DNSSEC so they can't do anything to your DNS queries (not even by directing you to an evil resolver), and SSL or similar for everything else so your connections can't be edited or sniffed.
Actually, once the bad guys have installed malware on your PC, it's pretty much game over. DNSSEC won't help you, and SSL won't help you: they are designed to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks, not man-in-the-endpoint attacks. If your PC is compromised, the DLL that performs DNSSEC or SSL verification can also be compromised. We don't really have a security model to deal with man-in-the-endpoint attacks, other than things like two-factor (or n-factor) authentication which work because one of the two (or n) communications channels isn't compromised by the bad guys.
In principle, what evidence would convince you that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous?
I've often pondered this, and the "anthropogenic" part is a real problem. It's one thing to demonstrate a factual trend in heat: you can demonstrate that with sufficient measurement. But putting your finger on the cause is much harder. This is one of those cases where it's necessary to infer causes almost entirely from measurement. Ideally, we'd be able to experiment with a whole bunch of Earths under controlled conditions, so as to experimentally isolate various causes. That's what you'd do if this were a biology or physics problem, but we're dealing with a problem that's simply not amenable to the kind of experiment we want. We have a single experiment: reality as it is, with no controlled parameters. No wonder there are divergent views. Add to this the fact that non-anthropogenic global warming is already well-accepted: think, "after the last ice age, the planet warmed up, and it wasn't the result of cave-man campfires."
So here we have an argument over genesis, not data, with an experimental sample size of one, and a whole bunch of religious zealotry thrown in the mix. By the time the concept of "atoning for your environmental sins" [heard it on BBC radio recently] reaches the mainstream, you can be sure that dispassionate discussion has left the building. Morality is a popular subject these days, so long as you mean environmental morality.
Oh, and in case anyone cares, and I haven't made myself clear, my personal position is that I have no idea whether or to what degree climate change is man made. I'm resigned to the fact that the political momentum is solidly on the side of the anthropogenic theory, and I have no wish to offer myself as a martyr for the opposing view, even if I generally like to side with the underdog.
For everyone's information: the page the author links to as the one that has javascript munging also has a noscript tag with the email out in the open. Guess what Google and spammers' email-crawlers really do?;)
I've checked your claim, and it's not true. The "noscript" tag contains warning text about Javascript being turned off and an instruction to use a web form instead of email. I've also checked my own Javascript obfuscation, which uses "blah at domain" type descriptive text in the noscript tag, and Google's search results do not de-obfuscate it. This may be due to the fact that my Javascript is loaded from a separate file -- a point raised in TFA.
Even if Google is rendering some amount of Javascript in this way, it's still a stretch to accuse Google of being the leak. If you correspond with a person who has malware installed on their computer, there's a high risk that your email address will be exposed to spammers via that route. Such malware is hardly uncommon, is it? The obfuscation technique was only ever going to buy a little extra spam-free time in any case.
There have been many variations on the "pay to email" theme over the years. The oldest relevant citation of which I am aware is Brad Templeton, E-Stamps. His proposal does not involve the middle-man that takes a cut. Esther Dyson has also advocated this kind of solution for many years. The nearest equivalents to "pay to email" that we have in the actual marketplace are certification schemes like those from Return Path and Goodmail. These involve paying to receive certification as a responsible practitioner of bulk email, and thereby receive a recommendation which will prevent your mail from being filtered in some cases. That's not much like an e-stamp, admittedly, but it's as near to the concept that the market actually bears. Nobody has yet figured out how to introduce an e-stamp system which any email senders have the slightest incentive to use.
...what the author fails to mention is that "slippery slope" arguments are part of a group of arguments known as logical fallacy's.
It's only a logical fallacy if it's presented as a logical argument. I don't see that here: I see a concern that although the thing is not bad in and of itself, it may lead to a trend that is. That's not a logical fallacy, it's a reasonable concern which arises from taking a long-term view. One could argue whether it's a valid concern, or whether the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks, but to cry "logical fallacy" here is just an attempt to dismiss the objection without discussing its actual merits.
Some "logical fallacies" are perfectly good rhetorical devices when used as such. Learn the difference. Also learn to use apostrophes, for Pete's sake.
'Slippery slope' is a quite inadequate description of the process, because it doesn't happen passively. People push it forward.
I think that the saying he's after is "letting the nose of the camel into the tent". The camel's nose poking in through the tent flaps isn't a problem in and of itself, but one still discourages it because of what will inevitably follow if one does not. It's much easier to address a camel-in-the-tent problem when it's just a nose, not the whole camel. This is similar to "nip it in the bud" (which is frequently mangled into "nip it in the butt" -- the dog's approach to discouraging a postman).
Re:It's called DOS, and it was done a long time ag
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
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· Score: 4, Informative
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
Let's just call this a gross oversimplification and be done with it, shall we?
Why bother having a separate OS when the kernel could fit on the firmware?
For security reasons. Your firmware OS might have exploitable privilege escalation bugs, so you don't want to run untrusted software under it directly, only in a protected virtual machine environment. That virtual machine environment must have its own OS, and that would be a disk-based OS which is easier (and safer) to update in the event that security holes are found. It's preferable if the whole boot environment is as near to possible as read-only, just to reduce the possibility of malicious exploit. It shouldn't even be possible to re-flash the system without physical intervention (such as changing a jumper).
With kernel drivers *in the hardware itself*, one would never have to worry about getting the correct driver, etc...
This is true for the flash-based OS and the built-in hardware, which is why you can boot into a usable system so long as enough of the hardware is integrated on the motherboard. Don't forget plug-in cards and external peripherals, though. There's no avoiding the need for those drivers, in general.
Huh. As I recall, the same kind of horse-trading went on with the passage of the GST many years back under the Howard Govt. They needed the support of Senator Brian Harradine to get GST through, and they traded off some Net Censorship thing which ultimately had no discernible impact on anything as far as I can tell (but it wasn't a mandatory filtering technology, obviously). Wikipedia seems to contradict me on the ultimate need for Harradine's support for GST, but I do distinctly remember him looking smug about some Internet-related thing in a TV news report at the time. A bit of digging makes me believe that the specific legislation in question is the "Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999", which amended the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 to cover Internet content. Consequently, a lot of things are illegal to host online in Australia. There's no corresponding obligation for anyone to filter out illegal stuff hosted outside Australia, however.
If you could do it without additional cost to infrastructure, without degradation to network service, without ANY false positives (one in a million is not good enough), without unforeseen side effects due to the fact that HTTP is not designed for interception, and without ambiguity thanks to the fact that legality is sometimes context sensitive, then it boils down to a philosophical argument as to whether it's best for government to actively prohibit illegal activity or detect and punish violations. I am slightly inclined to think that "freedom" includes "freedom to break the law and suffer the consequences", so I believe that censorship should be voluntary. That way you can decide for yourself whether you want "safety" or "freedom". Why deny people that choice?
They could be guessing cookies, and that would explain the "it will hurt intermediate systems" excuse they used for not demonstrating it, since they'd need to flood the peer TCP with millions of randomly-guessed initial sequence numbers.
Ugh -- scrap that theory. This report says they can take down a service with ten packets a second. Stuff it -- I'm off to bed. There will still be an Internet in the morning.
I took it to mean that the client is doing something equivalent to the "normal" SYN cookies that servers use...
I don't think so. A malicious TCP client can send out SYNs with completely random initial sequence numbers, and not retain any memory of what number was sent, since the client's initial sequence number is not important to the attack. The server increments the number and sends it back in the SYN+ACK response, along with its own initial sequence number (the SYN cookie, if they are being used). The client can simply ACK any incoming SYN+ACK without regard to whether it matches a SYN it sent or not. It's not actually trying to establish a connection, but merely persuade the victim TCP to enter the ESTABLISHED state, thus consuming a TCP state table entry. The malicious client is completely stateless.
Note that the above is not a particularly fearsome attack, since the SYN cookie prevents the client from forging its IP address. If the server side limits the number of TCP connections per peer IP address, the client will only deny service for its own IP address.
Sockstress computes and stores so-called client-side SYN cookies
This isn't supposed to be possible. SYN cookies are supposed to contain at least 24 bits worth of entropy, produced by running a server-side secret through a one-way hashing function. You can easily obtain a SYN cookie by performing the initial SYN with the server. A SYN+ACK comes back which contains the SYN cookie (as the initial sequence number). The cookie so received is unique per TCP connection (IP address and port numbers at both ends), and valid only for a limited time. The server side does not maintain any state information until the cookie is returned in the client's ACK.
If they are actually computing SYN cookies on the client side, it's evidence of a weak SYN cookie implementation. Computation of the cookie should be infeasible without access to the server-side secret. Of course, this may be a case of sloppy reporting. As usual, we aren't given all the details of this earth-shattering vulnerability. We are simply left to guess whether these folks (and those that report on them) know what they're talking about or not.
They could be guessing cookies, and that would explain the "it will hurt intermediate systems" excuse they used for not demonstrating it, since they'd need to flood the peer TCP with millions of randomly-guessed initial sequence numbers. Incidentally, if this is a TCP SYN-flood attack of this sort, the "after effects" they mention have to do with the fact that all the TCP connections must time out naturally -- a process which might take several minutes per connection, depending on the configuration of the listening server application. The process is naturally limited by bandwidth and the size of the TCP state table: you have to be able to send successful fake ACKs fast enough to fill the TCP state table. All the usual mitigations for TCP SYN floods apply, such as increasing the state table size and reducing the timeout for open but idle connections.
It's not at all clear that this is any worse than the kind of DDoS attack that a typical botnet can unleash. In that case, you get thousands of perfectly real TCP connections from multiple addresses almost simultaneously. So maybe this attack doesn't require a botnet, but I don't see that it's a big new threat (as I've described it).
I suppose you're talking about the scientific establishment, where I'm talking about the scientific ideal the establishment tries to live up to.
I'm a follower of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. I view the "scientific establishment" as a political force that primarily uses the "scientific ideal" as a means to exclude undesirables (creationists being a case in point) rather than a thing that they actively try to live up to. As Feyerabend points out in his book, Against Method, anyone who takes any formal scientific ideal seriously will wind up opposing scientific revolutions. Good science is not supplanted by better science: it is supplanted by different science. The old school firmly opposes the new because it sees the new as inferior, lacking the maturity and explanatory power of the old. Feyerabend's rule for science is "anything goes".
What were we talking about again? Teaching alternative theories in science class.
Sort of. The part of your message to which I responded was more about the distinction between science and non-science. You were saying that science is evidence-based reasoning (an oversimplification, and I'll let it slide since you recognise it as such -- some don't), but that things which weren't scientific shouldn't be taught in science. I think this is still where we have a point of disagreement, since I'm not going to lightly accept any such distinction. I say that science is the study of nature, not a method of studying nature.
It would be good to teach about the difference between scientific theories and pseudoscience
It would be bad to teach that pseudoscience is valid competition to science
It would be bad to teach that pseudoscience is a useful alternative to science
I tend to disagree with these. "Pseudoscience" is a term used by the current scientific mainstream as a simple term of disparagement for methods other than their own. It promotes closed-mindedness with regards to method. What would be better is to show how different discoveries in science have required different methods and different kinds of reasoning. Also, show that scientific progress does not rest purely on the merits of the ideas themselves, but also on the rhetorical ability of the idea's promoter. Galileo was a case in point.
This is probably too advanced a study for school, but it would be appropriate for anyone taking a science degree. However, nothing of the sort is taught anywhere that I know of. This comes as no surprise: the way that science is taught in school promotes "one true method" scientific thinking (in addition to giving a basic grounding in some current theories), and so people take it for granted that "science" involves a certain conduct, rather than being a field of study amenable to many methods. We definitely need to change the way we teach science at the school level in order to counteract this, and I think that change must necessarily offend the scientific mainstream, since it won't be sufficiently disparaging of "pseudoscience". Beyond that, I don't have detailed suggestions at this time.
Straight up: do you believe that creationism is a valid alternative to evolution, or are you just playing around?
It should be pretty clear by now that I do consider it a valid alternative. This should be clear on the basis that I am extremely liberal in what I will accept as "scientific". That's not to say that I have equal admiration for all scientific practice: far from it. I'm just opposed to the kind of ostracism that's being practised in scientific circles -- the whole "you have no place in my field, for you are not methodically acceptable" thing.
I claim that creationism (specifically the modern YEC movement) is unscientific, is not evidence based, is thinly veiled Christian literalist dogma and has n
There is no slicing and dicing. Just because Darwin threw out a potential hypothesis doesn't mean it's an integral part of evolutionary theory.
Of course there is slicing and dicing: knowledge doesn't classify itself. You draw the line at such and such a point, and I accept that, but don't insist that's the only possible place to draw the line.
Would you call someone an evolutionist if they claimed that God created the first living cell (and only that cell)?
No, that would be a creationist. To me, the simple matter that someone is willing to abandon all reason and usually the search for truth(scientific progress) just because science can't yet answer that earliest part of the origin of life question is enough to group them with any other creationist.
So here is someone who believes in the entirety of evolution theory as you have classified it, and you call him a creationist. From this, I surmise that by "creationist", you mean "irrational idiot", and you classify anyone who thinks that God exists and ever did anything as an "irrational idiot".
At this point I see no possible profit in reasoning with you.
Yes there is a loss on occasion of some good ideas that are too radical for its time, but that is offset by the fact that incrementally it is reached in due time.
That is an enormous, sweeping claim. Go write a book to defend that point of view. Be sure to address the issues already identified by Feyerabend in Against Method, since it offers a ready-made counter-argument.
Well I have to disagree, scientists and researchers who have tenure are free to do or say as they will. They don't have to subscribe to the consensus, and science in replete with stories of scientists who have been ignored or chose to research something that contradicts the mainstream, and emerging victorious after completing a persuasive study.
You have such an optimistic view of the process. In order to qualify for tenure (where it exists), one must have a significant degree of academic success as measured by publications, citations, and successful grant applications, so those who obtain tenure do so by having largely told the scientific world what it wants to hear. Some have the patience to achieve tenure before they pursue their crackpot ideas, and some even succeed in having their ideas accepted, but the process can hardly be said to encourage radical thinking. Naturally radical thinkers are, to use the evolutionary term, at a significant selective disadvantage.
Some of the great names in science have only been recognised as such posthumously: Mendel springs first to mind; Copernicus follows. God only knows how many great thinkers we have lost because their work was obscure at the time and then forgotten completely.
As for peer reviewed papers, on 90% of journals the people who do peer review are those who were accepted the previous edition.
Thus promoting "groupthink". It's not a cabal, no, but it is quite resilient to ideas outside the mainstream even so. If you want to get a paper published, look at the kinds of papers that have been accepted in the past and produce something like that.
I suspect that this whole questioning of the science world is a result of your disagreement with the consensus surrounding evolution.
And I suspect that your rosy view of science indicates that you really like the status quo, but that's irrelevant. Rational discourse demands that I focus on the actual content of your argument, not your motives for holding the position in the first place (cf. Bulverism).
the theory of evolution makes no claims on the origin of life.
Sure, if you arbitrarily slice and dice along those lines. Darwin's comment on the origin of life was that it could conceivably occur in a "warm little pond" with the right prevailing conditions. It's hardly a stretch to include this aspect of the overall problem under the heading "evolution", especially if it's part of a naturalistic programme which attempts to avoid intelligent intervention at all steps of the process. Would you call someone an evolutionist if they claimed that God created the first living cell (and only that cell)?
the big bang is more of an attempt at that, sure
WTF? Modded +5 insightful for this junk? The big bang has nothing to do with the origins of life at all. It's primarily an attempt to explain the large-scale shape of the universe, particularly the red-shift and background radiation observations.
If you accept change over time adaptations, then you accept evolution.
So, having accepted that variation occurs, I must accept that variation alone explains all the diversity of life on Earth? Some variation has been observed, ergo all life must have been produced through common descent and variation? This isn't a complete argument, and it's people who might want to say "I acknowledge variation within limits, but spare me the unsubstantiated nonsense about fish and mammals being related" who want to make distinctions like "microevolution" and "macroevolution".
Scientific enquiry is about figuring out which idea is right based on evidence; an alternative to science by definition ignores or dilutes evidence based reasoning (because the alternative didn't, it would be simply another branch of science). The rejection of evidence based reasoning would be the closed-mindedness in question.
The argument over whether the Earth moves or not was conducted on both sides by evidence-based reasoning. Galileo was opposed not only by the church, but also by the scientists of his day. Science had well-established and accepted reasons for concluding that the Earth did not move, based in physical evidence. If there's a Galileo around today, we almost certainly think of him as a crank -- we probably call him a "flat-earther" for his ridiculous views, although he's probably invented something useful.
My point is that even a creationist can use evidence-based reasoning, but you would simply reject his interpretation of the evidence in the same way that Copernicanism was rejected for so long. There was evidence, and there was reasoning, but it was considered inferior by the mainstream. Then there was a political watershed (what Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift"), and the motion of the Earth became the popular view. The shoe is now officially on the other foot, and anyone who presents the old arguments against the movement of the Earth is considered to hold an unscientific view, regardless of the empirical and rational content.
Summary: science is not simply evidence-based reasoning, because there's plenty of evidence-based reasoning not tolerated by modern science. (There's also quite a bit of science not based on evidence (e.g. "thought experiments"), but that's a different story.)
Ok - there is no scientific elite (I guess Nobel prize winners might be the "elite" but what they say is not taken as gospel), nor hierarchy - its a distributed system, that operates on consensus. There is no central system or "high scientists" that define what science is currently "accepted".
There's no scientific pope, no. There are, however, scientists in highly influential positions. There are those who influence which papers get published in their prestigious journals or conferences. There are those who make policy decisions regarding research in leading institutions. And the whole field is fraught with politics: if you hold a position of responsibility in science and make a public remark that might be construed as sympathetic to creationists (even if it isn't, actually), people will be howling for your resignation within hours. That's what I'm talking about when I speak of the scientific elite. I don't even mean "clever scientists" -- I mean people of influence in scientific circles, regardless of how that influence is achieved.
Oh, and "consensus, my arse." Consensus is de facto after the fact. If you manage to get a particular theory taught to the exclusion of others, or if you get to decide which research programme will be funded, you can be pretty sure that consensus will follow. We have consensus among scientists that evolution is a fact because everyone who thinks otherwise has been branded a non-scientist, even to the extent that saying something about creationism that isn't sufficiently harsh can be a career-limiting move.
I am not sure how what I have said in post above made you think that it resembles the Chinese government!
In short, the Chinese government is happy to allow ideas like capitalism, freedom of speech, and democracy only to the extent that they are compatible with the existing governmental regime, and that pretty much guts the concepts. You're happy to allow open discussion of matters in science class to the extent that it fits within the framework of currently acceptable scientific practice. Neither you nor the Chinese government will allow the kind of talk that leads to revolution. For China, the present style of government is government, and everything else is anti-government. (Actually, I'm probably being unfair when I single out China here. Think about it.) For you, the present style of science is science, and everything else is non-science or anti-science. China allows freedom of speech so long as it's pro-government, and you're happy with discussion in the science class so long as it's pro-science. One must not challenge the status quo in either case.
You're being inconsistent. You say that nature decides, but you then go on to explain about how scientists decide what it is that nature is saying. This depends on misunderstandings, ego, and a whole bunch of other irrational stuff. It is not "democratic" (as you point out), but is ultimately some kind of political struggle for the acceptance of ideas, and it involves persuading people to see the evidence of nature your way. You take it as given that eventually we come to a greater knowledge of the truth through this largely irrational, political process.
Pardon my scepticism, but how does this process differ from religious folk who start with, "the Bible decides what is right and wrong", but then have a professional class of scholars who decide what it is that the bible means, and those professionals have a shifting interpretation based on their own personal upbringing, pet theories, and a bunch of external influences in society? It seems to me that the two processes are very much alike, even if the objects they study are different. I'm not convinced that the process is inherently likely to get us closer to any kind of truth, whether it's truth about nature or truth about the Bible.
If you liked "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (did you actually read it?), then try Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" for a real paradigm shift.
Well, that makes it sound like, "open-mindedness has its place, but the scientific elite will decide under what circumstances it's allowed -- and that will generally be in areas other than science, since science has a Method for determining whether alternatives are good or not, and bad science is not allowed." There's nothing wrong with that as such, but (a) it's not exactly a thorough endorsement of open-mindedness (it's like the Chinese promotion of "freedom" and "democracy", which are fine so long as they don't upset the status quo), and (b) it sounds a lot like a priesthood deciding which ideas are heretical, and I thought people didn't like that kind of thing thanks to the Galileo incident.
"Falling" is an experience. A particular instance of a thing falling is a fact. (It's a fact that when I dropped my mobile phone earlier, it fell to the floor.) Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein have theoretical models which attempt to incorporate "falling" in their scope.
"Biological variation" is an experience. A particular instance of generational change is a fact. (It's a fact that lions and tigers have cross-bred and produced viable offspring.) Lamarck and Mendel have theoretical models which incorporate biological variation in their scope.
The origin of life is not an experience. It was thought to be an experience (known as "spontaneous generation"), but the work of Pasteur was sufficiently persuasive that most people now agree that life comes only from life. It's reasonable to assume, however, that it is a fact of the past that life had an origin. (Presumably, there was at some point nothing that could be called "a living organism", but now there is, and this implies an origin.) Evolution and creation are loose theoretical models (each has plenty of room for specific variation) which incorporate the origin of life in their scope. Evolution is the set of all naturalist theories of origin, and creation is the set of all interventionist theories of origin.
I agree with A.C. that philosophy is important for the development of critical thinking. I don't follow the bit about the teaching of alternatives in science as promoting closed-mindedness, though. How does that work? If you teach only the One Accepted Theory, this promotes open-mindedness? Seems backwards to me.
So what you're saying is that anything a scientist can do intentionally in a lab can happen all by itself given a lot of time, energy, and matter? Is the argument behind that something like, "anything which is physically possible at all can, in principle, happen by chance?" If so, that seems entirely logical, although it waves aside lot of interesting probability considerations. However, the OP asked, "since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise?" You haven't actually raised any questions for Creationism -- you've only pointed out that the experiment does not necessarily refute Naturalism. (Congratulations on making a defensive manoeuvre sound like an attack, by the way.)
So the meta-question still stands: what questions does this raise for Creationism -- or for Naturalism, for that matter? It seems to me that both sides will consider this very same act to be further evidence of their own views -- which is pretty much status quo, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
DNSSEC so they can't do anything to your DNS queries (not even by directing you to an evil resolver), and SSL or similar for everything else so your connections can't be edited or sniffed.
Actually, once the bad guys have installed malware on your PC, it's pretty much game over. DNSSEC won't help you, and SSL won't help you: they are designed to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks, not man-in-the-endpoint attacks. If your PC is compromised, the DLL that performs DNSSEC or SSL verification can also be compromised. We don't really have a security model to deal with man-in-the-endpoint attacks, other than things like two-factor (or n-factor) authentication which work because one of the two (or n) communications channels isn't compromised by the bad guys.
In principle, what evidence would convince you that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous?
I've often pondered this, and the "anthropogenic" part is a real problem. It's one thing to demonstrate a factual trend in heat: you can demonstrate that with sufficient measurement. But putting your finger on the cause is much harder. This is one of those cases where it's necessary to infer causes almost entirely from measurement. Ideally, we'd be able to experiment with a whole bunch of Earths under controlled conditions, so as to experimentally isolate various causes. That's what you'd do if this were a biology or physics problem, but we're dealing with a problem that's simply not amenable to the kind of experiment we want. We have a single experiment: reality as it is, with no controlled parameters. No wonder there are divergent views. Add to this the fact that non-anthropogenic global warming is already well-accepted: think, "after the last ice age, the planet warmed up, and it wasn't the result of cave-man campfires."
So here we have an argument over genesis, not data, with an experimental sample size of one, and a whole bunch of religious zealotry thrown in the mix. By the time the concept of "atoning for your environmental sins" [heard it on BBC radio recently] reaches the mainstream, you can be sure that dispassionate discussion has left the building. Morality is a popular subject these days, so long as you mean environmental morality.
Oh, and in case anyone cares, and I haven't made myself clear, my personal position is that I have no idea whether or to what degree climate change is man made. I'm resigned to the fact that the political momentum is solidly on the side of the anthropogenic theory, and I have no wish to offer myself as a martyr for the opposing view, even if I generally like to side with the underdog.
For everyone's information: the page the author links to as the one that has javascript munging also has a noscript tag with the email out in the open. Guess what Google and spammers' email-crawlers really do? ;)
I've checked your claim, and it's not true. The "noscript" tag contains warning text about Javascript being turned off and an instruction to use a web form instead of email. I've also checked my own Javascript obfuscation, which uses "blah at domain" type descriptive text in the noscript tag, and Google's search results do not de-obfuscate it. This may be due to the fact that my Javascript is loaded from a separate file -- a point raised in TFA.
Even if Google is rendering some amount of Javascript in this way, it's still a stretch to accuse Google of being the leak. If you correspond with a person who has malware installed on their computer, there's a high risk that your email address will be exposed to spammers via that route. Such malware is hardly uncommon, is it? The obfuscation technique was only ever going to buy a little extra spam-free time in any case.
There have been many variations on the "pay to email" theme over the years. The oldest relevant citation of which I am aware is Brad Templeton, E-Stamps. His proposal does not involve the middle-man that takes a cut. Esther Dyson has also advocated this kind of solution for many years. The nearest equivalents to "pay to email" that we have in the actual marketplace are certification schemes like those from Return Path and Goodmail. These involve paying to receive certification as a responsible practitioner of bulk email, and thereby receive a recommendation which will prevent your mail from being filtered in some cases. That's not much like an e-stamp, admittedly, but it's as near to the concept that the market actually bears. Nobody has yet figured out how to introduce an e-stamp system which any email senders have the slightest incentive to use.
...what the author fails to mention is that "slippery slope" arguments are part of a group of arguments known as logical fallacy's.
It's only a logical fallacy if it's presented as a logical argument. I don't see that here: I see a concern that although the thing is not bad in and of itself, it may lead to a trend that is. That's not a logical fallacy, it's a reasonable concern which arises from taking a long-term view. One could argue whether it's a valid concern, or whether the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks, but to cry "logical fallacy" here is just an attempt to dismiss the objection without discussing its actual merits.
Some "logical fallacies" are perfectly good rhetorical devices when used as such. Learn the difference. Also learn to use apostrophes, for Pete's sake.
'Slippery slope' is a quite inadequate description of the process, because it doesn't happen passively. People push it forward.
I think that the saying he's after is "letting the nose of the camel into the tent". The camel's nose poking in through the tent flaps isn't a problem in and of itself, but one still discourages it because of what will inevitably follow if one does not. It's much easier to address a camel-in-the-tent problem when it's just a nose, not the whole camel. This is similar to "nip it in the bud" (which is frequently mangled into "nip it in the butt" -- the dog's approach to discouraging a postman).
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
Let's just call this a gross oversimplification and be done with it, shall we?
Why bother having a separate OS when the kernel could fit on the firmware?
For security reasons. Your firmware OS might have exploitable privilege escalation bugs, so you don't want to run untrusted software under it directly, only in a protected virtual machine environment. That virtual machine environment must have its own OS, and that would be a disk-based OS which is easier (and safer) to update in the event that security holes are found. It's preferable if the whole boot environment is as near to possible as read-only, just to reduce the possibility of malicious exploit. It shouldn't even be possible to re-flash the system without physical intervention (such as changing a jumper).
With kernel drivers *in the hardware itself*, one would never have to worry about getting the correct driver, etc...
This is true for the flash-based OS and the built-in hardware, which is why you can boot into a usable system so long as enough of the hardware is integrated on the motherboard. Don't forget plug-in cards and external peripherals, though. There's no avoiding the need for those drivers, in general.
Huh. As I recall, the same kind of horse-trading went on with the passage of the GST many years back under the Howard Govt. They needed the support of Senator Brian Harradine to get GST through, and they traded off some Net Censorship thing which ultimately had no discernible impact on anything as far as I can tell (but it wasn't a mandatory filtering technology, obviously). Wikipedia seems to contradict me on the ultimate need for Harradine's support for GST, but I do distinctly remember him looking smug about some Internet-related thing in a TV news report at the time. A bit of digging makes me believe that the specific legislation in question is the "Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999", which amended the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 to cover Internet content. Consequently, a lot of things are illegal to host online in Australia. There's no corresponding obligation for anyone to filter out illegal stuff hosted outside Australia, however.
If you could do it without additional cost to infrastructure, without degradation to network service, without ANY false positives (one in a million is not good enough), without unforeseen side effects due to the fact that HTTP is not designed for interception, and without ambiguity thanks to the fact that legality is sometimes context sensitive, then it boils down to a philosophical argument as to whether it's best for government to actively prohibit illegal activity or detect and punish violations. I am slightly inclined to think that "freedom" includes "freedom to break the law and suffer the consequences", so I believe that censorship should be voluntary. That way you can decide for yourself whether you want "safety" or "freedom". Why deny people that choice?
They could be guessing cookies, and that would explain the "it will hurt intermediate systems" excuse they used for not demonstrating it, since they'd need to flood the peer TCP with millions of randomly-guessed initial sequence numbers.
Ugh -- scrap that theory. This report says they can take down a service with ten packets a second. Stuff it -- I'm off to bed. There will still be an Internet in the morning.
I took it to mean that the client is doing something equivalent to the "normal" SYN cookies that servers use...
I don't think so. A malicious TCP client can send out SYNs with completely random initial sequence numbers, and not retain any memory of what number was sent, since the client's initial sequence number is not important to the attack. The server increments the number and sends it back in the SYN+ACK response, along with its own initial sequence number (the SYN cookie, if they are being used). The client can simply ACK any incoming SYN+ACK without regard to whether it matches a SYN it sent or not. It's not actually trying to establish a connection, but merely persuade the victim TCP to enter the ESTABLISHED state, thus consuming a TCP state table entry. The malicious client is completely stateless.
Note that the above is not a particularly fearsome attack, since the SYN cookie prevents the client from forging its IP address. If the server side limits the number of TCP connections per peer IP address, the client will only deny service for its own IP address.
Sockstress computes and stores so-called client-side SYN cookies
This isn't supposed to be possible. SYN cookies are supposed to contain at least 24 bits worth of entropy, produced by running a server-side secret through a one-way hashing function. You can easily obtain a SYN cookie by performing the initial SYN with the server. A SYN+ACK comes back which contains the SYN cookie (as the initial sequence number). The cookie so received is unique per TCP connection (IP address and port numbers at both ends), and valid only for a limited time. The server side does not maintain any state information until the cookie is returned in the client's ACK.
If they are actually computing SYN cookies on the client side, it's evidence of a weak SYN cookie implementation. Computation of the cookie should be infeasible without access to the server-side secret. Of course, this may be a case of sloppy reporting. As usual, we aren't given all the details of this earth-shattering vulnerability. We are simply left to guess whether these folks (and those that report on them) know what they're talking about or not.
They could be guessing cookies, and that would explain the "it will hurt intermediate systems" excuse they used for not demonstrating it, since they'd need to flood the peer TCP with millions of randomly-guessed initial sequence numbers. Incidentally, if this is a TCP SYN-flood attack of this sort, the "after effects" they mention have to do with the fact that all the TCP connections must time out naturally -- a process which might take several minutes per connection, depending on the configuration of the listening server application. The process is naturally limited by bandwidth and the size of the TCP state table: you have to be able to send successful fake ACKs fast enough to fill the TCP state table. All the usual mitigations for TCP SYN floods apply, such as increasing the state table size and reducing the timeout for open but idle connections.
It's not at all clear that this is any worse than the kind of DDoS attack that a typical botnet can unleash. In that case, you get thousands of perfectly real TCP connections from multiple addresses almost simultaneously. So maybe this attack doesn't require a botnet, but I don't see that it's a big new threat (as I've described it).
I suppose you're talking about the scientific establishment, where I'm talking about the scientific ideal the establishment tries to live up to.
I'm a follower of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. I view the "scientific establishment" as a political force that primarily uses the "scientific ideal" as a means to exclude undesirables (creationists being a case in point) rather than a thing that they actively try to live up to. As Feyerabend points out in his book, Against Method, anyone who takes any formal scientific ideal seriously will wind up opposing scientific revolutions. Good science is not supplanted by better science: it is supplanted by different science. The old school firmly opposes the new because it sees the new as inferior, lacking the maturity and explanatory power of the old. Feyerabend's rule for science is "anything goes".
What were we talking about again? Teaching alternative theories in science class.
Sort of. The part of your message to which I responded was more about the distinction between science and non-science. You were saying that science is evidence-based reasoning (an oversimplification, and I'll let it slide since you recognise it as such -- some don't), but that things which weren't scientific shouldn't be taught in science. I think this is still where we have a point of disagreement, since I'm not going to lightly accept any such distinction. I say that science is the study of nature, not a method of studying nature.
I tend to disagree with these. "Pseudoscience" is a term used by the current scientific mainstream as a simple term of disparagement for methods other than their own. It promotes closed-mindedness with regards to method. What would be better is to show how different discoveries in science have required different methods and different kinds of reasoning. Also, show that scientific progress does not rest purely on the merits of the ideas themselves, but also on the rhetorical ability of the idea's promoter. Galileo was a case in point.
This is probably too advanced a study for school, but it would be appropriate for anyone taking a science degree. However, nothing of the sort is taught anywhere that I know of. This comes as no surprise: the way that science is taught in school promotes "one true method" scientific thinking (in addition to giving a basic grounding in some current theories), and so people take it for granted that "science" involves a certain conduct, rather than being a field of study amenable to many methods. We definitely need to change the way we teach science at the school level in order to counteract this, and I think that change must necessarily offend the scientific mainstream, since it won't be sufficiently disparaging of "pseudoscience". Beyond that, I don't have detailed suggestions at this time.
Straight up: do you believe that creationism is a valid alternative to evolution, or are you just playing around?
It should be pretty clear by now that I do consider it a valid alternative. This should be clear on the basis that I am extremely liberal in what I will accept as "scientific". That's not to say that I have equal admiration for all scientific practice: far from it. I'm just opposed to the kind of ostracism that's being practised in scientific circles -- the whole "you have no place in my field, for you are not methodically acceptable" thing.
I claim that creationism (specifically the modern YEC movement) is unscientific, is not evidence based, is thinly veiled Christian literalist dogma and has n
There is no slicing and dicing. Just because Darwin threw out a potential hypothesis doesn't mean it's an integral part of evolutionary theory.
Of course there is slicing and dicing: knowledge doesn't classify itself. You draw the line at such and such a point, and I accept that, but don't insist that's the only possible place to draw the line.
Would you call someone an evolutionist if they claimed that God created the first living cell (and only that cell)?
No, that would be a creationist. To me, the simple matter that someone is willing to abandon all reason and usually the search for truth(scientific progress) just because science can't yet answer that earliest part of the origin of life question is enough to group them with any other creationist.
So here is someone who believes in the entirety of evolution theory as you have classified it, and you call him a creationist. From this, I surmise that by "creationist", you mean "irrational idiot", and you classify anyone who thinks that God exists and ever did anything as an "irrational idiot".
At this point I see no possible profit in reasoning with you.
How would you make it better?
I promote Feyerabend's "scientific anarchy".
Yes there is a loss on occasion of some good ideas that are too radical for its time, but that is offset by the fact that incrementally it is reached in due time.
That is an enormous, sweeping claim. Go write a book to defend that point of view. Be sure to address the issues already identified by Feyerabend in Against Method, since it offers a ready-made counter-argument.
Well I have to disagree, scientists and researchers who have tenure are free to do or say as they will. They don't have to subscribe to the consensus, and science in replete with stories of scientists who have been ignored or chose to research something that contradicts the mainstream, and emerging victorious after completing a persuasive study.
You have such an optimistic view of the process. In order to qualify for tenure (where it exists), one must have a significant degree of academic success as measured by publications, citations, and successful grant applications, so those who obtain tenure do so by having largely told the scientific world what it wants to hear. Some have the patience to achieve tenure before they pursue their crackpot ideas, and some even succeed in having their ideas accepted, but the process can hardly be said to encourage radical thinking. Naturally radical thinkers are, to use the evolutionary term, at a significant selective disadvantage.
Some of the great names in science have only been recognised as such posthumously: Mendel springs first to mind; Copernicus follows. God only knows how many great thinkers we have lost because their work was obscure at the time and then forgotten completely.
As for peer reviewed papers, on 90% of journals the people who do peer review are those who were accepted the previous edition.
Thus promoting "groupthink". It's not a cabal, no, but it is quite resilient to ideas outside the mainstream even so. If you want to get a paper published, look at the kinds of papers that have been accepted in the past and produce something like that.
I suspect that this whole questioning of the science world is a result of your disagreement with the consensus surrounding evolution.
And I suspect that your rosy view of science indicates that you really like the status quo, but that's irrelevant. Rational discourse demands that I focus on the actual content of your argument, not your motives for holding the position in the first place (cf. Bulverism).
the theory of evolution makes no claims on the origin of life.
Sure, if you arbitrarily slice and dice along those lines. Darwin's comment on the origin of life was that it could conceivably occur in a "warm little pond" with the right prevailing conditions. It's hardly a stretch to include this aspect of the overall problem under the heading "evolution", especially if it's part of a naturalistic programme which attempts to avoid intelligent intervention at all steps of the process. Would you call someone an evolutionist if they claimed that God created the first living cell (and only that cell)?
the big bang is more of an attempt at that, sure
WTF? Modded +5 insightful for this junk? The big bang has nothing to do with the origins of life at all. It's primarily an attempt to explain the large-scale shape of the universe, particularly the red-shift and background radiation observations.
If you accept change over time adaptations, then you accept evolution.
So, having accepted that variation occurs, I must accept that variation alone explains all the diversity of life on Earth? Some variation has been observed, ergo all life must have been produced through common descent and variation? This isn't a complete argument, and it's people who might want to say "I acknowledge variation within limits, but spare me the unsubstantiated nonsense about fish and mammals being related" who want to make distinctions like "microevolution" and "macroevolution".
Scientific enquiry is about figuring out which idea is right based on evidence; an alternative to science by definition ignores or dilutes evidence based reasoning (because the alternative didn't, it would be simply another branch of science). The rejection of evidence based reasoning would be the closed-mindedness in question.
The argument over whether the Earth moves or not was conducted on both sides by evidence-based reasoning. Galileo was opposed not only by the church, but also by the scientists of his day. Science had well-established and accepted reasons for concluding that the Earth did not move, based in physical evidence. If there's a Galileo around today, we almost certainly think of him as a crank -- we probably call him a "flat-earther" for his ridiculous views, although he's probably invented something useful.
My point is that even a creationist can use evidence-based reasoning, but you would simply reject his interpretation of the evidence in the same way that Copernicanism was rejected for so long. There was evidence, and there was reasoning, but it was considered inferior by the mainstream. Then there was a political watershed (what Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift"), and the motion of the Earth became the popular view. The shoe is now officially on the other foot, and anyone who presents the old arguments against the movement of the Earth is considered to hold an unscientific view, regardless of the empirical and rational content.
Summary: science is not simply evidence-based reasoning, because there's plenty of evidence-based reasoning not tolerated by modern science. (There's also quite a bit of science not based on evidence (e.g. "thought experiments"), but that's a different story.)
Ok - there is no scientific elite (I guess Nobel prize winners might be the "elite" but what they say is not taken as gospel), nor hierarchy - its a distributed system, that operates on consensus. There is no central system or "high scientists" that define what science is currently "accepted".
There's no scientific pope, no. There are, however, scientists in highly influential positions. There are those who influence which papers get published in their prestigious journals or conferences. There are those who make policy decisions regarding research in leading institutions. And the whole field is fraught with politics: if you hold a position of responsibility in science and make a public remark that might be construed as sympathetic to creationists (even if it isn't, actually), people will be howling for your resignation within hours. That's what I'm talking about when I speak of the scientific elite. I don't even mean "clever scientists" -- I mean people of influence in scientific circles, regardless of how that influence is achieved.
Oh, and "consensus, my arse." Consensus is de facto after the fact. If you manage to get a particular theory taught to the exclusion of others, or if you get to decide which research programme will be funded, you can be pretty sure that consensus will follow. We have consensus among scientists that evolution is a fact because everyone who thinks otherwise has been branded a non-scientist, even to the extent that saying something about creationism that isn't sufficiently harsh can be a career-limiting move.
I am not sure how what I have said in post above made you think that it resembles the Chinese government!
In short, the Chinese government is happy to allow ideas like capitalism, freedom of speech, and democracy only to the extent that they are compatible with the existing governmental regime, and that pretty much guts the concepts. You're happy to allow open discussion of matters in science class to the extent that it fits within the framework of currently acceptable scientific practice. Neither you nor the Chinese government will allow the kind of talk that leads to revolution. For China, the present style of government is government, and everything else is anti-government. (Actually, I'm probably being unfair when I single out China here. Think about it.) For you, the present style of science is science, and everything else is non-science or anti-science. China allows freedom of speech so long as it's pro-government, and you're happy with discussion in the science class so long as it's pro-science. One must not challenge the status quo in either case.
You're being inconsistent. You say that nature decides, but you then go on to explain about how scientists decide what it is that nature is saying. This depends on misunderstandings, ego, and a whole bunch of other irrational stuff. It is not "democratic" (as you point out), but is ultimately some kind of political struggle for the acceptance of ideas, and it involves persuading people to see the evidence of nature your way. You take it as given that eventually we come to a greater knowledge of the truth through this largely irrational, political process.
Pardon my scepticism, but how does this process differ from religious folk who start with, "the Bible decides what is right and wrong", but then have a professional class of scholars who decide what it is that the bible means, and those professionals have a shifting interpretation based on their own personal upbringing, pet theories, and a bunch of external influences in society? It seems to me that the two processes are very much alike, even if the objects they study are different. I'm not convinced that the process is inherently likely to get us closer to any kind of truth, whether it's truth about nature or truth about the Bible.
If you liked "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (did you actually read it?), then try Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" for a real paradigm shift.
Well, that makes it sound like, "open-mindedness has its place, but the scientific elite will decide under what circumstances it's allowed -- and that will generally be in areas other than science, since science has a Method for determining whether alternatives are good or not, and bad science is not allowed." There's nothing wrong with that as such, but (a) it's not exactly a thorough endorsement of open-mindedness (it's like the Chinese promotion of "freedom" and "democracy", which are fine so long as they don't upset the status quo), and (b) it sounds a lot like a priesthood deciding which ideas are heretical, and I thought people didn't like that kind of thing thanks to the Galileo incident.
"Falling" is an experience. A particular instance of a thing falling is a fact. (It's a fact that when I dropped my mobile phone earlier, it fell to the floor.) Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein have theoretical models which attempt to incorporate "falling" in their scope.
"Biological variation" is an experience. A particular instance of generational change is a fact. (It's a fact that lions and tigers have cross-bred and produced viable offspring.) Lamarck and Mendel have theoretical models which incorporate biological variation in their scope.
The origin of life is not an experience. It was thought to be an experience (known as "spontaneous generation"), but the work of Pasteur was sufficiently persuasive that most people now agree that life comes only from life. It's reasonable to assume, however, that it is a fact of the past that life had an origin. (Presumably, there was at some point nothing that could be called "a living organism", but now there is, and this implies an origin.) Evolution and creation are loose theoretical models (each has plenty of room for specific variation) which incorporate the origin of life in their scope. Evolution is the set of all naturalist theories of origin, and creation is the set of all interventionist theories of origin.
I agree with A.C. that philosophy is important for the development of critical thinking. I don't follow the bit about the teaching of alternatives in science as promoting closed-mindedness, though. How does that work? If you teach only the One Accepted Theory, this promotes open-mindedness? Seems backwards to me.
So what you're saying is that anything a scientist can do intentionally in a lab can happen all by itself given a lot of time, energy, and matter? Is the argument behind that something like, "anything which is physically possible at all can, in principle, happen by chance?" If so, that seems entirely logical, although it waves aside lot of interesting probability considerations. However, the OP asked, "since the scientist did the (almost) creating here, what questions would this raise?" You haven't actually raised any questions for Creationism -- you've only pointed out that the experiment does not necessarily refute Naturalism. (Congratulations on making a defensive manoeuvre sound like an attack, by the way.)
So the meta-question still stands: what questions does this raise for Creationism -- or for Naturalism, for that matter? It seems to me that both sides will consider this very same act to be further evidence of their own views -- which is pretty much status quo, isn't it?