Günter Wallraff, a investigative journalist, uncovered turkish laborers were 'used' for a similar purpose in German nuclear plants in the 80ies:
Disguised as Ali, Wallraff took on jobs as laborer in construction firms, on farms, janitorial service, and even as a day laborer in a nuclear power plant. In the publication of his 2-year adventure as Turk in Germany, LOWEST OF THE LOW, Guenther Walraff later revealed that the Turkish workers at the power plant were not even provided the same amount of protective clothing at the nuclear power plant as were the German employees at the same plant.
My experiences surpassed my expectations. In a negative way. I have encountered [working] conditions right in the heart of the Federal Republic of Germany, that are usually described in historical accounts of the 19. century.
'Hidden complex social and physiological realities?'
I think 'exploitation' and the strive for 'profits' sums it up nicely.
Interactivity in graphs is smoke and mirrors. It suggests certain degrees of freedom, while the dataset is aligned to whatever 'benefits the company'. Interactivity merely creates the illusion of being able to 'find out' - This is not transparency; this is propaganda.
Google already keeps track of all kinds of data around my Gmail account, why does it not warn me whenever *irregular* patterns of access occurred, based on implausibly localized IPs?
Thank you for your consideration
- You already know I love you, Google. Sincerely, a concerned GMail customer.
Apart from the fact that this whole thing is ethnically ill-conceived, I will never believe it's going to be safe against being exploited in any way. Regardless of whether or not these machines are capable of storing actual images, the operator would always find a way to 'store' body scanner images given enough incentive. Imagine those images surfacing on the web, showing some child, some known celebrity - imagine the lawsuits, imagine the public outcry...
The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible...
Yeah, go maximum extend your mom!
Humans will always find a way - This shit is bound to fail simply given the troubled nature of the ordinary human being...
This may be a far thought, but if stochastic CPUs allow for increased performance in a trade-off for correctness, maybe something like following description may reap the benefits while keeping out the stochastics right away:
Suppose those CPUs really allow for faster instruction handling using less resources, maybe you could put more in a package, for the same price, which on a hardware level would give rise to more processing cores at the same cost. (Multi-Core stochastic CPUs) Naturally, you have the ability to do parallel processing, with errors possible, but you are able to process instructions at a faster rate.
On the software side, the support for concurrency is a mayor selling point, of course, there has to be something able recover from those pesky stochastics gracefully. I come up with the functional language 'Erlang'.
This is taken from wikipedia
Concurrency supports the primary method of error-handling in Erlang. When a process crashes, it neatly exits and sends a message to the controlling process which can take action. This way of error handling increases maintainability and reduces complexity of code
Erlang has a built-in feature for error handling between processes. Terminating processes will emit exit signals to all linked processes, which may terminate as well or handle the exit in some way. This feature can be used to build hierarchical program structures where some processes are supervising other processes, for example restarting them if they terminate abnormally.
Asked to 'refer to OTP Design Principles for more information about OTP supervision trees, which use[s] this feature' I read this:
A basic concept in Erlang/OTP is the supervision tree. This is a process structuring model based on the idea of workers and supervisors.
Workers are processes which perform computations, that is, they do the actual work.
Supervisors are processes which monitor the behaviour of workers. A supervisor can restart a worker if something goes wrong.
The supervision tree is a hierarchical arrangement of code into supervisors and workers, making it possible to design and program fault-tolerant software.
This seems well fit? Create a real, physical machine for a language both able to reap its benefits and cope with the trade-off.
Or maybe I'm too far off (I'm bored technologically, allow me some paradigmatic change at slashdot).
TamedStochastics - Hiring.
Yes, checksumming on dedicated hardware was my first thought as well.
I'd do the following if I was a musician / musician representative group in Germany:
1. Hire cracker to gain access to networks with with verified information about the owner.
2. Download 'your' IP from said network access.
3. Write a nice letter to said owners and urge them to pay up for the damage done.
4. Profit!!!
Now if only there were botnets, insecure routers / OSs and so on.
Oh wait...
In his Glitter and Doom tour, Tom Waits pioneered an effective anti scalpers scheme.
Tickets for Waits' summer shows were limited to two per person but, in an effort to beat ticket touts, a valid I.D. (passport or driving licence) matching the name on the ticket was required to gain entry. Any concert-goer who did not have a valid I.D. or was found to be in possession of a ticket that had been resold – electronic scanners were employed – was not allowed in and did not get a refund.
I'm trying a different angle here, bear with me for a moment:
While the effort of securing software (e.g. detection and removal of bugs) in a commercial closed source setting is taken out by staff which needs to be paid for, there needs to be a budget to be able to do that.
If a piece of software becomes good enough capitalist incentives leave no reason to commercial software vendors to continue improving the security of that particular piece of existing software. In a commercial closed source setting, there is a natural constraint to who may access and work with existing code and when this is allowed; it will hardly ever happen that the staff of a commercial software vendor improves existing software without being designated a concrete, funded task.
In an open source setting, commercial or not, this constraint does not exist.
We're besically free to do whatever we please, even if this includes improving our software.
In this regard, I don’t see any reason why the open source approach to software should be fundamentally broken.
Nothing like being handed a steaming plate of spaghetti and hearing about how much of a "genius" its creator was.
Far too many *programmers* have become invaluable assets due to their reluctance to write maintainable code, ignoring the most basic rules of software development, not to mention design patterns, etc. Needless to say, these individuals get handled with the utmost respect, often being the only ones who can make sense of the mess they have left.
To a limited extend, Ubuntu is already available for the ARM architecture; see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM for reference. I have a ARM based BeagleBoard which runs Ubuntu *nicely* (I don't do fancy GUI stuff, though). Installing Ubuntu on ARM is not hard, but it's not (yet) as trivial as on PC - I'm confident this will improve once more ARM based netbooks, etc. become more common. Also, some of the packages are (yet) missing, but like my previous point, that is only a matter of time too.
That is the main problem with closed source software; in the event of a security hole, you as a customer / company are left to the mercy / arrogance of your software vendor to patch the flaw. Until he does, you can do nothing but become increasingly concerned, since you're left to the increasing danger of having your machine compromised in the meantime.
This might be the right time to educate people about the main merit of open source software: As soon as a security hole is discovered, virtually anyone can contribute to a timely resolution.
0day? Fixed tomorrow!
Slashdot Mirror
from http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/2009/10/guenther-wallraff-returnsfrom-way-down.html
His summary is dead on (roughly translated from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_unten#Inhalt):
'Hidden complex social and physiological realities?' I think 'exploitation' and the strive for 'profits' sums it up nicely.
Interactivity in graphs is smoke and mirrors. It suggests certain degrees of freedom, while the dataset is aligned to whatever 'benefits the company'. Interactivity merely creates the illusion of being able to 'find out' - This is not transparency; this is propaganda.
I suppose that either I'm out of luck using Ubuntu
or did anyone manage to make it run under Wine yet?
Next turn...
1. Sell CPU
2.
a. Break it remotely.
b. Require periodical access to heartbeat signal via 3G, or else break CPU.
3. Goto 1.
ENHANCE!
Google already keeps track of all kinds of data around my Gmail account, why does it not warn me whenever *irregular* patterns of access occurred, based on implausibly localized IPs?
Thank you for your consideration
- You already know I love you, Google.
Sincerely, a concerned GMail customer.
Apart from the fact that this whole thing is ethnically ill-conceived, I will never believe it's going to be safe against being exploited in any way. Regardless of whether or not these machines are capable of storing actual images, the operator would always find a way to 'store' body scanner images given enough incentive. Imagine those images surfacing on the web, showing some child, some known celebrity - imagine the lawsuits, imagine the public outcry...
The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible...
Yeah, go maximum extend your mom!
Humans will always find a way - This shit is bound to fail simply given the troubled nature of the ordinary human being...
Suppose those CPUs really allow for faster instruction handling using less resources, maybe you could put more in a package, for the same price, which on a hardware level would give rise to more processing cores at the same cost. (Multi-Core stochastic CPUs)
Naturally, you have the ability to do parallel processing, with errors possible, but you are able to process instructions at a faster rate.
On the software side, the support for concurrency is a mayor selling point, of course, there has to be something able recover from those pesky stochastics gracefully. I come up with the functional language 'Erlang'.
This is taken from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#Concurrency_and_distribution_orientation
Concurrency supports the primary method of error-handling in Erlang. When a process crashes, it neatly exits and sends a message to the controlling process which can take action. This way of error handling increases maintainability and reduces complexity of code
From the official source:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/processes.html#errors
Erlang has a built-in feature for error handling between processes. Terminating processes will emit exit signals to all linked processes, which may terminate as well or handle the exit in some way. This feature can be used to build hierarchical program structures where some processes are supervising other processes, for example restarting them if they terminate abnormally.
Asked to 'refer to OTP Design Principles for more information about OTP supervision trees, which use[s] this feature' I read this:
http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/des_princ.html
A basic concept in Erlang/OTP is the supervision tree. This is a process structuring model based on the idea of workers and supervisors. Workers are processes which perform computations, that is, they do the actual work. Supervisors are processes which monitor the behaviour of workers. A supervisor can restart a worker if something goes wrong. The supervision tree is a hierarchical arrangement of code into supervisors and workers, making it possible to design and program fault-tolerant software.
This seems well fit? Create a real, physical machine for a language both able to reap its benefits and cope with the trade-off.
Or maybe I'm too far off (I'm bored technologically, allow me some paradigmatic change at slashdot).
TamedStochastics - Hiring.
Yes, checksumming on dedicated hardware was my first thought as well.
I'd do the following if I was a musician / musician representative group in Germany:
1. Hire cracker to gain access to networks with with verified information about the owner.
2. Download 'your' IP from said network access.
3. Write a nice letter to said owners and urge them to pay up for the damage done.
4. Profit!!!
Now if only there were botnets, insecure routers / OSs and so on.
Oh wait...
In his Glitter and Doom tour, Tom Waits pioneered an effective anti scalpers scheme.
Tickets for Waits' summer shows were limited to two per person but, in an effort to beat ticket touts, a valid I.D. (passport or driving licence) matching the name on the ticket was required to gain entry. Any concert-goer who did not have a valid I.D. or was found to be in possession of a ticket that had been resold – electronic scanners were employed – was not allowed in and did not get a refund.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitter_and_Doom_Tour#Tickets
How can I major in CS if I can't even count!
When exactly did you spy on me?
I'm trying a different angle here, bear with me for a moment:
While the effort of securing software (e.g. detection and removal of bugs) in a commercial closed source setting is taken out by staff which needs to be paid for, there needs to be a budget to be able to do that.
If a piece of software becomes good enough capitalist incentives leave no reason to commercial software vendors to continue improving the security of that particular piece of existing software. In a commercial closed source setting, there is a natural constraint to who may access and work with existing code and when this is allowed; it will hardly ever happen that the staff of a commercial software vendor improves existing software without being designated a concrete, funded task.
In an open source setting, commercial or not, this constraint does not exist.
We're besically free to do whatever we please, even if this includes improving our software.
In this regard, I don’t see any reason why the open source approach to software should be fundamentally broken.
Nothing like being handed a steaming plate of spaghetti and hearing about how much of a "genius" its creator was.
Far too many *programmers* have become invaluable assets due to their reluctance to write maintainable code, ignoring the most basic rules of software development, not to mention design patterns, etc. Needless to say, these individuals get handled with the utmost respect, often being the only ones who can make sense of the mess they have left.
Indeed, geniuses they are.
But the evil hackers with time travel will then go to the future to find out exploits before they've been found in the past.
...and that's exactly why need regulation with regards to time travel and access to time travel machinery, now. You there, drop that screwdriver!
If I can put ubuntu on it I will be interested.
To a limited extend, Ubuntu is already available for the ARM architecture; see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM for reference. I have a ARM based BeagleBoard which runs Ubuntu *nicely* (I don't do fancy GUI stuff, though). Installing Ubuntu on ARM is not hard, but it's not (yet) as trivial as on PC - I'm confident this will improve once more ARM based netbooks, etc. become more common. Also, some of the packages are (yet) missing, but like my previous point, that is only a matter of time too.
That is the main problem with closed source software; in the event of a security hole, you as a customer / company are left to the mercy / arrogance of your software vendor to patch the flaw. Until he does, you can do nothing but become increasingly concerned, since you're left to the increasing danger of having your machine compromised in the meantime. This might be the right time to educate people about the main merit of open source software: As soon as a security hole is discovered, virtually anyone can contribute to a timely resolution. 0day? Fixed tomorrow!