose to become the top grossing band on tour year after year.
The Dead started a movement in music that is very similar to the open source movement, and readers of/. would be wise to know about it as it offers parallels to the software industry. The model is now being followed by literally hundreds of "jam bands" (see JamBands.com).
The model is simple: play lots of concerts, improvise so every concert is different, allow people to freely record and trade your concerts. You get free publicity, and if you are any good people will buy tickets for your shows and buy your albums.
Another band called Phish used this same model. Without any radio or MTV play and no hit singles this band now regularly sells out 20,000 seat venues. They just sold 75,000 tickets for the new years show where they were the sole performers (they could have sold more but the place wouldn't hold any more). These guys are all millionaires and people trade their MP3's all day (and DAT's and CD-R's through the mail too). They have an official policy regarding MP3 trading since they even have their own MP3's available for download for fee!
You wanted to know how many other bands encourage the trading of their music, look at this, the bands that allow taping list. Note that these are bands that allow fans to record their live concerts and trade the recordings. Some of the big bands on this list are Perl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. There are many other small bands that are using MP3 for publicity that don't explicitly allow fans to record the live concerts.
This site, Sugarmegs is devoted to trading MP3's of live concerts and is fully condoned by all of the bands. The bands traded are Grateful Dead, Phish, and many other bands that allow trading of their music under the same model such as Widespread Panic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Moe., and others.
There is a lot of free music out there and it's not all hippie jam bands. There are many jazz artists that allow recording and trading such as Branford Marsalis, John Scofield, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bill Frisell, and Ken Vandermark. Almost all bluegrass is tradeable and some of the major bluegrass festivals have special sections for people to setup microphones (Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival, for instance).
There is a movement in free music (and subsequently free promotion of artists!). Much like free software, not all copying of music is copyright infringement!
Hey folks, lets face it, it way past time to phase out both IDE and SCSI and replace them with a modern standard such as IEEE.1394 (FireWire, iLink). 1394 has many advantages over both systems:
Hot Pluggable!
No ID's, IRQ's or other stuff to mess with
No termination issues
Power available from the host (except in portable situations)
Way faster. 400mbit/sec now, 800 almost out, gigabit speeds in the near future
Many more devices per bus. Topology can be daisy-chain or branched with hubs.
The bus is useful for much more than just storage devices. Literally millions of digital video cameras are already deployed with 1394. It is also useful for digital audio and as a LAN. (to be fair, SCSI is often used for scanners)
Very long cable lengths, over copper or fiber.
Cables are thinner, have less wires, and should be more reliable.
Connectors are smaller and tiny miniature connectors are available, which is why it fits on video cameras, where space is at a serious premium. The diminuitive Sony Vaio has 1394 on board!
Summary: IDE and SCSI are crufty. Something much better is available. Let's use it, shall we?
No, Mac OS-X has an all new object-oriented driver architecture. Drivers are written in C++ (if it were ObjC the hardware manufacturers wouldn't go for it, and C++ is slightly faster). You inherit base functionality from a variety of different driver clasess supplied. The architecture is designed so drivers are easy to write, but especially so they can be easily loaded and unloaded at runtime and also to make it easy for users to manage them. Mac OS-X really is going to be the most advanced operating system available!
No, just because Mac OS-X is based on Unix doesn't mean apps are going to be compatible with any other *nix. Purely command line programs that use stdio or curses are going to be pretty compatible, but nobody is going to write these for OS-X (instead they will be written for linux and we'll use them on OS-X;-). Any GUI applications are not going to be compatible. OS-X does not use XWindows. Classic and Carbon apps are basically regular Macintosh apps and Cocoa apps are basically NeXT apps. There is not going to be linux compatibility unless Apple provides a version of Cocoa/Quartz for Linux (which isn't going to happen soon, but could happen... remember that Apple is a hardware company).
As a longtime NeXT developer (since 1990) I feel like I can inject some rationality into this discussion.
1. Complete OpenSource. I would be VERY surprised if Cocoa (new name for the OpenStep AppKit, the class libraries for building GUI applications) and Quartz (the new window management system and Display-PDF) are actually open sourced as these are two of the "Crown Jewels" of Apple's software. Most likely the report is confusing the open-source core operating system (Darwin). Another poster dismissed Darwin saying that nothing has come about from that. Well, the operating system hasn't even been released (and won't be for at least 6 months) so I think it is premature to say that Darwin is a dud. Darwin has been keeping pace with the OS-X developer pre-releases.
2. OS-X on Intel. Apple got all this stuff from NeXT, which ran on Intel (since NeXT stopped making hardware back in '94 or so). Believe me, OS-X still runs on Intel. The problem is Apple still makes practically all it's money from hardware so they are VERY quiet about this. The long range plan must be to expand to Intel but this must be done very carefully in order to preserve their current customer and ISV base. They are still trying to figure out how to do it without screwing themselves. OTOH, Apple cares deeply about "Total Customer Experience" (yeah, it sound like marketspeak but it is real) and the only way they can ensure that the TCE is acceptable is to control the whole thing from top to bottom. This and the "Apple is a hardware company" thing are the two roadblocks to full-on Intel support. It is absolutely NOT a technological issue.
3. "Big deal, we'll make an X window manager that looks just like OS-X, just as we did with the NeXT" This always makes me laugh on several levels. Firstly, all of the X window managers that try to look like a NeXT are really pathetic, if you've ever seriously used a NeXT for any period of time. This is because there is much more to a good GUI than just the visual apperance of the widgets. More importantly, even if you make the widgets resemble OS-X, you still have X-Windows underneath, which is the worst GUI in the industry. I'm not talking about the way it looks, either. X-Windows beauty is only skin deep. Below it is awful. You still have that horrible device-dependent display model underneath. OS-X uses Display-PDF, which has the same powerful imaging model as PostScript and has the same description langauge as PDF, which is rapidly becoming a standard. PDF is device independent, you don't care what the resolution or color depth of your display is, PDF handles it. You get nice primitives such as bezier curves and extremely powerful coordinate space tranformations, masking and clipping, etc... Plus, you get *real* WYSIWYG and printing for FREE.
Furthermore, the Cocoa class libraries are the most mature and powerful available and really simplfy GUI development. There is still no equal to InterfaceBuilder (which does NOT generate code). Frankly, writing software for X is much more like coding for the old Mac Toolbox; everything is soooo tedious and manual. There really is a world of difference for the application developer that you must experience to believe. It's the class libraries and imaging model that are the key to simplified GUI development, not whizzy IDE's. It is the difficulty of writing GUI's brought on by the class libraries that holds back the development of cool software. That's why incredible applications were developed on the NeXT so long ago (such as Lotus Improv, Diagram, Notebook, and even Tim Berner Lee's original WWW browser) and took a long time to reach Wintel, if ever. They only got to Windoze because of the incredibly lucrative market. They still aren't on X since it's such an incredible pain in the ass that it isn't worth it (unlike Windoze).
I would highly recommend going to Apple's web site and check out some of the Cocoa API's. Especially look at the Text System Overview and Enterprise Objects Developer Guide. Even after developing on NeXT exclusively for so many years I was still amazed after reading the Text System Overview document.
4. Third Party Licenses prevent open sourcing. This applied to OpenStep but it is no longer true with OS-X. In fact, that was a major goal of OS-X and one of the biggest reasons why Display-PostScript was replaced with Display-PDF (which was written in-house). Other third party software that was dropped includes the Pantone stuff. I believe all third party licensed software that would be an impediment to open sourcing has been removed. However, I still believe that it'll be a cold day in hell before anything above the CoreFoundation libraries are made open source (CoreFoundation is an OS independent ANSI-C API that sits just above the OS upon which Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, Quartz and all of the other GUI software is built)
I believe John Gilmore deserves some recognition for finally putting the nail in DES' coffin. His machine, DEEP CRACK, is absolutely amazing. The NSA said it couldn't be done (in response to Weiner's 1990 paper describing such a machine). Of course, the NSA probably already has several...
While those in the crypto community who were both knowledgable and honest were vocal about 56-bit keys being vulnerable, Gilmore put his money on the line to prove it unequivocably. See Deep Crack Page at EFF
The results: the Clinton Administration was forced to admit in public that their export controls were a farce and needed serious revision. Now even PGP is freely exportable. The public will benefit from stronger security software as more products appear from relaxed export controls and the lack of weak encryption such as single DES.
Furthermore, Gilmore funded the development of FreeSWAN which was released this year. FreeSWAN is a free, open source IP/SEC implementation for Linux that gives you real, secure VPN capabilities. Developed outside the US, it's free of any type of import/export restrictions.
Whether or not you feel Gilmore deserves as much recognition as the likes of Bidzos, I highly encourage you to download and install FreeSWAN and begin using it. Provide your coding expertise if you are outside of the US as there is plenty of work to be done.
Ubiquitous, strong, link-level encryption between all nodes on the 'Net WILL have a significant impact on the world. People like Gilmore are leading the way.
Run, don't walk, to FreeSWAN Home Page and get it. Install it on your firewall. Setup VPN's between you and all of your friend's networks. This is the real way to "Jam Eschelon"...
Slashdot Mirror
The ADL is one of the biggest hate groups around. They spread hate and intolerance towards people who hate other people. Talk about being hypocritical.
Burris
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
The difference is that the NSA's dishes are surrounded by electrified fences and guards armed with automatic weapons.
Burris
Set it up and create secure connections between your peers. Very soon it will support automatic keying using DNS-SEC (public keys kept in the DNS database).
Echelon makes little difference if everyone is using end-to-end transport level strong encryption.
Burris
Take a look at this, for instance, it's the Text System Overview for OS-X. Read that and then come back and tell me that OS-X/Aqua/Cocoa is nothing special, and with the proper skins GNOME provides the exact same thing to developers.
That is just the beginning. There is EOF, which is the most advanced, high level, database independent access framework available. It's so far beyond ODBC, JDBC, and the frameworks available in commercial appservers like Dynamo and WebLogic that it really isn't even funny.
After 11 years, InterfaceBuilder is still without peer. It doesn't generate code. Nobody else seems to get it.
The fact is, Mac OS-X has the most powerful object-oriented API that has been under development and constant refinement for over 12 years. It has been shipping since 1989. It's been through four major revisions since then.
You may be able to make GNOME look something like Aqua, but it's still going to be a pain in the ass to write applications with a decent UI for it. I use GNOME every day and even the cut and paste support totally sucks. It's been 16 years since the Mac came out, you'd think that every GNOME app would have real cut and paste. I use Navigator, GNOME Terminal, and XChat every day. Only Navigator actually has "cut" in the menu. A quick survey of other GNOME apps that come with my system reveals that only a few have cut and paste support (GEdit comes to mind). Of course, Navigator's clipboard only works within Navigator. The others apps use something that vaguely resembles cut and past but isn't even close (middle clicking causing pasting of the selection does NOT count as real cut and paste). You guys really have no idea what you're missing here....
Burris
Some comments:
tcsh isn't running on MacOS. Remember that Mac OS-X is essentially OpenStep 6.0 (the NeXT operating system). Rhapsody was akin to OpenStep 5.0. It really is a NeXT, with Mac compatibility (Carbon and Classic) and Java.
Most BSD source will port pretty easily. The biggest gotcha I've found is that the HFS+ filesystem isn't case sensitive. Like NTFS, it preserves case but you cannot have two files with the same name differing only in case (i.e. you can't have "README" and "readme" and "ReaDMe" in the same directory). Prepare to hack some makefiles.
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
The "sheets" functionality is way cool. Modal dialogs like save panels are attached to specific document windows and do not affect other documents. They scroll down from the title bar and cover part of the window. However, they are translucent so you can still see some of the document behind it.
Another new thing are "drawers" which are sub-windows that scroll out when you activate a control. For instance, in the Mail application, hitting the "Mailboxes" menu item causes a "drawer" containing your list of mailboxes to slide out from the side of your mail reading window.
The finder has plug-in support for document previewing... I was quite surprised to select WAV and AIFF sound files and find that I could play them from within the finder. Writing your own plugins is not that difficult.
Mac OS-X really is going to be the coolest operating system around. I've been waiting years for it...
Burris
How are you supposed to play Nethack then? I suppose if you are concerned about RSI then Nethack is out of the question... ;-)
Burris
Switching to Dvorak made a much larger difference for me than any keyboard has. Given that it is optimized for typing in English, it is the logical choice. When temporarily using QWERTY it becomes painfully obvious to me that the standard layout is extremely suboptimal.
Given that every operating system is easily switched back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak, there is little excuse not to make the switch. It isn't nearly as hard as learning qwerty the first time. The only way to switch is to go "Cold Turkey" (get some overlays for your current keyboard). You'll be very slow at first, but you'll rapidly get faster and you should back to your previous qwerty speed in two weeks.
I've been doing it since Oct '93 and am very happy. Like I said, it's hard to know just how awful qwerty is until you have used something else (i.e. masturbation seems like the greatest thing in the world until you have real sex). My hands do not trouble me anymore (despite typing just as much as I always have). The few friends that I have been able to convince to switch to Dvorak agree with me: it's far superior to qwerty!
Burris
So the MPAA is right and /.'ers are wrong: DeCSS *does* enable piracy.
Burris
Forget DeCSS. I would like to see someone create a device driver for Windows that fool software into thinking the encrypted .vob files (and whatever else off the DVD disk) sitting on your hard-drive is actually a physical DVD disk. That way you can use real, licensed, DVD player software to decrypt and play pirated movies you downloaded off the net.
By demonstrating that pirating over the internet can be done with any licensed software player the judges might be convinced that DeCSS really is about playback freedom for unsupported platforms.
Burris
Nobody got fired for buying IBM^H^H^HMicrosoft.
Burris
The main reason most people don't think much of OOP is because the most popular OOP environments are based on C++, which is about the worst OOP language ever (if you can even call it OOP).
Burris
There are several different implementations of Python, but the most notable are CPython (Original Python) and JPython. JPython is an implementation of Python in 100% pure Java. Python scripts run anywhere there is a JVM (though you need the JPython jar and probably the Python class library). Furthermore you get complete access to Java from within Python. You can instantate and send messages to any Java class. You can even subclass Java classes in Python. You can use the Python interactive mode to interactively manipulate Java classes. It's way cool! In my opinion, it is the best way to deal with Java. Python becomes a higher level langauge on top of Java.
Anyone who is forced to use Java (which is becoming more and more politically correct every day) would be wise to check out JPython.
Many people complain about Python's use of relative indentation but those people typically don't use python. It really is a complete non-issue for people that use Python. Let's face it, cutting and pasting code when using an Object Oriented language is Bad Form.
Note that it is indeed possible to defeat the indentation if necessary. Check out this implementation of a CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode Karn cipher in Python (using MD5 for the hash function). The key and IV are crunched with MD5 before usage, so they can be of arbitrary length and density.
Usage: karn -e "key" "initialization-vector" | karn -d "key" "initialization-vector"
from md5 import *;from sys import *;from string import *;M=md5;il=ir=M(argv[3]\ ).digest();ki=M(argv[2]).digest();K,k=ki[:8],ki[8: ];p=stdin.read(32);c={'-e':'\ l=x(l,il);r=x(r,ir);R=x(M(l+K).digest(),r);L=x(M(R +k).digest(),l);il=L;ir=R','\ -d':'L=x(M(r+k).digest(),l);R=x(M(L+K).digest(),r) ;L=x(L,il);R=x(R,ir);ir=r;il\ 1 6],p[16:\ ];exec(c[argv[1]]);stdout.write(L+R);p=stdin.read( 32)";exec(main)
=l'};main="def x(a,b):return joinfields(map(lambda m,n:chr(m^n),map(lambda m:o\
rd(m),a),map(lambda m:ord(m),b)),'');\nwhile(p):p=ljust(p,32);l,r=p[:
There is an implementation of Python in ocaml, believe it or not. It has true garbage collection and possibly "proper" closures. There are also other features...
t ar.gz
ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jskaller/viper_2_0_a1.
What is wrong with closures in CPython?
Burris
Well, I think the Slashdotters got through as now the URL says that the article has been pulled due to "Flagrant inaccuracies." The editor even apologized saying that sometimes articles like that "slip through."
Burris
In case you don't know, CALEA is the "Communications Access to Law Enforcement Act" they got passed in '94. It requires that all manufacturers of telecommunications equipment (does that include Cisco?) make their products "Wiretap Ready." Wiretap Ready means the equipment must be able to provide plaintext for 1% of the maximum call/connection capacity at the whim of the FBI (subject to "Lawful Authorization" of course). Despite the act being passed, it was never funded (the Gov't is supposed to foot the bill for all the wiretaps). The newly proposed budget is going to fund this act.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
The nice thing is the stupidity and kowtowing to big money interests practiced by the biggies (AOL/Netscape and M$) creates a niche for alternative browsers that do things like filter banner ads, disable portions of javascript, and don't have annoying "Shop" buttons and bookmarks to their partners that you cannot remove. Navigator and IE will never have banner ad filtering.
In Navigator you can stop animations once the page is loaded, using the ESC key.
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
> Encryption may have become more POPULAR lately...
> but some VERY strong algorithms have existed for 10 years or more.
The Vigenere Cipher has been around since 1913 or so and when used with a truly random key is absolutely unbreakable (proven by Claude Shannon in the 1940's).
DES has been around since the mid-1970's and has no practical attacks that are better than complete-trial-and-error (since the key size is only 56-bits). Now that DES has been proven not to be a group (early 1990's), certain variants of triple DES are the most trusted block ciphers in the open crypto community today.
PGP-2 came out in mid '91 and uses IDEA, which doesn't have any serious flaws that would allow the FBI to compromise Kevin's data if PGP-2 were used (IDEA is not an AES contender because of patents).
I learned about PGP-2 at HoHoCon (a cracker/phreaker convention in Texas organized by LoD folks) in December 1991 where John Draper, a.k.a. Captain Crunch, was busy telling everyone who would listen about it. So it was definitely well known in the cracker community by 1994.
Summary: There was plenty of strong crypto available to Kevin and he probably used it. Strong encryption has been available to anyone who bothered to do their homework for a while now. Most commercial crypto is written by people who are just plain ignorant.
Burris
Nope. Macs will most likely always have one button mice. Mac users have gotten along just fine with a single button for 16 years. Trust Uncle Steve.
The NeXT had a two button mouse, but the second button was only to pop up the menu (which would give you access to the Edit menu, and subsequently the pasteboard functions, which we all like). That's why the NeXTies joked about it being the "only one button mouse with two buttons" Don't count on this feature making it into Mac OS-X.
The hockypuck mouse is a compromise intended to be used by children and adults (and be cheap!). It was not intedned to be the end-all-be-all of mice (as if such a thing were possible, considering how much people's tastes differ). If you don't like it then get another mouse. It's not as if mice are expensive or difficult to install.
Mac OS-X is based on unix, but only for the guts. It's windowing system internally does not bear any resemblence to X-Windows or any X window managers whatsoever.
burris
The Dead started a movement in music that is very similar to the open source movement, and readers of /. would be wise to know about it as it offers parallels to the software industry. The model is now being followed by literally hundreds of "jam bands" (see JamBands.com).
The model is simple: play lots of concerts, improvise so every concert is different, allow people to freely record and trade your concerts. You get free publicity, and if you are any good people will buy tickets for your shows and buy your albums.
Another band called Phish used this same model. Without any radio or MTV play and no hit singles this band now regularly sells out 20,000 seat venues. They just sold 75,000 tickets for the new years show where they were the sole performers (they could have sold more but the place wouldn't hold any more). These guys are all millionaires and people trade their MP3's all day (and DAT's and CD-R's through the mail too). They have an official policy regarding MP3 trading since they even have their own MP3's available for download for fee!
You wanted to know how many other bands encourage the trading of their music, look at this, the bands that allow taping list. Note that these are bands that allow fans to record their live concerts and trade the recordings. Some of the big bands on this list are Perl Jam and Dave Matthews Band. There are many other small bands that are using MP3 for publicity that don't explicitly allow fans to record the live concerts.
This site, Sugarmegs is devoted to trading MP3's of live concerts and is fully condoned by all of the bands. The bands traded are Grateful Dead, Phish, and many other bands that allow trading of their music under the same model such as Widespread Panic, Medeski Martin & Wood, Moe., and others.
There is a lot of free music out there and it's not all hippie jam bands. There are many jazz artists that allow recording and trading such as Branford Marsalis, John Scofield, Medeski Martin & Wood, Bill Frisell, and Ken Vandermark. Almost all bluegrass is tradeable and some of the major bluegrass festivals have special sections for people to setup microphones (Merle Watson Memorial Bluegrass Festival, for instance).
There is a movement in free music (and subsequently free promotion of artists!). Much like free software, not all copying of music is copyright infringement!
Burris
Hey folks, lets face it, it way past time to phase out both IDE and SCSI and replace them with a modern standard such as IEEE.1394 (FireWire, iLink). 1394 has many advantages over both systems:
Hot Pluggable!
No ID's, IRQ's or other stuff to mess with
No termination issues
Power available from the host (except in portable situations)
Way faster. 400mbit/sec now, 800 almost out, gigabit speeds in the near future
Many more devices per bus. Topology can be daisy-chain or branched with hubs.
The bus is useful for much more than just storage devices. Literally millions of digital video cameras are already deployed with 1394. It is also useful for digital audio and as a LAN. (to be fair, SCSI is often used for scanners)
Very long cable lengths, over copper or fiber.
Cables are thinner, have less wires, and should be more reliable.
Connectors are smaller and tiny miniature connectors are available, which is why it fits on video cameras, where space is at a serious premium. The diminuitive Sony Vaio has 1394 on board!
Summary: IDE and SCSI are crufty. Something much better is available. Let's use it, shall we?
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
No, Mac OS-X has an all new object-oriented driver architecture. Drivers are written in C++ (if it were ObjC the hardware manufacturers wouldn't go for it, and C++ is slightly faster). You inherit base functionality from a variety of different driver clasess supplied. The architecture is designed so drivers are easy to write, but especially so they can be easily loaded and unloaded at runtime and also to make it easy for users to manage them. Mac OS-X really is going to be the most advanced operating system available!
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
No, just because Mac OS-X is based on Unix doesn't mean apps are going to be compatible with any other *nix. Purely command line programs that use stdio or curses are going to be pretty compatible, but nobody is going to write these for OS-X (instead they will be written for linux and we'll use them on OS-X ;-). Any GUI applications are not going to be compatible. OS-X does not use XWindows. Classic and Carbon apps are basically regular Macintosh apps and Cocoa apps are basically NeXT apps. There is not going to be linux compatibility unless Apple provides a version of Cocoa/Quartz for Linux (which isn't going to happen soon, but could happen... remember that Apple is a hardware company).
burris
1. Complete OpenSource. I would be VERY surprised if Cocoa (new name for the OpenStep AppKit, the class libraries for building GUI applications) and Quartz (the new window management system and Display-PDF) are actually open sourced as these are two of the "Crown Jewels" of Apple's software. Most likely the report is confusing the open-source core operating system (Darwin). Another poster dismissed Darwin saying that nothing has come about from that. Well, the operating system hasn't even been released (and won't be for at least 6 months) so I think it is premature to say that Darwin is a dud. Darwin has been keeping pace with the OS-X developer pre-releases.
2. OS-X on Intel. Apple got all this stuff from NeXT, which ran on Intel (since NeXT stopped making hardware back in '94 or so). Believe me, OS-X still runs on Intel. The problem is Apple still makes practically all it's money from hardware so they are VERY quiet about this. The long range plan must be to expand to Intel but this must be done very carefully in order to preserve their current customer and ISV base. They are still trying to figure out how to do it without screwing themselves. OTOH, Apple cares deeply about "Total Customer Experience" (yeah, it sound like marketspeak but it is real) and the only way they can ensure that the TCE is acceptable is to control the whole thing from top to bottom. This and the "Apple is a hardware company" thing are the two roadblocks to full-on Intel support. It is absolutely NOT a technological issue.
3. "Big deal, we'll make an X window manager that looks just like OS-X, just as we did with the NeXT" This always makes me laugh on several levels. Firstly, all of the X window managers that try to look like a NeXT are really pathetic, if you've ever seriously used a NeXT for any period of time. This is because there is much more to a good GUI than just the visual apperance of the widgets. More importantly, even if you make the widgets resemble OS-X, you still have X-Windows underneath, which is the worst GUI in the industry. I'm not talking about the way it looks, either. X-Windows beauty is only skin deep. Below it is awful. You still have that horrible device-dependent display model underneath. OS-X uses Display-PDF, which has the same powerful imaging model as PostScript and has the same description langauge as PDF, which is rapidly becoming a standard. PDF is device independent, you don't care what the resolution or color depth of your display is, PDF handles it. You get nice primitives such as bezier curves and extremely powerful coordinate space tranformations, masking and clipping, etc... Plus, you get *real* WYSIWYG and printing for FREE.
Furthermore, the Cocoa class libraries are the most mature and powerful available and really simplfy GUI development. There is still no equal to InterfaceBuilder (which does NOT generate code). Frankly, writing software for X is much more like coding for the old Mac Toolbox; everything is soooo tedious and manual. There really is a world of difference for the application developer that you must experience to believe. It's the class libraries and imaging model that are the key to simplified GUI development, not whizzy IDE's. It is the difficulty of writing GUI's brought on by the class libraries that holds back the development of cool software. That's why incredible applications were developed on the NeXT so long ago (such as Lotus Improv, Diagram, Notebook, and even Tim Berner Lee's original WWW browser) and took a long time to reach Wintel, if ever. They only got to Windoze because of the incredibly lucrative market. They still aren't on X since it's such an incredible pain in the ass that it isn't worth it (unlike Windoze).
I would highly recommend going to Apple's web site and check out some of the Cocoa API's. Especially look at the Text System Overview and Enterprise Objects Developer Guide. Even after developing on NeXT exclusively for so many years I was still amazed after reading the Text System Overview document.
4. Third Party Licenses prevent open sourcing. This applied to OpenStep but it is no longer true with OS-X. In fact, that was a major goal of OS-X and one of the biggest reasons why Display-PostScript was replaced with Display-PDF (which was written in-house). Other third party software that was dropped includes the Pantone stuff. I believe all third party licensed software that would be an impediment to open sourcing has been removed. However, I still believe that it'll be a cold day in hell before anything above the CoreFoundation libraries are made open source (CoreFoundation is an OS independent ANSI-C API that sits just above the OS upon which Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, Quartz and all of the other GUI software is built)
While those in the crypto community who were both knowledgable and honest were vocal about 56-bit keys being vulnerable, Gilmore put his money on the line to prove it unequivocably. See Deep Crack Page at EFF
The results: the Clinton Administration was forced to admit in public that their export controls were a farce and needed serious revision. Now even PGP is freely exportable. The public will benefit from stronger security software as more products appear from relaxed export controls and the lack of weak encryption such as single DES.
Furthermore, Gilmore funded the development of FreeSWAN which was released this year. FreeSWAN is a free, open source IP/SEC implementation for Linux that gives you real, secure VPN capabilities. Developed outside the US, it's free of any type of import/export restrictions.
Whether or not you feel Gilmore deserves as much recognition as the likes of Bidzos, I highly encourage you to download and install FreeSWAN and begin using it. Provide your coding expertise if you are outside of the US as there is plenty of work to be done.
Ubiquitous, strong, link-level encryption between all nodes on the 'Net WILL have a significant impact on the world. People like Gilmore are leading the way.
Run, don't walk, to FreeSWAN Home Page and get it. Install it on your firewall. Setup VPN's between you and all of your friend's networks. This is the real way to "Jam Eschelon" ...