They are probably doing exactly the sort of thing you suggest, and it turned out to be highly correlated to winners instead of "should be sufficiently rare".
One problem is that saying "should be sufficiently rare" isn't an analysis: it's a guess based on your personal expectations. "This system is so complex it must be equal to random" has never worked out well for cryptography, either. The lottery algorithms really need to be vetted by experts.
How about you do the very tiniest bit of legwork and RTFA? He explains his method so clearly that his 8 year old daughter was able to understand it. And he says that lotteries continue to produce games with statistical flaws, and that his simple analytical method keeps working, it just doesn't pay out with as high a probability.
You can figure it all out from his article, and he's not even asking for a cut. But I'm sure he'd appreciate the 50/50 split if you voluntarily sent it to him!
It all seems kind of tragic. Where are the public efforts to make technology help people now instead of just classes in how to use Microsoft office?
Honestly, helping people learn to use Office isn't the worst thing ever. Most people aren't programmers, can't be programmers, and never will be programmers; trying to teach them something like database structures or object oriented principles would be like trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time, and annoys the pig. But teach them something they can use, like how to put together a coherent letter, or how to create a household budget in Excel, and at least some benefit comes out of it.
What Minnesota did with MECC in the 1970s did was noble and admirable. They succeeded in inculcating a lifelong interest in computers in thousands of kids; at a time in our nation's history when computers were known only as terrifying machines that could ruin your life by sending you punch-card utility bills with "computer errors" demanding millions of dollars due by February 15th. (See Brazil by Terry Gilliam, or Colossus: the Forbin Project for public attitudes towards computers of the era.) Lots of those MECC kids went on to become technology industry leaders, programmers, and engineers. It was a huge boost to those of us fortunate enough to seize the opportunity, and beneficial to the state overall.
But those same opportunities are now widespread, and available to anyone with a browser. Running another public effort today would not accomplish anything delivering the same level of result for the same level of spending, at least not with a simple investment in computers. Biotech, nano machines, green living, robotics, none of those are going to transform the world the way the Information Revolution just did. We might be able to spark some interest, but it won't be the same.
Most of those programs were written by students or other users of the MECC system, not by MECC employees. I wouldn't call them "MECC software".
I'm pretty sure XTALK was written entirely in COMPASS. WEST was a chat program like XTALK with a Western flair, but it was written in FORTRAN, and as I learned as I was adding stuff to it, the FORTRAN generated code was nowhere near as efficient as the assembler code used in XTALK and MTC. The MULTI subsystem ran in very high priority (near real-time) on the host and so it had protections in it to abort any task that took over 0.5 seconds of CPU time. Remember *PREMATURE TASK ABORT*? Trying to add CPU-intensive stuff (searching the input data for bad words, for example) took so much time that the app became a lot less stable.
And I again played Oregon Trail in...had to be '92? obviously not on a MECC.
MECC was the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, not the brand of terminal. In 1974 or 1975 the terminal was likely a Teletype ASR 33; later on the schools started purchasing ASR 43s. MECC operated two different mainframe computers, starting with a UNIVAC 1100, and later replacing it with a CDC Cyber 73. They were made accessible via dialup modem lines to all the schools in Minnesota. MECC also developed educational software, part of which is the history explained in TFA.
By the time you were playing Oregon Trail in 1992, you were likely on the PC version. While it was an N-th generation rewrite, the story and the history came from the same roots as that original version I remember playing as a grade school student.
Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.
And maybe it did.
Do you know for an absolute fact that the ribbon negatively impacted the vast majority of users of Office? Or is that your opinion, based on your samples of friends and family and/or Slashdot comments?
I learned a long time ago that while I may have a strong opinion on design choices, my opinion rarely meshes with the vast majority of the population. I am not a representative sample, and my peer group doesn't consist of too many people who are representative samples, either.
Remember that stupid talking dog assistant thing that infested Office (Office XP or Office 2003, I never remember which)? I thought since every self-respecting nerd thought it an abomination that the whole world also would hate it. Well, turns out they didn't. I was stunned to learn just how many people loved it and complained bitterly when it was turned off.
In this case some people didn't like the ribbon, or having to learn something new, but it turns out most of them love it. They really don't care about the academic arguments of screen real estate, or pure menus, or large icons, or learning something new. They spent a few minutes getting used to it, discovered that it's actually a very useful tool, and they moved on.
I'm willing to bet that, like me, you spent more time complaining about the forced change than you actually did learning the ribbon. It turns out that our assumptions about what's collectively "good" and "bad" are not always correct.
Benevolent Dictator is fine for a while, but it's not scalable and it's not maintainable.
With luck, a successful product can have enough of a following to grow a foundation that will keep it open. It's worked well for Apache and Mozilla, but of course those are two of the most successful open source products ever.
But a benevolent dictator can get spread so thin that his or her actual control is all but gone. A benevolent dictator can abdicate (or die) at any time, leaving a power vacuum that may never get filled before the product dies, or can result in a struggle between senior maintainers. And sometimes they just get tired and sell out for the profit.
Linus has been a golden exception. But how long will he be around? This is his third decade of Linux. Will he remain devoted for 20 more years, or will he step in front of a bus tomorrow? And who would take his place, Shuttleworth?
If you want to see how this goes down, watch what happens to Apple now that Jobs' health is on the wane again. They very much run well only under his benevolent dictatorship, and, while I'm not wishing ill on him, his health problems sound insurmountable. There's no mini-Steve Jobs waiting in the wings; but I bet there are a dozen neo-Gil Amelios all champing at the bit, waiting for their chance to ride that pony all the way to the bottom. And next time, there will be no Turtlenecked-One to save them from their swan dive.
Because an Android phone is no guarantee of an open platform, either. I was really hoping the OpenMoko FreeRunner was going to go somewhere, but it never made it to "ready for prime time" status.
AN OPEN LETTER TO CHINA By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to CHINA
To me, the most critical thing in the CHINA market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a CHINESE computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the CHINA market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the CHINA market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to CHINA makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of CHINESE must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What CHINESE can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in CHINESE software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to CHINA. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on CHINESE software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give CHINA a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the CHINA market with good software.
No, because the "ordinary" people will never care. These are the people who bought an iPhone 4 even though they had a perfectly serviceable iPhone 3GS, that they bought to replace their iPhone 2, that replaced their iPod Touch. Instead of a replacement battery, they will buy an iPhone 5.
Apple is counting on it, and so is Wall Street. And so far, they're right. Apple stock has proven wildly profitable, based on this model.
As I said, I can no longer stomach the lockdown. Not that just any other brand of phone is an improvement (Motorola is out of the running because of their fusible link that bricks the phone if you try to install an unsigned operating system) but there are alternatives that are more open than others, and I will be ensuring my future dollars don't go to fuel anybody's WardenWare(TM) phone.
I kind of figure the expiration dates on medicines are legal CYAs. Let's say you still have a bottle of Vioxx in your medicine cabinet, and it expired in 2002. Well guess what: Vioxx has been linked to heart failures since it was produced, and was pulled off the market for safety reasons. If you respected the expiration date, and said "I think I'll ask the doctor to sell me fresh medicine", the doctor and/or pharmacist would be able to tell you to throw away the Vioxx you already have because it might kill you.
That's the only justification I can possibly come up with for printing expiring dates on otherwise stable compounds.
No, they're still not making their loyal customers mad enough. The ordinary iPod/iPhone/iPad carrying schmoe doesn't care at all about the screws. And the true loyalists will proclaim stupid crap like "pentalobular screws are superior to Phillips screws in that they can't be accidentally removed."
As far as their "disloyal" customers go, this isn't the tipping point either. Most of us have already purchased our last Apple product ever, after having been thoroughly disgusted by the walled garden. If the only "lock out" Apple ever did was to use non-standard screws, I'd still be happy with them. Instead, I have to play the jailbreak game, dodging update bullets and ignoring new app updates that aren't compatible with 3.1.2.
So ICANN should issue a.riaa gTLD, and give the RIAA the authority to be the regsitrar.
Then everyone business and and ISP on the planet could block.riaa resolution, keeping us safe from being subjected to lawsuits for infringing their rights by looking at their content.
When I was a kid, I had a dog that could follow a parabolic trajectory. By throwing the ball at an angle to roll along the angled roof of our house, its trajectory would follow the arc and drop down at a point further down the yard.
The dog learned to anticipate where the ball would fall from the roof, even though she couldn't see the ball from her vantage point on the ground.
It has never been proven that Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges where damaged by Stuxnet. The Iranians deny it. I wouldn't rely on the NYT for information about such topics. It might well be a propaganda spin.
Ahmadinejad admitted the worm had affected Iran's uranium enrichment. "They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts," the president said. "They did a bad thing. Fortunately our experts discovered that, and today they are not able [to do that] anymore."
That means very little, other than that you probably shouldn't rely on an Iranian news source for actual news about Iran.
Especially with all the calls recently saying how we need to be prepared for cyberwar. If this is true, we are more than prepared for it: we are doing it.
There is a difference between being able to attack and being able to defend. The US, Israel, China and Russia are apparently able to mount attacks quite well but the development of "armor" has lagged significantly.
You probably would have been interested in hearing General Hayden's keynote to Blackhat last year. In it, he explained how U.S. cyber* warfare policies are aligned with existing organizations. Cyber defense falls to the DHS. Cyber attack is in the purview of the armed forces. Cyber espionage is assigned to the intel organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.) And then he pointed out that attacks, defense, and espionage are all varying facets of exactly the same things.
*He also stated that he thinks "cyber" is a stupid name for this domain, but it's the one we're stuck with.
Looking at the likely result of this attack I cannot possibly see how anyone would wish to let the Iranians know about the intelligence source for the sake of some minor inconvenience to the Iranian program.
I wouldn't qualify it as a "minor inconvenience." The Pakistanis made the few thousands of P-1 centrifuges that exist prior to the embargo on the parts used to make them, and sold them to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. When Libya gave up their nuclear ambitions, they turned their centrifuges over to the West. According to TFA's guess, the USA shared some with England and Israel for the purpose of testing them for weaknesses in order to figure out an effective method of sabotage. Also according to TFA, 984 Iranian centrifuges were destroyed by Stuxnet. It's estimated that they only have a few thousand, so this is a significant reduction of their overall enrichment capability.
In addition, the second payload of Stuxnet (which did not appear to have the intended effect) appears to have been targeting the reactor at Buheshr. Disassembly of the control codes indicated the worm was intended to overspeed the turbine in such a way that it would destroy itself. That also would not have qualified as a "minor inconvenience".
Someone else also posed the theory that some of the behaviors of Stuxnet were provided as cover for the inside agent. After spending the enormous amounts of money required to develop Stuxnet, would they really leave it to chance that the worm would somehow find its way into the Natanz industrial control systems? By making the behavior of the worm such that it has a plausible way to get onto the Siemens controller, the agent could have simply stuck an infected USB stick directly into that machine, and let the worm propagate all over anyway. Or maybe the agent just infected one machine in the plant, but inside the firewall. Because of the stealthy nature of the worm, there is no way to prove which direction the attack came from.
By the way, all the pundits saying it would take the resources of a government to create that worm know very little about what it actually takes to make one. It did however take very intimate knowledge of the code running on those systems, so the creator probably has a copy of the source code on those machines, or the equivalent. (I'm pretty sure it's too large to be memorized by a single person.)
Did you RTFA? It claims Israel acquired some of the centrifuges that Iran is using, got them working, then tested the worm's effect on them. That's a lot more than the resources of Joe Hacker. Not just anyone can run down to Pakistani-Centrifuges-R-Us and buy a dozen of them to test with.
When you look at the instructions Stuxnet was sending to the centrifuges, they're brilliantly designed exactly to cause them to fail. After lurking for a couple weeks, they over-speed them for a few minutes, then drop them down to almost stopped speed, then bring them back to a fairly normal operating speed. The overspeed period stresses the already stressed components, occasionally beyond the breaking point. The underspeed periods act like a mixer, stirring up any U-238 that had already been spun out of suspension. Returning them to normal speed allayed suspicion that they were faulty.
There is no way one guy is going to know exactly what values it would take to create such a precise scenario. It takes massive resources to pull that off.
Someone had an interesting theory that the USB-autorun flaw that Stuxnet exploited was added to the worm as part of a cover-up. If the attackers were going to the trouble of investing millions of dollars in creating Stuxnet, they probably didn't want to leave it to chance that the Natanz plant would get infected. They'd want to be absolutely sure. So they gave the worm to a sympathetic inside agent, who made sure it got onto the control system. The worm's activity provided the cover, and made it possible for the agent to plant it without risking personal discovery.
Slashdot Mirror
They are probably doing exactly the sort of thing you suggest, and it turned out to be highly correlated to winners instead of "should be sufficiently rare".
One problem is that saying "should be sufficiently rare" isn't an analysis: it's a guess based on your personal expectations. "This system is so complex it must be equal to random" has never worked out well for cryptography, either. The lottery algorithms really need to be vetted by experts.
How about you do the very tiniest bit of legwork and RTFA? He explains his method so clearly that his 8 year old daughter was able to understand it. And he says that lotteries continue to produce games with statistical flaws, and that his simple analytical method keeps working, it just doesn't pay out with as high a probability.
You can figure it all out from his article, and he's not even asking for a cut. But I'm sure he'd appreciate the 50/50 split if you voluntarily sent it to him!
It all seems kind of tragic. Where are the public efforts to make technology help people now instead of just classes in how to use Microsoft office?
Honestly, helping people learn to use Office isn't the worst thing ever. Most people aren't programmers, can't be programmers, and never will be programmers; trying to teach them something like database structures or object oriented principles would be like trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time, and annoys the pig. But teach them something they can use, like how to put together a coherent letter, or how to create a household budget in Excel, and at least some benefit comes out of it.
What Minnesota did with MECC in the 1970s did was noble and admirable. They succeeded in inculcating a lifelong interest in computers in thousands of kids; at a time in our nation's history when computers were known only as terrifying machines that could ruin your life by sending you punch-card utility bills with "computer errors" demanding millions of dollars due by February 15th. (See Brazil by Terry Gilliam, or Colossus: the Forbin Project for public attitudes towards computers of the era.) Lots of those MECC kids went on to become technology industry leaders, programmers, and engineers. It was a huge boost to those of us fortunate enough to seize the opportunity, and beneficial to the state overall.
But those same opportunities are now widespread, and available to anyone with a browser. Running another public effort today would not accomplish anything delivering the same level of result for the same level of spending, at least not with a simple investment in computers. Biotech, nano machines, green living, robotics, none of those are going to transform the world the way the Information Revolution just did. We might be able to spark some interest, but it won't be the same.
Most of those programs were written by students or other users of the MECC system, not by MECC employees. I wouldn't call them "MECC software".
I'm pretty sure XTALK was written entirely in COMPASS. WEST was a chat program like XTALK with a Western flair, but it was written in FORTRAN, and as I learned as I was adding stuff to it, the FORTRAN generated code was nowhere near as efficient as the assembler code used in XTALK and MTC. The MULTI subsystem ran in very high priority (near real-time) on the host and so it had protections in it to abort any task that took over 0.5 seconds of CPU time. Remember *PREMATURE TASK ABORT*? Trying to add CPU-intensive stuff (searching the input data for bad words, for example) took so much time that the app became a lot less stable.
And I again played Oregon Trail in...had to be '92? obviously not on a MECC.
MECC was the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, not the brand of terminal. In 1974 or 1975 the terminal was likely a Teletype ASR 33; later on the schools started purchasing ASR 43s. MECC operated two different mainframe computers, starting with a UNIVAC 1100, and later replacing it with a CDC Cyber 73. They were made accessible via dialup modem lines to all the schools in Minnesota. MECC also developed educational software, part of which is the history explained in TFA.
By the time you were playing Oregon Trail in 1992, you were likely on the PC version. While it was an N-th generation rewrite, the story and the history came from the same roots as that original version I remember playing as a grade school student.
FULL BELLIES TONIGHT!
...heal thyself!
Engineer - repair thyself!
When I read that Amazon was going to "Lure Spammers" I was hoping they meant "into pit traps, filled with tigers."
Boy, was I disappointed.
Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.
And maybe it did.
Do you know for an absolute fact that the ribbon negatively impacted the vast majority of users of Office? Or is that your opinion, based on your samples of friends and family and/or Slashdot comments?
I learned a long time ago that while I may have a strong opinion on design choices, my opinion rarely meshes with the vast majority of the population. I am not a representative sample, and my peer group doesn't consist of too many people who are representative samples, either.
Remember that stupid talking dog assistant thing that infested Office (Office XP or Office 2003, I never remember which)? I thought since every self-respecting nerd thought it an abomination that the whole world also would hate it. Well, turns out they didn't. I was stunned to learn just how many people loved it and complained bitterly when it was turned off.
In this case some people didn't like the ribbon, or having to learn something new, but it turns out most of them love it. They really don't care about the academic arguments of screen real estate, or pure menus, or large icons, or learning something new. They spent a few minutes getting used to it, discovered that it's actually a very useful tool, and they moved on.
I'm willing to bet that, like me, you spent more time complaining about the forced change than you actually did learning the ribbon. It turns out that our assumptions about what's collectively "good" and "bad" are not always correct.
Benevolent Dictator is fine for a while, but it's not scalable and it's not maintainable.
With luck, a successful product can have enough of a following to grow a foundation that will keep it open. It's worked well for Apache and Mozilla, but of course those are two of the most successful open source products ever.
But a benevolent dictator can get spread so thin that his or her actual control is all but gone. A benevolent dictator can abdicate (or die) at any time, leaving a power vacuum that may never get filled before the product dies, or can result in a struggle between senior maintainers. And sometimes they just get tired and sell out for the profit.
Linus has been a golden exception. But how long will he be around? This is his third decade of Linux. Will he remain devoted for 20 more years, or will he step in front of a bus tomorrow? And who would take his place, Shuttleworth?
If you want to see how this goes down, watch what happens to Apple now that Jobs' health is on the wane again. They very much run well only under his benevolent dictatorship, and, while I'm not wishing ill on him, his health problems sound insurmountable. There's no mini-Steve Jobs waiting in the wings; but I bet there are a dozen neo-Gil Amelios all champing at the bit, waiting for their chance to ride that pony all the way to the bottom. And next time, there will be no Turtlenecked-One to save them from their swan dive.
Because an Android phone is no guarantee of an open platform, either. I was really hoping the OpenMoko FreeRunner was going to go somewhere, but it never made it to "ready for prime time" status.
AN OPEN LETTER TO CHINA
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to CHINA
To me, the most critical thing in the CHINA market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a CHINESE computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the CHINA market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the CHINA market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to CHINA makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of CHINESE must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What CHINESE can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in CHINESE software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to CHINA. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on CHINESE software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give CHINA a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the CHINA market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
No, because the "ordinary" people will never care. These are the people who bought an iPhone 4 even though they had a perfectly serviceable iPhone 3GS, that they bought to replace their iPhone 2, that replaced their iPod Touch. Instead of a replacement battery, they will buy an iPhone 5.
Apple is counting on it, and so is Wall Street. And so far, they're right. Apple stock has proven wildly profitable, based on this model.
As I said, I can no longer stomach the lockdown. Not that just any other brand of phone is an improvement (Motorola is out of the running because of their fusible link that bricks the phone if you try to install an unsigned operating system) but there are alternatives that are more open than others, and I will be ensuring my future dollars don't go to fuel anybody's WardenWare(TM) phone.
I kind of figure the expiration dates on medicines are legal CYAs. Let's say you still have a bottle of Vioxx in your medicine cabinet, and it expired in 2002. Well guess what: Vioxx has been linked to heart failures since it was produced, and was pulled off the market for safety reasons. If you respected the expiration date, and said "I think I'll ask the doctor to sell me fresh medicine", the doctor and/or pharmacist would be able to tell you to throw away the Vioxx you already have because it might kill you.
That's the only justification I can possibly come up with for printing expiring dates on otherwise stable compounds.
No, they're still not making their loyal customers mad enough. The ordinary iPod/iPhone/iPad carrying schmoe doesn't care at all about the screws. And the true loyalists will proclaim stupid crap like "pentalobular screws are superior to Phillips screws in that they can't be accidentally removed."
As far as their "disloyal" customers go, this isn't the tipping point either. Most of us have already purchased our last Apple product ever, after having been thoroughly disgusted by the walled garden. If the only "lock out" Apple ever did was to use non-standard screws, I'd still be happy with them. Instead, I have to play the jailbreak game, dodging update bullets and ignoring new app updates that aren't compatible with 3.1.2.
So ICANN should issue a .riaa gTLD, and give the RIAA the authority to be the regsitrar.
Then everyone business and and ISP on the planet could block .riaa resolution, keeping us safe from being subjected to lawsuits for infringing their rights by looking at their content.
Brilliant!
+5, pedantic AND funny!
An "Angry Birds" movie? Look, I love the game, I really do. But a movie? Please no.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMltvlqEM54
It's less than three minutes, and completely hilarious. Warning: audio contains the 'F-bomb' and you may not consider it SFW.
I think it's exactly the right length for an "Angry Birds" movie.
When I was a kid, I had a dog that could follow a parabolic trajectory. By throwing the ball at an angle to roll along the angled roof of our house, its trajectory would follow the arc and drop down at a point further down the yard.
The dog learned to anticipate where the ball would fall from the roof, even though she couldn't see the ball from her vantage point on the ground.
It has never been proven that Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges where damaged by Stuxnet. The Iranians deny it. I wouldn't rely on the NYT for information about such topics. It might well be a propaganda spin.
That's funny, because the president of Iran admitted it. He said
That means very little, other than that you probably shouldn't rely on an Iranian news source for actual news about Iran.
Especially with all the calls recently saying how we need to be prepared for cyberwar. If this is true, we are more than prepared for it: we are doing it.
There is a difference between being able to attack and being able to defend. The US, Israel, China and Russia are apparently able to mount attacks quite well but the development of "armor" has lagged significantly.
You probably would have been interested in hearing General Hayden's keynote to Blackhat last year. In it, he explained how U.S. cyber* warfare policies are aligned with existing organizations. Cyber defense falls to the DHS. Cyber attack is in the purview of the armed forces. Cyber espionage is assigned to the intel organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.) And then he pointed out that attacks, defense, and espionage are all varying facets of exactly the same things.
*He also stated that he thinks "cyber" is a stupid name for this domain, but it's the one we're stuck with.
Looking at the likely result of this attack I cannot possibly see how anyone would wish to let the Iranians know about the intelligence source for the sake of some minor inconvenience to the Iranian program.
I wouldn't qualify it as a "minor inconvenience." The Pakistanis made the few thousands of P-1 centrifuges that exist prior to the embargo on the parts used to make them, and sold them to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. When Libya gave up their nuclear ambitions, they turned their centrifuges over to the West. According to TFA's guess, the USA shared some with England and Israel for the purpose of testing them for weaknesses in order to figure out an effective method of sabotage. Also according to TFA, 984 Iranian centrifuges were destroyed by Stuxnet. It's estimated that they only have a few thousand, so this is a significant reduction of their overall enrichment capability.
In addition, the second payload of Stuxnet (which did not appear to have the intended effect) appears to have been targeting the reactor at Buheshr. Disassembly of the control codes indicated the worm was intended to overspeed the turbine in such a way that it would destroy itself. That also would not have qualified as a "minor inconvenience".
Someone else also posed the theory that some of the behaviors of Stuxnet were provided as cover for the inside agent. After spending the enormous amounts of money required to develop Stuxnet, would they really leave it to chance that the worm would somehow find its way into the Natanz industrial control systems? By making the behavior of the worm such that it has a plausible way to get onto the Siemens controller, the agent could have simply stuck an infected USB stick directly into that machine, and let the worm propagate all over anyway. Or maybe the agent just infected one machine in the plant, but inside the firewall. Because of the stealthy nature of the worm, there is no way to prove which direction the attack came from.
True. It took 8 years to get rid of the previous religious radicals, thieves and thugs, and 8 years to get rid of the thieves and thugs prior to them.
It seems we're pretty much stuck with the thieves and thugs model, too.
By the way, all the pundits saying it would take the resources of a government to create that worm know very little about what it actually takes to make one. It did however take very intimate knowledge of the code running on those systems, so the creator probably has a copy of the source code on those machines, or the equivalent. (I'm pretty sure it's too large to be memorized by a single person.)
Did you RTFA? It claims Israel acquired some of the centrifuges that Iran is using, got them working, then tested the worm's effect on them. That's a lot more than the resources of Joe Hacker. Not just anyone can run down to Pakistani-Centrifuges-R-Us and buy a dozen of them to test with.
When you look at the instructions Stuxnet was sending to the centrifuges, they're brilliantly designed exactly to cause them to fail. After lurking for a couple weeks, they over-speed them for a few minutes, then drop them down to almost stopped speed, then bring them back to a fairly normal operating speed. The overspeed period stresses the already stressed components, occasionally beyond the breaking point. The underspeed periods act like a mixer, stirring up any U-238 that had already been spun out of suspension. Returning them to normal speed allayed suspicion that they were faulty.
There is no way one guy is going to know exactly what values it would take to create such a precise scenario. It takes massive resources to pull that off.
Someone had an interesting theory that the USB-autorun flaw that Stuxnet exploited was added to the worm as part of a cover-up. If the attackers were going to the trouble of investing millions of dollars in creating Stuxnet, they probably didn't want to leave it to chance that the Natanz plant would get infected. They'd want to be absolutely sure. So they gave the worm to a sympathetic inside agent, who made sure it got onto the control system. The worm's activity provided the cover, and made it possible for the agent to plant it without risking personal discovery.
An interesting theory, anyway.