Thats a long term aim, but no reference work started out comprehensive
Errr, come on! Most reference works start out as comprehensive. Not perfect, but comprehensive. Let's see, the first "Complete works of Shakespeare", was, I bet pretty comprehensive. Maybe an obscure sonnet was missing, added in edition 4. But, no one in the real world is publishing something called "The works of Shakespeare" with 4 plays in and a preface saying that with so many members of the public contributing other works, they hope to have at least 12 plays by edition 2!
The value of reference works is in their comprehensiveness. Who wants a guide to the Java class libraries that just leaves out 400 assorted methods because no-one got round to writing the entries for them? Do you think people would still say it was a useful book? If you were teaching chemistry, would you advice students to pay for a full periodic table of elements, or encourage them to use a free one that still have a few elements missing, but was copyright free!
I currently work for a medical journal (www.bmj.com). I can attest the the value and importance of running expert reviews, medical specialist editors, technical editors, copy editors and the rest of it. You don't get that for free.
The thing about these Encyclopedias is that they are meant to be comprehensive. So far, none of the free ones are. I mean they are nowhere close to it.
So, there are lots of arguments about why it is possible for people to create a free encyc. but the proof of the pudding is, let's face it, in the eating.
So far, there is simply no evidence (regardless of what predictions might be plausible) that these kind of free info repositories work.
The Internet itself (+google) is the closest thing to a free 'as in beer' encyclopaedia.
Free speech is where you pay a lot of money for a police force to make sure that wierdos get to say things in public without being beaten up by violent stupid people who disagree with them.
Free 'as in beer' software is software that costs you nothing. Free 'as in speech' software is software that you're allowed to fix if it's borked, and call it something else and give it to your friends, and get a warm fuzzy feeling out of it.
Free as in 'from the constraints of rational thought' is the usual mental state of people arguing about free software of either type.
Why is it laughable? It is an encryption mechanism, end of story. It's a perfectly reasonable one, with a number of properties:
1. Very easy to implement (small, fast)
2. Very easy to decrypt ciphertext
3. Trivial to brute-force, has other known weaknesses and attacks (vulnerable to freq. analysis etc).
There are many applications where ROT-13 is a suitable cipher mechanism (profane usenet messages being just one).
I can't be bothered to reply to every lame slashbot remark about ROT-13 here, but I've yet to see anyone indicate precisely where ROT-13 was used and if it was actually used inappropriately or not.
For instance, an eBook might want to use ROT-13 as a child lock so that adult eBooks, even when purchased, could be weakly encrypted by the owner to prevent children reading them.
You are missing the point. It is illegal for someone to trespass, quite regardless of what they break, take or whatever. If they pick the lock on my house, wander about for a bit, then leave, locking the door behind them, it's still illegal. The illegality remains quite regardless of how primitive my lock is, if I left the window wide open or whatever.
"Copyright law as we know it began in England in 1710 when the British Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne. The Statute of Anne contained, for the first time in copyright law, legal protection for consumers of copyrighted works by curtailing the term of a copyright thus, preventing a monopoly on the part of the booksellers. It also created a "public domain" for literature by requiring the creation of a new work in order to obtain a copyright, by limiting the length of term of a copyright, and by limiting the rights granted to the copyright owner (print, publish, and sell) so that once purchased the copyright owner does not control the use of the work. The statute also provided for an author's copyright - although the benefit to authors was minimal because in order to be paid for a work an author had to assign the work to a bookseller or publisher. "
Hardly the monarchist instrument of repression the MSNBC starts with...
For the kind of job I do (Technical Management), formal education doesn't make sense. I have alot of control over how I spend my time, and I find it more effective for me to educate myself. If I come across a conference or seminar or whatever, then I have to make a business case for the cost of me going to that, and that's fine. This kind of ad hoc self education relies on two factors:
1. The company leaves you enough 'free' time in your general plan that you can schedule in your own days for reading XML books or whatever
2. You do the kind of job where it's possible to teach yourself.
Computing seems to be one of the industries in which it is easiest to teach yourself. I don't blame companies for taking advantage of that. As a manager I can also sympathise with not wanting to book employees on long training courses in advance. That two weeks in October may look free now, but by September we may really need that person on the project.
From both learner and manager perspective, I prefer to see a budget for books and journal subscriptions, and enough slack in people's schedules that they can teach themselves.
Can't help thinking that RH is really benefitting from their system integration and consultancy skills. If they did the same stuff for Solaris and other nixes, they'd probably be making alot more money!
Still, things like this have to be good news for Linux:
"Contract signed with BP Oil for support renewal for POS rollout to 2,500 petrol stations across Europe. "
Assuming that the POS systems actually _are_ Linux....
The environmental impact of manufacturing computers is quite high. Just because we think of chip fabs as nice clean places with no smoke stacks doesn't mean they have a low impact.
Chip fabrication consumes quite enormous amounts of water. I've no idea how much energy goes into purifying all that water.
All the devices consume vast amounts of power. Your average webserver draws, say, 1.5 amps. That means a rack of 1 u machines in a data center is getting close to, say 60 amps, errr say 12 kilowatts (UK power). That's 12 kw per rack in a datacenter that, while admittedly not really running at that density throughout, is still drawing a massive amount of power.
Add to that every home PC, all the littel ebooks of the future charging their heavy-metal batteries every night. The power requirements become massive.
Now, because of the massive cost of fabs for chips and so on, there are very few factories in the world for these items. Because of that, they all have to be shipped all over the world, with assocciated use of fossil fuels, not to mention all the disposable packaging consumed each time.
A report a few years back said that you were more likely to fall victim to mugging, burglary, car theft, sexual attack (not including rape), and other violent acts (which do not end in murder) in England and Wales than anywhere else in the world.
I think you'll find that needs to be qualified. Possibly 'anywhere else in the world that produces reliable crime statistics', possibly...
These cameras are there to protect the public at large from quite serious criminals, they are not looking into your bedroom at night, or monitoring your normal activities.
Firstly, many of the town center cameras have views into people's rooms, flats above shops etc. Secondly I include 'doing the shopping' and 'walking home' within the category of normal activities, so yes, they are monitoring normal activities.
All games are zero sum in that the sum of the winners and losers is zero. Otherwise, it's called an activity, not a game.
Sports, say football are not zero sum, in that scoring a goal has no effect on the other team's ability to score unlimited goals. But, there is always a winner and loser.
The same is true for modern econics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
Rather cool to see a contest one of the rules of which is "All submissions must be created using Linux and native Linux tools."
Whoaaa, that's the dumbest thing I've heared for a long time. That's like Ford hiring a contract product designer to work on their new car and requiring that the product designer drive a Ford.
Now, if this were, say, the Gimp, looking for a new logo then there'd be _some_ sense in it. It would be like Ford requiring that their travelling sales staff drive Ford cars.
You know, I'd bet that 90% of all Microsoft Marketing output is done on Macs, since that's what most advertising creative departments use. And I bet Microsoft really doesn't care about that because it's looking for an end product that's of high quality, not high ideology.
This has been quite effective for me. Barclays Bank (UK clearing bank) sends quite extreme quantities of junk mail. One day I was so fed up that I took their unsolicited home loan application form and filled it out all the way through, until I got to the signature box, where I just wrote I'VE WASTED YOUR TIME TOO, NOW STOP SENDING ME JUNK MAIL.
I figured some happless employee would have entered all the info on the form and then got to the end and realised it was a wasted effort.
After that, I didn't get any more junk mail from Barclays at all - but it started up again as soon as I moved house.
In my experience, Afterstep has a far bigger marketshare than either KDE or Gnome. Neither KDE nor Gnome appeal at all to people who really want X to simply be a way of running a web browser and lots of terminal windows on a single display. And that does seem to account for alot of people.
Personally, I find Windows98 a far better way of running lots of terminal sessions and a web browser, but of course you need two machines to make that useful:-)
I'm getting really fed up with this notion that all Open Source software is Linux software. I hate Linux. It's pretty good, but it's not as good as, say, Solaris.
I run KDE on Solaris. It runs just fine. It's great. Everything works just like it does on Linux, only better because, frankly Solaris 2.7 on Sparc is simply more powerful than Linux on anything.
Come to that, I run Apache, Perl, Mailman, and about 20 other well known Open Source packages on Solaris. Gosh! they all work!
So, frankly, I don't give a damn about the Linux desktop and who has control over it. Nor do I care how Linux fares in the eyes of anyone at all.
All I care about is KDE and whether it continues to be considerably better than CDE, which is a pile of crap.
So can we PLEASE keep Linux OUT of every f***ing discussion about software which JUST HAPPENS to run on Linux because Linux JUST HAPPENS to be a clone workalike of Unix.
I doubt very much that anyone is advocating Exchange simply to use it as an IMAP/SMTP server.
Exchange is a groupware server. It handles calendaring, discussion groups, boards, forums, surveys, forms, and many other things. Like most MS software it is heavily integrated with other MS software such as NT and Outlook, although some of its functions will work in a more open way.
There is no comparison of Exchange and any mail server. If management want groupware (and there ARE good reasons for using it) then Lotus Notes, Exchange, and maybe some of the iPlanet stuff is about all that's available.
My experience of running a trivial (50 user) Exchange setup is that it's a pain in the arse to manage. In particular, its logging is very poor, and the whole architecture is very counterintuitive if you are coming from a Unix background. However, it does seem stable and secure, and has many nice features, and a good API (if you want to control it programmatically).
Outlook, is another pain in the arse, being insecure (open to macro virus abuse), and in my experience it is confusing for users.
If what you need is fully functional groupware, Exchange is probably your best bet. If all you need is email, I'd steer well clear for many many reasons. If, in fact, all management want is to have shared calendars, there ARE some standalone solutions to that, and iPlanet (Netscape...) over some integrated mail/calendar stuff.
Rich, spoilt, person buys nightclub.
on
Hacking The City
·
· Score: 2
Oh give me a break.
Some opinionated rich kid hacker (good hacker, mind you) decides he'd rather have a cool club to invite all his friends too rather than a cool car to show off to all his friends in. And because of this he's changing the world? Or even changing the city?
Big deal. Apparently he thinks the only important thing is making sure young, rich hacker people JUST LIKE HIM have somewhere to go that fits into their oh so cool post-modern e-lifestyle.
Last I went to San Fran there seemed to be some other problems like the real large number of homeless people, the emtpy wastelands of (largely latino??) poor housing and freeways all around the edge of Palo Alto and a billion other things, all of which matter rather more than making sure that the San Fran rich kids scene is just as swell as it can be.
I wonder how much JWZ gives to charity each month....
I know of a bank that once looked at a GPS based security system. The problem was that different countries have different laws on data protection, so it was important that the laptops of it's employees couldn't do certain things (or release certain informatiom) in countries with restrictive (or 'good' as I think of it) data protection laws. Such as the UK.
So, the laptops were fitted with PCMCIA GPS cards, and these were integrated with some of the apps on the laptops. The employee couldn't access some things if they were in the wrong country.
I'm not sure if the project was ever widely released or seen as practical. Obviously it relies on not being able to hack the GPS card, and not getting administrator/root access to the machine.
GPS, fun as it is, is limited. The GPS system is passive and cannot determine the location of GPS devices - unlike, say, the mobile GSM system that CAN determine where mobile phone devices are. Rather, the GPS receiver devices can determine the location of the GPS satellites, and then compute their own location from that data. That makes it rather less useful for proving the location of a GPS receiver.
Also, in my experience of GPS, which is quite good, it is utterly useless at determining altitude. But maybe I've been unlucky with handsets:-)
That's a silly thing to say. We can map the Internet just as well as we can map a country. My OS map of Sussex is about 10 years old, and doesn't show some modern houses and roads. Also, being 1:25,000 scale, it doesn't show some things at all (like individual trees). Does that mean that's it's useless?? Of course not.
Likewise a map of the Internet. Likewise a phone book, or a dictionary, or anything else.
So, maybe the Internet changes faster than physical features or phone numbers, or languages, or anything else you might want to chart and record. That doesn't mean much, it's a degree of error at best, maybe not even that if the mapping technology can keep up.
Geez. I wish people would stop thinking that the Internet was some kind of amazing unstoppable thing that breaks all rules, paradigms and everything else. It's just a bunch of computers on a network. Sure, a big one and a disorganised one, but hey...
It's a battle out there. The battle between net net users' and programmers' desire to be anonymous and private, and their desire (especially the programmers) to log every damn thing that happens.
There seems to be a huge contradiction in the hacker mentality, on the one hand to collect endless log files, traces, data stores, id's, usernames, passwords, tags and the rest of it, and on the other hand to want to remain entirely private, safe behind their screen.
Personally I'd love to remove all the log files. No more http log files analysis. No more SMTP message-id's and paths in the headers. No more off the cuff usenet postings archived for the next n decades and cross referenced by the university userid of the the guy who posted it 6 years ago.
I don't see what's so good about archiving the Internet. It's like having a ten hour meeting where nothing gets decided but hey - we'll be able to see exactly what was said 10 years from now!
If you want it to last, print it out. On non-bleached paper. [Anyone who knows where you can buy unbleached long life printer paper please let me know...].
So, I'm all for Buchanan and it's sleuthing. I'm not convinced they can do all they said they can do, but hey, you leave enough log files lying around and sooner or later someone'll make a living reading through them.
Computers are deterministic. Your 'con' is simply lock picking on a more complex scale. The fact that some logical constructs involving words similar to English are involved is not relevant. When you con someone into opening their house to you they make a voluntary decision. Computers can't do that.
Nonetheless, hacking computers is not equivalent to housebreaking, because no property is interfered with.
Hacking a system and looking around without making any changes or taking any information is, perhaps, closest to the crime of peeping tom or voyeurism in real life.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr, come on! Most reference works start out as comprehensive. Not perfect, but comprehensive. Let's see, the first "Complete works of Shakespeare", was, I bet pretty comprehensive. Maybe an obscure sonnet was missing, added in edition 4. But, no one in the real world is publishing something called "The works of Shakespeare" with 4 plays in and a preface saying that with so many members of the public contributing other works, they hope to have at least 12 plays by edition 2!
The value of reference works is in their comprehensiveness. Who wants a guide to the Java class libraries that just leaves out 400 assorted methods because no-one got round to writing the entries for them? Do you think people would still say it was a useful book? If you were teaching chemistry, would you advice students to pay for a full periodic table of elements, or encourage them to use a free one that still have a few elements missing, but was copyright free!
I currently work for a medical journal (www.bmj.com). I can attest the the value and importance of running expert reviews, medical specialist editors, technical editors, copy editors and the rest of it. You don't get that for free.
The thing about these Encyclopedias is that they are meant to be comprehensive. So far, none of the free ones are. I mean they are nowhere close to it.
So, there are lots of arguments about why it is possible for people to create a free encyc. but the proof of the pudding is, let's face it, in the eating.
So far, there is simply no evidence (regardless of what predictions might be plausible) that these kind of free info repositories work.
The Internet itself (+google) is the closest thing to a free 'as in beer' encyclopaedia.
Free beer is a cool drink that costs you nothing.
Free speech is where you pay a lot of money for a police force to make sure that wierdos get to say things in public without being beaten up by violent stupid people who disagree with them.
Free 'as in beer' software is software that costs you nothing. Free 'as in speech' software is software that you're allowed to fix if it's borked, and call it something else and give it to your friends, and get a warm fuzzy feeling out of it.
Free as in 'from the constraints of rational thought' is the usual mental state of people arguing about free software of either type.
Why is it laughable? It is an encryption mechanism, end of story. It's a perfectly reasonable one, with a number of properties:
1. Very easy to implement (small, fast)
2. Very easy to decrypt ciphertext
3. Trivial to brute-force, has other known weaknesses and attacks (vulnerable to freq. analysis etc).
There are many applications where ROT-13 is a suitable cipher mechanism (profane usenet messages being just one).
I can't be bothered to reply to every lame slashbot remark about ROT-13 here, but I've yet to see anyone indicate precisely where ROT-13 was used and if it was actually used inappropriately or not.
For instance, an eBook might want to use ROT-13 as a child lock so that adult eBooks, even when purchased, could be weakly encrypted by the owner to prevent children reading them.
You are missing the point. It is illegal for someone to trespass, quite regardless of what they break, take or whatever. If they pick the lock on my house, wander about for a bit, then leave, locking the door behind them, it's still illegal. The illegality remains quite regardless of how primitive my lock is, if I left the window wide open or whatever.
Hey, what's with the anti British side swipe in the first paragraph? Is this 4th July national fervour or something?
From: http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html
"Copyright law as we know it began in England in 1710 when the British Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne. The Statute of Anne contained, for the first time in copyright law, legal protection for consumers of copyrighted works by curtailing the term of a copyright thus, preventing a monopoly on the part of the booksellers. It also created a "public domain" for literature by requiring the creation of a new work in order to obtain a copyright, by limiting the length of term of a copyright, and by limiting the rights granted to the copyright owner (print, publish, and sell) so that once purchased the copyright owner does not control the use of the work. The statute also provided for an author's copyright - although the benefit to authors was minimal because in order to be paid for a work an author had to assign the work to a bookseller or publisher. "
Hardly the monarchist instrument of repression the MSNBC starts with...
Jon 'Whingeing Pom' Peterson
For the kind of job I do (Technical Management), formal education doesn't make sense. I have alot of control over how I spend my time, and I find it more effective for me to educate myself. If I come across a conference or seminar or whatever, then I have to make a business case for the cost of me going to that, and that's fine. This kind of ad hoc self education relies on two factors:
1. The company leaves you enough 'free' time in your general plan that you can schedule in your own days for reading XML books or whatever
2. You do the kind of job where it's possible to teach yourself.
Computing seems to be one of the industries in which it is easiest to teach yourself. I don't blame companies for taking advantage of that. As a manager I can also sympathise with not wanting to book employees on long training courses in advance. That two weeks in October may look free now, but by September we may really need that person on the project.
From both learner and manager perspective, I prefer to see a budget for books and journal subscriptions, and enough slack in people's schedules that they can teach themselves.
"Wacka wacka."
/.'s editorial response to this important issue.
Yup, I think that concisely sums up
Can't help thinking that RH is really benefitting from their system integration and consultancy skills. If they did the same stuff for Solaris and other nixes, they'd probably be making alot more money!
Still, things like this have to be good news for Linux:
"Contract signed with BP Oil for support renewal for POS rollout to 2,500 petrol stations across Europe. "
Assuming that the POS systems actually _are_ Linux....
LOL!
/. post I've read in ages :-)
Best
The environmental impact of manufacturing computers is quite high. Just because we think of chip fabs as nice clean places with no smoke stacks doesn't mean they have a low impact.
Chip fabrication consumes quite enormous amounts of water. I've no idea how much energy goes into purifying all that water.
All the devices consume vast amounts of power. Your average webserver draws, say, 1.5 amps. That means a rack of 1 u machines in a data center is getting close to, say 60 amps, errr say 12 kilowatts (UK power). That's 12 kw per rack in a datacenter that, while admittedly not really running at that density throughout, is still drawing a massive amount of power.
Add to that every home PC, all the littel ebooks of the future charging their heavy-metal batteries every night. The power requirements become massive.
Now, because of the massive cost of fabs for chips and so on, there are very few factories in the world for these items. Because of that, they all have to be shipped all over the world, with assocciated use of fossil fuels, not to mention all the disposable packaging consumed each time.
Just out of interest, how old are you?
I think you'll find that needs to be qualified. Possibly 'anywhere else in the world that produces reliable crime statistics', possibly...
These cameras are there to protect the public at large from quite serious criminals, they are not looking into your bedroom at night, or monitoring your normal activities.
Firstly, many of the town center cameras have views into people's rooms, flats above shops etc. Secondly I include 'doing the shopping' and 'walking home' within the category of normal activities, so yes, they are monitoring normal activities.
All games are zero sum in that the sum of the winners and losers is zero. Otherwise, it's called an activity, not a game.
Sports, say football are not zero sum, in that scoring a goal has no effect on the other team's ability to score unlimited goals. But, there is always a winner and loser.
The same is true for modern econics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
Whoaaa, that's the dumbest thing I've heared for a long time. That's like Ford hiring a contract product designer to work on their new car and requiring that the product designer drive a Ford.
Now, if this were, say, the Gimp, looking for a new logo then there'd be _some_ sense in it. It would be like Ford requiring that their travelling sales staff drive Ford cars.
You know, I'd bet that 90% of all Microsoft Marketing output is done on Macs, since that's what most advertising creative departments use. And I bet Microsoft really doesn't care about that because it's looking for an end product that's of high quality, not high ideology.
This has been quite effective for me. Barclays Bank (UK clearing bank) sends quite extreme quantities of junk mail. One day I was so fed up that I took their unsolicited home loan application form and filled it out all the way through, until I got to the signature box, where I just wrote I'VE WASTED YOUR TIME TOO, NOW STOP SENDING ME JUNK MAIL.
I figured some happless employee would have entered all the info on the form and then got to the end and realised it was a wasted effort.
After that, I didn't get any more junk mail from Barclays at all - but it started up again as soon as I moved house.
In my experience, Afterstep has a far bigger marketshare than either KDE or Gnome. Neither KDE nor Gnome appeal at all to people who really want X to simply be a way of running a web browser and lots of terminal windows on a single display. And that does seem to account for alot of people.
:-)
Personally, I find Windows98 a far better way of running lots of terminal sessions and a web browser, but of course you need two machines to make that useful
I'm getting really fed up with this notion that all Open Source software is Linux software. I hate Linux. It's pretty good, but it's not as good as, say, Solaris.
I run KDE on Solaris. It runs just fine. It's great. Everything works just like it does on Linux, only better because, frankly Solaris 2.7 on Sparc is simply more powerful than Linux on anything.
Come to that, I run Apache, Perl, Mailman, and about 20 other well known Open Source packages on Solaris. Gosh! they all work!
So, frankly, I don't give a damn about the Linux desktop and who has control over it. Nor do I care how Linux fares in the eyes of anyone at all.
All I care about is KDE and whether it continues to be considerably better than CDE, which is a pile of crap.
So can we PLEASE keep Linux OUT of every f***ing discussion about software which JUST HAPPENS to run on Linux because Linux JUST HAPPENS to be a clone workalike of Unix.
Thanks,
Jon
I doubt very much that anyone is advocating Exchange simply to use it as an IMAP/SMTP server.
Exchange is a groupware server. It handles calendaring, discussion groups, boards, forums, surveys, forms, and many other things. Like most MS software it is heavily integrated with other MS software such as NT and Outlook, although some of its functions will work in a more open way.
There is no comparison of Exchange and any mail server. If management want groupware (and there ARE good reasons for using it) then Lotus Notes, Exchange, and maybe some of the iPlanet stuff is about all that's available.
My experience of running a trivial (50 user) Exchange setup is that it's a pain in the arse to manage. In particular, its logging is very poor, and the whole architecture is very counterintuitive if you are coming from a Unix background. However, it does seem stable and secure, and has many nice features, and a good API (if you want to control it programmatically).
Outlook, is another pain in the arse, being insecure (open to macro virus abuse), and in my experience it is confusing for users.
If what you need is fully functional groupware, Exchange is probably your best bet. If all you need is email, I'd steer well clear for many many reasons. If, in fact, all management want is to have shared calendars, there ARE some standalone solutions to that, and iPlanet (Netscape...) over some integrated mail/calendar stuff.
Oh give me a break.
Some opinionated rich kid hacker (good hacker, mind you) decides he'd rather have a cool club to invite all his friends too rather than a cool car to show off to all his friends in. And because of this he's changing the world? Or even changing the city?
Big deal. Apparently he thinks the only important thing is making sure young, rich hacker people JUST LIKE HIM have somewhere to go that fits into their oh so cool post-modern e-lifestyle.
Last I went to San Fran there seemed to be some other problems like the real large number of homeless people, the emtpy wastelands of (largely latino??) poor housing and freeways all around the edge of Palo Alto and a billion other things, all of which matter rather more than making sure that the San Fran rich kids scene is just as swell as it can be.
I wonder how much JWZ gives to charity each month....
I know of a bank that once looked at a GPS based security system. The problem was that different countries have different laws on data protection, so it was important that the laptops of it's employees couldn't do certain things (or release certain informatiom) in countries with restrictive (or 'good' as I think of it) data protection laws. Such as the UK.
:-)
So, the laptops were fitted with PCMCIA GPS cards, and these were integrated with some of the apps on the laptops. The employee couldn't access some things if they were in the wrong country.
I'm not sure if the project was ever widely released or seen as practical. Obviously it relies on not being able to hack the GPS card, and not getting administrator/root access to the machine.
GPS, fun as it is, is limited. The GPS system is passive and cannot determine the location of GPS devices - unlike, say, the mobile GSM system that CAN determine where mobile phone devices are. Rather, the GPS receiver devices can determine the location of the GPS satellites, and then compute their own location from that data. That makes it rather less useful for proving the location of a GPS receiver.
Also, in my experience of GPS, which is quite good, it is utterly useless at determining altitude. But maybe I've been unlucky with handsets
Since when was a tv called a boob tube?? A boob tube refers to a figure-hugging tube-like dress.
Has tv replaced sex in the US?? Maybe so...
That's a silly thing to say. We can map the Internet just as well as we can map a country. My OS map of Sussex is about 10 years old, and doesn't show some modern houses and roads. Also, being 1:25,000 scale, it doesn't show some things at all (like individual trees). Does that mean that's it's useless?? Of course not.
Likewise a map of the Internet. Likewise a phone book, or a dictionary, or anything else.
So, maybe the Internet changes faster than physical features or phone numbers, or languages, or anything else you might want to chart and record. That doesn't mean much, it's a degree of error at best, maybe not even that if the mapping technology can keep up.
Geez. I wish people would stop thinking that the Internet was some kind of amazing unstoppable thing that breaks all rules, paradigms and everything else. It's just a bunch of computers on a network. Sure, a big one and a disorganised one, but hey...
It's a battle out there. The battle between net net users' and programmers' desire to be anonymous and private, and their desire (especially the programmers) to log every damn thing that happens.
There seems to be a huge contradiction in the hacker mentality, on the one hand to collect endless log files, traces, data stores, id's, usernames, passwords, tags and the rest of it, and on the other hand to want to remain entirely private, safe behind their screen.
Personally I'd love to remove all the log files. No more http log files analysis. No more SMTP message-id's and paths in the headers. No more off the cuff usenet postings archived for the next n decades and cross referenced by the university userid of the the guy who posted it 6 years ago.
I don't see what's so good about archiving the Internet. It's like having a ten hour meeting where nothing gets decided but hey - we'll be able to see exactly what was said 10 years from now!
If you want it to last, print it out. On non-bleached paper. [Anyone who knows where you can buy unbleached long life printer paper please let me know...].
So, I'm all for Buchanan and it's sleuthing. I'm not convinced they can do all they said they can do, but hey, you leave enough log files lying around and sooner or later someone'll make a living reading through them.
You can't have your cake and eat it!
No, it's not a good analogy.
Computers are deterministic. Your 'con' is simply lock picking on a more complex scale. The fact that some logical constructs involving words similar to English are involved is not relevant. When you con someone into opening their house to you they make a voluntary decision. Computers can't do that.
Nonetheless, hacking computers is not equivalent to housebreaking, because no property is interfered with.
Hacking a system and looking around without making any changes or taking any information is, perhaps, closest to the crime of peeping tom or voyeurism in real life.