...where a Prime computer told him to marry Lala Ward. I'm not sure which happened first - they split up or Prime went belly up, but I can't help but think that codependence on a buggy mainframe explains a lot.
...that in many countries, when a carrier censors content, it automatically loses "common carrier" status and becomes liable for what it carries. In other words, AT&T probably can't be sued right now for movies on their lines, but if they censor those lines and miss something - however accidental - they are liable. In the UK, carriers have been sued into bankrupcy after losing common carrier status. I don't know if this is true in the US, but if it is and someone wants to go digging for gold, they would be doing everyone a huge favour.
I have to say this doesn't sound like a good book.
on
Linux Programmer's Toolbox
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Good programmers think the most, design the cleanest, and write the least. Reusability is paramount, lines-of-code is unimportant. Good programmers also refer to reference manuals, sample code and other snippets, online texts and header files - you only need know A computer language for the structure, the rest can be gained by inference and reference. There is no debugger superior to appropriate printing of state in the code. A source debugger is helpful, but not very - I've got more mileage from debugging libraries and suitable test harnesses. The other tools are useless if you've any level of programming aptitude, except in very specialized circumstances. And even then, not much. I can inspect a binary file better in emacs, as it prints non-printable characters as escaped but leaves ordinary characters alone.
All in all, the book gives suggestions that will help you get a good grade at CS, and maybe Software Engineering, but probably not more formal courses (too little emphasis on the thinking part). It will help you write good programs, without a doubt, but not great programs and certainly not masterpieces. Nor will it help you with the history of programming (programmers predate text editors OR debuggers) or the future of programming (this book is only marginally useful on fourth- and fifth-generation languages, RAD, specification compilers, massively parallel programs, fuzzy logic, self-modifying code, and other such fun stuff).
All in all, there will be many people who will get great value from this text, but they will never be language-agnostic and they will never write the truly brilliant software that they are quite capable of. Yes, it's easy to criticise and harder to do, and it's most unlikely I would ever write a computer book. Mostly because nobody would be able to understand it - my writing style is hard enough to follow on Slashdot, I can guarantee you'd see people jumping off bridges if faced with 500+ pages of my degenerate writings. However, the fact is that there are many good books for novice programmers who want to be adequate, a few for adequate programmers to unlearn bad habits and become good programmers, far fewer that skip the middle step and go straight to good, and none at all that show someone how to go the extra mile that turns something good into something amazing.
That's the book I want to see someone write, and get reviewed on Slashdot.
He was never shown in England, as best as I can recall, however two similar presenters from the sceptered isle were Johnny Ball and Professor Heinz Wolff. Their different, light, entertaining approach to science probably did much the same for British kids as Mr Wizard did for the US. Other countries probably have similar figures they can point to.
(Mentally crosses over to the alternative fuels story and pictures North Carolina being invaded by people on Eggmobiles performing strange chemical experiments in mayonnaise jars. Me, normal? No, but thanks for asking.)
Minimum bond for storing alternative fuels for a car: $2,000
Minimum bond for blending any type of fuels for a car: $2,000
Minimum bond as a bulk-end user of alternative fuels: $2,000
Tax per gallon: 29.9 cents + 7% of average wholesale price + 0.25 cents for inspection
Assuming that there's no wholesale price for used frying oil, and that you use 10 gallons in a week, your bond is $6,000 and your tax bill is $7,839, giving you a total cost of $13,839
All things considered, he got off lightly. He could have been ordered to pay the full costs outlined above (although probably at the wholesale price of cooking oil), plus fines for non-payment of the various bonds, plus a fine for non-payment of taxes.
Do I agree with these kinds of charges? No friggin' way! You want to talk about encouraging innovation, well innovate THIS, North Carolina - there will be no Hewletts or Packards or Jobs or Wosniks in a place that makes any kind of innovation totally unaffordable. If the best a startup can afford is a garage, what is the point in charging them in taxation more than everything they posses combined? It's a great way to kill the real doers in the world.
The same goes for any other State that inflicts taxes greater than the value of that which is being taxed, and doubly goes for Britain where common law and common sense are supposed to take precedence over civil and criminal law. (That fact has been used many times in appeals, and is probably the only notable achievement British justice has, but it's probably one of the greatest achievements of any legal system.)
Depends on where/how he's getting the grease. If he is buying it from a supplier and not paying any applicable sales tax, or if there's some sort of quota on manufacturing your own fuel (there's a limit to how much you can homebrew before you need a brewing license for example), then maybe there's some regulation that would make some sort of sense.
However, he's been busted for a fuel tax (info courtesy of North Carolina's Department of Revenue), which charges a flat tax per gallon, plus a percent of wholesale prices, plus an inspection tax. Oh, and there's also a tax for being a bulk end-user of alternative fuels, which may also be what he's being busted on. Yes, there really is a North Carolina tax on being an end-user of alternative fuels. Oh, and if the oil isn't pure oil, but contains something else (due to cooking fish or potatos), then that second document states that he must get a license as a blender AS WELL. (Exceptions only apply to those creating a minimal amount of blend to start an engine - if you can run a car off it, you need to pay.)
These are straight off NC's own website, they're not interpretations by anyone, they're not downloaded and modified in The Gimp, these are what NC really charge. And, yes, you can claim tax back, but you can't get back what you haven't paid. And they get the interest off the money in the meantime, you don't. (That's why I detest getting taxes back - they got not only the use of the extra money, but they get to keep whatever was made off it. I don't care if they're not supposed to, nobody gets into government if they're risk-averse.)
A recent survey of Americans showed that 25% believe both in the theory of evolution AND the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and a 6,000 year-old Earth, at the same time. (The actual figures were: 50% believed in a young Earth & Genesis, 65% believed in evolution. People could pick more than one option.)
If people can believe utterly contradictory ideas and accept them all as entirely true, then it is hardly surprising that they can be talked into believing in Time Travel. If people had better education in critical thinking, the inventor would be working on more interesting lines and the investors would be more careful.
I am totally, 100%, for "blue-sky" research and for totally speculative work of the most daring kind, but daredevils in general are amongst the most meticulous people on Earth. Well, those that live past the first try, anyway. Those who produce the most amazing results are/were amazing observers, patient, thorough and intolerant of contradictions and conflicting information.
I am also totally, 100%, against any system in which belief A must be held as divine truth in circumstance A, belief B must likewise be held as divine truth in circumstance B, where beliefs A and B cannot both be true. Unfortunately, this is common in schools, where different teachers in different subjects (and sometimes the same subject) insist that what they say is the Absolute Truth, no matter what the course textbook says, what experience or observation says, or what anyone else in any other class says.
It is such systems that create the confusion and distortion in the brain that allows for confidence tricksters. If the brain is geared to accept the impossible, then conmen will have total freedom to sell the impossible. It's hard to blame the conmen for using an exposed API to the brain.
Last, but not least, is the question of whether time travel can exist. Maybe, but not through an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It's not stable. There are wormholes that are potentially stable, but you need to line it with negative energy potential that has the mass equivalence equal to or exceeding the mass traveling through it, or it instantaneously collapses. The ends of the wormhole must also only ever exist in each other's future light cone. The restrictions keep on for a while, and it is entirely possible that enough restrictions exist to make a wormhole impossible by merit of contradiction. This has not been demonstrated - yet. All that has been shown impossible is time travel in the local time frame.
Kernels are not Operating Systems and it is syntactically incorrect to place a "," before an "and", although it is usually acceptable where one list contains a second list. In this case, where the "and" applies to the whole of the remainder of the sentence and not just the insert, the comma should follow the and.
There's a PL/I compiler that works with GCC that's open-source and free. (I'm adding that because I've found at least one commercial PL/I compiler for Linux, which costs $15,000/seat.) If we had enough of the Multics OS code, it should be possible to replace the hardware-specific calls to the Linux equivalent and then compile it as a wrapper.
Yep, seen that at plenty of places. At one place, the IT department clearly spelled out what was possible and in what timeframe. Marketing oversold anyway. However, this isn't just IT, and that's the scary part of it. Airlines routinely overbook aircraft. Package holiday companies sell hotel rooms for hotels that haven't yet been built. You too can place advance orders for books that haven't been written or buy computers that have not yet been built. (One company I know has made substantial money off a computer for which even the prototype does not yet work.)
The problem with marketing is that it is not about selling what you have, it's about selling what the person wants to buy. If there's a discrepancy between the two, well, that's not your department. Complaints is three doors down, across the hall from Abuse.
...is much the same as the crisis with the sponsored academic and the sponsored journalist. Ultimately, those doing the sponsoring (whether it is big business or big government) will want a return on investment. In the case of academia, this involves fraudulent research and a restriction on what can be studied. In the case of journalism, fraudulent articles and a restriction on what can be covered. In the case of the Internet - well, we've seen some attempts at disinformation campaigns and we're certainly seeing a restriction on what can be distributed.
Far as I can see, this isn't anything new. The sole difference is that we could always blame the academic or the journalist for caving in. This time, it's us. Nothing is going to change, "us" is too vague a concept and most Internet users have trouble realizing or understanding that there are people on the other end of connections. What's more, most of those with enough vision and intelligence are libertarian. Nothing wrong with libertarians, but isolated individuals have never made an effective stand against anything. Libertarians are sufficiently against organized opposition (associating unions with the American versions, which never did have anything to do with international unionism) and any form of solidarity (which is only associated with communism in the States) that the worthiness of their ideals is a total side-issue. They will never be heard.
Related to that is that everything socially-oriented (socialism, universal healthcare, whatever) are also always labeled as communist. Yeah, right. Only communists could want to see people in good heath, and the only forms of political system the Universe will ever see are either right-wing totalitarian regimes or Stalinist totalitarian regimes. The remaining thousand or so countries only think they have something else. Sigh.
In countries like China, and so on, they do exactly the same only in reverse. You're either identical (and therefore have nothing to add) or a polar opposite (and therefore have nothing to contribute).
Why is this political rant relevant? Because it is absolutely perfect for making it impossible to make a difference. I don't know if that was deliberate or accidental, and frankly I don't care. Nor do I care if corporations or governments are responding instinctively or deliberately. Why should it matter? If you want the Internet to be a medium that allows for the free exchange of information and ideas, it's utterly unimportant as to whether the blockages are caused by stupidity, malice or budgerigars. The issue is the blockage, not how it all began.
True, you've got to fix the originating cause or it's just going to recur. But if you stand back and do nothing, because fixing the cause is too hard, you lose all that you could still have gained. Corruption, due to money and power, is at least a five-thousand year old problem - that being how far written records go, though is more likely to have been a problem with the advent of humanity roughly a quarter of a million years ago. Yes, it's obnoxious and childish, but spanking politicians would be a bad idea. They'd enjoy it too much.
The only option left is to collectively assert, on a global scale, that the current state of affairs is unacceptable, that the constraints will not be tolerated, and (this is the important part) if those with authority over the Internet are unwilling to act with responsibility, they are replaceable. Anyone can run a DNS server. Anyone can install a router. Long-distance high bandwidth cables and fibre - yeah, ok, those are a problem, and no private individual can possibly replace even one of those. But collectively, there is no ISP or backbone provider that is not dispensable, if (and only if) people stopped being so fanatical about individualism that they acted together to preserve their individuality.
I've seen more codecs on the back of a postage stamp. Seriously, one "modern", effectively one "old" (DivX and XviD are forks of the same original design), and one "archaic" does not make for much of a range. It doesn't even cover the spectrum of eras, never mind the spectrum of codecs.
For those who like laundry lists, here are some codecs not listed: Dirac, Theora, Huffyuv, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer Codec, MNG, Cell, NV, WaveCodec, Motion JPEG and MSU Lossless Video Codec. The wikipedia page doesn't list all of these, it took some scouting to find others and some of the early early ones are apparently only listed in the documentation on Open Source videoconferencing software I had back in the early 1990s.
Are any of these significant, though? Well, Dirac (BBC) damn well should be - we're only talking a high-definition TV quality codec by a major broadcaster with on-site offices in most countries that would be a logical choice for their remote bureaus to use and be a good candidate for competing with digital broadcasters in general.
Theora - well, it would be the ideal desktop videoconferencing codec in many ways. Those in common use today are heavier than necessary but the quality you buy with that at the bandwidth generally available just isn't worth it.
Huffyuv is said to be the fastest codec on the planet by some, which is entirely possible. That would make it good for most things where CPU power is expensive but bandwidth is cheap. (Embedded systems would probably fall into that category a lot.)
MSU's Lossless Codec is probably the slowest codec ever written, but gives by far the best compression. It makes a great reference codec to compare others against, apparently. If you could develop a decent hardware implementation, it might be a serious competitor to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, as you could pack a comparable volume of material onto a standard DVD and therefore use already-existing commodity disks and players. All you'd need is a patch kit to add the decoder. This would likely appeal far more to consumers, as they wouldn't need to spend as much, but the studios and the manufacturers would hate and despise it for the same reason.
As another poster noted, a sink hole would be a perfectly good explanation. Erosion can also produce some amazing results - the Giant's Causeway is a series of pillars that stretch from Ireland to Scotland that formed because of intrusion into softer rock. This could be some weird reverse of that. It might not really be a hole, per-se, but merely something transparent at the frequency of observation that again has intruded a-la the Giant's Causeway. Maybe this was a gigantic geyser in a time when surface water was more common. As with the "face" on Mars, maybe this is an artifact of the camera, the angle, or the lighting.
At this point, as far as I can tell, there are a huge number of possibilities and no information to distinguish between them.
I'm working on the changing face by trying to have one of the better online comic strips declared the national cartoon, in the same way we have a national flower and national tree. The chances are extremely high that nobody will take this petition seriously (which is just as well), but then the chances are also extremely high that nobody will take the censorship story seriously either, or any efforts to counter censorship. My efforts will therefore be no less successful than anyone else's but is at least good for an occasional smirk.
Seriously, if you don't want censorship, why are you using IPv4 (which never had security in mind)? Some of you run servers, why aren't they IPv6+IPSec enabled? If you don't want censors reading your email, why are you using plain SMTP and not servers that support SMTP-over-SSL or SMTP-over-TLS? If you don't want censors monitoring the websites you visit, why aren't you proxying through squid? For that matter, why are you using plain HTTP and not HTTPS or S/HTTP (which is a different protocol)? Yes, your internet provider monitors for encryption. So why are you using them and not someone else? If there isn't a someone else, and it's such a big issue for many people, then why aren't you building a cooperative that will damn-well be that someone else?
In other words, many people talk a good talk about privacy without doing bugger all when tens of millions of credit card details get lifted in the break-ins that seem to be increasing in frequency, without doing bugger all when the IETF sets up a working body to examine an issue relating to privacy or security (how many have you joined?), without doing bugger all when the opportunity arises to do things differently, and without doing bugger all when the petitions start to get drawn up for what's on each State's ballot.
I do a little more - I actually follow the work that is being done and experiment with it - but mostly I end up feeling that campaigning for a national cartoon is a far more productive use of time and effort. If people wanted security, we'd already have it. It's not hard, the software already exists, the only thing that is left to do is use it. If that's not happened in the past ten years of a deteriorating privacy and security situation due to negligent corporations, it's unlikely to happen in the next ten.
Spare yourselves the pain. If you can't stop things becoming a joke, then at least make it inescapable that it's a joke.
Headline: "Gotcha!" (ripped from their Belgrano headline - they might even use the same photo). The "technical" (ha!) part of the story goes on page 2, so that readers get distracted by page 3 and don't care.
...do forget, deluges of information do occur. People on the Autistic Spectrum suffer from massive sensory overload. The "lower" the functioning, the less able they are to filter information out. Slowing down the information flow does not wholly or even mostly mitigate the problem, but it does reduce it quite considerably nonetheless. Much of the perceived "slowness" of someone who is autistic is a product of their brain working overtime to deal with the volume of data. If you liken the brain to a computer, the CPU is spending all its time processing sensory interrupts and has no time left to actually run anything.
People with synesthesia suffer from cross-wired senses and ergo get more information than is actually present and in effect this can rapidly become massively overloading. (It is unclear to me what happens when someone is both autistic AND a synesthete, although it's certain it happens. My guess is that the extreme overloading would be almost impossible for the person.)
Those with tetrachromatic vision have an enlarged visual cortex to deal with the extra data, but the increased volume of visual data must place some stress on the rest of the brain, though it's unclear if anyone has ever done the research to find out what.
Other disorders that increase sensory data certainly exist and again there's going to be a point where that data is beyond overwhelming and supersaturates the brain's ability to model the world and process the data.
Getting back to the original article, if forgetting is as important as is implied, then it must be MORE important for those with any of the above disorders, because you would need to temporarily block more in order to free up an equivalent level of mental capacity. Is this what we find, in practice?
The answer, at first glance, is maybe no. Computer programmers are frequently on the autistic spectrum but have phenomenal memories for technical stuff and usually an astonishing learning speed. These are indications of efficient relationship mapping (something anyone who uses mnemonic memorization techniques can attest to) and minimal stacking (the brain has a hard limit of about 7 items on the mental stack at a time. Those who can recite long strings of numbers, such as the digits of Pi, do so by placing a mnemonic at the end of the stack that links onto another stack).
In science, you learn more by examining the exceptions than by looking at the rule. Besides, the rule is just a simplification of a greater rule that includes those exceptions. If you want to truly understand remembering and forgetting, you are wasting your time to look at when they "work". You must study when things break down, when normal mechanisms fail, when you cannot extrapolate that far from the standard model. It is then that you will be able to draw meaningful conclusions and upgrade the standard model to a more accurate depiction of reality.
Ok, here's a rundown on what I'd consider to be the criteria for measuring the trust of an OS:
Privileges should be defined on a gross level using role-based access controls and then on a fine level using hierarchical access controls:
Privileges should be universal. In other words, they should not just apply to applications or system calls, but also to address ranges, network ports, network types of service, disk directories, memory regions, shared memory regions, login and authentication methods, swap space quota and rights, run queues available - everything.
Privileges can never increase, but they can decrease. If a thread loses the right to run, any time to run in, or any ability to do anything if running, then it can be used for denial of service but nothing else and should therefore be eliminated.
The OS should not allow a user to escalate their privileges, even if a flaw is found within an application or Operating System:
Programs either run or accessed by a "local" user (or remotely by an identified "local" user) should never have greater rights than that subset of rights that exists for both program and user.
Programs either run or accessed by any other remote user should always be run with minimal rights.
The same is true for all other communication between any combination of users, processes, activities and resources.
The OS should not allow a user to escalate anyone else's privileges either (a major requirement of systems on classified networks):
If any resource of any kind is placed somewhere another user can access it, that resource must have privileges that are no greater than the subset of it's own privileges, that of the source user/process and that of the destination user/process.
The source and destination must be of a compatible nature - some roles cannot transfer resources to other roles, transfers that would result in the elimination of a mandated right would not be permitted, etc.
Where the transfer is of a pipe or other communications mechanism, nothing coming through the pipe can have greater rights than the pipe itself.
There should be no bypass mechanism:
This means no superuser, no special kernel components and no supervisory element. Everything that runs, including all kernel threads, should run with relative not absolute rights. When bugs are found - and they will be - the damage should be restricted to within a smaller scope than could have been inflicted without the bug.
The overall design of the software should be structurally correct.
In other words, if you draw out how the data flows, there should be no arc that would invalidate the security model by running out of rights or by having too many.
Those components for which a mathematical model can both exist and be verified should have such a model that has been verified.
Formal Methods are extremely hard to use well for giant projects, but there are many subsets for which they are ideal. An example of a formal method would be the Z Specification language, which is now an ISO standard. Tedious in the extreme for anything that's long and complex, it would be very usable for privilege management, key functions such as kmalloc/kfree, and other fundamental components on which the OS depends.
All components and combinations of components should be fully specified in some form and tested to that specification.
A specification needn't be formal in the mathematical sense, but it should be possible to derive valid cases, extreme (ie: corner) cases, and invalid cases. Both component-level and integrated test harnesses should then validate that all identified cases produce the expected results. Integrated testing should include both shotgun and continuous tests.
Distributed and massively parallel algorithms can be extremely difficult to prove, but it is essential for any level of confidence that they be pr
It was rated C2, which means that it's got the real basic protections but that's about it. C-class operating systems were the lowest that could be used in any Government role, so when the early Windows 2000 failed one of the tests, it was technically unlawful to use Windows 2000 for any Government work, even when totally standalone. (The Orange Book only measured internal security, not network security, so failing on the Orange Book tests was a big deal.)
Although NT4 was certainly used for secret material, I am pretty sure that only B-rated operating systems were entitled to hold secret and some top secret information. A-rated systems could be used for anything. Only one truly general-purpose A-rated OS (Genesis) was ever developed and officially rated - many other A-rated OS' existed, but they were all special-purpose. C-rated systems were only supposed to be used for unclassified and commercially sensitive material, if I remember the system correctly.
Trusted Solaris was rated B1, which meant it was as good as you could get without some very stringent formal proofs of correctness and formal design methodologies. The big difference between B1 and A1 is that a B1 system is bulletproof only according to any tests and evaluations performed on it, but the tests aren't guaranteed comprehensive. With an A1 system, you also know that the implementation exactly matches the design and that there is no obvious flaw in the design.
However, the criteria have shifted over time. Under the Common Criteria, Trusted Solaris and Solaris 9 "only" rate EAL-4+ (out of a maximum of 7), with PR/SM and XTS-400 being the only ones to rate 5. Bear in mind that RHEL4 update 1 is also classed as 4+, as are Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. The difference in security between Windows 2003 and Trusted Solaris is so vast as to be laughable, and the idea that a highly specialized, highly secure system like XTS-400 is less than a single unit of trustworthiness better than XP is a complete joke. Clearly the method used in the Common Criteria is flawed to the point of not being useful as a measure of trust.
Mind you, the Orange Book was not perfect. Trusted Irix was rated B3, MULTIX was rated B2. The Multicians (a group of surviving kernel developers for MULTICS) let me know that there was no API, but you can't test if the API works if there is no API to test against. This makes testing for code safety difficult at best - you've nothing to tell you what's meant by safe. I'm prepared to believe MULTIX was brilliant, in fact I do believe that, but I have a hard time believing that the level of trust you could place in it was somewhere between that of Trusted Irix and Trusted Solaris. That may well be the case, but it feels more likely somehow that the evaluation criteria are too narrow and too minimalistic.
(I'd develop my own criteria, but having friends and karma on Slashdot doesn't equate to being taken more seriously by industrial leaders on security issues than defense industry specialists. In fact, even being on Slashdot is probably a big minus in the eyes of places like BAE or Sun Microsystems. Which, of course, is stupid - everyone here knows Slashdot readers are the creme a-la creme of the industry.)
It's by no means guaranteed - the judge has amazing flexibility when awarding costs. (Costs may include all of the legal fees and lawyer costs involved.) If the judge feels that the guy is guilty as charged but the charge was totally stupid and should never have been taken to court, then the judge is entitled to order Microsoft to pay them. Or, if he feels both sides have been stupid, he can split the costs pretty well any way he likes. All of the above have happened, and do happen on a fairly regular basis. It's a way of penalizing legit cases that are also complete abuses of the system. It gets more complicated when you consider appeals, as both sides can appeal regardless of the verdict. The appeals court is entitled to increase penalties exacted, as well as decrease them. As far as I know, there is no refund on costs, regardless of the opinion of the appeals court.
There are only a handful of OS' that are considered "trusted". HP-UX BLS, Trusted Unicos 8.0, SEVMS, CS/SX, Trusted IRIX, Trusted Solaris, VSLAN, Trusted XENIX, XTS-300, XTS-400, PR/SM, SACDIN, THETA and Genesis. I see a distinct lack of OS/X, Microsoft isn't even remotely close, Linux has 30% of the RBAC requirements to be really secure in a modern environment - which is better than many, and OpenBSD is only considered watertight from external attacks - it has minimal security between users.
When you consider that you can build role-based access controls that can migrate with applications across clusters, when network connection types, network bandwidth, shared memory and inter-process communication have mandatory access controls, you really begin to see just how pathetically limited generally-available OS' really are. There's no reason for it - there's nothing that prevents a widely-available system from being harder than a diamond-encrusted pulsar.
The reason that nobody bothers much with making OS' secure is that the DoD has long-proved (by buying Windows and by failing their security audits) that security doesn't matter enough to be worth the effort. Security to this level costs big money, and only the really big corporations can afford the costs or have the market to pay for it. Companies can lose hundreds of thousands of credit cards and maybe get rapped knuckles - if they're even discovered. Only one State requires reporting - but plenty of other places have e-Commerce. System crackers - black hats especially - are a pervasive part of society with no serious effort to secure networks against them.
If the money did exist, if there was serious interest in serious prevention, host intrusion detection wouldn't be MD5 checksums (which were beaten soundly, according to the Internet Auditing Project). Plain-text passwords wouldn't exist. One-time pads and public-key encryption would be the only way to log onto Slashdot or any other web service. Zombies, Trojans and Viruses would be found in technology museums, under "extinct electronic lifeforms". If a disk drive with tens of millions of credit cards or social security numbers went missing, in a secure world that would be cause for a few minutes downtime to replace what was lost, rather than a few weeks or months of running round in circles doing nothing.
You see any of that happening? No? Then security is still regarded as an optional extra, not as a fundamental design requirement, and will never reach its true potential. Furthermore, agencies will continue buying/copying OS' based on ease of initial deployment and not on whether it'll protect the data sufficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
...where a Prime computer told him to marry Lala Ward. I'm not sure which happened first - they split up or Prime went belly up, but I can't help but think that codependence on a buggy mainframe explains a lot.
Ha! I'm far sneakier than that. I'm crazy AND I like to post on Slashdot whilst my code recompiles. :)
...that in many countries, when a carrier censors content, it automatically loses "common carrier" status and becomes liable for what it carries. In other words, AT&T probably can't be sued right now for movies on their lines, but if they censor those lines and miss something - however accidental - they are liable. In the UK, carriers have been sued into bankrupcy after losing common carrier status. I don't know if this is true in the US, but if it is and someone wants to go digging for gold, they would be doing everyone a huge favour.
All in all, the book gives suggestions that will help you get a good grade at CS, and maybe Software Engineering, but probably not more formal courses (too little emphasis on the thinking part). It will help you write good programs, without a doubt, but not great programs and certainly not masterpieces. Nor will it help you with the history of programming (programmers predate text editors OR debuggers) or the future of programming (this book is only marginally useful on fourth- and fifth-generation languages, RAD, specification compilers, massively parallel programs, fuzzy logic, self-modifying code, and other such fun stuff).
All in all, there will be many people who will get great value from this text, but they will never be language-agnostic and they will never write the truly brilliant software that they are quite capable of. Yes, it's easy to criticise and harder to do, and it's most unlikely I would ever write a computer book. Mostly because nobody would be able to understand it - my writing style is hard enough to follow on Slashdot, I can guarantee you'd see people jumping off bridges if faced with 500+ pages of my degenerate writings. However, the fact is that there are many good books for novice programmers who want to be adequate, a few for adequate programmers to unlearn bad habits and become good programmers, far fewer that skip the middle step and go straight to good, and none at all that show someone how to go the extra mile that turns something good into something amazing.
That's the book I want to see someone write, and get reviewed on Slashdot.
(Mentally crosses over to the alternative fuels story and pictures North Carolina being invaded by people on Eggmobiles performing strange chemical experiments in mayonnaise jars. Me, normal? No, but thanks for asking.)
Assuming that there's no wholesale price for used frying oil, and that you use 10 gallons in a week, your bond is $6,000 and your tax bill is $7,839, giving you a total cost of $13,839
All things considered, he got off lightly. He could have been ordered to pay the full costs outlined above (although probably at the wholesale price of cooking oil), plus fines for non-payment of the various bonds, plus a fine for non-payment of taxes.
Do I agree with these kinds of charges? No friggin' way! You want to talk about encouraging innovation, well innovate THIS, North Carolina - there will be no Hewletts or Packards or Jobs or Wosniks in a place that makes any kind of innovation totally unaffordable. If the best a startup can afford is a garage, what is the point in charging them in taxation more than everything they posses combined? It's a great way to kill the real doers in the world.
The same goes for any other State that inflicts taxes greater than the value of that which is being taxed, and doubly goes for Britain where common law and common sense are supposed to take precedence over civil and criminal law. (That fact has been used many times in appeals, and is probably the only notable achievement British justice has, but it's probably one of the greatest achievements of any legal system.)
However, he's been busted for a fuel tax (info courtesy of North Carolina's Department of Revenue), which charges a flat tax per gallon, plus a percent of wholesale prices, plus an inspection tax. Oh, and there's also a tax for being a bulk end-user of alternative fuels, which may also be what he's being busted on. Yes, there really is a North Carolina tax on being an end-user of alternative fuels. Oh, and if the oil isn't pure oil, but contains something else (due to cooking fish or potatos), then that second document states that he must get a license as a blender AS WELL. (Exceptions only apply to those creating a minimal amount of blend to start an engine - if you can run a car off it, you need to pay.)
These are straight off NC's own website, they're not interpretations by anyone, they're not downloaded and modified in The Gimp, these are what NC really charge. And, yes, you can claim tax back, but you can't get back what you haven't paid. And they get the interest off the money in the meantime, you don't. (That's why I detest getting taxes back - they got not only the use of the extra money, but they get to keep whatever was made off it. I don't care if they're not supposed to, nobody gets into government if they're risk-averse.)
If people can believe utterly contradictory ideas and accept them all as entirely true, then it is hardly surprising that they can be talked into believing in Time Travel. If people had better education in critical thinking, the inventor would be working on more interesting lines and the investors would be more careful.
I am totally, 100%, for "blue-sky" research and for totally speculative work of the most daring kind, but daredevils in general are amongst the most meticulous people on Earth. Well, those that live past the first try, anyway. Those who produce the most amazing results are/were amazing observers, patient, thorough and intolerant of contradictions and conflicting information.
I am also totally, 100%, against any system in which belief A must be held as divine truth in circumstance A, belief B must likewise be held as divine truth in circumstance B, where beliefs A and B cannot both be true. Unfortunately, this is common in schools, where different teachers in different subjects (and sometimes the same subject) insist that what they say is the Absolute Truth, no matter what the course textbook says, what experience or observation says, or what anyone else in any other class says.
It is such systems that create the confusion and distortion in the brain that allows for confidence tricksters. If the brain is geared to accept the impossible, then conmen will have total freedom to sell the impossible. It's hard to blame the conmen for using an exposed API to the brain.
Last, but not least, is the question of whether time travel can exist. Maybe, but not through an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It's not stable. There are wormholes that are potentially stable, but you need to line it with negative energy potential that has the mass equivalence equal to or exceeding the mass traveling through it, or it instantaneously collapses. The ends of the wormhole must also only ever exist in each other's future light cone. The restrictions keep on for a while, and it is entirely possible that enough restrictions exist to make a wormhole impossible by merit of contradiction. This has not been demonstrated - yet. All that has been shown impossible is time travel in the local time frame.
Kernels are not Operating Systems and it is syntactically incorrect to place a "," before an "and", although it is usually acceptable where one list contains a second list. In this case, where the "and" applies to the whole of the remainder of the sentence and not just the insert, the comma should follow the and.
There's a PL/I compiler that works with GCC that's open-source and free. (I'm adding that because I've found at least one commercial PL/I compiler for Linux, which costs $15,000/seat.) If we had enough of the Multics OS code, it should be possible to replace the hardware-specific calls to the Linux equivalent and then compile it as a wrapper.
Just remember. As any UFOlogist can tell you, Space Squirrels are the Greys.
The problem with marketing is that it is not about selling what you have, it's about selling what the person wants to buy. If there's a discrepancy between the two, well, that's not your department. Complaints is three doors down, across the hall from Abuse.
Far as I can see, this isn't anything new. The sole difference is that we could always blame the academic or the journalist for caving in. This time, it's us. Nothing is going to change, "us" is too vague a concept and most Internet users have trouble realizing or understanding that there are people on the other end of connections. What's more, most of those with enough vision and intelligence are libertarian. Nothing wrong with libertarians, but isolated individuals have never made an effective stand against anything. Libertarians are sufficiently against organized opposition (associating unions with the American versions, which never did have anything to do with international unionism) and any form of solidarity (which is only associated with communism in the States) that the worthiness of their ideals is a total side-issue. They will never be heard.
Related to that is that everything socially-oriented (socialism, universal healthcare, whatever) are also always labeled as communist. Yeah, right. Only communists could want to see people in good heath, and the only forms of political system the Universe will ever see are either right-wing totalitarian regimes or Stalinist totalitarian regimes. The remaining thousand or so countries only think they have something else. Sigh.
In countries like China, and so on, they do exactly the same only in reverse. You're either identical (and therefore have nothing to add) or a polar opposite (and therefore have nothing to contribute).
Why is this political rant relevant? Because it is absolutely perfect for making it impossible to make a difference. I don't know if that was deliberate or accidental, and frankly I don't care. Nor do I care if corporations or governments are responding instinctively or deliberately. Why should it matter? If you want the Internet to be a medium that allows for the free exchange of information and ideas, it's utterly unimportant as to whether the blockages are caused by stupidity, malice or budgerigars. The issue is the blockage, not how it all began.
True, you've got to fix the originating cause or it's just going to recur. But if you stand back and do nothing, because fixing the cause is too hard, you lose all that you could still have gained. Corruption, due to money and power, is at least a five-thousand year old problem - that being how far written records go, though is more likely to have been a problem with the advent of humanity roughly a quarter of a million years ago. Yes, it's obnoxious and childish, but spanking politicians would be a bad idea. They'd enjoy it too much.
The only option left is to collectively assert, on a global scale, that the current state of affairs is unacceptable, that the constraints will not be tolerated, and (this is the important part) if those with authority over the Internet are unwilling to act with responsibility, they are replaceable. Anyone can run a DNS server. Anyone can install a router. Long-distance high bandwidth cables and fibre - yeah, ok, those are a problem, and no private individual can possibly replace even one of those. But collectively, there is no ISP or backbone provider that is not dispensable, if (and only if) people stopped being so fanatical about individualism that they acted together to preserve their individuality.
For those who like laundry lists, here are some codecs not listed: Dirac, Theora, Huffyuv, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer Codec, MNG, Cell, NV, WaveCodec, Motion JPEG and MSU Lossless Video Codec. The wikipedia page doesn't list all of these, it took some scouting to find others and some of the early early ones are apparently only listed in the documentation on Open Source videoconferencing software I had back in the early 1990s.
Are any of these significant, though? Well, Dirac (BBC) damn well should be - we're only talking a high-definition TV quality codec by a major broadcaster with on-site offices in most countries that would be a logical choice for their remote bureaus to use and be a good candidate for competing with digital broadcasters in general.
Theora - well, it would be the ideal desktop videoconferencing codec in many ways. Those in common use today are heavier than necessary but the quality you buy with that at the bandwidth generally available just isn't worth it.
Huffyuv is said to be the fastest codec on the planet by some, which is entirely possible. That would make it good for most things where CPU power is expensive but bandwidth is cheap. (Embedded systems would probably fall into that category a lot.)
MSU's Lossless Codec is probably the slowest codec ever written, but gives by far the best compression. It makes a great reference codec to compare others against, apparently. If you could develop a decent hardware implementation, it might be a serious competitor to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, as you could pack a comparable volume of material onto a standard DVD and therefore use already-existing commodity disks and players. All you'd need is a patch kit to add the decoder. This would likely appeal far more to consumers, as they wouldn't need to spend as much, but the studios and the manufacturers would hate and despise it for the same reason.
At this point, as far as I can tell, there are a huge number of possibilities and no information to distinguish between them.
What makes you think this isn't a prototype Death Star, disguised as a planet? The photo is just looking down the giant planet-smashing plasma cannon.
There's a hole in my planet, dear NASA, a hole.
Then fill it, dear Martian, dear Martian,
Then fill it, dear Martion, fill it.
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, dear NASA,
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, with what?
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, dear Martian,
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, space probes.
Seriously, if you don't want censorship, why are you using IPv4 (which never had security in mind)? Some of you run servers, why aren't they IPv6+IPSec enabled? If you don't want censors reading your email, why are you using plain SMTP and not servers that support SMTP-over-SSL or SMTP-over-TLS? If you don't want censors monitoring the websites you visit, why aren't you proxying through squid? For that matter, why are you using plain HTTP and not HTTPS or S/HTTP (which is a different protocol)? Yes, your internet provider monitors for encryption. So why are you using them and not someone else? If there isn't a someone else, and it's such a big issue for many people, then why aren't you building a cooperative that will damn-well be that someone else?
In other words, many people talk a good talk about privacy without doing bugger all when tens of millions of credit card details get lifted in the break-ins that seem to be increasing in frequency, without doing bugger all when the IETF sets up a working body to examine an issue relating to privacy or security (how many have you joined?), without doing bugger all when the opportunity arises to do things differently, and without doing bugger all when the petitions start to get drawn up for what's on each State's ballot.
I do a little more - I actually follow the work that is being done and experiment with it - but mostly I end up feeling that campaigning for a national cartoon is a far more productive use of time and effort. If people wanted security, we'd already have it. It's not hard, the software already exists, the only thing that is left to do is use it. If that's not happened in the past ten years of a deteriorating privacy and security situation due to negligent corporations, it's unlikely to happen in the next ten.
Spare yourselves the pain. If you can't stop things becoming a joke, then at least make it inescapable that it's a joke.
Headline: "Gotcha!" (ripped from their Belgrano headline - they might even use the same photo). The "technical" (ha!) part of the story goes on page 2, so that readers get distracted by page 3 and don't care.
People with synesthesia suffer from cross-wired senses and ergo get more information than is actually present and in effect this can rapidly become massively overloading. (It is unclear to me what happens when someone is both autistic AND a synesthete, although it's certain it happens. My guess is that the extreme overloading would be almost impossible for the person.)
Those with tetrachromatic vision have an enlarged visual cortex to deal with the extra data, but the increased volume of visual data must place some stress on the rest of the brain, though it's unclear if anyone has ever done the research to find out what.
Other disorders that increase sensory data certainly exist and again there's going to be a point where that data is beyond overwhelming and supersaturates the brain's ability to model the world and process the data.
Getting back to the original article, if forgetting is as important as is implied, then it must be MORE important for those with any of the above disorders, because you would need to temporarily block more in order to free up an equivalent level of mental capacity. Is this what we find, in practice?
The answer, at first glance, is maybe no. Computer programmers are frequently on the autistic spectrum but have phenomenal memories for technical stuff and usually an astonishing learning speed. These are indications of efficient relationship mapping (something anyone who uses mnemonic memorization techniques can attest to) and minimal stacking (the brain has a hard limit of about 7 items on the mental stack at a time. Those who can recite long strings of numbers, such as the digits of Pi, do so by placing a mnemonic at the end of the stack that links onto another stack).
In science, you learn more by examining the exceptions than by looking at the rule. Besides, the rule is just a simplification of a greater rule that includes those exceptions. If you want to truly understand remembering and forgetting, you are wasting your time to look at when they "work". You must study when things break down, when normal mechanisms fail, when you cannot extrapolate that far from the standard model. It is then that you will be able to draw meaningful conclusions and upgrade the standard model to a more accurate depiction of reality.
Thx for the correction. I'll blame it on not having had the privileges needed to perform the query. :)
Although NT4 was certainly used for secret material, I am pretty sure that only B-rated operating systems were entitled to hold secret and some top secret information. A-rated systems could be used for anything. Only one truly general-purpose A-rated OS (Genesis) was ever developed and officially rated - many other A-rated OS' existed, but they were all special-purpose. C-rated systems were only supposed to be used for unclassified and commercially sensitive material, if I remember the system correctly.
Trusted Solaris was rated B1, which meant it was as good as you could get without some very stringent formal proofs of correctness and formal design methodologies. The big difference between B1 and A1 is that a B1 system is bulletproof only according to any tests and evaluations performed on it, but the tests aren't guaranteed comprehensive. With an A1 system, you also know that the implementation exactly matches the design and that there is no obvious flaw in the design.
However, the criteria have shifted over time. Under the Common Criteria, Trusted Solaris and Solaris 9 "only" rate EAL-4+ (out of a maximum of 7), with PR/SM and XTS-400 being the only ones to rate 5. Bear in mind that RHEL4 update 1 is also classed as 4+, as are Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. The difference in security between Windows 2003 and Trusted Solaris is so vast as to be laughable, and the idea that a highly specialized, highly secure system like XTS-400 is less than a single unit of trustworthiness better than XP is a complete joke. Clearly the method used in the Common Criteria is flawed to the point of not being useful as a measure of trust.
Mind you, the Orange Book was not perfect. Trusted Irix was rated B3, MULTIX was rated B2. The Multicians (a group of surviving kernel developers for MULTICS) let me know that there was no API, but you can't test if the API works if there is no API to test against. This makes testing for code safety difficult at best - you've nothing to tell you what's meant by safe. I'm prepared to believe MULTIX was brilliant, in fact I do believe that, but I have a hard time believing that the level of trust you could place in it was somewhere between that of Trusted Irix and Trusted Solaris. That may well be the case, but it feels more likely somehow that the evaluation criteria are too narrow and too minimalistic.
(I'd develop my own criteria, but having friends and karma on Slashdot doesn't equate to being taken more seriously by industrial leaders on security issues than defense industry specialists. In fact, even being on Slashdot is probably a big minus in the eyes of places like BAE or Sun Microsystems. Which, of course, is stupid - everyone here knows Slashdot readers are the creme a-la creme of the industry.)
It's by no means guaranteed - the judge has amazing flexibility when awarding costs. (Costs may include all of the legal fees and lawyer costs involved.) If the judge feels that the guy is guilty as charged but the charge was totally stupid and should never have been taken to court, then the judge is entitled to order Microsoft to pay them. Or, if he feels both sides have been stupid, he can split the costs pretty well any way he likes. All of the above have happened, and do happen on a fairly regular basis. It's a way of penalizing legit cases that are also complete abuses of the system. It gets more complicated when you consider appeals, as both sides can appeal regardless of the verdict. The appeals court is entitled to increase penalties exacted, as well as decrease them. As far as I know, there is no refund on costs, regardless of the opinion of the appeals court.
When you consider that you can build role-based access controls that can migrate with applications across clusters, when network connection types, network bandwidth, shared memory and inter-process communication have mandatory access controls, you really begin to see just how pathetically limited generally-available OS' really are. There's no reason for it - there's nothing that prevents a widely-available system from being harder than a diamond-encrusted pulsar.
The reason that nobody bothers much with making OS' secure is that the DoD has long-proved (by buying Windows and by failing their security audits) that security doesn't matter enough to be worth the effort. Security to this level costs big money, and only the really big corporations can afford the costs or have the market to pay for it. Companies can lose hundreds of thousands of credit cards and maybe get rapped knuckles - if they're even discovered. Only one State requires reporting - but plenty of other places have e-Commerce. System crackers - black hats especially - are a pervasive part of society with no serious effort to secure networks against them.
If the money did exist, if there was serious interest in serious prevention, host intrusion detection wouldn't be MD5 checksums (which were beaten soundly, according to the Internet Auditing Project). Plain-text passwords wouldn't exist. One-time pads and public-key encryption would be the only way to log onto Slashdot or any other web service. Zombies, Trojans and Viruses would be found in technology museums, under "extinct electronic lifeforms". If a disk drive with tens of millions of credit cards or social security numbers went missing, in a secure world that would be cause for a few minutes downtime to replace what was lost, rather than a few weeks or months of running round in circles doing nothing.
You see any of that happening? No? Then security is still regarded as an optional extra, not as a fundamental design requirement, and will never reach its true potential. Furthermore, agencies will continue buying/copying OS' based on ease of initial deployment and not on whether it'll protect the data sufficiently.