Microsoft was founded in/around *1975* at a time when nobody thought there was a market for PC software. Some of the Marxists-in-training who regularly snipe at Microsoft were probably not even born then.
Actually, I believe Richard Stallman was born by then and he created the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project... and probably the whole idea of Free Software. Also, he started working on Free Software on Sun hardware and not not PCs, so that kind of shoots your argument down a little. He wrote emacs (a free software product) in 1974 before Microsoft was even founded.
Heck, Microsoft wasn't even working on Operating Systems until the emergence of commodity PCs (thanks to IBM for mistakenly creating the commodity PC market) in the early eighties. MSDOS 1.0 (which Microsoft didn't write and instead bought off of someone else) wasn't released until 1981. The GNU project to create a free version of Unix was founded in 1984. The same year the Microsoft finally got around to stealing the idea of a GUI OS from Apple (who in turn stole it from Xerox Parc... which ended up giving it to Apple for... ahem... free).
So...what was your point again?
While it is "in," among the Microsoft faithful, to be an Open Source basher, you should try looking at reality sometime.
There is a great story at the end of the PBS series American Photography: A Century of Images. It concerns the infamous Monica Lewinski photograph that "proved" that she had met and known the President to some degree before his denials. It was the one of the two hugging at some Whitehouse event. You probably saw it on the cover of Time (or was it Newsweek?).
Anyway, on the last tape of the series, they interview the photographer who took that photo. He is a crusty sort who insists on using real film and scoffs at digital and the story of the picture fixes his argument, he believes.
When the whole Monica-gate thing went down, he remembered seeing her somewhere before. So he hired an assistant to pour over his contact sheets until she found that picture. Which turned out to be pretty important and earned him a pretty penny in the process.
What he wonders is where all the other pictures are? At the same event there were about 50 other photographers taking the same picture at the same time out of the press area. No one else stepped forward before or since. The difference is that all of those photographers use digital almost exclusively and probably cleared off the photo from their hard drives to make way for potentially more "important" pictures.
You have to consider that a professional photographer in that setting may burn through 8 to 10 rolls of film a day. Thats on the order of 240 to 300 high res pictures a day. You may take over 1000 pictures a week. I don't care how big your hard drive is, you're not going to be able to store everything you take digitally. In my mind, she has a point.
The problem is that history gains relevance through context. That context shifts as new information and associations are made. Some "meaningless" photo today could be catching the future's savior or destroyer. You can't make that judgement until some n day in the future.
Final side note... I found the Lewinski photo story funny considering the big deal made about a similar photo of Clinton (as a boy) meeting Kennedy. The relevance had to wait 20 years to show itself.
The Difference Engine number two was ahead of its time, indeed. In a head to head polynomial calculation test with a Windows-based Canon BJ Notebook BN22 (with built-in ink-jet printer), the mechanical Difference Engine initially beat the pants off the laptop, but was then overtaken. Not bad for a technology that was concieved around 160 years before its competitor.
From this account, we find the following description from a witness:
"...With the windows overhead slugging the Canon, the additional time taken for 31-digit extended precision arithmetic, and the printer buffer soaking up results before making them visible to the race referees, the Babbage engine produced nine 31-digit results before the Canon bubble jet printer blasted off the starting blocks. It then spewed out the first 50 results in little more than the time for the Babbage machine to produce one more result. The hare finally overtook the tortoise."
Wow! Not bad for a version 2.0 product. Consider the advancements it would have made had Babbage been successful all those years before.
We built that into our software engineering student project in 1996. We built a resource allocation program for our computer science department called SCORE (for Scheduling Courses with Order, Reliability and Efficiency) for the Department chair that would allow him to easily assign courses and work out room and faculty assignments with automatic conflict catching.
Our client wanted to be able to post reports that were output from the software to the web. Our head programmer put a very rudimentary web template system in place that would output reports with choices of sort order, gawd-aweful background colors (from a 16 color palett), and customized headings and footers. This was all done without the user having to know any HTML. You can see samples here dating back to 1997.
The About SCORE page even references automated HTML authorship. From the page:
SCORE (Scheduling Classes with Order Reliability and Efficiency) is an application developed by a group of Computer Science students enrolled in the Software Engineering sequence at Ball State University. SCORE is an application that is a flexible scheduling advisor for use by faculty involved in the creation of course offerings by a department. SCORE has features which allow for powerful schedule reporting, class conflict catching and reporting, persistent and consistent data retieval and automated HTML authorship of documents for Internet/Intranet display.
Though ugly, I think these qualify as prior art and beat IBM's 1998 application.
Re:Because no one here exerts any effort..
on
Slashdot in Politics?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Congresspeople and other politicans pay attention to three things: (1) manually typed, manually signed letters from registered voters with reasonable arguments and tone
If you don't have a manual typwriter, bring out that old impact printer that is gathering dust in your closet. A simple Perl script could change the letters you send enough to make them seem less formulaic.
Then send them to all of your:
Representatives in Washington
state Reps
local Reps
heads of the Political Parties at the national and state level
governors
state attorney generals
attorney general of the United States
president
vice president
speaker of the house
Heads of pertinent committees
Heads of pertinent agencies
Editors of influential Magazines and Newspapers
Then you just have to sign them by hand OR get a plotter to do it.
I think we are framing the idea of "lazy" wrong. Sure computer people are lazy. They hate expending effort that will just have to be done over and over again. It is better to spend a couple of days hacking together a solution that could be applied when needed instead of taking the few minutes it will take to solve the problem once.
Doesn't Larry Wall say that the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris? Well, let's put that crap to work.
If you don't have an impact printer, fake it by choosing a crappy fixed width font like IMPACT or something. Sure, it is not the same, but it does tend to throw people used to recieving nicely formatted text. Also throw in some spelling errors and leave out some words (then go back and correct them with whiteout... though this goes against the virtues
If you start to analyze the problem, you could probably figure out what makes a personal letter sound personal and a form letter sound like a form letter. Capitalize on that! Keep a couple of flat files with appropriate phrases in them for a particular subject. Combine them in interesting ways with a program and only include a couple of new sentences here and there of original content (which should be put into files for later use).
I think this could work. Anybody have any concrete ideas or recipes?
It did? The CDA passed Congress and was signed by President Clinton and worked its way through the court system before it was (partially [cnn.com]) struck down on First Amendment grounds. Which part of that was due to site blackouts?
If you don't believe that the public protest over the passing of the CDA had anything to do with the Court's decisions, I'm surprised. If I remember correctly... the blackouts didn't happend until after the CDA was approved. Correct me if I am wrong (honestly). If that was the case, then we can't guage what effect that such actions would have before such legislation was passed.
The way I see it we have a couple of options (taking cues from the blacked out homepages across the Internet that helped draw attention to and fight the Communications Decency Act):
Put a new intro page on every site that runs on or was created withany Open source or free software(or supports those that do)
Maybe it should say something about the SSCA and how future accesses to this site may be illegal (or the site will need to be taken down) because running a particular operating system is against the law. This same Operating System that has been faithfully delivering this site to you for a long time. If you agree that this is wrong then follow the link to enter and take a moment to fill out the form on the next page. It will be emailed to the Senators/Congressmen/Media Outlets of your choice (use checkboxes and send then into the site when they click the submit button). If you think this is OK and we should be taken down for not complying, click the Leave link and you will be randomly sent to a supporter of this evil legislation (please note how bland the resulting Internet will be).
Put up a page that says that this site will go dark, using only pages of protest, until this proposed legislation is shot down. The sooner it fails, the sooner we can run our sites without fear and you can be returned to your original content.
There are probably others, but I think some sort of BlackOut is in order. It worked before. Maybe we could use netcraft to get statistics on how many sites that would mean if every OSS site was brought down and perhaps we can highlight some particularly good examples like/. (of course) but also famous sites that run OSS that Joe Sixpack would know about. Think about how many people would be pissed if they knew that this would put the crapper on Google.com and Yahoo.com.
I work at a place that has done something similar. All traffic but port 80 is blocked and the user of an infected machine can only get to a web page (no matter what address he is trying to go to) that says they have been blocked because they are infected and then lists instructions for removal and mirrors the appropriate tools. When done, the fix is verified and they can continue.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them?
Backdoor keys are more than a means for interception. They can intercept encypted traffic now. Carnivore has the ability. They then just have to apply an awful lot of computing power towards brute forcing it... hmmm.
Well, various No Such Agencies in the government are the largest consumers of supercomputing hardware in the world. I read somewhere that they bought between 60 and 80% of the Cray supercomputers ever made. So, they have the computing chops. It will still take a while (as far as we know)... hmmm.
Now this seems like it has come up before. Let's look to the Cold War. Did the Russians use encryption? You Betcha. Did they pose a threat? Presumably. Did we force them to use encryption that we could backdoor? We would have liked to. So, were their secrets unknown to us? Nope and I will tell you why.
It is because of people. If we didn't have a key to some piece of encrypted traffic, we brute forced it or, more likely/cheaply/easily, we bought it, sniffed it, or we stole it. Why the hell do you think spying against the US by an American citizen is treasonous? It is because no matter how good your processes or technologies for keeping secrets are, one weak or greedy or careless person shoots it all to hell. You have to guard against that sort of thing. How does this apply to our current situation?
Let's say that the government is monitoring communications. But they don't do that, you ask...do they? Ever heard of the NSA, it's their job. Let's say they see a strange pattern of encrypted traffic between, uh, 21 (was that the terrorist count) people. This is traffic analysis, not content analysis. They think this is odd and notify the proper agencies who then get warrants for surveillance. Surveillance turns up that these guys are up to some odd practices... spooky, suspicious, stuff, but they don't know what because of that damned encryption. So, they are screwed right?
No. They ran into that with Scarfo and they puta (in my opinion, illegal - because they didn't ask to be able to do that to the oversight body) key sniffer on his keyboard. All of the sudden, all of those encrypted files were open to them... no back doors. Why didn't the FBI/CIA/NSA do this for WTC?
Manpower. Fewer people want to work for those agencies for the pay and prestige that they give, versus the risk and hassle (I can't blame them). Backdoored crypto would not have solved the problem because the terrorists wouldn't have used it. In the end it would have just been a manpower issue all over again.
Increase MANPOWER to solve the issue. Decreasing crypto strength solves nothing.
I dont think that most people around here understand something. THE CONSTITUTION IS NOT GOING TO GO AWAY. Short of a constitutional ammendment repealing all of the ammendments in the bill of rights, your rights are secured.
This is actually tricky because the Supreme Court has sort of a black mark against it in terms of protecting privacy (crypto being a part of this). Do some searching on this one and you will find that the supreme court often comes down on the side of law enforcement on this one. Strict reading of the Constitution does not support an inherent right to Privacy. It is only in Common Law that this idea crops in. Since it isn't strictly and expressly written in the constitution then the Supreme Court must fall back on precedent and, I am sorry to say, there isn't much there to help it find in favor of the crypto user (and privacy seeker) at this point.
I'm not asking about whether justice was served in particular cases (it *is* mostly used against drug dealers), but about whether it is reasonable for police agencies to take people's property based on suspicion and then not return it, even when charges are dismissed. This is perfectly legal and happens all the time. The police agencies get to keep the assets for themselves.
This happens with suspected "hackers" all the time as well. In fact, up until a few years ago, prosecuting hacking and computer crimes was a pain in law enforcement's butt. It was too dry and they couldn't get an angle on it in most cases that would engage the jury (and sometimes they succeed with only limitedresults). Instead it was a lot easier to confiscate all their equipment and scare the hell out of them (see Sterlings book, The Hacker Crackdown). They didn't just pull this trick on teenagers, either. They went after an odd, but respectable, game maker as well. Check here for Steve Jackson's account of the mess and here for Bruce Sterling's.
This seems like the most underhanded and rights trampling kind of things that they can do... but it is totally legal. Ugh!
You do make some good points. However, I still disagree. I am not a big crypto user because most of my stuff is uninteresting and I could give a damn if you see it. If I thought it was important, I would take the proper steps.
However, I am a big crypto supporter. The reason being is because crypto is about more than hiding stuff. It is about verifying identity. It is about defeating the problem of digital storage (everything is copyable). It is about business transactions. It is about authentication.
These are all good reasons to support and use crypto. If I were a business, I wouldn't want backdoored crypto to ensure the immutability of my electronic legal documents. The fact that there is a backdoor leaves open the idea that the contract (or whatever) could have been changed. As we move closer and closer to paperless transfers (notice, I didn't say offices), we need strong crypto.
My final argument falls on the disagreement that anybody's job has to be easy. My job isn't and, sure, computer and network support would be a hell of a lot easier if my users were forced to never change anything on their computer and only do things in certain codified ways. But I'm realistic, it won't happen and that's why I get paid to do what I do. Law enforcement is in a similar boat. No one said that their job has to be easy and it is not my job to make it easier (as long as I am not actively obstructing justice... and I argue that my private use of crypto for legal means does not actively obstruct justice). In fact, there are laws in place to make law enforcement difficult in order to ensure and maintain the liberties that we enjoy as citizens.
Sources from the CIA and various government officials have come out and point blank stated that they have a severe lack of spies out there to actually infiltrate these terrorist cells...
You also have to consider that the monitoring they are doing is hampered by a lack (or shortage) of experts in various languages and dialects around the world (not just the Middle East). They also don't have theology experts to help them navigate the intricacies of the various factions that engage in guerilla warfare around the world (this includes every religion... Christianity, whatever). The incidents in Japan with the Ohm (sp?) cult are an example of language and theology why these areas need to be addressed.
My question stems from enforcement. Let's say that backdoor systems become the only form of crypto that is legally allowed to be used in the US. OK. So now we're all supposed to use it to encrypt our precious/. posts.
Now, one of us uses a copy of PGP (pre-backdoor) or codes his own blowfish app and uses it to encrypt her letters to CyptoGRRL Magazine. How is the US going to stop her from doing this?
What do officials say?
"We were randomly sampling the crypto streams traversing the net and noticed that our backdoor key didn't work on your message stream. You are in violation of US Code BlahBlahBlah."
Doesn't that seem to open some other sticky questions? I mean, if I'm not breaking the law (other than using strong crypto), how are they going to tell or prosecute me?
It seems that you are protected by the chicken and the egg principle. To wit, to know that I am using "undefeatable" crypto, you have to get a wiretap (or a search warrant). To get a wiretap you have to prove that I am breaking the law by using undefeatable crypto.
Besides, development of Open Source versions of crypto programs would continue in other parts of the world. The US won't be able to stop that. I could just download the program from CryptoGRRL.de (as long as the server actually resided outside of the US).
Personally, I love the Visor. It has a ton of memory at a good price and the expansion slot is a cool idea. Unfortunately Handspring has failed to capitalize on their lead in innovation and even palm pilots and pocket pc's support expansion slots now. When are they going to push this platform to its potential.
Some things that I would like to see, beyond new colors, include:
A serial travel cable... they have USB, but no serial... what's the deal? A serial travel cable will allow me to configure Cisco Routers without having to lug a laptop around.
A wired ethernet card. With a wired card, all these Visors become cheap network testers. They would make a killing selling these things.
Oh well. No one listens to me. I have sent Handspring email on this and called thier customer service line, but they don't seem to want to work in the areas that would pull them ahead of the pack. It may be to late, by the time they come around (if at all).
Get some sort of cheap, but compliant, ethernet to token ring switch/router. Plug ethernet in on your side of the thing and plug token ring into the other.
Theoretically, it should work. However, I am not aware of any specific products. I have a friend with similar ATM problems and they grouped the people on one side of a router that seperated and translated from ethernet to ATM. Fixed the problem at a moderate cost.
As has been pointed out. The outrage over Kevin Mitnick centered on the fact that he had no due process. Many people thought that he should go to trial and serve time, if a jury so decided. However, Mitnick never got a trial... he just had a bail hearing. Every time the trial got near, it ended up being pushed back... for four years.
Seems like false imprisonment (never tried or sentenced) and lack of due process to me.
I say punish the parents as well. Seems to me that a punk-ass kid like this should have had some decent parenting to guard against his crime in the first place.
I know I was more scared of my father than I was of juvi when I was a kid. Where were this kids parents in all of this?
It speaks to the whole lack of parenting, a sort of disconnect, when it comes to technology. Pre-Internet-Explosion, you heard of teen girls running off with 40 year old men that the parents had never heard of. When asked how this could be, the parents explained that their daughter had her own phoneline and they never knew who she was talking to. The same goes for the Internet and computers. You have all these kids working on stuff totally unsupervised and the parents think it is great that johnny is gaining computer skills.
You'd supervise your kid if they were at an amusement park. Wouldn't you? But somehow this disconnect sinks in and parents don't think that junior could be bringing down major businesses from thier "harmless" machines.
It's funny, too. Every book I have read about kids and the Internet suggests supervision over filters. Put the computer in a public place and learn to recognize what junior is doing on it. Be interactive and don't assume that all is well. I totally agree with this stance. Besides filters are easy to bypass and none of them keep junior out of Juvi.
I told all of this stuff to my uncle when his family "took the plunge" and got Internet access (if you can call AOL "Internet access"). I told him of the things that a curious kid on a computer could get into and that supervision is about the only way to avoid a knock on the door from the FBI or my cousins (4 curious and, how should I say, "trouble gifted" boys) stumbling onto things (or actively seeking them out) that their parents might not want them being exposed to. Their reaction? Put the computer into a private room, facing the only door, in a cabinet that obscures the view of the monitor unless you take a lot of effort to get back behind the user. ALT-Tab and its almost like nothing is going on.
In my opinion, that's not the smartest way to educate your kids on the proper use of the technology, thereby leaving that education up to whoever (or whatever) they come across online.
If you notice, the message that was originally posted was on Tuesday. Sure, it might be Bin Laden, but at this point it is early, awfully early, to choose America's target.
If it turns out to be Bin Laden, fine. Deal with it and move on.
There happen to be other people that perform suicide missions. Some of the bombings in Ireland have been suicidal. Some Algerian based attacks have been suicidal. Based on the fact that the attack was suicidal, you still don't know crap. Sure, you can guess and it leads towards such a conclusion, but it is not definitive... and we need definitive proof before we act as a nation.
Islam is one of the few religions where suicide attacks are encouraged.
Bullshit! Show it to me in the Koran. Suicide is one of the worst sins that can be committed according to the text. The religion is actually very peaceful and is founded on the idea of love. You are being confused by media reportage on the religion. The encouragement of suicide attacks comes from some whacked out (power mad) political/religious leaders who bastardize the teachings of the Koran and convince their followers that suicide for a cause leads to heaven. While it is an erroneous teaching from a respected leader, it is not backed up by the primary text of the religion. There are a number of Islamic scholars who have been trying to fight this idea.
I've never flown a 767, but I used to be a private pilot, and I seriously doubt that Joe Shmoe Terrorist off the streets of Palestine would have been able to take over the controls and fly these planes in like that. These guys had training in commercial aviation, and you're talking some big bucks there. That narrows it down to a select group of terrorist organizations that they could have come from, and Bin Laden is on that list.
It's interesting that you assume that it is not a Palestinian group like they are the only other suspects that it could possibly be. I think that you are forgetting that we have no fucking idea who it is. No proof. Nothing. Just conjecture.
For all we know it could have been a bunch of coked up ex airline pilots who are upset at the recent steps the Bush administration has taken to curb their union rights. Who the fuck knows?
No one.
Get off your high horse. Let the investigation take its course. The last "single largest attack on American soil" turned out to be perpetrated by one of our own. Not some foriegner.
The virtical steel columns that make up the sides of the Towers were supposed to be strong enough to survive the impact of a 747 and also to be strong enough so that 1/2 of the columns on 2
sides could be destroyed and the Tower would still remain standing.
OK, I'll bite. You'll notice that the towers did survive the crash. They didn't, however, survive the aftermath. As an earlier post said "fire melts steel." Take a highly combustible substance like, um, I don't know, jet fuel, and toss a few hundred (thousand ?) gallons around and add a crash to kick it all off and I bet you have a fire to best almost any solid engineering.
Besides, if you watched Building Big, you'd realize that the worst place to hit a skyscraper is about two thirds of the way up. You see, they have these huge stabilizers in their upper floors that glide back and forth to help combat the effects of wind shear. If the building is hit around this area it turns into a critical breakpoint. It seems, from the series at least, that wind alone can tear skyscapers apart if they don't have systems actively counteracting the affects of wind.
My guess is that the planes started the job (which the building survived), but the fire and Mother Nature finished it up.
About 3,000 have been killed since the sixties in Northern Ireland related violence. I suspect that today's deaths dwarf that figure.
No one knows how many people were affected by these attacks, but the fact that they WTC sees close to 150,000 visitors a day and has roughly 50,000 people working in it may mean that your 3,000 number has a chance of being dwarfed. This is not to argue that the deaths in Northern Ireland are unimportant, but it is to say that this is a catastrophe of an unimaginable scale. Like Pearl Harbor, something like this has NEVER been seen before. It sheer size speaks to the comparisons.
Now, we're supposed to believe that the NSA when they go on national TV and complain about their lack of money?
No... of course not. How much do you think all that authentication technology costs? Its gotta be a huge amount... and they are still working on it. In cash strapped places, R&D is usually (stupidly) the first to go. I don't think they are out of money. You wouldn't be able to tell if you looked at the budget anyway... its funding is hidden under many many psuedonyminous appropriations.
The most probably reason that they are opening up is to show them as kinder, gentler, and "working hard for democracy." New books about them like Crypto and the new one by the author of the Puzzle Palace are starting to shine light on their activities and the fact that they have been a stumbling block to some privacy technology. As more and more Americans become aware of privacy as an "issue," they are also becoming aware of this "secret" organization. I am guessing this is a bunch of pre-spin to stem the tide of an upcomming backlash (which, in a round about way, may give No Such Agency a funding problem in the future). It also could be a means to attack new privacy technologies... by getting public support for future crackdowns.
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Actually, I believe Richard Stallman was born by then and he created the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project... and probably the whole idea of Free Software. Also, he started working on Free Software on Sun hardware and not not PCs, so that kind of shoots your argument down a little. He wrote emacs (a free software product) in 1974 before Microsoft was even founded.
Heck, Microsoft wasn't even working on Operating Systems until the emergence of commodity PCs (thanks to IBM for mistakenly creating the commodity PC market) in the early eighties. MSDOS 1.0 (which Microsoft didn't write and instead bought off of someone else) wasn't released until 1981. The GNU project to create a free version of Unix was founded in 1984. The same year the Microsoft finally got around to stealing the idea of a GUI OS from Apple (who in turn stole it from Xerox Parc... which ended up giving it to Apple for... ahem... free ).
So...what was your point again?
While it is "in," among the Microsoft faithful, to be an Open Source basher, you should try looking at reality sometime.
Anyway, on the last tape of the series, they interview the photographer who took that photo. He is a crusty sort who insists on using real film and scoffs at digital and the story of the picture fixes his argument, he believes.
When the whole Monica-gate thing went down, he remembered seeing her somewhere before. So he hired an assistant to pour over his contact sheets until she found that picture. Which turned out to be pretty important and earned him a pretty penny in the process.
What he wonders is where all the other pictures are? At the same event there were about 50 other photographers taking the same picture at the same time out of the press area. No one else stepped forward before or since. The difference is that all of those photographers use digital almost exclusively and probably cleared off the photo from their hard drives to make way for potentially more "important" pictures.
You have to consider that a professional photographer in that setting may burn through 8 to 10 rolls of film a day. Thats on the order of 240 to 300 high res pictures a day. You may take over 1000 pictures a week. I don't care how big your hard drive is, you're not going to be able to store everything you take digitally. In my mind, she has a point.
The problem is that history gains relevance through context. That context shifts as new information and associations are made. Some "meaningless" photo today could be catching the future's savior or destroyer. You can't make that judgement until some n day in the future.
Final side note... I found the Lewinski photo story funny considering the big deal made about a similar photo of Clinton (as a boy) meeting Kennedy. The relevance had to wait 20 years to show itself.
The Difference Engine number two was ahead of its time, indeed. In a head to head polynomial calculation test with a Windows-based Canon BJ Notebook BN22 (with built-in ink-jet printer), the mechanical Difference Engine initially beat the pants off the laptop, but was then overtaken. Not bad for a technology that was concieved around 160 years before its competitor.
From this account, we find the following description from a witness:
"...With the windows overhead slugging the Canon, the additional time taken for 31-digit extended precision arithmetic, and the printer buffer soaking up results before making them visible to the race referees, the Babbage engine produced nine 31-digit results before the Canon bubble jet printer blasted off the starting blocks. It then spewed out the first 50 results in little more than the time for the Babbage machine to produce one more result. The hare finally overtook the tortoise."
Wow! Not bad for a version 2.0 product. Consider the advancements it would have made had Babbage been successful all those years before.
Our client wanted to be able to post reports that were output from the software to the web. Our head programmer put a very rudimentary web template system in place that would output reports with choices of sort order, gawd-aweful background colors (from a 16 color palett), and customized headings and footers. This was all done without the user having to know any HTML. You can see samples here dating back to 1997.
The About SCORE page even references automated HTML authorship. From the page:
SCORE (Scheduling Classes with Order Reliability and Efficiency) is an application developed by a group of Computer Science students enrolled in the Software Engineering sequence at Ball State University. SCORE is an application that is a flexible scheduling advisor for use by faculty involved in the creation of course offerings by a department. SCORE has features which allow for powerful schedule reporting, class conflict catching and reporting, persistent and consistent data retieval and automated HTML authorship of documents for Internet/Intranet display.
Though ugly, I think these qualify as prior art and beat IBM's 1998 application.
If you don't have a manual typwriter, bring out that old impact printer that is gathering dust in your closet. A simple Perl script could change the letters you send enough to make them seem less formulaic.
Then send them to all of your:
Then you just have to sign them by hand OR get a plotter to do it.
I think we are framing the idea of "lazy" wrong. Sure computer people are lazy. They hate expending effort that will just have to be done over and over again. It is better to spend a couple of days hacking together a solution that could be applied when needed instead of taking the few minutes it will take to solve the problem once.
Doesn't Larry Wall say that the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris? Well, let's put that crap to work.
If you don't have an impact printer, fake it by choosing a crappy fixed width font like IMPACT or something. Sure, it is not the same, but it does tend to throw people used to recieving nicely formatted text. Also throw in some spelling errors and leave out some words (then go back and correct them with whiteout... though this goes against the virtues
If you start to analyze the problem, you could probably figure out what makes a personal letter sound personal and a form letter sound like a form letter. Capitalize on that! Keep a couple of flat files with appropriate phrases in them for a particular subject. Combine them in interesting ways with a program and only include a couple of new sentences here and there of original content (which should be put into files for later use).
I think this could work. Anybody have any concrete ideas or recipes?
If you don't believe that the public protest over the passing of the CDA had anything to do with the Court's decisions, I'm surprised. If I remember correctly... the blackouts didn't happend until after the CDA was approved. Correct me if I am wrong (honestly). If that was the case, then we can't guage what effect that such actions would have before such legislation was passed.
Just a thought. Thanks for keeping me on my toes.
Maybe it should say something about the SSCA and how future accesses to this site may be illegal (or the site will need to be taken down) because running a particular operating system is against the law. This same Operating System that has been faithfully delivering this site to you for a long time. If you agree that this is wrong then follow the link to enter and take a moment to fill out the form on the next page. It will be emailed to the Senators/Congressmen/Media Outlets of your choice (use checkboxes and send then into the site when they click the submit button). If you think this is OK and we should be taken down for not complying, click the Leave link and you will be randomly sent to a supporter of this evil legislation (please note how bland the resulting Internet will be).
There are probably others, but I think some sort of BlackOut is in order. It worked before. Maybe we could use netcraft to get statistics on how many sites that would mean if every OSS site was brought down and perhaps we can highlight some particularly good examples like /. (of course) but also famous sites that run OSS that Joe Sixpack would know about. Think about how many people would be pissed if they knew that this would put the crapper on Google.com and Yahoo.com.
Just a thought.
Backdoor keys are more than a means for interception. They can intercept encypted traffic now. Carnivore has the ability. They then just have to apply an awful lot of computing power towards brute forcing it... hmmm.
Well, various No Such Agencies in the government are the largest consumers of supercomputing hardware in the world. I read somewhere that they bought between 60 and 80% of the Cray supercomputers ever made. So, they have the computing chops. It will still take a while (as far as we know)... hmmm.
Now this seems like it has come up before. Let's look to the Cold War. Did the Russians use encryption? You Betcha. Did they pose a threat? Presumably. Did we force them to use encryption that we could backdoor? We would have liked to. So, were their secrets unknown to us? Nope and I will tell you why.
It is because of people. If we didn't have a key to some piece of encrypted traffic, we brute forced it or, more likely/cheaply/easily, we bought it, sniffed it, or we stole it. Why the hell do you think spying against the US by an American citizen is treasonous? It is because no matter how good your processes or technologies for keeping secrets are, one weak or greedy or careless person shoots it all to hell. You have to guard against that sort of thing. How does this apply to our current situation?
Let's say that the government is monitoring communications. But they don't do that, you ask...do they? Ever heard of the NSA, it's their job. Let's say they see a strange pattern of encrypted traffic between, uh, 21 (was that the terrorist count) people. This is traffic analysis, not content analysis. They think this is odd and notify the proper agencies who then get warrants for surveillance. Surveillance turns up that these guys are up to some odd practices... spooky, suspicious, stuff, but they don't know what because of that damned encryption. So, they are screwed right?
No. They ran into that with Scarfo and they puta (in my opinion, illegal - because they didn't ask to be able to do that to the oversight body) key sniffer on his keyboard. All of the sudden, all of those encrypted files were open to them... no back doors. Why didn't the FBI/CIA/NSA do this for WTC?
Manpower. Fewer people want to work for those agencies for the pay and prestige that they give, versus the risk and hassle (I can't blame them). Backdoored crypto would not have solved the problem because the terrorists wouldn't have used it. In the end it would have just been a manpower issue all over again.
Increase MANPOWER to solve the issue. Decreasing crypto strength solves nothing.
This is actually tricky because the Supreme Court has sort of a black mark against it in terms of protecting privacy (crypto being a part of this). Do some searching on this one and you will find that the supreme court often comes down on the side of law enforcement on this one. Strict reading of the Constitution does not support an inherent right to Privacy. It is only in Common Law that this idea crops in. Since it isn't strictly and expressly written in the constitution then the Supreme Court must fall back on precedent and, I am sorry to say, there isn't much there to help it find in favor of the crypto user (and privacy seeker) at this point.
This happens with suspected "hackers" all the time as well. In fact, up until a few years ago, prosecuting hacking and computer crimes was a pain in law enforcement's butt. It was too dry and they couldn't get an angle on it in most cases that would engage the jury (and sometimes they succeed with only limited results). Instead it was a lot easier to confiscate all their equipment and scare the hell out of them (see Sterlings book, The Hacker Crackdown). They didn't just pull this trick on teenagers, either. They went after an odd, but respectable, game maker as well. Check here for Steve Jackson's account of the mess and here for Bruce Sterling's.
This seems like the most underhanded and rights trampling kind of things that they can do... but it is totally legal. Ugh!
You do make some good points. However, I still disagree. I am not a big crypto user because most of my stuff is uninteresting and I could give a damn if you see it. If I thought it was important, I would take the proper steps.
However, I am a big crypto supporter. The reason being is because crypto is about more than hiding stuff. It is about verifying identity. It is about defeating the problem of digital storage (everything is copyable). It is about business transactions. It is about authentication.
These are all good reasons to support and use crypto. If I were a business, I wouldn't want backdoored crypto to ensure the immutability of my electronic legal documents. The fact that there is a backdoor leaves open the idea that the contract (or whatever) could have been changed. As we move closer and closer to paperless transfers (notice, I didn't say offices), we need strong crypto.
My final argument falls on the disagreement that anybody's job has to be easy. My job isn't and, sure, computer and network support would be a hell of a lot easier if my users were forced to never change anything on their computer and only do things in certain codified ways. But I'm realistic, it won't happen and that's why I get paid to do what I do. Law enforcement is in a similar boat. No one said that their job has to be easy and it is not my job to make it easier (as long as I am not actively obstructing justice... and I argue that my private use of crypto for legal means does not actively obstruct justice). In fact, there are laws in place to make law enforcement difficult in order to ensure and maintain the liberties that we enjoy as citizens.
.02 anyway...
My
"You can have my encryption key when you pry it off the cold dead NT server that you can't repair on your own."
You also have to consider that the monitoring they are doing is hampered by a lack (or shortage) of experts in various languages and dialects around the world (not just the Middle East). They also don't have theology experts to help them navigate the intricacies of the various factions that engage in guerilla warfare around the world (this includes every religion... Christianity, whatever). The incidents in Japan with the Ohm (sp?) cult are an example of language and theology why these areas need to be addressed.
Now, one of us uses a copy of PGP (pre-backdoor) or codes his own blowfish app and uses it to encrypt her letters to CyptoGRRL Magazine. How is the US going to stop her from doing this?
What do officials say?
"We were randomly sampling the crypto streams traversing the net and noticed that our backdoor key didn't work on your message stream. You are in violation of US Code BlahBlahBlah."
Doesn't that seem to open some other sticky questions? I mean, if I'm not breaking the law (other than using strong crypto), how are they going to tell or prosecute me?
It seems that you are protected by the chicken and the egg principle. To wit, to know that I am using "undefeatable" crypto, you have to get a wiretap (or a search warrant). To get a wiretap you have to prove that I am breaking the law by using undefeatable crypto.
Besides, development of Open Source versions of crypto programs would continue in other parts of the world. The US won't be able to stop that. I could just download the program from CryptoGRRL.de (as long as the server actually resided outside of the US).
Handspring makes both of those things
http://handspring.com/products/Product.jhtml?id= 8& cat=4
This is a cradle. I would like a travel cable... but thanks, I didn't know about this.
http://www.handspring.com/products/sbmodules/ether netcradle.jhtml
I would prefer a module and I thought that these only allow you to sink up your data.
Some things that I would like to see, beyond new colors, include:
Oh well. No one listens to me. I have sent Handspring email on this and called thier customer service line, but they don't seem to want to work in the areas that would pull them ahead of the pack. It may be to late, by the time they come around (if at all).
Warning: Kludge fix
Get some sort of cheap, but compliant, ethernet to token ring switch/router. Plug ethernet in on your side of the thing and plug token ring into the other.
Theoretically, it should work. However, I am not aware of any specific products. I have a friend with similar ATM problems and they grouped the people on one side of a router that seperated and translated from ethernet to ATM. Fixed the problem at a moderate cost.
Hope this helps
Seems like false imprisonment (never tried or sentenced) and lack of due process to me.
I know I was more scared of my father than I was of juvi when I was a kid. Where were this kids parents in all of this?
It speaks to the whole lack of parenting, a sort of disconnect, when it comes to technology. Pre-Internet-Explosion, you heard of teen girls running off with 40 year old men that the parents had never heard of. When asked how this could be, the parents explained that their daughter had her own phoneline and they never knew who she was talking to. The same goes for the Internet and computers. You have all these kids working on stuff totally unsupervised and the parents think it is great that johnny is gaining computer skills.
You'd supervise your kid if they were at an amusement park. Wouldn't you? But somehow this disconnect sinks in and parents don't think that junior could be bringing down major businesses from thier "harmless" machines.
It's funny, too. Every book I have read about kids and the Internet suggests supervision over filters. Put the computer in a public place and learn to recognize what junior is doing on it. Be interactive and don't assume that all is well. I totally agree with this stance. Besides filters are easy to bypass and none of them keep junior out of Juvi.
I told all of this stuff to my uncle when his family "took the plunge" and got Internet access (if you can call AOL "Internet access"). I told him of the things that a curious kid on a computer could get into and that supervision is about the only way to avoid a knock on the door from the FBI or my cousins (4 curious and, how should I say, "trouble gifted" boys) stumbling onto things (or actively seeking them out) that their parents might not want them being exposed to. Their reaction? Put the computer into a private room, facing the only door, in a cabinet that obscures the view of the monitor unless you take a lot of effort to get back behind the user. ALT-Tab and its almost like nothing is going on.
In my opinion, that's not the smartest way to educate your kids on the proper use of the technology, thereby leaving that education up to whoever (or whatever) they come across online.
If it turns out to be Bin Laden, fine. Deal with it and move on.
There happen to be other people that perform suicide missions. Some of the bombings in Ireland have been suicidal. Some Algerian based attacks have been suicidal. Based on the fact that the attack was suicidal, you still don't know crap. Sure, you can guess and it leads towards such a conclusion, but it is not definitive... and we need definitive proof before we act as a nation.
Islam is one of the few religions where suicide attacks are encouraged.
Bullshit! Show it to me in the Koran. Suicide is one of the worst sins that can be committed according to the text. The religion is actually very peaceful and is founded on the idea of love. You are being confused by media reportage on the religion. The encouragement of suicide attacks comes from some whacked out (power mad) political/religious leaders who bastardize the teachings of the Koran and convince their followers that suicide for a cause leads to heaven. While it is an erroneous teaching from a respected leader, it is not backed up by the primary text of the religion. There are a number of Islamic scholars who have been trying to fight this idea.
It's interesting that you assume that it is not a Palestinian group like they are the only other suspects that it could possibly be. I think that you are forgetting that we have no fucking idea who it is. No proof. Nothing. Just conjecture.
For all we know it could have been a bunch of coked up ex airline pilots who are upset at the recent steps the Bush administration has taken to curb their union rights. Who the fuck knows?
No one.
Get off your high horse. Let the investigation take its course. The last "single largest attack on American soil" turned out to be perpetrated by one of our own. Not some foriegner.
sides could be destroyed and the Tower would still remain standing.
OK, I'll bite. You'll notice that the towers did survive the crash. They didn't, however, survive the aftermath. As an earlier post said "fire melts steel." Take a highly combustible substance like, um, I don't know, jet fuel, and toss a few hundred (thousand ?) gallons around and add a crash to kick it all off and I bet you have a fire to best almost any solid engineering.
Besides, if you watched Building Big, you'd realize that the worst place to hit a skyscraper is about two thirds of the way up. You see, they have these huge stabilizers in their upper floors that glide back and forth to help combat the effects of wind shear. If the building is hit around this area it turns into a critical breakpoint. It seems, from the series at least, that wind alone can tear skyscapers apart if they don't have systems actively counteracting the affects of wind.
My guess is that the planes started the job (which the building survived), but the fire and Mother Nature finished it up.
No one knows how many people were affected by these attacks, but the fact that they WTC sees close to 150,000 visitors a day and has roughly 50,000 people working in it may mean that your 3,000 number has a chance of being dwarfed. This is not to argue that the deaths in Northern Ireland are unimportant, but it is to say that this is a catastrophe of an unimaginable scale. Like Pearl Harbor, something like this has NEVER been seen before. It sheer size speaks to the comparisons.
No... of course not. How much do you think all that authentication technology costs? Its gotta be a huge amount... and they are still working on it. In cash strapped places, R&D is usually (stupidly) the first to go. I don't think they are out of money. You wouldn't be able to tell if you looked at the budget anyway... its funding is hidden under many many psuedonyminous appropriations.
The most probably reason that they are opening up is to show them as kinder, gentler, and "working hard for democracy." New books about them like Crypto and the new one by the author of the Puzzle Palace are starting to shine light on their activities and the fact that they have been a stumbling block to some privacy technology. As more and more Americans become aware of privacy as an "issue," they are also becoming aware of this "secret" organization. I am guessing this is a bunch of pre-spin to stem the tide of an upcomming backlash (which, in a round about way, may give No Such Agency a funding problem in the future). It also could be a means to attack new privacy technologies... by getting public support for future crackdowns.