The CAs can prevent it. Back when certificates first started, certificates were graded according to the quality of information needed to back them. The highest grade required two or maybe three pieces of approved official ID and direct contact with the purchaser. It would not surprise me if some of the vendors also ran background checks and perform other basic authentication.
If they only want one level today, then what's to stop them from switching to the highest standard they used to have, rather than unifying on the lowest standard?
Ahhhh! Money. Yeah, that would be a big factor. You'll sell more cheap certs that are no good than you'll sell deluxe kitchen-sink-included certs. Enough more that nobody could afford to sell the deluxe model.
Slashdot is like the cars built and raced by Malcolm McLaren or by Donald Campbell. His retirement is comparable to their tragic ends in that it marks the end of the Golden Age.
According to the etymology dictionary, the first one was Vrueje, Sem, Fogamar and Wentruz. However, these only remained in use until the replacement of PL/Earth.
Not sure it's sensationalist to say that algorithms with poorly-understood (by the users) feedback mechanisms can have unintended consequences. Nor is it sensational to say that people should be as competent with the tools they use in high finance as they would be if they were in any physical craft. There really should be an expectation that these people know more than just how to determine if the difference between two numbers is positive or negative.
I'll agree that it was overplayed, but I won't agree it was overplayed by a lot. When the London Stock Market went online, stocks crashed due to incompetent coding turning the regular noise of trading into a positive feedback loop. When a branch took out a single power line a few years back, it took out I think 3 States and half of Canada due to computer feeback loops not being capable of handling the situation. The first Ariane 5 exploded on launch because a feedback mechanism for guidance had a sign swapped, again creating positive feedback.
These were all preventable and anyone who actually understood dynamic systems (a generic understanding is fine) SHOULD have been able to spot that the code was intrinsically unstable.
But coders are moving further and further away from such understanding. Understanding isn't as common as it once was. What did you expect? Understanding requires maths and the US is currently ranked 26th in the world on just the basic stuff. Sure, the best coders will be as good now as they ever were, if not better. But the worst coders will be worse and the users will be far, far worse. (PEBCAK isn't a computer literacy problem, it is a total breakdown in the ability of people to comprehend even the most elementary aspects of logical thought, and where is logical thought taught? Generally maths and the hard sciences. Disciplines certain politicians are keen to replace with calculators made overseas and Creationism.)
Having said that, the 45 million year old yeast was a much more interesting discovery (Wired's article includes info on how to extract it from amber) but it hasn't really spawned much of an interest in paleantology. Damn shame.
Early computers used Octal, not Hex, and technically the language would have been the instruction set not the format of entry. I also suspect your professor was confusing assemblers with compilers. I will also have to deduct marks from your professor for poor use of language.
Yes, but spam didn't become a major phenomena until two Utah lawyers published a book on how to make money fast by plundering Usenet, just as e-mail viruses didn't proliferate until Outlook, the Sendmail and Vax Mail scripting bugs notwithstanding.
The good news is that Queen Elizabeth didn't start using e-mail until 1974, so she's not to blame for unsolicited mass mailings.
Exactly what those updates are, that's more debatable. tftp is excellent for bootstrapping a machine with an OS and is independent of machine architecture (ix86, MIPS, UltraSPARC) and BIOS (Corelis, Phoenix, UEFI, etc) - I really, really, really do NOT want to try implementing SCP in Forth for bootstrap purposes. I couldn't afford the psychiatric treatment afterwards.
Likewise, I would not consider using any other authentication mechanism in environments already using SASLv2. MIT Kerberos is good for distributed environments and is safer against DDoS attacks.
You're absolutely right that it doesn't have to be the only protocol at that layer. The X protocols from Europe cover the full spectrum of the OSI model, including layers 3 and 4. The TUBA protocol (one of the candidates for IPv6) could perfectly well be implemented, again sitting at that layer. Infiniband has its own layers 2, 3 and 4. Other IP protocols exist - albeit in experimental form for the most part. (IPv0 could be said to still exist.)
SSH has severe performance issues and hardly anyone uses the high-performance patches. (Hell, hardly anyone knows the high-performance patches exist!)
You'll notice the patches are not being funded any more and that none of the SSH enthusiasts are, well, enthused enough to have volunteered to help the maintainer. Don't get me wrong, I like SSH, but it doesn't write itself and I have very little sympathy for those who complain about under-utilization when doing nothing about helping to address the issues that would improve the situation.
FTP over TLS will - by dint of TLS providing a reliable data stream - avoid corruption issues. Honestly.
SFTP isn't ubiquitous, FTP is. SCP is only useful if you have full filepaths to work with and is even rarer than SFTP.
Besides, since people like the convenience of single-sign-on, you're better off using Kerberos (the MIT version). SASLv2 is also nice.
Look, this is very simple. What "makes sense" doesn't matter. Betamax "made sense". The Transputer "made sense". Multicast "makes sense". IPv6 "makes sense". Infiniband "makes sense". The Itanium and MIPS architectures make far more sense than the x64. Tell me, do you always do what "makes sense"? No? Why not? Because it's sometimes more important to get the job done than to get it "done right"?
You've seen the security fiascos in recent times. SCP isn't going to add any security to the enterprise environment because it's not on the critical path. Social engineering is, still, by far the weakest link, followed by societal incompetencies. Packet sniffing is a problem, yes, but in order of priorities I'd put lolcats ahead of them.
Unencrypted FTP with Kerberos? Anonymous FTP? Plenty of ways you can use FTP without putting an account at risk.
As for your claim that "FTP hasn't been used in a long time" - it's clearly bogus. FTP is widely used. More web browsers support vanilla FTP than support FTP over SSH. If you want the Linux kernel sources, or a distro ISO image, the overheads of encryption aren't gaining you enough to make it worth the effort - the higher throughput and lower server loads win every time.
Web hosting sites usually don't support SCP by default - you have to have it enabled, maybe even pay extra, and some sites don't provide it at all. You can argue all you like for what people SHOULD do in such cases, but it's total idiocy to claim that because people SHOULD insist on secure transfer that FTP is dead. The best you can claim is that you wish it dead. Sure, the world would be a better place if rsync+ssh and scp were universal. The world would doubtless have been better had fsp replaced ftp. Life would be infinitely more pleasent had multicasting become ubiquitous (we wouldn't have the damn bandwidth wars with the ISPs for a start). But that's not the world we're in.
FTP exists, it is used, it is used extensively, it is probably used too much, but it's not going away.
Ok, so you'd have a lot of platters. The area of a platter would be pi.r^2. Allowing 10' per level, you'd need a height of (10'+thickness of platter).(number of levels). You'd then have to subtract the stairwell(s) and structures that occupy floorspace that you'd need to duplicate. This would compare to having a single cylinder, whose area is 2.pi.r.h.
Determine the number of people you'd want to have in transit (100 is the smallest population that is genetically stable, but IVF shows that you don't need a genetically population to be "alive" during transit - a few hundred frozen eggs, a couple dozen octomoms and a surgeon would technically produce the same result). Determine the area needed for those people to live comfortably. Then determine which of the two configurations would produce that area most effectively. Remember, though, that the usable area on a disk is less than the actual area, but the usable area on a rectangle folded into a cylinder is 100%.
Space is extremely busy. You've meteorites, micrometeorites, space gasses, the solar wind, hard radiation, solar flares, comets and asteroids, NINE PLANETS DAMMIT!, Kuipier Belt Objects, possibly an Oort Cloud, extrasolar debris between the solar systems, and then an unknown amount of congestion at the other end. Space, far from being empty, isn't even a hard vaccuum (no such thing exists). It's a partial vaccuum at best, which means shock waves can travel through it. Slowly and poorly, but there's a medium and therefore there's a means.
Now, if you were to build a platform in space, using your approach, but build it very very large (I'm going to say 4x the area of Biosphere 2*) and then have two layers (you will still want the "lungs" as per Biosphere 2), you can build an artificial "world". If you're going to have a fusion drive, then you've got plenty of energy to create a full-spectrum "sun" and a Mobile Biosphere has the advantage over any other design that you don't have to pack supplies. You pack a regenerating environment instead.
*The experiment didn't fail, rather it quantified the total amount of CO2-to-O2 conversion needed by virtue of the volume of CO2 that needed to be converted and wasn't being. Now, Biosphere 2 only took 6 people, so you have to multiply the area by more than 16 to get a genetically stable population. Which means you need 64x the area of Biosphere 2, which is equal to 8x the radius.
This would make for a very big platform, but it could travel to as many star systems as it took to find a terraformable planet and could temporarily over-populate so as to produce a stable seeding population for a planet that had been terraformed. As such, you need produce only one of these and it could populate as many worlds as you liked without limit.
My understanding, from the various articles read, is that the only thing removed from the grant proposal is the person's explicitly-given ethnicity and gender. The name, institute, and all the other information on the individual, is left in.
For those not familiar with NIH grants, I believe Cayuse has an online demo package for collecting the data needed and turning it into a grant proposal. There is a LOT of information on there, and therefore all kinds of things that may be being used to unfairly discriminate. Yes, it should be completely on the science (well, that and the realistic ability of the person to perform it). In practice, the current methodology is a bit of a disaster.
Just because they're called "wafers" doesn't mean they're supposed to be edible!
Seriously, protein-based and other forms of organic computing are fields that have been talked a lot about for decades. (References that I know of go back to the 70s, there may well have been earlier.) It's good that they're getting to this stage in organics, though I do have to ask why it has taken so long.
Mr. Apotheker, a former software executive, has been developing a new strategy for H-P based on technology services and software.
Remember, HP doesn't just make home computers. HP is a major manufacturer of network hardware, computers for the military, Intel-based servers, printers and other appliances, etc. To talk of "services" and "software" basically means the CEO isn't just looking at spinning-off the PC section but all of the different hardware groups. That's not trivial. Even if the spin-off organizations and units sold to other organizations continue running as they are, it's going to shake things up.
Think about it. Launches are expensive. Spaceflight is expensive. Nobody has found a pure gold asteroid, and even if they did it would take more money to get any of the gold back to Earth than the gold would be worth. Communications satellites only exist because the phone companies can charge users a fortune in bills over decades.
Private investors don't give a shit about technology, and certainly certainly not for technology that has no possibility of a financial return.
Remember, billionaires got that way because they're damn stingy and only give in order to get more. Wannabe billionaires are even more that way. Where they donate, it is purely for tax reasons. (They can offset all the taxes from income and capital gains and still make a fortune.) It's not for charity and it's certainly not for the benefit of industrialists who could become rich if the technology pays off. This isn't even putting the billionaires down at all. This is simply the logic of economics and it is the logic of economics that create the uber-wealthy in the first place.
The ONLY people who have both the money AND the incentive to do this kind of work is government. That is why the US and USSR have space programs and Argentinia (which had no shortage of private individuals with know-how for sale after the war) does not. If private investors had any motivation to actually do something in space (as opposed to paying an agency to lob yet another radio/tv/bittorrent relay into orbit), it would have already happened. The closest we've seen yet are Virgin Galactic (which doesn't even reach orbit) and some guys launching small rockets from old oil rig platforms (who, incidentally, you don't hear much about these days).
As for half a million - it might sound a lot but it would pay for five mid-grade private sector researchers for a year. Not equipment, computers, space, or anything else, just the salaries of those five people. Public sector workers would be cheaper - you could get easily two or three times as many - but this is funding for a private effort so you're limited to five. This research is going to require pushing what we know about human hibernation to the absolute limits. It is going to require some amazing work on radiation shielding. In order for the people on board to develop normally, it is going to require some fantastic developments in materials science (you will need a vehicle 3/4 of a mile in diameter to be able to develop artificial gravity without inducing motion sickness - and then you will need to figure out how to put that vehicle in orbit).
And, yes, those are mid-grade researchers. Top-end researchers in the private sector would limit you to two or three people, which wouldn't even get you enough to have one specialist per major problem to be solved.
This is another reason the private sector is a Bad Choice for this kind of work. Public sector scientists are much much cheaper and, since they have access to shared regional or national computation resources, don't require as much money to get a project like this off the ground. The private sector is simply not cost-effective for this kind of work.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine gifts can be written off for tax purposes, so said Big Name Company might actually be making a profit by giving the money to SCO.
The CAs can prevent it. Back when certificates first started, certificates were graded according to the quality of information needed to back them. The highest grade required two or maybe three pieces of approved official ID and direct contact with the purchaser. It would not surprise me if some of the vendors also ran background checks and perform other basic authentication.
If they only want one level today, then what's to stop them from switching to the highest standard they used to have, rather than unifying on the lowest standard?
Ahhhh! Money. Yeah, that would be a big factor. You'll sell more cheap certs that are no good than you'll sell deluxe kitchen-sink-included certs. Enough more that nobody could afford to sell the deluxe model.
Yes, but how does this relate to Southern State Lobbyists (SSLs)?
Slashdot is like the cars built and raced by Malcolm McLaren or by Donald Campbell. His retirement is comparable to their tragic ends in that it marks the end of the Golden Age.
If you notice, they both resigned at the same time. AND they have never been photographed together. This proves CmdrTaco IS Steve Jobs!
According to the etymology dictionary, the first one was Vrueje, Sem, Fogamar and Wentruz. However, these only remained in use until the replacement of PL/Earth.
Not sure it's sensationalist to say that algorithms with poorly-understood (by the users) feedback mechanisms can have unintended consequences. Nor is it sensational to say that people should be as competent with the tools they use in high finance as they would be if they were in any physical craft. There really should be an expectation that these people know more than just how to determine if the difference between two numbers is positive or negative.
I'll agree that it was overplayed, but I won't agree it was overplayed by a lot. When the London Stock Market went online, stocks crashed due to incompetent coding turning the regular noise of trading into a positive feedback loop. When a branch took out a single power line a few years back, it took out I think 3 States and half of Canada due to computer feeback loops not being capable of handling the situation. The first Ariane 5 exploded on launch because a feedback mechanism for guidance had a sign swapped, again creating positive feedback.
These were all preventable and anyone who actually understood dynamic systems (a generic understanding is fine) SHOULD have been able to spot that the code was intrinsically unstable.
But coders are moving further and further away from such understanding. Understanding isn't as common as it once was. What did you expect? Understanding requires maths and the US is currently ranked 26th in the world on just the basic stuff. Sure, the best coders will be as good now as they ever were, if not better. But the worst coders will be worse and the users will be far, far worse. (PEBCAK isn't a computer literacy problem, it is a total breakdown in the ability of people to comprehend even the most elementary aspects of logical thought, and where is logical thought taught? Generally maths and the hard sciences. Disciplines certain politicians are keen to replace with calculators made overseas and Creationism.)
Nonono, this Viking, surely!
BBC Article
Having said that, the 45 million year old yeast was a much more interesting discovery (Wired's article includes info on how to extract it from amber) but it hasn't really spawned much of an interest in paleantology. Damn shame.
Early computers used Octal, not Hex, and technically the language would have been the instruction set not the format of entry. I also suspect your professor was confusing assemblers with compilers. I will also have to deduct marks from your professor for poor use of language.
And this stopped the lawsuits over the GIF patents?
I thought they were called "transistor radios" rather than "the wireless" by the 1990s. Damn.
Yes, but spam didn't become a major phenomena until two Utah lawyers published a book on how to make money fast by plundering Usenet, just as e-mail viruses didn't proliferate until Outlook, the Sendmail and Vax Mail scripting bugs notwithstanding.
The good news is that Queen Elizabeth didn't start using e-mail until 1974, so she's not to blame for unsolicited mass mailings.
In need of updates? I fully agree.
Exactly what those updates are, that's more debatable. tftp is excellent for bootstrapping a machine with an OS and is independent of machine architecture (ix86, MIPS, UltraSPARC) and BIOS (Corelis, Phoenix, UEFI, etc) - I really, really, really do NOT want to try implementing SCP in Forth for bootstrap purposes. I couldn't afford the psychiatric treatment afterwards.
Likewise, I would not consider using any other authentication mechanism in environments already using SASLv2. MIT Kerberos is good for distributed environments and is safer against DDoS attacks.
You're absolutely right that it doesn't have to be the only protocol at that layer. The X protocols from Europe cover the full spectrum of the OSI model, including layers 3 and 4. The TUBA protocol (one of the candidates for IPv6) could perfectly well be implemented, again sitting at that layer. Infiniband has its own layers 2, 3 and 4. Other IP protocols exist - albeit in experimental form for the most part. (IPv0 could be said to still exist.)
SSH has severe performance issues and hardly anyone uses the high-performance patches. (Hell, hardly anyone knows the high-performance patches exist!)
You'll notice the patches are not being funded any more and that none of the SSH enthusiasts are, well, enthused enough to have volunteered to help the maintainer. Don't get me wrong, I like SSH, but it doesn't write itself and I have very little sympathy for those who complain about under-utilization when doing nothing about helping to address the issues that would improve the situation.
FTP over TLS will - by dint of TLS providing a reliable data stream - avoid corruption issues. Honestly.
SFTP isn't ubiquitous, FTP is. SCP is only useful if you have full filepaths to work with and is even rarer than SFTP.
Besides, since people like the convenience of single-sign-on, you're better off using Kerberos (the MIT version). SASLv2 is also nice.
Look, this is very simple. What "makes sense" doesn't matter. Betamax "made sense". The Transputer "made sense". Multicast "makes sense". IPv6 "makes sense". Infiniband "makes sense". The Itanium and MIPS architectures make far more sense than the x64. Tell me, do you always do what "makes sense"? No? Why not? Because it's sometimes more important to get the job done than to get it "done right"?
You've seen the security fiascos in recent times. SCP isn't going to add any security to the enterprise environment because it's not on the critical path. Social engineering is, still, by far the weakest link, followed by societal incompetencies. Packet sniffing is a problem, yes, but in order of priorities I'd put lolcats ahead of them.
Unencrypted FTP with Kerberos? Anonymous FTP? Plenty of ways you can use FTP without putting an account at risk.
As for your claim that "FTP hasn't been used in a long time" - it's clearly bogus. FTP is widely used. More web browsers support vanilla FTP than support FTP over SSH. If you want the Linux kernel sources, or a distro ISO image, the overheads of encryption aren't gaining you enough to make it worth the effort - the higher throughput and lower server loads win every time.
Web hosting sites usually don't support SCP by default - you have to have it enabled, maybe even pay extra, and some sites don't provide it at all. You can argue all you like for what people SHOULD do in such cases, but it's total idiocy to claim that because people SHOULD insist on secure transfer that FTP is dead. The best you can claim is that you wish it dead. Sure, the world would be a better place if rsync+ssh and scp were universal. The world would doubtless have been better had fsp replaced ftp. Life would be infinitely more pleasent had multicasting become ubiquitous (we wouldn't have the damn bandwidth wars with the ISPs for a start). But that's not the world we're in.
FTP exists, it is used, it is used extensively, it is probably used too much, but it's not going away.
Ok, so you'd have a lot of platters. The area of a platter would be pi.r^2. Allowing 10' per level, you'd need a height of (10'+thickness of platter).(number of levels). You'd then have to subtract the stairwell(s) and structures that occupy floorspace that you'd need to duplicate. This would compare to having a single cylinder, whose area is 2.pi.r.h.
Determine the number of people you'd want to have in transit (100 is the smallest population that is genetically stable, but IVF shows that you don't need a genetically population to be "alive" during transit - a few hundred frozen eggs, a couple dozen octomoms and a surgeon would technically produce the same result). Determine the area needed for those people to live comfortably. Then determine which of the two configurations would produce that area most effectively. Remember, though, that the usable area on a disk is less than the actual area, but the usable area on a rectangle folded into a cylinder is 100%.
Space is extremely busy. You've meteorites, micrometeorites, space gasses, the solar wind, hard radiation, solar flares, comets and asteroids, NINE PLANETS DAMMIT!, Kuipier Belt Objects, possibly an Oort Cloud, extrasolar debris between the solar systems, and then an unknown amount of congestion at the other end. Space, far from being empty, isn't even a hard vaccuum (no such thing exists). It's a partial vaccuum at best, which means shock waves can travel through it. Slowly and poorly, but there's a medium and therefore there's a means.
Now, if you were to build a platform in space, using your approach, but build it very very large (I'm going to say 4x the area of Biosphere 2*) and then have two layers (you will still want the "lungs" as per Biosphere 2), you can build an artificial "world". If you're going to have a fusion drive, then you've got plenty of energy to create a full-spectrum "sun" and a Mobile Biosphere has the advantage over any other design that you don't have to pack supplies. You pack a regenerating environment instead.
*The experiment didn't fail, rather it quantified the total amount of CO2-to-O2 conversion needed by virtue of the volume of CO2 that needed to be converted and wasn't being. Now, Biosphere 2 only took 6 people, so you have to multiply the area by more than 16 to get a genetically stable population. Which means you need 64x the area of Biosphere 2, which is equal to 8x the radius.
This would make for a very big platform, but it could travel to as many star systems as it took to find a terraformable planet and could temporarily over-populate so as to produce a stable seeding population for a planet that had been terraformed. As such, you need produce only one of these and it could populate as many worlds as you liked without limit.
My understanding, from the various articles read, is that the only thing removed from the grant proposal is the person's explicitly-given ethnicity and gender. The name, institute, and all the other information on the individual, is left in.
For those not familiar with NIH grants, I believe Cayuse has an online demo package for collecting the data needed and turning it into a grant proposal. There is a LOT of information on there, and therefore all kinds of things that may be being used to unfairly discriminate. Yes, it should be completely on the science (well, that and the realistic ability of the person to perform it). In practice, the current methodology is a bit of a disaster.
Just because they're called "wafers" doesn't mean they're supposed to be edible!
Seriously, protein-based and other forms of organic computing are fields that have been talked a lot about for decades. (References that I know of go back to the 70s, there may well have been earlier.) It's good that they're getting to this stage in organics, though I do have to ask why it has taken so long.
There was a Space Shuttle experiment to try that. The tether exploded due to the potential difference across it.
3 is basically already done. See Delay Tolerant Networking, which is already used for orbital packet switched networks.
Think about it. Launches are expensive. Spaceflight is expensive. Nobody has found a pure gold asteroid, and even if they did it would take more money to get any of the gold back to Earth than the gold would be worth. Communications satellites only exist because the phone companies can charge users a fortune in bills over decades.
Private investors don't give a shit about technology, and certainly certainly not for technology that has no possibility of a financial return.
Remember, billionaires got that way because they're damn stingy and only give in order to get more. Wannabe billionaires are even more that way. Where they donate, it is purely for tax reasons. (They can offset all the taxes from income and capital gains and still make a fortune.) It's not for charity and it's certainly not for the benefit of industrialists who could become rich if the technology pays off. This isn't even putting the billionaires down at all. This is simply the logic of economics and it is the logic of economics that create the uber-wealthy in the first place.
The ONLY people who have both the money AND the incentive to do this kind of work is government. That is why the US and USSR have space programs and Argentinia (which had no shortage of private individuals with know-how for sale after the war) does not. If private investors had any motivation to actually do something in space (as opposed to paying an agency to lob yet another radio/tv/bittorrent relay into orbit), it would have already happened. The closest we've seen yet are Virgin Galactic (which doesn't even reach orbit) and some guys launching small rockets from old oil rig platforms (who, incidentally, you don't hear much about these days).
As for half a million - it might sound a lot but it would pay for five mid-grade private sector researchers for a year. Not equipment, computers, space, or anything else, just the salaries of those five people. Public sector workers would be cheaper - you could get easily two or three times as many - but this is funding for a private effort so you're limited to five. This research is going to require pushing what we know about human hibernation to the absolute limits. It is going to require some amazing work on radiation shielding. In order for the people on board to develop normally, it is going to require some fantastic developments in materials science (you will need a vehicle 3/4 of a mile in diameter to be able to develop artificial gravity without inducing motion sickness - and then you will need to figure out how to put that vehicle in orbit).
And, yes, those are mid-grade researchers. Top-end researchers in the private sector would limit you to two or three people, which wouldn't even get you enough to have one specialist per major problem to be solved.
This is another reason the private sector is a Bad Choice for this kind of work. Public sector scientists are much much cheaper and, since they have access to shared regional or national computation resources, don't require as much money to get a project like this off the ground. The private sector is simply not cost-effective for this kind of work.