The cached server approach seems to be a really, really bad idea. But it also seems like it's going to happen first and that bothers me. To us this naturally sounds bad because of all the obvious reasons but don't be surprised if some of the airlines buy into this garbage. After all, look what AOL is able to sell under the guise of technology.
I guarantee the server's cache isn't going to have what I want on it. What you end up with is a situation where there are a lot of captive eyeballs on airplanes every year and surprise, surprise, there are people out there who want to dictate what those eyeballs will see. Sounds like a perfect world scenario for the likes of Time Warner (speaking of AOL).
Some email connectivity may be better than none at all, however. I suspect that once the technology is in place customer demand and preference will eventually force the airlines to switch over to providing true real-time internet connecions. But if Terzen is able to sell their junk the time frame will end up being later rather than sooner. With the entrenched hubris of airline management today it will be years before any airline that uses the Terzen system realizes that their system sucks. Their short-term evaluation of a cached server system will lead them to conclude that "Gee, the Internet isn't as popular as we thought."
If they conclude that the time frame for true internet connectivity will only be pushed even further out into the future. Having said all that, I'd want to buy into Terzen's IPO and then sell out 6 months later and short the stock as much as I could. Their technology sucks and long-term is doomed to failure.
Just look at the first couple of lines of the press release:
RSA Security Releases RSA Encryption Algorithm into Public Domain
"c = me mod n" Made Available Two Weeks Early
This basically says "We patented this equation". The whole fiasco surrounding software and business patents is going to get really ugly. At some point the ridiculousness of these kinds of patents will become obvious, even to the many judges in the US that have their heads planted firmly up their rectums. If we could get the politicians to get their hands out of the lobyists' pockets things would move along even faster.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:
2 + 2 = 4 patent pending
And boy, are you all gonna pay for using that. Anyone who has ever said that without getting a license from me will be really sorry.
"We're suing you for millions.... but we don't want to embarass you". Any doubt as to why Apple seems to be such a schizophrenic company and has had a hard time finding its way? Some vision.
I previewed the damn post, confirmed it and then noticed an apparent contradiction! The information was first leaked by relatives and then indirectly confirmed by many who work in the City.
Here's why I believe the information supposedly "leaked" on the CBS site is bogus:
I live on Long Island in a town called Massapequa where Sean grew up. The word on the street here is that Sean will be the sole survivor. This information made its way via the many people who live on Long Island and work in Manhattan where Madison Avenue is the home of many huge advertising firms, and also home to CBS.
Reports in the local and NYC newspapers have taken note of this information floating around and there has been no refutation of it by CBS. While you would expect them to have no comment either way on any leaks, if you assume the information is accurate and that Sean is the winner, it makes sense for CBS to try to keep interest up in the show by presenting a plausible alternative. It's not much of a stretch IMO for a corporate network to distribute disinformation in an effort to shore up its sagging ratings and advertising revenues. If everyone knows who wins, interest approaches zero.
By the way, Sean now lives several towns away from Massapequa. The information we've been hearing comes from his relatives who still live here. Unofficially, of course!
This may be semantics, but the earth's atmosphere doesn't have a bandwidth capacity per se. While the atmosphere certainly affects the propagation of certain frequency bands, the atmosphere doesn't provide the bandwidth and therefore can't be said to have a capacity. The proagation of electromagnetic radiation through space is, as far as we know, the same throughout the universe. It's not a function of the atmosphere. I hope you knew this already and I just misinterpreted your question!
The new century is in for some nastiness
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 3
In America it's said that people vote with their pocketbooks. I don't see anyone rushing to pledge their fortunes anymore for the idea of liberty. Here's where I see our net freedoms going:
France wants to ban Nazi items. Australia wants to ban porno. America wants to ban gambling over the net and drug-related information. China wants to ban all criticism. God only knows what Iraq will want to ban when it finally gets its shit together.
It's pretty easy to see where this is all going to end up in a few years. There WILL be some sort of international treaty where all signatories agree to implement and enforce these bans. ISPs will be licensed and audited. Separate licenses will be required for T1 (and other high speed) backbone connections to the net. There's really only a handful of really big nodes in the US and probably the same is true in most countries. MAE EAST and MAE WEST anyone? Add in a dose of protect-the-children and anti-terrorism hysteria and kick it up a few notches with organized crime fears, Intellectual Property wars and BAM! it becomes all too clear. People, i.e. the Governments, will demand this wholesale control over who sees what. And the people who make those decisions will have absolutely no idea what they're doing or talking about. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
We, the enlightened ones, won't be able to stop it. We can't stop the RIAA or the MPAA. We're losing the DeCSS battle on the DVD front. Napster might be doomed, for all we know. The companies that have the money will get their way like dingos in a day-care center and THAT will set the precedents. Once the technical means are in place to impose content filtering on a large scale, then the really radical do-gooders will follow in their footsteps and screw it up but good.
I hate to say it but the Geeks and privacy activists and defense-of-rights groups are going to be left out in the cold like one-legged men in an ass kicking contest. Unless people start taking stuff like liberty seriously.
France wants to ban Nazi items. Australia wants to ban porno. America wants to ban gambling over the net and drug-related information. China wants to ban criticism. God only knows what Iraq will want to ban when it finally gets its shit together.
It's pretty easy to see where this is all going to end up in a few years. There WILL be some sort of international treaty where all signatories agree to implement and enforce these bans. ISPs will be licensed and audited. Separate licenses will be required for T1 (and other high speed) backbone connections to the net. There's really only a handful of really big nodes in the US and probably the same is true in most countries. MAE EAST and MAE WEST anyone? Add in a dose of protect-the-children and anti-terrorism hysteria and kick it up a few notches with organized crime fears and Intellectual Property wars and it becomes all too clear. People, i.e. the Governments, will demand this wholesale control over who sees what. And the people who make those decisions will have absolutely no idea what they're doing or talking about. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
We, the enlightened ones, won't be able to stop it. We can't stop the RIAA or the MPAA. We're losing the DeCSS battle on the DVD front. Napster might be doomed, for all we know. The companies that have the money will get their way like dingos in a day-care center and THAT will set the precedents. Once the technical means are in place to impose content filtering on a large scale, then the really radical do-gooders will follow in their path and screw it up but good.
I hate to say it but the Geeks and privacy activists and defense-of-rights groups are going to be left out in the cold like one-legged men in an ass kicking contest.
Whenever you see a reference to a NYT article remember this: Replace "www" with "partners" in the URL and voila! No login required. Here's the article without needing to login.
Attorney-Client privilege is one of the most sacred tenets of our judicial system. It's what allows you to tell your lawyer "Yes, I did it" and prevents the other side from forcing him to testify that you confessed. It means you can reveal things to your lawyer you wouldn't want anyone else to find out and not worry about reprecussions. Normally in a case - civil or criminal - your opposition can compel you to produce all sorts of information, documents, records, etc. You might not want to give them any "ammunition" but the law says you must. Privileged communication means none of what you talk about can be compelled to be revealed.
There are other privileged party relationships: Husband-Wife, Penitent-Clergyman, Doctor-Patient. There might be others that I don't remember offhand. No conversation or information passed between privileged parties can be compelled.
Notice that "compelled" is key here. There is no *right* to keeping these conversations secret. It is a privilege and that privilege can be waived. For instance, remember the OJ case? Rosie Greer was visiting OJ in jail one day and supposedly a guard overheard OJ confess to Rosie. Since they thought they were having a private conversation that was covered by the Penitent-Clergyman privilege, any testimony by that guard (if he did actually hear anything) was disallowed. It couldn't be used against him. On the other hand, if the substance of a privileged communication is revealed outright without trying to preserve its confidentiality then the privilege is waived and the information used by the other side.
So, you say, "I don't have anything to hide. I'm on the side of Good and my opponent is on the side of Evil. Why do I have to hide my thoughts and actions?" You would be surprised at some of the dirty tricks pulled in a lawsut. There is absolutely no reason to tip your hand in advance. If/. did come out and start talking about their legal options and strategy it would be worrisome. You want to know what's going on because you're upset? My friend, you have no idea what "upset" means until you're on the receiving end of potentially serious legal action. So chill out and rest assured that they're doing absolutely the right thing here in keeping quiet.
Now I know what my next nonprofit time-wasting project will be! The prospect of even greater download speeds with a cable modem is just too great to pass up.
The Big Ball of Mud website at www.laputan.org doesn't seem to be responding. I get the first page but trying to d/l any of the document formats is futile. Their web server seems to be a Big Ball of Bugs../ effect or simply a weekend fallover with no one around to reboot?
Ooooh, I want a road-show too! If they were selling sex instead of worthless stock IPO speculatory securities it would surely be called prostitution!
Why the delay? What are they afraid of? Can we get a wiretap order on them to see whether their recent business dealings have caused them to suddenly transfer over $10,000 out of the country?
Now that they've delayed their IPO, I wouldn't trust 'em.
B5. Great series. It was extremely watered down in its last year due to the change of networks and the untimely departure of Claudia What's-her-name. Did she go back to playing a hooker in the movies? The very last episode was taped well over a year before it was broadcast and it was the ONLY episode I never saw.
The last year was further sullied by the "Byron" storyline. Such a waste. I religiously watched EVERY episode until year 5. Then I caught a few here and there but missed a few. I finally saw those in reruns but by the time the wrap episode was broadcast on TNT I just didn't care anymore. Like I said - a shame it had to suffer the fate it did.
Nevertheless I encourage anyone who hasn't watched it to do so. The writing is excellent.
My only bitch about Stracyzinski is that he used to write for that old hag on "Murder She Wrote". I never had any respect for that show, probably because Jessica Lange never looked good in her best day and she was a lousy actress as well IMO.
I know. I did VM system programming for a couple of years. With VM you don't even need to run them in separate LPARs unless you need the dedicated hardware performance. They'll run V=V, V=F or V=R just fine if they're not being heavily used, i.e. testing, development, etc. Carving up a system into LPARs is basically partitioning your machine into 2 or more separate hardware chunks.
I've seen people refer to both OS/390 (MVS) and VM. These are 2 completely different systems. As different as night and day. I guess I should read the report myself a bit more carefully, however, I would assume running 40,000 copies would apply only to VM and not OS/390.
I have no doubt that machines may be eventually able to do something that we humans might confuse with thought. But the "spiritual" part is utter BS./. fails yet again to bring us the news that really matters.
It would be way too easy to say the U.S. is "in a period of sloth and introspection". Let's face it - when the bottom drops out of the current stock market we're in for a bad time. This country is finished - doomed.
I've been trying to upgrade a system from glibc-2.0.7 to glibc-2.1.2. The HOWTO and other misc. docs on doing this are woefully inadequate. They're probably woefully inadequate for most things libc-related. The HOWTO - which did help me when I initially installed 2.0.7 - stops right AT version 2.0.7. Now what do I do? I've been hacking with linux for > 3 yrs now and I can't figure it out. What's a *new* user supposed to do?
After going through the painful process of getting libc5 to peacefully coexist with libc6 about 18 months ago, I thought that any future glibc upgrades would be less painful. Hah!
I read the INSTALL doc, searched the web, finally went to deja where a search of the "gnu.*,linux.*,comp.os.linux.*,comp.os.linux.*" groups led me to conclude that the only way to upgrade to glibc-2.1.2 reliably is to upgrade the whole distro from square one. This is totally unacceptable, IMO, and even though I successfully installed gcc-2.95(?) there doesn't seem to be a clear map as to how to proceed from here. What's the next step? Note that glibc-2.1.2 BUILT SUCCESSFULLY but how the hell do I install it on a live working system as the new default libc?
This is only one example of how frustrating linux can be. A clear set of docs is a MUST for linux to prosper and I don't see it happening. People are lazy and writing documentation is the last thing anyone wants to do. Absent an army of paid technical writers nothing is ever going to develop along the lines of the MSDN library. This more than anything will stifle linux's growth, mark my words.
The original referenced LDP article recommends (paraphrasing) "Don't lay out a template with holes to be filled in later - this will ensure it never gets done". I think just as important as an organized 'what IS available list' should be a 'what IS NOT available' list. Does that really differ from an outline with gaps that need to be filled in?
Another "tool", Stacheldraht, is apparently a modification of Trinoo. I've been looking at the source code for it and I can only say it's amazing these things actually work at all! The level of sophistication in the programming of Stacheldraht, at least, is abysmal! I haven't seen the source for TFN or TFN2K but it wouldn't surprise me if it was in the same class. In no particular order Stacheldraht exhibits: Tons of unused variables Casting of pointers that don't need to be casted Spaghetti code par excellence Mass use of deprecated network programming funcs. Inclusion of.C source in.h files (ugh) Multiple header files with no rhyme or reason A lack of understanding of the 'fork()' process Definition of functions that don't exist Non-declaration of functions that do exist The best thing I can say for it is that if the guy who wrote it is from Germany at least the variable names chosen are somewhat understandable in their use. One thing that strikes me is the way the authors tout these tools as being for demonstration of vulnerabilities. Then once the vulnerability has been demonstrated in a huge way, they continue to modify and upgrade the programs! Just for demonstration purposes? Yeah, right.
Slashdot Mirror
The cached server approach seems to be a really, really bad idea. But it also seems like it's going to happen first and that bothers me. To us this naturally sounds bad because of all the obvious reasons but don't be surprised if some of the airlines buy into this garbage. After all, look what AOL is able to sell under the guise of technology.
I guarantee the server's cache isn't going to have what I want on it. What you end up with is a situation where there are a lot of captive eyeballs on airplanes every year and surprise, surprise, there are people out there who want to dictate what those eyeballs will see. Sounds like a perfect world scenario for the likes of Time Warner (speaking of AOL).
Some email connectivity may be better than none at all, however. I suspect that once the technology is in place customer demand and preference will eventually force the airlines to switch over to providing true real-time internet connecions. But if Terzen is able to sell their junk the time frame will end up being later rather than sooner. With the entrenched hubris of airline management today it will be years before any airline that uses the Terzen system realizes that their system sucks. Their short-term evaluation of a cached server system will lead them to conclude that "Gee, the Internet isn't as popular as we thought."
If they conclude that the time frame for true internet connectivity will only be pushed even further out into the future. Having said all that, I'd want to buy into Terzen's IPO and then sell out 6 months later and short the stock as much as I could. Their technology sucks and long-term is doomed to failure.
Just look at the first couple of lines of the press release:
RSA Security Releases RSA Encryption Algorithm into Public Domain
"c = me mod n" Made Available Two Weeks Early
This basically says "We patented this equation". The whole fiasco surrounding software and business patents is going to get really ugly. At some point the ridiculousness of these kinds of patents will become obvious, even to the many judges in the US that have their heads planted firmly up their rectums. If we could get the politicians to get their hands out of the lobyists' pockets things would move along even faster.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:
2 + 2 = 4
patent pending
And boy, are you all gonna pay for using that. Anyone who has ever said that without getting a license from me will be really sorry.
This cuts to the core of the matter at hand. This one post should be at the TOP of the moderation list. My Kingdom for Karma!
"We're suing you for millions.... but we don't want to embarass you". Any doubt as to why Apple seems to be such a schizophrenic company and has had a hard time finding its way? Some vision.
I previewed the damn post, confirmed it and then noticed an apparent contradiction! The information was first leaked by relatives and then indirectly confirmed by many who work in the City.
Here's why I believe the information supposedly "leaked" on the CBS site is bogus:
I live on Long Island in a town called Massapequa where Sean grew up. The word on the street here is that Sean will be the sole survivor. This information made its way via the many people who live on Long Island and work in Manhattan where Madison Avenue is the home of many huge advertising firms, and also home to CBS.
Reports in the local and NYC newspapers have taken note of this information floating around and there has been no refutation of it by CBS. While you would expect them to have no comment either way on any leaks, if you assume the information is accurate and that Sean is the winner, it makes sense for CBS to try to keep interest up in the show by presenting a plausible alternative. It's not much of a stretch IMO for a corporate network to distribute disinformation in an effort to shore up its sagging ratings and advertising revenues. If everyone knows who wins, interest approaches zero.
By the way, Sean now lives several towns away from Massapequa. The information we've been hearing comes from his relatives who still live here. Unofficially, of course!
This may be semantics, but the earth's atmosphere doesn't have a bandwidth capacity per se. While the atmosphere certainly affects the propagation of certain frequency bands, the atmosphere doesn't provide the bandwidth and therefore can't be said to have a capacity. The proagation of electromagnetic radiation through space is, as far as we know, the same throughout the universe. It's not a function of the atmosphere. I hope you knew this already and I just misinterpreted your question!
France wants to ban Nazi items.
Australia wants to ban porno.
America wants to ban gambling over the net and drug-related information.
China wants to ban all criticism.
God only knows what Iraq will want to ban when it finally gets its shit together.
It's pretty easy to see where this is all going to end up in a few years. There WILL be some sort of international treaty where all signatories agree to implement and enforce these bans. ISPs will be licensed and audited. Separate licenses will be required for T1 (and other high speed) backbone connections to the net. There's really only a handful of really big nodes in the US and probably the same is true in most countries. MAE EAST and MAE WEST anyone? Add in a dose of protect-the-children and anti-terrorism hysteria and kick it up a few notches with organized crime fears, Intellectual Property wars and BAM! it becomes all too clear. People, i.e. the Governments, will demand this wholesale control over who sees what. And the people who make those decisions will have absolutely no idea what they're doing or talking about. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
We, the enlightened ones, won't be able to stop it. We can't stop the RIAA or the MPAA. We're losing the DeCSS battle on the DVD front. Napster might be doomed, for all we know. The companies that have the money will get their way like dingos in a day-care center and THAT will set the precedents. Once the technical means are in place to impose content filtering on a large scale, then the really radical do-gooders will follow in their footsteps and screw it up but good.
I hate to say it but the Geeks and privacy activists and defense-of-rights groups are going to be left out in the cold like one-legged men in an ass kicking contest. Unless people start taking stuff like liberty seriously.
Australia wants to ban porno.
America wants to ban gambling over the net and drug-related information.
China wants to ban criticism.
God only knows what Iraq will want to ban when it finally gets its shit together.
It's pretty easy to see where this is all going to end up in a few years. There WILL be some sort of international treaty where all signatories agree to implement and enforce these bans. ISPs will be licensed and audited. Separate licenses will be required for T1 (and other high speed) backbone connections to the net. There's really only a handful of really big nodes in the US and probably the same is true in most countries. MAE EAST and MAE WEST anyone? Add in a dose of protect-the-children and anti-terrorism hysteria and kick it up a few notches with organized crime fears and Intellectual Property wars and it becomes all too clear. People, i.e. the Governments, will demand this wholesale control over who sees what. And the people who make those decisions will have absolutely no idea what they're doing or talking about. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
We, the enlightened ones, won't be able to stop it. We can't stop the RIAA or the MPAA. We're losing the DeCSS battle on the DVD front. Napster might be doomed, for all we know. The companies that have the money will get their way like dingos in a day-care center and THAT will set the precedents. Once the technical means are in place to impose content filtering on a large scale, then the really radical do-gooders will follow in their path and screw it up but good.
I hate to say it but the Geeks and privacy activists and defense-of-rights groups are going to be left out in the cold like one-legged men in an ass kicking contest.
Whenever you see a reference to a NYT article remember this: Replace "www" with "partners" in the URL and voila! No login required. Here's the article without needing to login.
There are other privileged party relationships: Husband-Wife, Penitent-Clergyman, Doctor-Patient. There might be others that I don't remember offhand. No conversation or information passed between privileged parties can be compelled.
Notice that "compelled" is key here. There is no *right* to keeping these conversations secret. It is a privilege and that privilege can be waived. For instance, remember the OJ case? Rosie Greer was visiting OJ in jail one day and supposedly a guard overheard OJ confess to Rosie. Since they thought they were having a private conversation that was covered by the Penitent-Clergyman privilege, any testimony by that guard (if he did actually hear anything) was disallowed. It couldn't be used against him. On the other hand, if the substance of a privileged communication is revealed outright without trying to preserve its confidentiality then the privilege is waived and the information used by the other side.
So, you say, "I don't have anything to hide. I'm on the side of Good and my opponent is on the side of Evil. Why do I have to hide my thoughts and actions?" You would be surprised at some of the dirty tricks pulled in a lawsut. There is absolutely no reason to tip your hand in advance. If /. did come out and start talking about their legal options and strategy it would be worrisome. You want to know what's going on because you're upset? My friend, you have no idea what "upset" means until you're on the receiving end of potentially serious legal action. So chill out and rest assured that they're doing absolutely the right thing here in keeping quiet.
Now I know what my next nonprofit time-wasting project will be! The prospect of even greater download speeds with a cable modem is just too great to pass up.
The Big Ball of Mud website at www.laputan.org doesn't seem to be responding. I get the first page but trying to d/l any of the document formats is futile. Their web server seems to be a Big Ball of Bugs. ./ effect or simply a weekend fallover with no one around to reboot?
Ooooh, I want a road-show too! If they were selling sex instead of worthless stock IPO speculatory securities it would surely be called prostitution!
Why the delay? What are they afraid of? Can we get a wiretap order on them to see whether their recent business dealings have caused them to suddenly transfer over $10,000 out of the country?
Now that they've delayed their IPO, I wouldn't trust 'em.
B5. Great series. It was extremely watered down in its last year due to the change of networks and the untimely departure of Claudia What's-her-name. Did she go back to playing a hooker in the movies? The very last episode was taped well over a year before it was broadcast and it was the ONLY episode I never saw.
The last year was further sullied by the "Byron" storyline. Such a waste. I religiously watched EVERY episode until year 5. Then I caught a few here and there but missed a few. I finally saw those in reruns but by the time the wrap episode was broadcast on TNT I just didn't care anymore. Like I said - a shame it had to suffer the fate it did.
Nevertheless I encourage anyone who hasn't watched it to do so. The writing is excellent.
My only bitch about Stracyzinski is that he used to write for that old hag on "Murder She Wrote". I never had any respect for that show, probably because Jessica Lange never looked good in her best day and she was a lousy actress as well IMO.
I know. I did VM system programming for a couple of years. With VM you don't even need to run them in separate LPARs unless you need the dedicated hardware performance. They'll run V=V, V=F or V=R just fine if they're not being heavily used, i.e. testing, development, etc. Carving up a system into LPARs is basically partitioning your machine into 2 or more separate hardware chunks.
After you install it just fire up the cookie tool and delete it! The cookie management tool looks to be one of the more useful new features.
I've seen people refer to both OS/390 (MVS) and VM. These are 2 completely different systems. As different as night and day. I guess I should read the report myself a bit more carefully, however, I would assume running 40,000 copies would apply only to VM and not OS/390.
Who was it that said "for every complex problem, there's an answer that's simple, elegant and wrong?"
Not sure but I'm *pretty* sure it was in reference to one of Reagan's "solutions" for some ill or other. Possibly Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign.
Sucked. All of it.
I have no doubt that machines may be eventually able to do something that we humans might confuse with thought. But the "spiritual" part is utter BS. /. fails yet again to bring us the news that really matters.
It would be way too easy to say the U.S. is "in a period of sloth and introspection". Let's face it - when the bottom drops out of the current stock market we're in for a bad time. This country is finished - doomed.
After going through the painful process of getting libc5 to peacefully coexist with libc6 about 18 months ago, I thought that any future glibc upgrades would be less painful. Hah!
I read the INSTALL doc, searched the web, finally went to deja where a search of the "gnu.*,linux.*,comp.os.linux.*,comp.os.linux.*" groups led me to conclude that the only way to upgrade to glibc-2.1.2 reliably is to upgrade the whole distro from square one. This is totally unacceptable, IMO, and even though I successfully installed gcc-2.95(?) there doesn't seem to be a clear map as to how to proceed from here. What's the next step? Note that glibc-2.1.2 BUILT SUCCESSFULLY but how the hell do I install it on a live working system as the new default libc?
This is only one example of how frustrating linux can be. A clear set of docs is a MUST for linux to prosper and I don't see it happening. People are lazy and writing documentation is the last thing anyone wants to do. Absent an army of paid technical writers nothing is ever going to develop along the lines of the MSDN library. This more than anything will stifle linux's growth, mark my words.
The original referenced LDP article recommends (paraphrasing) "Don't lay out a template with holes to be filled in later - this will ensure it never gets done". I think just as important as an organized 'what IS available list' should be a 'what IS NOT available' list. Does that really differ from an outline with gaps that need to be filled in?
Another "tool", Stacheldraht, is apparently a modification of Trinoo. I've been looking at the source code for it and I can only say it's amazing these things actually work at all! The level of sophistication in the programming of Stacheldraht, at least, is abysmal! I haven't seen the source for TFN or TFN2K but it wouldn't surprise me if it was in the same class. In no particular order Stacheldraht exhibits: Tons of unused variables Casting of pointers that don't need to be casted Spaghetti code par excellence Mass use of deprecated network programming funcs. Inclusion of .C source in .h files (ugh) Multiple header files with no rhyme or reason A lack of understanding of the 'fork()' process Definition of functions that don't exist Non-declaration of functions that do exist The best thing I can say for it is that if the guy who wrote it is from Germany at least the variable names chosen are somewhat understandable in their use. One thing that strikes me is the way the authors tout these tools as being for demonstration of vulnerabilities. Then once the vulnerability has been demonstrated in a huge way, they continue to modify and upgrade the programs! Just for demonstration purposes? Yeah, right.