Is there some virulent new strain of libertarianism going around that finds voluntary, contractually based, private-sector risk pooling to be insufficiently individualistic? Seriously?
Frontend vs. Protocol...
on
Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The aspect of Google's wave rollout that I found baffling was their more or less complete inability to conceptually separate(at least in their marketing messages, which is bad, possibly in some of their internal thinking, which would be worse) the specific "Google wave" webapp they had created; frankly a rather rough and somewhat niche-y thing, from the wave protocol, which had considerably greater potential to power a variety of frontend activities in a standardized way that would allow for productive interaction between them.
The closest analogy that I can think of offfhand would be if XMPP had been introduced by releasing a Pidgin fork named "XMPP" and offering no particularly interesting benefits aside from instant messaging over XMPP rather than Oscar or IRC or whatever. The world would have greeted it with a collective "meh." As it is, though, XMPP is capable of running all sorts of more or less real time communication scenarios behind the scenes, basic chat being a small subset of that. Similarly, Wave the protocol is quite powerful and interesting, "Wave" the webapp is kind of blah.
Not just that. Given that males tend to have more muscle mass(which is calorically expensive), slightly larger bodies(ditto), and do not much contribute to a colony's growth potential(you do need sperm for population growth; but # potential children is pretty much a direct factor of # of available uteruses), it makes much more sense for the crew to be all female, with a genetically varied selection of sperm stored cryogenically until the colony is ready to grow.
I'm guessing that a fair proportion of the senators in question would rent this movie; but not appropriate funding for this space mission...
Apparently, if you pick the right species, they are surprisingly discerning about only eating necrotic tissue; but I suspect that you Do Not Want to get the bill from somebody who did years and years of med school just so he could pick maggots out of your horrid wound...
Good point. I was thinking of their desktop stuff. Particularly back when intel was still flogging FSB based stuff, AMD was just too superior to ignore in servers.
Dell has sold AMDs for a while now. They tend to be the poor cousins of the intels(you rarely see them in the enterprise lines, and their BIOSes don't get the same Dell branding, and so forth); but they do exist.
At least back when I last looked, the convention seemed to be that the model numbers ending in "1" were AMDs, while the ones ending in "0" were intels, ie. the Inspiron 530 was a basic consumer desktop tower. The Inspiron 531 was the otherwise similar model; but AMD based.
Other than, of course, the fact that an intel GPU comes on the die of every intel CPU sold, atoms excepted(for now).
This order just prevents them from trimming PCIe so as to make their GPU the only thing with a fast enough connection to the CPU that it isn't a total joke.
Unfortunately, NASA would never be allowed to release a game based on the real drama of human space colonization....
Stuff is expensive to boost out of earth's gravity well. Solution: Midgets. Lighter, lower metabolic needs, work well in small spaces, standard human capabilities in all respects except brute strength, which doesn't matter much in low or zero gravity.
Long term survival of human colony populations will require reproduction; but Newton's 3rd poses difficulties in microgravity. Solution: Bondage enthusiasts.
The day NASA releases this game is the day that they discover what real funding cuts look like...
If one were feeling especially unpleasant, one needn't wait for the brain to shut down before replacing the brain's control of the body with an artificial control unit...(extra credit will, naturally, be granted for allowing the brain to retain enough sensory access to witness the body that it no longer controls destroying everyone and everything it ever loved)
It's probably the closest you can get to "I have no mouth and I must scream" with relatively plausible near future technology.
They may have stopped in later versions(my job description requires supporting XP, and you have to pay me to care about windows, so that is where my knowledge lies); but MS included flash in XP. It is version 6; because base XP is older than dirt; but they did include it.
More relevant to modern readers, most OEMs seem to ship consumer-focused systems with vaguely up-to-date-but-just-a-bit-behind versions of Flash(and acrobat reader, and other stuff). This isn't strictly microsoft's fault; but it is what you are likely to get out of the box.
This actually illustrates what is perhaps the great security downside of locked-down systems.
Unlike open systems, they do largely prevent users from doing stupid stuff. However, because some percentage of users wish to escape the controls(which are never entirely benevolent, the temptation to rent-seek is just too strong), those users and the platform vendor become adversaries.
On an open system, the incentives of the user and the platform vendor are aligned: both want it to be as secure as possible. In a closed system, some percentage of the users actively depend on the existence of vulnerabilities, and wish to prolong that existence as much as possible, in order to secure their freedom from the platform vendor's control.
This is, of course, in addition to black hats, who have an equal desire for the existence of unknown security flaws on both closed and open platforms.
I'm not at all surprised that it hasn't show up in consumer electronics until quite recently, since LCDs were cost prohibitive until pretty recently, and touchscreens were not that big a deal(you can find examples going back at least to the 70's; but they weren't exactly mass-market items). Thin glass would have been counterproductive for CRTs, since, when your product basically involves pointing a small linear accelerator at the user's face, you want an adequate amount of leaded glass between it and them.
I am surprised, though, that corning never managed to sell any serious quantity as a structural material. Glass-coated skyscrapers have been considered quite stylish for decades, and I'd imagine that "resists birdstrike, rocks, wind forces, and idiots leaning against the windows just as well as ordinary glass, at 20% the weight" would be a selling point.
Good heavens. I've just been struck by a horrible vision. Remember the ""Leave Britney alone!" kid?
I am now imagining all the sinister and bewrinkled PNACers delivering tearful "Leave Nixon alone!" monologues in the slightly lurid colors of 1970s TV...
I think you are overstating the security of Assange's position a bit here.
There is basically nothing, aside from publicity, preventing him from being black-bagged by some three-letter-agency and never heard from again. The US government explicitly asserts the right to do that, and it isn't as though the world is short on clandestine intelligence services that do rather more than they would be willing to admit.
This isn't a "flounce, flounce, if the editor dares mark up my next op-ed or doesn't publish it to my liking I'll reveal the key" sort of thing. This is more of a "If our people disappear, likely ending up in the network of US black sites, we'll reveal the key. Classic MAD deterrence theory.
Guess what the ISP's precious pipes run across? Oh, thats right, easements carved out of people's physical property by eminent domain.
The 5th amendment argument is cute, and maybe the professor will get a paper out of it; but "Oh no, not eminent domain!" is not an argument that the ISPs would be wise to start.
With the exception of bits and pieces of backbone, that may in fact be owned outright, the majority of an ISP, cable company, or telco's lines run across easements carved out of private property by eminent domain. Although they have been very effective at propagandizing to the contrary, the majority of their cabling(and basically all of the "last mile" that actuallly allows them to have customers) is permitted at the mere pleasure of the state, theoretically representing the interests and consent of the citizens.
Their "property" is founded entirely on 'state taking' by eminent domain. If they want to argue that they should be immune, they had better have an excellent reason why the millions of people whose property their wires cross should not. The ISPs have, rhetorically, been very effective at linking what they want with the value of "upholding private property"; but their very existence is, in fact, predicated on the systematic expropriation of private property on a massive scale.
Given the relative political influences involved, this would never happen; but a real upholding of the Fifth amendment would be to reverse the ISPs' easements, and tell them that they have a week to either agree to our terms or remove their equipment.
Because humans have annoyingly long generation times, and the technology for producing areas of high radiation is relatively new(never mind the ethics...) I don't think that we've had the chance to find out, nor are we likely to in under a few centuries. Humans just don't reproduce that fast.
There are some species that(usually as a side effect of adaptations to resist either dessication or extreme heat) exhibit impressive radiation resistance and we have been able to study those.
D. radiodurans will shrug off 1,000 times the lethal dose for a human without ill effects that it is incapable of repairing. Even 3,000 times the lethal human dose will leave ~1/3 of a colony alive.
T. gammatolerans does pretty much what it says on the tin, in addition to growing at alarmingly high temperatures.
Then you have radiotrophic fungi, which can do something analogous to photosynthesis; but with gamma radiation. Populations of the stuff have been seen sliming up the walls inside the ruins of reactor 4...
None of this is immediately applicable to humans; but all these organisms depend on DNA, just like us, so observing their defense and repair mechanisms may tell us something.
I can only assume that the PR/morale implications of driving away a few grandparently types, who are going to die soonish anyway, at bayonet point just wasn't worth it(and/or they had their hands full with more important things, like making sure that opportunistic looters weren't exporting cesium and strontium coated parts and food items to every grey and black market in the area...).
Purely a question of risk tolerance. The "forcibly expelling your innards out of both ends of your digestive track within hours or days" levels of radiation were mostly confined to a fairly small area around the reactor(or especially unlucky downwind areas when it was on fire) and are largely gone. I still wouldn't set up camp inside the sarcophagus, next to the big pile of still-quite-zesty mixed fuel and melted containment; but the exclusion zone is a much larger area.
There are already some inhabitants, mostly stubborn old people who didn't want to leave their villages and either didn't believe in the seriousness of the threat or considered their deaths from natural causes to be fairly close at hand anyway. They aren't growing third arms or anything.
I suspect that any attempt to repopulate the area would generate upticks in unusual childhood cancers, birth defects, and chromosomal abnormalities that would make an epidemiologist cringe; but that a self-supporting human population would be totally doable. Consider, for example, how people lived before antibiotics. Mortality from bacterial disease on a scale that would horrify a modern first world observer; but, at a population level, people kept plugging right along. Living in the exclusion zone would probably be rather similar; but with cancer and such instead of infection. Rates that would be considered wildly unacceptable; but would fall well below those required to actually render the population nonviable....
I'm operating on the understanding that any iPhone you haven't jailbroken isn't actually your phone, it's just a leased device that you managed to pick up all the financial responsibility for...
I don't have access to one of these routers to check; but googling around for "port 4567 verizon" returns all sorts of hits, the gist of which is that this "feature" is on by default and cannot be turned off. In what I imagine is an oversight on Verizon's part, it is apparently possible to set a firewall rule that blocks that port, which is the closest you can get to disabling it in the default firmware.
As for what it is capable of, reports suggest that it can be used for firmware updates, and TFS suggests that it can see(and change) password hashes on the system. If it can do that, it seems reasonable to assume that it can probably access the entire local filesystem on the device. Further, if it can update the firmware, Verizon could always push a firmware update giving their remote management interface any powers that it currently lacks.
In addition to unnervingly paternalistic, but more or less benign, firmware updating and password securing; it isn't exactly tinfoil-hat territory to postulate that it might be used for market research(number of devices/household, manufacturers, determined by MAC, of those devices, etc.)
I would assume, though, that any heavy network monitoring/secret sinister CALEA/NSL stuff probably isn't handled on the router. Verizon, being your ISP, controls the other end of the connection(and, unless you take specific steps to the contrary, is your DNS provider), so they hardly need to build any serious spying power into their routers(especially since that would raise BOM cost for a device that they order millions of, and expose their sinister program to anybody with some basic linux hacking chops who either downloads and disassembles the firmware, or snags a used router on ebay, or signs up and investigates his own router(and, given that techies are more than usually interested in high-speed internet, the odds are very good of this happening). Therefore, I would expect that this management interface offers an upsettingly comprehensive set of functions for controlling the router and accessing its filesystem; but contains no overtly sinister embedded logic. Any of that that exists would be closer to the center of the network.
While perhaps commendable for its honestly, a policy of implying that concern for individual privacy is a "left-wing bias" is arguably not the best of strategies...
There is no particular reason to suspect that changing the password would alter their level of access.
On most consumer routers, "the password" is what controls access to the dinky webserver serving the configuration interface, on port 80, LAN side only. According to TFS, Verizon's pet routers have something listening to port 4567, WAN side. There is no particular reason to believe(and, indeed, reason to disbelieve) that the password controlling access to the port 80 web interface and the access control mechanism on the port 4567 WAN management interface are at all connected. Assuming they aren't total morons, I'd imagine that they would use some flavor of keypair auth for that one.
We would need somebody to grab the firmware for the router in question and have a look to actually settle the issue.
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Is there some virulent new strain of libertarianism going around that finds voluntary, contractually based, private-sector risk pooling to be insufficiently individualistic? Seriously?
The aspect of Google's wave rollout that I found baffling was their more or less complete inability to conceptually separate(at least in their marketing messages, which is bad, possibly in some of their internal thinking, which would be worse) the specific "Google wave" webapp they had created; frankly a rather rough and somewhat niche-y thing, from the wave protocol, which had considerably greater potential to power a variety of frontend activities in a standardized way that would allow for productive interaction between them.
The closest analogy that I can think of offfhand would be if XMPP had been introduced by releasing a Pidgin fork named "XMPP" and offering no particularly interesting benefits aside from instant messaging over XMPP rather than Oscar or IRC or whatever. The world would have greeted it with a collective "meh." As it is, though, XMPP is capable of running all sorts of more or less real time communication scenarios behind the scenes, basic chat being a small subset of that. Similarly, Wave the protocol is quite powerful and interesting, "Wave" the webapp is kind of blah.
Not just that. Given that males tend to have more muscle mass(which is calorically expensive), slightly larger bodies(ditto), and do not much contribute to a colony's growth potential(you do need sperm for population growth; but # potential children is pretty much a direct factor of # of available uteruses), it makes much more sense for the crew to be all female, with a genetically varied selection of sperm stored cryogenically until the colony is ready to grow.
I'm guessing that a fair proportion of the senators in question would rent this movie; but not appropriate funding for this space mission...
Apparently, if you pick the right species, they are surprisingly discerning about only eating necrotic tissue; but I suspect that you Do Not Want to get the bill from somebody who did years and years of med school just so he could pick maggots out of your horrid wound...
Good point. I was thinking of their desktop stuff. Particularly back when intel was still flogging FSB based stuff, AMD was just too superior to ignore in servers.
Dell has sold AMDs for a while now. They tend to be the poor cousins of the intels(you rarely see them in the enterprise lines, and their BIOSes don't get the same Dell branding, and so forth); but they do exist.
At least back when I last looked, the convention seemed to be that the model numbers ending in "1" were AMDs, while the ones ending in "0" were intels, ie. the Inspiron 530 was a basic consumer desktop tower. The Inspiron 531 was the otherwise similar model; but AMD based.
Other than, of course, the fact that an intel GPU comes on the die of every intel CPU sold, atoms excepted(for now).
This order just prevents them from trimming PCIe so as to make their GPU the only thing with a fast enough connection to the CPU that it isn't a total joke.
Those are usually specially raised, sterile medical maggots, often in a dressing designed to keep them from escaping; but the principle is the same.
Unfortunately, NASA would never be allowed to release a game based on the real drama of human space colonization....
Stuff is expensive to boost out of earth's gravity well. Solution: Midgets. Lighter, lower metabolic needs, work well in small spaces, standard human capabilities in all respects except brute strength, which doesn't matter much in low or zero gravity.
Long term survival of human colony populations will require reproduction; but Newton's 3rd poses difficulties in microgravity. Solution: Bondage enthusiasts.
The day NASA releases this game is the day that they discover what real funding cuts look like...
If one were feeling especially unpleasant, one needn't wait for the brain to shut down before replacing the brain's control of the body with an artificial control unit...(extra credit will, naturally, be granted for allowing the brain to retain enough sensory access to witness the body that it no longer controls destroying everyone and everything it ever loved)
It's probably the closest you can get to "I have no mouth and I must scream" with relatively plausible near future technology.
They may have stopped in later versions(my job description requires supporting XP, and you have to pay me to care about windows, so that is where my knowledge lies); but MS included flash in XP. It is version 6; because base XP is older than dirt; but they did include it.
More relevant to modern readers, most OEMs seem to ship consumer-focused systems with vaguely up-to-date-but-just-a-bit-behind versions of Flash(and acrobat reader, and other stuff). This isn't strictly microsoft's fault; but it is what you are likely to get out of the box.
This actually illustrates what is perhaps the great security downside of locked-down systems.
Unlike open systems, they do largely prevent users from doing stupid stuff. However, because some percentage of users wish to escape the controls(which are never entirely benevolent, the temptation to rent-seek is just too strong), those users and the platform vendor become adversaries.
On an open system, the incentives of the user and the platform vendor are aligned: both want it to be as secure as possible. In a closed system, some percentage of the users actively depend on the existence of vulnerabilities, and wish to prolong that existence as much as possible, in order to secure their freedom from the platform vendor's control.
This is, of course, in addition to black hats, who have an equal desire for the existence of unknown security flaws on both closed and open platforms.
I'm not at all surprised that it hasn't show up in consumer electronics until quite recently, since LCDs were cost prohibitive until pretty recently, and touchscreens were not that big a deal(you can find examples going back at least to the 70's; but they weren't exactly mass-market items). Thin glass would have been counterproductive for CRTs, since, when your product basically involves pointing a small linear accelerator at the user's face, you want an adequate amount of leaded glass between it and them.
I am surprised, though, that corning never managed to sell any serious quantity as a structural material. Glass-coated skyscrapers have been considered quite stylish for decades, and I'd imagine that "resists birdstrike, rocks, wind forces, and idiots leaning against the windows just as well as ordinary glass, at 20% the weight" would be a selling point.
Good heavens. I've just been struck by a horrible vision. Remember the ""Leave Britney alone!" kid?
I am now imagining all the sinister and bewrinkled PNACers delivering tearful "Leave Nixon alone!" monologues in the slightly lurid colors of 1970s TV...
I think you are overstating the security of Assange's position a bit here.
There is basically nothing, aside from publicity, preventing him from being black-bagged by some three-letter-agency and never heard from again. The US government explicitly asserts the right to do that, and it isn't as though the world is short on clandestine intelligence services that do rather more than they would be willing to admit.
This isn't a "flounce, flounce, if the editor dares mark up my next op-ed or doesn't publish it to my liking I'll reveal the key" sort of thing. This is more of a "If our people disappear, likely ending up in the network of US black sites, we'll reveal the key. Classic MAD deterrence theory.
The only surprisingly thing about his bio is that PNAC doesn't show up somewhere.
Guess what the ISP's precious pipes run across? Oh, thats right, easements carved out of people's physical property by eminent domain.
The 5th amendment argument is cute, and maybe the professor will get a paper out of it; but "Oh no, not eminent domain!" is not an argument that the ISPs would be wise to start.
With the exception of bits and pieces of backbone, that may in fact be owned outright, the majority of an ISP, cable company, or telco's lines run across easements carved out of private property by eminent domain. Although they have been very effective at propagandizing to the contrary, the majority of their cabling(and basically all of the "last mile" that actuallly allows them to have customers) is permitted at the mere pleasure of the state, theoretically representing the interests and consent of the citizens.
Their "property" is founded entirely on 'state taking' by eminent domain. If they want to argue that they should be immune, they had better have an excellent reason why the millions of people whose property their wires cross should not. The ISPs have, rhetorically, been very effective at linking what they want with the value of "upholding private property"; but their very existence is, in fact, predicated on the systematic expropriation of private property on a massive scale.
Given the relative political influences involved, this would never happen; but a real upholding of the Fifth amendment would be to reverse the ISPs' easements, and tell them that they have a week to either agree to our terms or remove their equipment.
Because humans have annoyingly long generation times, and the technology for producing areas of high radiation is relatively new(never mind the ethics...) I don't think that we've had the chance to find out, nor are we likely to in under a few centuries. Humans just don't reproduce that fast.
There are some species that(usually as a side effect of adaptations to resist either dessication or extreme heat) exhibit impressive radiation resistance and we have been able to study those.
D. radiodurans will shrug off 1,000 times the lethal dose for a human without ill effects that it is incapable of repairing. Even 3,000 times the lethal human dose will leave ~1/3 of a colony alive.
T. gammatolerans does pretty much what it says on the tin, in addition to growing at alarmingly high temperatures.
Then you have radiotrophic fungi, which can do something analogous to photosynthesis; but with gamma radiation. Populations of the stuff have been seen sliming up the walls inside the ruins of reactor 4...
None of this is immediately applicable to humans; but all these organisms depend on DNA, just like us, so observing their defense and repair mechanisms may tell us something.
The IAEA says that some people returned(though children were apparently forbidden to do so).
I can only assume that the PR/morale implications of driving away a few grandparently types, who are going to die soonish anyway, at bayonet point just wasn't worth it(and/or they had their hands full with more important things, like making sure that opportunistic looters weren't exporting cesium and strontium coated parts and food items to every grey and black market in the area...).
Purely a question of risk tolerance. The "forcibly expelling your innards out of both ends of your digestive track within hours or days" levels of radiation were mostly confined to a fairly small area around the reactor(or especially unlucky downwind areas when it was on fire) and are largely gone. I still wouldn't set up camp inside the sarcophagus, next to the big pile of still-quite-zesty mixed fuel and melted containment; but the exclusion zone is a much larger area.
There are already some inhabitants, mostly stubborn old people who didn't want to leave their villages and either didn't believe in the seriousness of the threat or considered their deaths from natural causes to be fairly close at hand anyway. They aren't growing third arms or anything.
I suspect that any attempt to repopulate the area would generate upticks in unusual childhood cancers, birth defects, and chromosomal abnormalities that would make an epidemiologist cringe; but that a self-supporting human population would be totally doable. Consider, for example, how people lived before antibiotics. Mortality from bacterial disease on a scale that would horrify a modern first world observer; but, at a population level, people kept plugging right along. Living in the exclusion zone would probably be rather similar; but with cancer and such instead of infection. Rates that would be considered wildly unacceptable; but would fall well below those required to actually render the population nonviable....
I'm operating on the understanding that any iPhone you haven't jailbroken isn't actually your phone, it's just a leased device that you managed to pick up all the financial responsibility for...
If you want the dirty details, I suspect that Motive, an Alcatel-Lucent Company probably has them.
Apparently Verizon is one of their big customers, and their business is management middleware for "customer premise equipment", among other things.
I don't have access to one of these routers to check; but googling around for "port 4567 verizon" returns all sorts of hits, the gist of which is that this "feature" is on by default and cannot be turned off. In what I imagine is an oversight on Verizon's part, it is apparently possible to set a firewall rule that blocks that port, which is the closest you can get to disabling it in the default firmware.
As for what it is capable of, reports suggest that it can be used for firmware updates, and TFS suggests that it can see(and change) password hashes on the system. If it can do that, it seems reasonable to assume that it can probably access the entire local filesystem on the device. Further, if it can update the firmware, Verizon could always push a firmware update giving their remote management interface any powers that it currently lacks.
In addition to unnervingly paternalistic, but more or less benign, firmware updating and password securing; it isn't exactly tinfoil-hat territory to postulate that it might be used for market research(number of devices/household, manufacturers, determined by MAC, of those devices, etc.)
I would assume, though, that any heavy network monitoring/secret sinister CALEA/NSL stuff probably isn't handled on the router. Verizon, being your ISP, controls the other end of the connection(and, unless you take specific steps to the contrary, is your DNS provider), so they hardly need to build any serious spying power into their routers(especially since that would raise BOM cost for a device that they order millions of, and expose their sinister program to anybody with some basic linux hacking chops who either downloads and disassembles the firmware, or snags a used router on ebay, or signs up and investigates his own router(and, given that techies are more than usually interested in high-speed internet, the odds are very good of this happening). Therefore, I would expect that this management interface offers an upsettingly comprehensive set of functions for controlling the router and accessing its filesystem; but contains no overtly sinister embedded logic. Any of that that exists would be closer to the center of the network.
While perhaps commendable for its honestly, a policy of implying that concern for individual privacy is a "left-wing bias" is arguably not the best of strategies...
There is no particular reason to suspect that changing the password would alter their level of access.
On most consumer routers, "the password" is what controls access to the dinky webserver serving the configuration interface, on port 80, LAN side only. According to TFS, Verizon's pet routers have something listening to port 4567, WAN side. There is no particular reason to believe(and, indeed, reason to disbelieve) that the password controlling access to the port 80 web interface and the access control mechanism on the port 4567 WAN management interface are at all connected. Assuming they aren't total morons, I'd imagine that they would use some flavor of keypair auth for that one.
We would need somebody to grab the firmware for the router in question and have a look to actually settle the issue.