And it turns out, because of propositions such as the above, the Bush government is one major PR disaster and every government that associates itself too closely with him get lambasted in election days (Spain, UK, Italy,...)
Nice how you fail to mention Australia in your list, the most obvious counter-example. Georgia seems to not consider Bush's administration a "PR disaster" either.
Also, if I recall, Blair *won* in the UK (admittedly not by much, but that certainly wasn't the result the anti-US crowd wanted). And Spain? Come on...If anything it shows how easily Spain's elections (and electorate) can be swayed by terrorist attacks.
And hey, at least they're having elections in Iraq and Afghanistan now...
It would seem that one obvious solution would be to have some sort of civilian review board that reviews all documents that are to be classified and decides whether or not it's in the public interest to classify those documents as secret and for how long.
On Windows (or Linspire) if the vast majority of users are running with root it presents a much more attactive attack surface. Aside from that, it prevents users from themselves - e.g. stopping some dumb user from cleaning up their machine like deleting etc/ for example.
Well, here's one of those philosophical differences then... Why doesn't 'rm' put forth an extra warning when you delete a directory named "/etc"? Or any of the "system" directory paths known to be important?
cd/ rm -fR etc
*** Deleting the '/etc' directory may cause your computer to be unable to reboot properly and may cause serious loss of data. Are you sure you want to do this? (yes/NO)
It could have a list of directories that it checks again (/etc,/*/usr/local, etc...). Or perhaps a hashed listing of all directories owned by any given package (on RPM-based systems). Someone tries to delete it manually and they get a confirmation like this:
*** The '/usr/local/foo' directory is owned by the foo-devel-3.25-1 package. To remove this directory, you should uninstall the package using rpm instead; manually deleting files may cause your system to fail. Proceed with delete? (yes/NO)
Special warnings could be bypassed with rm -ffR/blah
See this Slashdot thread for more discussion... but basically, why should I have to enter a separate and artificial "mode" in which to do things to my computer? Isn't it the system's fault if it allows me to do something it knows will be "bad" without warning me?
Umm.. this is the NSA we're talking about. I'm sure they're not just putting forth the raw words, but are trying all the common leet-speak variations thereof. And probably word+digit, digit+word and various popular capitalization possibilities. Even with all those variations (maybe 100 for each word) it'll still be a very significant improvement over a brute force attack.
We have a large Japanese-American community here, great weather (even though it's raining outside right now), a decent enough public transit system that you'll be able to get around (for a little bit) until you can get a car - though it won't be fun.
There is a wonderful, relaxing atmosphere here, with a multi-cultural and well-balanced lifestyle. We're also still a military town, with an Army and Marine station in the county, which allows for a nice political balance (not as wacky as LA or SF, but not red-state hickville either).
Internet and technology concerns are wonderful here... lots of cheap bandwidth, 4Mbps to my house for $40/month, and one of the highest concentration of biotech and hi-tech firms in the country.
Things to watch out for are: cost of goods and services; and, especially in SoCal, cost of housing. It's sky-high here, and even many locals are having problems finding affordable places to live.
In exchange for that, you'll get a wonderful location, with tons of amenities, the amazing Balboa Park, Sea World, and Zoo.... and, er, um... great taco shops every 1/4 mile.
Instead of rapidly creating a prototype and trying it out and making sure they are on the right track, they create a massive project and find out way too late that they did not ask for exactly what they needed.
It's the causal daily chatting to a spouse/partner or story-telling to their children that seems confidental that gets them going and can be colourful and can contain lots of details.
Loose lips sink ships. I wish the trolls here would try to understand that very simple concept.
HAL: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
This is really something that, IMHO, calls for more interaction between the best of the futurists, science-fiction writers, and coders, and other complexity thinkers.
In order for any system to have an understanding of and proper diagnosis of its own operation, it needs to be able to conceptualize its relationship to other systems around it. Am I important? What functions do I provide? What level of error is proper to report to my administrator? Do I have a history of hardware problems? Has chip 2341 on motherboard 12 been acting up intermittently? If so, is it getting worse or better? How have I been doing over the last few days? Is there a new virus going around that is similar to something I've had before?
What good is a self-diagnosing system without a memory of its prior actions?
All of these questions imply some sort of context that will require the system to use symbols to represent "things" in the "world" around it. Clearly, the largest (though perhaps not qualitatively different) symbol will be a "self" symbol.
From there, all you have to do is follow Hofstadter's path and you'll arrive at a system with emergent self-awareness or consciousness.
The end result of this will be something a) very complex and b) designed/grown by itself. You'll have either the computer from the U.S.S. Enterprise or H.A.L.
20 years ago, Apple was figuring out how to squeeze a graphical operating system into 128K of RAM. Permanent storage that didn't cost 5 figures was in the 400K range.
In this day of multi-gigabyte OS installs, it's refreshing to see people return to the "lean and mean" OS mentality, even if it's out of necessity. Hell, even 10 years ago, you could still install an entire installation of Mac OS 7.6 on a set of 10-12 floppies.
Those were the days. Nice to see such "hack"ish talent used again.
you ought to be worried about how much damage you can do when you accidentally type something wrong
It's funny how the *nix community generally chastized the classic Mac OS as a "toy" operating system, when it gave the user more power than the recommended operating mode on a standard Linux distro. I'm aware of what I am doing, and take full responsibility for myself and my actions. If I tried to throw away the System Folder on an older Mac, it would ask me if I really wanted to do that -- but it would let me do it without changing to a different (super)"user level."
I'm not sure what you mean by "artificial". Maybe I'm being closed-minded or not thinking for the future, but I still think permission models are a good thing (if only people would use them properly)...
"Artificial" models are those that do not layer onto the environment properly. There is only one person who ever operates my computer (me), so why should I have to create two "user" accounts (me and root)? Why should I be forced into two different identification "modes" when there is only a single person using it?
At the risk of being kicked off Slashdot for being a devil's advocate...;)
If you aren't running as an administrator, which you shouldn't be, it can't install itself. It's the same as Linux or any other OS with a basic user system.
Why shouldn't I be able to run as an administrator on my own machine? It's my computer... I paid for it... I'm the only one using it. If the system is insecure, isn't that the system's fault? Am I to be blamed for operating my computer in a fashion that (*gasp*) allows me to make changes to it when I want without it bitching to me any further?
Think bigger. Think to the future. "Don't log in as root/Don't be an administrator." is NOT an answer. Mac OS 9 and below operated by default in a single-user mode without *any* authentication necessary to make changes and I can list the successful viruses/exploits (especially remote exploits) by hand on a single sheet of paper.
Artificial permission models (where "artificial" means "not needed by the environment") are not panaceas and aren't excuses for poor OS design.
... has his own blog. While not restricted only to polictics (few blogs are), he has a lot of insight into worldly things... I'm especially fond of this piece on the Mainstream Media's waning influence in swinging elections:
American politics, for better or for worse, impact the entire world. We are the only remaining SuperPower, and Slashdot was founded in America.
If you want to discuss your politics, go start your own discussion board (you can even use Slash). Just remember that without the U.S., you wouldn't be passing your TCP packets.
However, the TAM was limited to a 4x CD-ROM drive for precisely that reason. As the parent says, though, I have no idea how much technology has improved for vertically-mounted drives since then.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about:) With normal (non-Sonic) games, you'll get a single bonus level. When you add Sonic 1 to it, you get a progressive game where you can complete some ungodly number of them in a row (I heard it was over 3000). For some reason I find the endless number of the bonus-round-like puzzles to be very relaxing.
When I've been bored, I've been trying to compile a list of the bonus codes (so you can skip to where you left off). If anyone has any additions or knows of any other list, let me know.
God, I remember staying up nights back in 91/92 finishing the Sonic games. It's enough to make me want to go plug the console in right now and spend some time with Sonic&Knuckles + Sonic 1.:-\
It truly was designed for a different era, but has its uses even today. Virtually all weather emergency bulletins are sent out via the EAS protocols today, which doesn't normally affect people in, say, Silicon Valley, but makes a big difference in Tornado Alley and in Florida right now.
A few miles from here there was a fire at a chemical factory in La Mesa, CA... I was sitting there watching something on a high-cable channel when I hear a tone and see scrolling text at the top of the screen advising me to evacuate the area. Thank you EAS, and thank you Cox Cable.
When San Diego had its Cedar Fire in 2003 (largest fire in the history of CA, which altered everyone here's life) the EAS was used by the NWS, FD, and PD to provide information on evacuation across all channels on the cable systems (not sure about the radio, they might have been covering that themselves).
The California Office of Emergency Services has a Emerg. Digital Info Service that uses some of the same technology and protocols as well (includes the much-reknowned AMBER alerts).
Don't think that this is some relic, this is used and tested on at least a weekly basis nationwide (SD Info).
That being said, efforts to modernize and update things are great. I'd like to see some sort of emergency protocol for data packets, similar to the emergency phone service that allows infrastructure workers' phone calls to have priority in the midst of an emergency. There should be a EAS sitatuion website that is update out-of-bounds and is replicated (through some fancy AS routing) to servers all across the country, so it's always accessible. Think of a FEMA-run Akamai.
The company I work for was even considering some way to allow people to have EDIS/EAS alerts pop up (via Messenger service or some other client) whenever they were released for the area they're in (won't work because of all the RFC1918 space they use:\).
Emergency Alert Systems, and Civil Defense systems in general ARE still around, and ARE working within their original intent, but more public attention needs to be brought to them, so that all know about them. It's not so much security, but having more eyes on them will undoubtedly help suggest further improvements.
And I agree with the earlier poster... ANYONE who hacks a system like this deserves the 20 years of time they'll get. That's just dumb. It's on a par with DOSing a 911 call center. Don't do it. You WILL cause loss of life and NO ONE will have any sympathy when you go to prison for a very, very long time. In fact, I'd love to help catch you.
Slashdot Mirror
And it turns out, because of propositions such as the above, the Bush government is one major PR disaster and every government that associates itself too closely with him get lambasted in election days (Spain, UK, Italy,
Nice how you fail to mention Australia in your list, the most obvious counter-example. Georgia seems to not consider Bush's administration a "PR disaster" either.
Also, if I recall, Blair *won* in the UK (admittedly not by much, but that certainly wasn't the result the anti-US crowd wanted). And Spain? Come on...If anything it shows how easily Spain's elections (and electorate) can be swayed by terrorist attacks.
And hey, at least they're having elections in Iraq and Afghanistan now...
Defending yourself against the United States makes you a "bad guy?"
From the perspective of a citizen of the United States, yes.
It would seem that one obvious solution would be to have some sort of civilian review board that reviews all documents that are to be classified and decides whether or not it's in the public interest to classify those documents as secret and for how long.
Isn't that called... a Congress?
(Oversight Committees -- in theory at least...)
TigerDirect sells iPods...
Not for long...
On Windows (or Linspire) if the vast majority of users are running with root it presents a much more attactive attack surface. Aside from that, it prevents users from themselves - e.g. stopping some dumb user from cleaning up their machine like deleting etc/ for example.
/
/* /usr/local, etc...). Or perhaps a hashed listing of all directories owned by any given package (on RPM-based systems). Someone tries to delete it manually and they get a confirmation like this:
/blah
Well, here's one of those philosophical differences then... Why doesn't 'rm' put forth an extra warning when you delete a directory named "/etc"? Or any of the "system" directory paths known to be important?
cd
rm -fR etc
*** Deleting the '/etc' directory may cause your computer to be unable to reboot properly and may cause serious loss of data. Are you sure you want to do this? (yes/NO)
It could have a list of directories that it checks again (/etc,
*** The '/usr/local/foo' directory is owned by the foo-devel-3.25-1 package. To remove this directory, you should uninstall the package using rpm instead; manually deleting files may cause your system to fail. Proceed with delete? (yes/NO)
Special warnings could be bypassed with rm -ffR
See this Slashdot thread for more discussion... but basically, why should I have to enter a separate and artificial "mode" in which to do things to my computer? Isn't it the system's fault if it allows me to do something it knows will be "bad" without warning me?
Just some $.02
No, but I trust the Telegraph a lot more than I'd trust, say, the Guardian!
Umm.. this is the NSA we're talking about. I'm sure they're not just putting forth the raw words, but are trying all the common leet-speak variations thereof. And probably word+digit, digit+word and various popular capitalization possibilities. Even with all those variations (maybe 100 for each word) it'll still be a very significant improvement over a brute force attack.
They've been on the Internet too, you know?
We have a large Japanese-American community here, great weather (even though it's raining outside right now), a decent enough public transit system that you'll be able to get around (for a little bit) until you can get a car - though it won't be fun.
There is a wonderful, relaxing atmosphere here, with a multi-cultural and well-balanced lifestyle. We're also still a military town, with an Army and Marine station in the county, which allows for a nice political balance (not as wacky as LA or SF, but not red-state hickville either).
Internet and technology concerns are wonderful here... lots of cheap bandwidth, 4Mbps to my house for $40/month, and one of the highest concentration of biotech and hi-tech firms in the country.
Things to watch out for are: cost of goods and services; and, especially in SoCal, cost of housing. It's sky-high here, and even many locals are having problems finding affordable places to live.
In exchange for that, you'll get a wonderful location, with tons of amenities, the amazing Balboa Park, Sea World, and Zoo.... and, er, um... great taco shops every 1/4 mile.
Hope this helps...
Sounds like the Feds need some Perl Hackers
Only the smartest and most physically fit. These are not the people who sit around all day watching cheetos and eating TV.
I most certainly hope not! We are not a nation of retards.
Loose lips sink ships. I wish the trolls here would try to understand that very simple concept.
Heh... how do you know they haven't?
This is really something that, IMHO, calls for more interaction between the best of the futurists, science-fiction writers, and coders, and other complexity thinkers.
In order for any system to have an understanding of and proper diagnosis of its own operation, it needs to be able to conceptualize its relationship to other systems around it. Am I important? What functions do I provide? What level of error is proper to report to my administrator? Do I have a history of hardware problems? Has chip 2341 on motherboard 12 been acting up intermittently? If so, is it getting worse or better? How have I been doing over the last few days? Is there a new virus going around that is similar to something I've had before?
What good is a self-diagnosing system without a memory of its prior actions?
All of these questions imply some sort of context that will require the system to use symbols to represent "things" in the "world" around it. Clearly, the largest (though perhaps not qualitatively different) symbol will be a "self" symbol.
From there, all you have to do is follow Hofstadter's path and you'll arrive at a system with emergent self-awareness or consciousness.
The end result of this will be something a) very complex and b) designed/grown by itself. You'll have either the computer from the U.S.S. Enterprise or H.A.L.
Side question: What is CYC doing these days?
Do you mean Eon? If so, I would still love to see that book filmed, even if the Russian-US component would have to be changed (or maybe not?)
If only Greg Bear wrote consistently at quality...
20 years ago, Apple was figuring out how to squeeze a graphical operating system into 128K of RAM. Permanent storage that didn't cost 5 figures was in the 400K range.
In this day of multi-gigabyte OS installs, it's refreshing to see people return to the "lean and mean" OS mentality, even if it's out of necessity. Hell, even 10 years ago, you could still install an entire installation of Mac OS 7.6 on a set of 10-12 floppies.
Those were the days. Nice to see such "hack"ish talent used again.
you ought to be worried about how much damage you can do when you accidentally type something wrong
It's funny how the *nix community generally chastized the classic Mac OS as a "toy" operating system, when it gave the user more power than the recommended operating mode on a standard Linux distro. I'm aware of what I am doing, and take full responsibility for myself and my actions. If I tried to throw away the System Folder on an older Mac, it would ask me if I really wanted to do that -- but it would let me do it without changing to a different (super)"user level."
I'm not sure what you mean by "artificial". Maybe I'm being closed-minded or not thinking for the future, but I still think permission models are a good thing (if only people would use them properly)...
"Artificial" models are those that do not layer onto the environment properly. There is only one person who ever operates my computer (me), so why should I have to create two "user" accounts (me and root)? Why should I be forced into two different identification "modes" when there is only a single person using it?
At the risk of being kicked off Slashdot for being a devil's advocate...
Why shouldn't I be able to run as an administrator on my own machine? It's my computer... I paid for it... I'm the only one using it. If the system is insecure, isn't that the system's fault? Am I to be blamed for operating my computer in a fashion that (*gasp*) allows me to make changes to it when I want without it bitching to me any further?
Think bigger. Think to the future. "Don't log in as root/Don't be an administrator." is NOT an answer. Mac OS 9 and below operated by default in a single-user mode without *any* authentication necessary to make changes and I can list the successful viruses/exploits (especially remote exploits) by hand on a single sheet of paper.
Artificial permission models (where "artificial" means "not needed by the environment") are not panaceas and aren't excuses for poor OS design.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/#154
Other blogs worth checking out:
American politics, for better or for worse, impact the entire world. We are the only remaining SuperPower, and Slashdot was founded in America.
If you want to discuss your politics, go start your own discussion board (you can even use Slash). Just remember that without the U.S., you wouldn't be passing your TCP packets.
However, the TAM was limited to a 4x CD-ROM drive for precisely that reason. As the parent says, though, I have no idea how much technology has improved for vertically-mounted drives since then.
2+2=5, but only for extremely large values of 2.
(thank you TG)
Yeah, I was curious enough to Google some of them after posting that (I hadn't updated my page in several months) and found that. (http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/genesis/file/soni
Yes, that's what I'm talking about
When I've been bored, I've been trying to compile a list of the bonus codes (so you can skip to where you left off). If anyone has any additions or knows of any other list, let me know.
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~cleaver/sonic.html
Take a look at the Open Directory Project's category on it.
God, I remember staying up nights back in 91/92 finishing the Sonic games. It's enough to make me want to go plug the console in right now and spend some time with Sonic&Knuckles + Sonic 1.
It truly was designed for a different era, but has its uses even today. Virtually all weather emergency bulletins are sent out via the EAS protocols today, which doesn't normally affect people in, say, Silicon Valley, but makes a big difference in Tornado Alley and in Florida right now.
A few miles from here there was a fire at a chemical factory in La Mesa, CA... I was sitting there watching something on a high-cable channel when I hear a tone and see scrolling text at the top of the screen advising me to evacuate the area. Thank you EAS, and thank you Cox Cable.
When San Diego had its Cedar Fire in 2003 (largest fire in the history of CA, which altered everyone here's life) the EAS was used by the NWS, FD, and PD to provide information on evacuation across all channels on the cable systems (not sure about the radio, they might have been covering that themselves).
The California Office of Emergency Services has a Emerg. Digital Info Service that uses some of the same technology and protocols as well (includes the much-reknowned AMBER alerts).
Don't think that this is some relic, this is used and tested on at least a weekly basis nationwide (SD Info).
That being said, efforts to modernize and update things are great. I'd like to see some sort of emergency protocol for data packets, similar to the emergency phone service that allows infrastructure workers' phone calls to have priority in the midst of an emergency. There should be a EAS sitatuion website that is update out-of-bounds and is replicated (through some fancy AS routing) to servers all across the country, so it's always accessible. Think of a FEMA-run Akamai.
The company I work for was even considering some way to allow people to have EDIS/EAS alerts pop up (via Messenger service or some other client) whenever they were released for the area they're in (won't work because of all the RFC1918 space they use
Emergency Alert Systems, and Civil Defense systems in general ARE still around, and ARE working within their original intent, but more public attention needs to be brought to them, so that all know about them. It's not so much security, but having more eyes on them will undoubtedly help suggest further improvements.
And I agree with the earlier poster... ANYONE who hacks a system like this deserves the 20 years of time they'll get. That's just dumb. It's on a par with DOSing a 911 call center. Don't do it. You WILL cause loss of life and NO ONE will have any sympathy when you go to prison for a very, very long time. In fact, I'd love to help catch you.