I'm thinking of opening a sourceforge project to write software which will, given a complete list of objects, problems, methodologies, nouns,adverbs buzzwords, makey-upey words, and adjectives will generate syntactically correct descriptions of how to do anything to anything, using any damn method.
Then I'll publish them all and we'll be done with this patent rubbish.:)
Hang on a moment, were they even THINKING when they came up with this?
There are a set
of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the
generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two
letter country codes from ISO-3166. ( RFC 1591)
The.go gTLD should not be delegated for the following, simple reason:
Assume, for arguments sake that the Golan Heights declare themselves an independent nation, are internationally accepted, and ISO assign them a
ISO 3166-1-Alpha-2 code of GO.
Since ICANN assign ccTLDs based on the ISO-3166 list, this would cause an obvious conflict.
This is precisely the reason all the gTLDs are three letters long and ccTLDs two letters long. Obviously those people in Dubai didn't have their thinking caps on.
Allowing.go would be a dangerous precedence and should not happen.
Oh yeah, and before anyone mentions it, the very next line from RFC 1591 is "It is extremely unlikely that
any other TLDs will be created.".
Just goes to show...
So then, how much data can can an angel on a pinhead process in a given time?
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Re:GPG offers command line, PGP didn't
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
On a similar note:
I'd written a few tcl scripts to encrypt orders being submitted from a site, and on the clients side, decrypt it before sending & printing the order on their local network, hiding all the encryption from the client.
Installing it for a client the other day, I discovered the latest unix version, has, yet again, changed the syntax, left no backwards compatability, and no longer implemented batch processing. So I had to reinstall an older version of PGP. I've always felt that the unix implementations of PGP have never left beta.
hmm... GPG ahoy!
Okay, normally I get annoyed at the "spend money on earth, not space" line, but in your case I'll make an exception. I only wish that the poeple spending the 'earth money' had the perspective you do.
For roughly each dollar invested in NASA, 10 dollars are returned to the US economy.
Actually, I think that value has increased since the eighties, but NASA has always been of benefit to the US. But because you can't SEE the results, your apparent narrow-mindedness gets the better of you, and your senators. If only my bank gave such a return for money.
The only time I wish I was a US citizen, is to support NASA with my vote.
"The post mentions something about a dual processor G4 Cube. This simply isn't true. The G4 cubes come with either a 450 or 500mhz G4 chip. One lonely chip."
Well, he's confused between the G4 Cube and the non-cube G4, both of which have varying options: Should he have read the article before posting he'd have seen that they don't claim the existence of a dual-processor Power Mac G4 Cube:
"the PowerMacintosh G4 Cube (see it on Apple.com!). Fanless, with a well-concealed sloat-loading DVD-ROM drive (on top of the box!), 450MHz ($1799) and 500MHz ($2299) versions will be available soon."
They do however mention a dual-processor Power Mac G4.
"Apple has announced the immediate availability of two dual-processor PowerMac G4s at 450 and 500MHz, with the low-end model sporting a single 450MHz processor."
You see, there are two distinct different products: 1). The Power Mac G4 which has the following processor options:
single processor 400MHz ($1,599.00);
dual-processor 450MHz ($2,499.00);
dual-processor 500MHz ($3,499.00).
2). The Power Mac G4 Cube which has the following processor options:
single-processor 450MHz ($1799.00)
single-processor 500MHz ($2299.00)
So there are dual-processor G4s, they just don't come in an eight inch cube. Hope this clears things up.
Unless the 'secret' technology on your employees boards is so funky that nobody else is going to come near it for the next 3 years or so, it really doesn't matter. Things were different a few years back, but these days, the life-cycle of a particular product is a year, if it's lucky.
I don't know how long your company spent developing the new technology, and integrating it into their boards, but I am pretty certain that other manufacturers will spend as much time copying and applying your technology as they would developing the thing for themselves.
One compromise would be to develop fully featured binary drivers for say, Red Hat, and FreeBSD, plus low-funtionality driver code for other platforms.
Include in the package an email address where people can ask for a binary for a particular platform. If there's enough support for it, then bring it out. There shouldn't be that much modification required, and the kudos you'll earn with the opensource community may be more valuable than you think.
Even that's not enough though. I won't order any hardware that I don't see in the supported drivers list. So the faster you get some form of drivers out there, the better your board will sell.
It looks quite nice but it's no damn use for my PSION is it..? HCI has tinkered along in the past, with no dire need for innovation in terms of input. It's only recently that the industry has really kicked off, so I expect a lot more cool things to come. Graffiti is smart, but I still find it a little too slow, compared to mini-keyboads.
Read about it, but basically it's a glove/keyboard with receptors/keys on each segment of your finger, palm up, forming a 3x4 keyboard. One "types" by touching a finger segment with your thumb. Depending on whether the four fingers are together or apart, we end up with a 96-character keyboard. The nice thing is it's completely device independent so I could plug my 'thumbboard' into whatever device I wanted. I think one of the wearable manufacturers have produced a working model, but I haven't been able to find a page about it.
As a pianist, I reckon the fingers can be trained quite quickly to produce respectable wpm times. What I like most about it though, is it's really the first miniature input device that doesn't require you to hunch over squinting while you try to type in your shopping list... I also think it's very natural, so I'm looking forward to a production model someday.
[Steve Golldsmiths] assessment of his agent's abilities is blunt: "If every node on the Internet was run by one of these agents, the I-Love-You virus would not have got beyond the first machine."... decentralised control makes each agent autonomous yet cooperative... Cyberagents faced with a runaway barrage of incoming network requests close the gates of the system to prevent it from being flooded.
Closing the gates doesn't stop a DDos attack, it merely limits the damage which can be caused. One defence mechanism is having redundant links which are 'turned on' when currently active links come under attack. If you detect the attack quickly enough, it is, theoretically, possible to redirect valid connections to your new links. In practice it's difficult to implement as you run the risk of redirecting the attackers to your new links too. Of course the attack is still effective, it's closed rendered the link that was there useless, and should the attackers be dynamic enough, the can start attacking the new links.
Sandia's system offers up a new defence - Assume multiple ISPs had agents deployed, say ISP A comes under an attack routed through ISP B from a user connected to ISP C.
Assuming also that the ISPs cooperated, their agents would have a certain level of trust. ISP A's agents could, upon detecting an attack, seek help from ISP B's agents. ISP B then filters that route, and asks ISP C what the hell is going on. And so forth. Of course, one ISPs bot couldn't control another, but I think them saying "Help!!! I'm getting these from here. Please make them go away..." is acceptable.
The thing I don't like about this however is the trust issue. As they say, Trust no one. Practical authentication methods are never 100% reliable. Distributed security agents should never have to trust anybody else. If they do, they run the risk of being compromised if the trusted party is compromised. I accept that trust is neccessary in order that network immune systems, anti-virus distributors, and agents like these are effective. But the control that one agent has over another agent is something to be wary of. I'm wondering whether Santia may opensource their non-munitions version when it's releaed. They appear keen on the idea of their system being implemented worldwide. Of course, if they didn't opensource, then its all just a government plot to control the world.:)
The other defence of course, is everybody could just implement RFC 2267 to prevents address spoofing.
If it builds enough momentum it will start to carry over to the mainstream media.
Not neccessarily, think back to the whole Y2k hype. There were more than enough online tech-aware sites saying that it's not going to lead to the end of the world, but we still had huge elements of the media purporting otherwise. Now, I know a lot of it was to sell papers, but it identified a key point when dealing with mainstream media. If they get an idea about something, which can be summarised into one sentence, as in y2k will cause computers to crash, PCs=Windows, or Mr X planted the Atlanta bomb, they tend to stick to it.
It's true that given enough momentum, it will carry over to the mainstream. However this will only happen swiftly with the largest, "mega-medias". The "middle-media" then, and only then move, and at a much slower pace. If we target them at the beginning, through letters etc., we should see a much faster response from the middle-media, which is much more responsible for general opinion. And once they catch on, it hits the Micro-media
Mega-media - International news agencies Middle-media - National/State only Micro-media - Local newspapers and channels
This time, I've had a few drinks, so again I may not be at my most salient.
A problem slashdotters have is that we tend to live online, and presume that all computer users who are online do so too. I haven't bought a newspaper becaues I use the likes of slashdot, my yahoo, and bbc-online to stay up to date. This is not mainstream media however. An effective campaign has to focus on the likes of newspaper letter pages, radio/tv call-ins as well as internet news agencies and forums. Look at any tech story on TV - They'll usually gauge a reaction from a computer 'expert' but they don't usually do a Joe-Soap_Computer_User_In-The-Street quickie. I think that's because most Joe Soaps aren't aware enough of issues that often comes down to their basic rights.
And the internet isn't just in the US. We've seen them implementing laws like the UCITA or DMCA which, while being US laws, end up having a kickback effect to the international community because often, the rest of the world looks to the US first.
I'm not aware of the EU or the WTO ever really getting involved in the laws that the US are laying down. They should be alerted more to these issues, hoping that they can put pressure on the US. You can be sure that US consumers are not the only ones who suffered from Microsofts behaviour.
I'm kinda distracted and can't tell if I'm making my point well or not, but if you don't get the gist, oh well...
Interesting to read the bit about how FreeBSD linked up with Walnut Creek CDROM. Is it possible that without Walnut Creeks kind response, FreeBSD as we know it would either not exist, be later coming along???
First off, one feature that could be added to slashdot is the ability to remove one's own comments. While slashdot may or may not have responsibility for content of posts to the site, the poster certainly does. This does not impinge on anybody's freedom, except possibly the freedom to read what somebody has retracted. It's something I've thought about before - I had made a rather tired-and-late-at-night post and upset some BeOS fans. Upon correction, I would have quite liked to have removed my post - I didn't want to offend any more people.
Of course, the problem of anonymous posts remain, and the ability to post anonymously is an attraction for many people. But it would affirm that resonsibility for posts luy with the poster
Before I go on, I'm not a legal expert, so forgive and correct any glaring errors I make
The main question here concerns whether or not slashdot is legally responsible for postings on the service. As Rob alluded to in his reply, if I send an email containing copyrighted material via Hotmail, are Microsoft responsible for that? After all, it's from their servers that the recipient receives the information.
Perhaps some analogies would be useful here. If I enter a bookshop, and buy a book with illegal content, who is legally at fault? Commonly, the author for writing the material and the publishers for publishing the material. The bookshop is not at fault, until the book is put on a censored list. Until it is censored, it's legal for them to sell it. (I could be wrong here, but I think it would be exceptional for a bookshop to be sued for selling the book prior to any complaints.)
Thinking along those lines, then with the case at hand, the people at fault are as follows: the poster for writing it and Slashdot for publishing it. This however assumes that slashdot are publishing it. Certainly they are distributing it, but are distributors at fault? Is the logistics company who shipped the book at fault? I think not. The problem is that lawmakers are applying publishing laws to the internet is a rather haphazard manner. To me, slashdot is a forum where I can publish my comments, knowing that slashdot will not censor it - if they were to, then they would be taking responsibility for it. I don't want them to. I want to keep responsibility for what I do or say. That's why I love slashdot so much. I am a mature (sic) adult who is capable of rationalizing for myself, and who is prepared to defend myself when needs be, and to apologize, when needs be. To this end, I acclaim that I am the publisher of this comment, and all comments that I make, and responsibility for them lies with me.
All slashdot does is distribute the comments of a million people. (How's that for a caption...;) ) My technical manager recently rang me asking if I was near to a TCP/IP session, as there was a problem. Remembering that makes me think this: If slashdot are held legally responsible for the material posted, then it's the owners of the server for my HTTP session that are being made responsible. So if collect illegal mail from a POP3 server, the owners of that server are responsible. And if that's the case all one has to do to get an ISP in trouble is to send illegal material to one of it's customers. So then, if I were an ISP (which I am, actually) I would start censoring peoples e-mails to protect myself. In other words, I would be (legally) invading people's privacy. And I would expect every other ISP to do likewise.
"That's different!" I hear you say. Is it? HTTP? POP3? They're just protocols based on TCP/IP.
"Ahh, but your customer must have signed an agreement saying that they absolve you from all responsibility for email sent to them" I hear you say. True, they would have, which leads me to suggest a second solution to slashdot's problem:
A little link on all pages, to a disclaimer, stating that by looking at these pages you absolve andover.net and slashdot for any responsibility for their content.
Or is that too elegant a solution? What do people think?
Finally, I might remind the poster's of the original comments, that they can request slashdot to remove them. But that would be backing down...
Well you haven't pissed me off, then again I'm not quite finished my course.
I'm not sure if this will get rid of the obselete stuff, it may result in graduates being unable to handle change... That all depends on the emphasis of the course though. If Arsdigita, like so many other colleges and universities, teach 'how to program a computer using ', instead of 'how to program a computer' then their students may end up being left behind in 5 years time.
The college I'm currently in makes this mistake, and, combined with a lack of resources, and lack of foresight, a lot of students suffer as a result. 4 years ago, 1st years were being introduced to Modula-2, 3 years ago C++, and now their introductory language in javascript.
These days, a lot of people study Comp Sci. for job-prospects, not for pleasure. If the faculty does not encourage students to use the machines outside of class, just to play with them, this genre of student will not become more than a slightly competant programmer, and will probably be slow to change in years to come. And with the current lack of IT people, we'll end up seeing a lot of low quality software being produced, and being accepted as worthwhile products. "Hey, it only crashes twice a day! Let me get my cheque-book!"
What I like about the arstechnica initiative is the focusing of students towards hands-on developement, and towards co-operative work.
The fact that they plan to release notes on the web is particulary pleasing, although it will be interesting to see how well they keep this promise.
This is either a good thing, or a bad thing, depending how rational your reasons for dislinking are. If you MUST DESTROY EVIL M$ EMPIRE JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL AND BILL GATES HAS MORE MONEY THAN YOU, hard luck, Micro-Soft will port, and develop all their horrible apps to 'nix. Given their track record, they are likely to dominate things too. On the good side though, Micro-Hard will probably lose out on their market share [People use M$ because they are ignorant, or they appreciate the fact that all their.docs &.xls' will work on any real computer with little difficulty. (Win-boxes...Eek!)] Once Micro-Soft supports 'nix, and 'nix becomes a bit friendlier, we will see a migration from Win to 'nix. But don't forget... there's nothing to stop Micro-Hard from releasing their own 'Bin-ix'
If, on the other hand, you dislike M$ because they rush products, make bad developement decisions, and lower the general standards of the entire industy, this is a good thing. The three new houses would be free of the constraints of inter-dependability, and thus may be able to concentrate on actually getting things right. There would be no need to rush, say, Office 2001 just because Win 2001 is due on release. Thus, added stability should creep into their products. Don't bring up the HP-UX version of IE, by-the-way, IE was developed to be an integral part of the Win OS', of course it's going to port badly. Also, you won't need that Win partition that you play games on once Micro-Soft start developing for 'nix. (I have to confess, KDE's Minesweeper sucks compared to M$'s). And how many times have you tried viewing a site which required a plug-in, that exists for Win/Mac only? Well guess what, people follow by example so if M$ will lead...
Of course, they could just screw things up, in which case, the status qou is maintained.
You'll notice I haven't commented on Micro-Net here. I don't see any negative ramifications from this change. Already Hotmail runs on FreeBSD, Apache is the dominant server, and M$'s security record is a laughing stock. The only innovation I have seen recently from M$ has been the Passport server system for e-commerce. See previous point. So I reckon the Micro-Net crowd will have their work cut out for them if they want to build a strong position. But who knows, maybe they can get their excrement together and produce something decent. Like matter teleportation or something.
You know, looking at those stats a thought struck me - despite BeOS managing a high of 35 days uptime, the average of four machines was just five days, implying there were a number of instant deaths. Pretty bad yeah?
Now compare this to the 49 day high of Win NT (40% improvement) achieved from a pool of seventy-two NT servers (1800% more machines) and BeOS is pretty much doing as well as NT. Especially when you consider the amount of NT trouble-shooting being done by both MS and the community in general - When was the last time you saw BeOS mentioned on Bug-traq? Nt does manage to improve on BeOS' average uptime though - twelve days... Must be why NT admins get uptight every fortnight...:)
In the end of the day though, Yay for Chuckie!!! Bu-Wa-Ha-Ha-Ha-Haaa!
Hmm, From what I know about the 'oil eaters' they, don't actually, change the chemical make-up, they just break it apart, and then envelope the molecules.
I would presume these do the same thing, breaking down the bond, and then surrounding the molecules. I would think they disperse them as well.
hat really interests me here is the 'Oh my Gosh! These super bacteria will take over the world!' posts. Are we really that negative here? I understand the neccessity of the devil's advocate, but sometimes guys...
We really should have seen this coming. Once the use of surveillance cameras became widespread, of course efforts were going to be made to improve their effectiveness.
I spent many years working in a petrol station, and one of my banes were shoplifters. After a while though, you learn to spot them, by their behaviour, hanging around shelves, looking around themselves. Usually, I could deter them with a look, and a suggestive glance at the security cameras. Sometimes though I would realize that they were merely confused, and were searching for a product, and I would then offer them assistance.
The important thing is that they came to my attention because of their behaviour patterns. I then made the decision on how to react. We still lost a lot though, if we were busy and I was too busy to watch. And there were always the professional thieves who would know how not to stand out.
What I'm trying to say here is that this is another example of tools frightening people. While there is potential to abuse these systems, we have to bear in mind that the systems are reporting to human supervisors any 'erratic' behaviour - the kind of thing that the supervisors are already looking out for. This system is simply aiding their job. If you have a problem with it, then it's with the camera's themselves, not the pattern-recognition software. Camera systems are already being used to track suspect individuals who have been picked out by security personnel - a prime example is in Oxford Street, London.
Any abuses will be committed by the human monitors. So our imperative is not to recoil from such systems, but to try to ensure that they are used responsibly, and genuinely with the safety of the public in mind.
Good point, I am wary of posting a rebuttal, but...
While I understand the concept of moral justification for illegal actions, I do not think passing pamplets and the Revolutionary war are analogous. Presuming that you are, in general against tax-evaders (you would like a health-service, wouldn't you..), you would undoubtably like to see the IRS dealing efficiently against tax frauds. And efficiently means making the best use of resources at their disposal.
This may mean that 'moral protesters' end up being arrested, along with the 'real' criminals. However, if you consciously choose to break the law, whether for heinous, or especially for moral reasons, you must be prepared to be arrested.
I will listen to protesters who chain themselves to buildings, go on hunger strike, or otherwise make their feelings and their identity publicly known. I will not listen to those who opt instead to remain anonymous, afraid of how society will react.
But I guess that's where we differ... By the way, completely unrelated, why do slashdotters tend to frown upon anonymous posts..? (/me becomes petty)
What if? What if I print a page and it is uniquely watermarked? If I am not in breach of any laws, where is the problem?
There is always a knee-jerk reaction to things like this, but think about it. All this allows is for somebody, (presumably) in authority, to find out what machine printed/photocopied a page which they already have in their possesion. It is not sending copies to bigbrother@everygovernment.com.
What kind of intrusions may be present here? Let's see...
They can tell that a love-letter sent to your mistress originated from you. Are you listening Mr. Starr?
They know that the nude pictures of P. Anderson are yours. The fact the were under your mattress didn't tip them off...
They have proof that you printed off 500 flyers for your local nightclub. Shame on you.
More importantly, they can track counterfeiters, blackmailers, child-pornographers, stalkers, and abusers of copyright, among other things.
Remember: Before any tracing can begin, the page be in the tracers possesion. And at this point, they have already served a warrant, or invaded your privacy. Next thing they'll start uniquely identifying the car I drive...
More interestingly, how difficult is it to forge these anyway? Can I register a personal 'Pretty Good Paper' signature based on the watermark my printer produces?
Do they include timestamps? If so, I'm buying the best there is next time I want to copyright something...
Slashdot Mirror
Another site with it is www.cyberdryft.net
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
I'm thinking of opening a sourceforge project to write software which will, given a complete list of objects, problems, methodologies, nouns,adverbs buzzwords, makey-upey words, and adjectives will generate syntactically correct descriptions of how to do anything to anything, using any damn method. :)
Then I'll publish them all and we'll be done with this patent rubbish.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
There are a set of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two letter country codes from ISO-3166. ( RFC 1591)
TheAssume, for arguments sake that the Golan Heights declare themselves an independent nation, are internationally accepted, and ISO assign them a ISO 3166-1-Alpha-2 code of GO. Since ICANN assign ccTLDs based on the ISO-3166 list, this would cause an obvious conflict. This is precisely the reason all the gTLDs are three letters long and ccTLDs two letters long. Obviously those people in Dubai didn't have their thinking caps on. Allowing
Oh yeah, and before anyone mentions it, the very next line from RFC 1591 is "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created.". Just goes to show...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
So then, how much data can can an angel on a pinhead process in a given time?
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
On a similar note: I'd written a few tcl scripts to encrypt orders being submitted from a site, and on the clients side, decrypt it before sending & printing the order on their local network, hiding all the encryption from the client. Installing it for a client the other day, I discovered the latest unix version, has, yet again, changed the syntax, left no backwards compatability, and no longer implemented batch processing. So I had to reinstall an older version of PGP. I've always felt that the unix implementations of PGP have never left beta. hmm... GPG ahoy!
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Okay, normally I get annoyed at the "spend money on earth, not space" line, but in your case I'll make an exception. I only wish that the poeple spending the 'earth money' had the perspective you do.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
I can't decide which thread to put this in.
For roughly each dollar invested in NASA, 10 dollars are returned to the US economy. Actually, I think that value has increased since the eighties, but NASA has always been of benefit to the US. But because you can't SEE the results, your apparent narrow-mindedness gets the better of you, and your senators. If only my bank gave such a return for money.
The only time I wish I was a US citizen, is to support NASA with my vote.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
"The post mentions something about a dual processor G4 Cube. This simply isn't true. The G4 cubes come with either a 450 or 500mhz G4 chip. One lonely chip."
Well, he's confused between the G4 Cube and the non-cube G4, both of which have varying options: Should he have read the article before posting he'd have seen that they don't claim the existence of a dual-processor Power Mac G4 Cube:
"the PowerMacintosh G4 Cube (see it on Apple.com!). Fanless, with a well-concealed sloat-loading DVD-ROM drive (on top of the box!), 450MHz ($1799) and 500MHz ($2299) versions will be available soon."
They do however mention a dual-processor Power Mac G4.
"Apple has announced the immediate availability of two dual-processor PowerMac G4s at 450 and 500MHz, with the low-end model sporting a single 450MHz processor."
You see, there are two distinct different products:
1). The Power Mac G4 which has the following processor options:
2). The Power Mac G4 Cube which has the following processor options:
So there are dual-processor G4s, they just don't come in an eight inch cube. Hope this clears things up.
Shame on you Timothy... :)
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
I don't know how long your company spent developing the new technology, and integrating it into their boards, but I am pretty certain that other manufacturers will spend as much time copying and applying your technology as they would developing the thing for themselves.
One compromise would be to develop fully featured binary drivers for say, Red Hat, and FreeBSD, plus low-funtionality driver code for other platforms.
Include in the package an email address where people can ask for a binary for a particular platform. If there's enough support for it, then bring it out. There shouldn't be that much modification required, and the kudos you'll earn with the opensource community may be more valuable than you think.
Even that's not enough though. I won't order any hardware that I don't see in the supported drivers list. So the faster you get some form of drivers out there, the better your board will sell.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
For me though, the coolest has to be Thumbcode, developed over in Stanford University. There's an old (April 99) New York Times story here.
Read about it, but basically it's a glove/keyboard with receptors/keys on each segment of your finger, palm up, forming a 3x4 keyboard. One "types" by touching a finger segment with your thumb. Depending on whether the four fingers are together or apart, we end up with a 96-character keyboard. The nice thing is it's completely device independent so I could plug my 'thumbboard' into whatever device I wanted. I think one of the wearable manufacturers have produced a working model, but I haven't been able to find a page about it.
As a pianist, I reckon the fingers can be trained quite quickly to produce respectable wpm times. What I like most about it though, is it's really the first miniature input device that doesn't require you to hunch over squinting while you try to type in your shopping list... I also think it's very natural, so I'm looking forward to a production model someday.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
[Steve Golldsmiths] assessment of his agent's abilities is blunt: "If every node on the Internet was run by one of these agents, the I-Love-You virus would not have got beyond the first machine." ... decentralised control makes each agent autonomous yet cooperative ... Cyberagents faced with a runaway barrage of incoming network requests close the gates of the system to prevent it from being flooded.
Closing the gates doesn't stop a DDos attack, it merely limits the damage which can be caused. One defence mechanism is having redundant links which are 'turned on' when currently active links come under attack. If you detect the attack quickly enough, it is, theoretically, possible to redirect valid connections to your new links. In practice it's difficult to implement as you run the risk of redirecting the attackers to your new links too. Of course the attack is still effective, it's closed rendered the link that was there useless, and should the attackers be dynamic enough, the can start attacking the new links.
Sandia's system offers up a new defence - Assume multiple ISPs had agents deployed, say ISP A comes under an attack routed through ISP B from a user connected to ISP C.
Assuming also that the ISPs cooperated, their agents would have a certain level of trust. ISP A's agents could, upon detecting an attack, seek help from ISP B's agents. ISP B then filters that route, and asks ISP C what the hell is going on. And so forth. Of course, one ISPs bot couldn't control another, but I think them saying "Help!!! I'm getting these from here. Please make them go away..." is acceptable.
The thing I don't like about this however is the trust issue. As they say, Trust no one. Practical authentication methods are never 100% reliable. Distributed security agents should never have to trust anybody else. If they do, they run the risk of being compromised if the trusted party is compromised. I accept that trust is neccessary in order that network immune systems, anti-virus distributors, and agents like these are effective. But the control that one agent has over another agent is something to be wary of. I'm wondering whether Santia may opensource their non-munitions version when it's releaed. They appear keen on the idea of their system being implemented worldwide. Of course, if they didn't opensource, then its all just a government plot to control the world. :)
The other defence of course, is everybody could just implement RFC 2267 to prevents address spoofing.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
What's worse, is the number of warranties and guarantees that are invalidated if you dare install a different OS.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
If it builds enough momentum it will start to carry over to the mainstream media.
Not neccessarily, think back to the whole Y2k hype. There were more than enough online tech-aware sites saying that it's not going to lead to the end of the world, but we still had huge elements of the media purporting otherwise. Now, I know a lot of it was to sell papers, but it identified a key point when dealing with mainstream media. If they get an idea about something, which can be summarised into one sentence, as in y2k will cause computers to crash, PCs=Windows, or Mr X planted the Atlanta bomb, they tend to stick to it.
It's true that given enough momentum, it will carry over to the mainstream. However this will only happen swiftly with the largest, "mega-medias". The "middle-media" then, and only then move, and at a much slower pace. If we target them at the beginning, through letters etc., we should see a much faster response from the middle-media, which is much more responsible for general opinion. And once they catch on, it hits the Micro-media
Mega-media - International news agencies
Middle-media - National/State only
Micro-media - Local newspapers and channels
This time, I've had a few drinks, so again I may not be at my most salient.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
A problem slashdotters have is that we tend to live online, and presume that all computer users who are online do so too. I haven't bought a newspaper becaues I use the likes of slashdot, my yahoo, and bbc-online to stay up to date. This is not mainstream media however. An effective campaign has to focus on the likes of newspaper letter pages, radio/tv call-ins as well as internet news agencies and forums. Look at any tech story on TV - They'll usually gauge a reaction from a computer 'expert' but they don't usually do a Joe-Soap_Computer_User_In-The-Street quickie. I think that's because most Joe Soaps aren't aware enough of issues that often comes down to their basic rights.
And the internet isn't just in the US. We've seen them implementing laws like the UCITA or DMCA which, while being US laws, end up having a kickback effect to the international community because often, the rest of the world looks to the US first.
I'm not aware of the EU or the WTO ever really getting involved in the laws that the US are laying down. They should be alerted more to these issues, hoping that they can put pressure on the US. You can be sure that US consumers are not the only ones who suffered from Microsofts behaviour.
I'm kinda distracted and can't tell if I'm making my point well or not, but if you don't get the gist, oh well...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Interesting to read the bit about how FreeBSD linked up with Walnut Creek CDROM. Is it possible that without Walnut Creeks kind response, FreeBSD as we know it would either not exist, be later coming along???
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
God! There's so many issues here to deal with...
First off, one feature that could be added to slashdot is the ability to remove one's own comments. While slashdot may or may not have responsibility for content of posts to the site, the poster certainly does. This does not impinge on anybody's freedom, except possibly the freedom to read what somebody has retracted. It's something I've thought about before - I had made a rather tired-and-late-at-night post and upset some BeOS fans. Upon correction, I would have quite liked to have removed my post - I didn't want to offend any more people.
Of course, the problem of anonymous posts remain, and the ability to post anonymously is an attraction for many people. But it would affirm that resonsibility for posts luy with the poster
Before I go on, I'm not a legal expert, so forgive and correct any glaring errors I make
The main question here concerns whether or not slashdot is legally responsible for postings on the service. As Rob alluded to in his reply, if I send an email containing copyrighted material via Hotmail, are Microsoft responsible for that? After all, it's from their servers that the recipient receives the information.
Perhaps some analogies would be useful here. If I enter a bookshop, and buy a book with illegal content, who is legally at fault? Commonly, the author for writing the material and the publishers for publishing the material. The bookshop is not at fault, until the book is put on a censored list. Until it is censored, it's legal for them to sell it. (I could be wrong here, but I think it would be exceptional for a bookshop to be sued for selling the book prior to any complaints.)
Thinking along those lines, then with the case at hand, the people at fault are as follows: the poster for writing it and Slashdot for publishing it. This however assumes that slashdot are publishing it. Certainly they are distributing it, but are distributors at fault? Is the logistics company who shipped the book at fault? I think not. The problem is that lawmakers are applying publishing laws to the internet is a rather haphazard manner. To me, slashdot is a forum where I can publish my comments, knowing that slashdot will not censor it - if they were to, then they would be taking responsibility for it. I don't want them to. I want to keep responsibility for what I do or say. That's why I love slashdot so much. I am a mature (sic) adult who is capable of rationalizing for myself, and who is prepared to defend myself when needs be, and to apologize, when needs be. To this end, I acclaim that I am the publisher of this comment, and all comments that I make, and responsibility for them lies with me.
All slashdot does is distribute the comments of a million people. (How's that for a caption... ;) ) My technical manager recently rang me asking if I was near to a TCP/IP session, as there was a problem. Remembering that makes me think this: If slashdot are held legally responsible for the material posted, then it's the owners of the server for my HTTP session that are being made responsible. So if collect illegal mail from a POP3 server, the owners of that server are responsible. And if that's the case all one has to do to get an ISP in trouble is to send illegal material to one of it's customers. So then, if I were an ISP (which I am, actually) I would start censoring peoples e-mails to protect myself. In other words, I would be (legally) invading people's privacy. And I would expect every other ISP to do likewise.
"That's different!" I hear you say. Is it? HTTP? POP3? They're just protocols based on TCP/IP.
"Ahh, but your customer must have signed an agreement saying that they absolve you from all responsibility for email sent to them" I hear you say. True, they would have, which leads me to suggest a second solution to slashdot's problem:
A little link on all pages, to a disclaimer, stating that by looking at these pages you absolve andover.net and slashdot for any responsibility for their content.
Or is that too elegant a solution? What do people think?
Finally, I might remind the poster's of the original comments, that they can request slashdot to remove them. But that would be backing down...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Well you haven't pissed me off, then again I'm not quite finished my course.
I'm not sure if this will get rid of the obselete stuff, it may result in graduates being unable to handle change... That all depends on the emphasis of the course though. If Arsdigita, like so many other colleges and universities, teach 'how to program a computer using ', instead of 'how to program a computer' then their students may end up being left behind in 5 years time.
The college I'm currently in makes this mistake, and, combined with a lack of resources, and lack of foresight, a lot of students suffer as a result. 4 years ago, 1st years were being introduced to Modula-2, 3 years ago C++, and now their introductory language in javascript.
These days, a lot of people study Comp Sci. for job-prospects, not for pleasure. If the faculty does not encourage students to use the machines outside of class, just to play with them, this genre of student will not become more than a slightly competant programmer, and will probably be slow to change in years to come. And with the current lack of IT people, we'll end up seeing a lot of low quality software being produced, and being accepted as worthwhile products. "Hey, it only crashes twice a day! Let me get my cheque-book!"
What I like about the arstechnica initiative is the focusing of students towards hands-on developement, and towards co-operative work.
The fact that they plan to release notes on the web is particulary pleasing, although it will be interesting to see how well they keep this promise.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
This is either a good thing, or a bad thing, depending how rational your reasons for dislinking are. If you MUST DESTROY EVIL M$ EMPIRE JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL AND BILL GATES HAS MORE MONEY THAN YOU, hard luck, Micro-Soft will port, and develop all their horrible apps to 'nix. Given their track record, they are likely to dominate things too. On the good side though, Micro-Hard will probably lose out on their market share [People use M$ because they are ignorant, or they appreciate the fact that all their .docs & .xls' will work on any real computer with little difficulty. (Win-boxes...Eek!)] Once Micro-Soft supports 'nix, and 'nix becomes a bit friendlier, we will see a migration from Win to 'nix. But don't forget... there's nothing to stop Micro-Hard from releasing their own 'Bin-ix'
If, on the other hand, you dislike M$ because they rush products, make bad developement decisions, and lower the general standards of the entire industy, this is a good thing. The three new houses would be free of the constraints of inter-dependability, and thus may be able to concentrate on actually getting things right. There would be no need to rush, say, Office 2001 just because Win 2001 is due on release. Thus, added stability should creep into their products. Don't bring up the HP-UX version of IE, by-the-way, IE was developed to be an integral part of the Win OS', of course it's going to port badly. Also, you won't need that Win partition that you play games on once Micro-Soft start developing for 'nix. (I have to confess, KDE's Minesweeper sucks compared to M$'s). And how many times have you tried viewing a site which required a plug-in, that exists for Win/Mac only? Well guess what, people follow by example so if M$ will lead...
Of course, they could just screw things up, in which case, the status qou is maintained.
You'll notice I haven't commented on Micro-Net here. I don't see any negative ramifications from this change. Already Hotmail runs on FreeBSD, Apache is the dominant server, and M$'s security record is a laughing stock. The only innovation I have seen recently from M$ has been the Passport server system for e-commerce. See previous point. So I reckon the Micro-Net crowd will have their work cut out for them if they want to build a strong position. But who knows, maybe they can get their excrement together and produce something decent.
Like matter teleportation or something.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
You know, looking at those stats a thought struck me - despite BeOS managing a high of 35 days uptime, the average of four machines was just five days, implying there were a number of instant deaths. Pretty bad yeah?
Now compare this to the 49 day high of Win NT (40% improvement) achieved from a pool of seventy-two NT servers (1800% more machines) and BeOS is pretty much doing as well as NT. Especially when you consider the amount of NT trouble-shooting being done by both MS and the community in general - When was the last time you saw BeOS mentioned on Bug-traq? Nt does manage to improve on BeOS' average uptime though - twelve days... Must be why NT admins get uptight every fortnight... :)
In the end of the day though, Yay for Chuckie!!! Bu-Wa-Ha-Ha-Ha-Haaa!
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
I would presume these do the same thing, breaking down the bond, and then surrounding the molecules. I would think they disperse them as well.
hat really interests me here is the 'Oh my Gosh! These super bacteria will take over the world!' posts. Are we really that negative here? I understand the neccessity of the devil's advocate, but sometimes guys...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
We really should have seen this coming. Once the use of surveillance cameras became widespread, of course efforts were going to be made to improve their effectiveness.
I spent many years working in a petrol station, and one of my banes were shoplifters. After a while though, you learn to spot them, by their behaviour, hanging around shelves, looking around themselves. Usually, I could deter them with a look, and a suggestive glance at the security cameras. Sometimes though I would realize that they were merely confused, and were searching for a product, and I would then offer them assistance.
The important thing is that they came to my attention because of their behaviour patterns. I then made the decision on how to react. We still lost a lot though, if we were busy and I was too busy to watch. And there were always the professional thieves who would know how not to stand out.
What I'm trying to say here is that this is another example of tools frightening people. While there is potential to abuse these systems, we have to bear in mind that the systems are reporting to human supervisors any 'erratic' behaviour - the kind of thing that the supervisors are already looking out for. This system is simply aiding their job. If you have a problem with it, then it's with the camera's themselves, not the pattern-recognition software. Camera systems are already being used to track suspect individuals who have been picked out by security personnel - a prime example is in Oxford Street, London.
Any abuses will be committed by the human monitors. So our imperative is not to recoil from such systems, but to try to ensure that they are used responsibly, and genuinely with the safety of the public in mind.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
While I understand the concept of moral justification for illegal actions, I do not think passing pamplets and the Revolutionary war are analogous. Presuming that you are, in general against tax-evaders (you would like a health-service, wouldn't you..), you would undoubtably like to see the IRS dealing efficiently against tax frauds. And efficiently means making the best use of resources at their disposal.
This may mean that 'moral protesters' end up being arrested, along with the 'real' criminals.
However, if you consciously choose to break the law, whether for heinous, or especially for moral reasons, you must be prepared to be arrested.
I will listen to protesters who chain themselves to buildings, go on hunger strike, or otherwise make their feelings and their identity publicly known. I will not listen to those who opt instead to remain anonymous, afraid of how society will react.
But I guess that's where we differ... By the way, completely unrelated, why do slashdotters tend to frown upon anonymous posts..? (/me becomes petty)
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
There is always a knee-jerk reaction to things like this, but think about it. All this allows is for somebody, (presumably) in authority, to find out what machine printed/photocopied a page which they already have in their possesion. It is not sending copies to bigbrother@everygovernment.com.
What kind of intrusions may be present here?
Let's see...
More importantly, they can track counterfeiters, blackmailers, child-pornographers, stalkers, and abusers of copyright, among other things.
Remember: Before any tracing can begin, the page be in the tracers possesion. And at this point, they have already served a warrant, or invaded your privacy. Next thing they'll start uniquely identifying the car I drive...
More interestingly, how difficult is it to forge these anyway? Can I register a personal 'Pretty Good Paper' signature based on the
watermark my printer produces?
Do they include timestamps? If so, I'm buying the best there is next time I want to copyright something...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"