Your guess is perfectly accurate; a Berkeley department cluster, with Wren having no power beyond informing the sysadmins of the breakin, which she promptly did.
I've known Wren since college, and I share two (non-Berkeley) systems compromised by "Stakkato", and much of the article was spot on. The Cisco stuff I don't know anything about, but the hacker had broken into clusters at Berkeley and Caltech, and a private shared machine, and bragged about much much more. People we knew near Caltech security didn't say much, but indicated that the wave of breakins was in fact widespread and worrisome. IT people I know at Indiana University with TeraGrid connections also indicated at the time that much was going on. E-mails forwarded from the hacker showed much immaturity and petty malice, on top of deleting her home directory ("computer file directory" in the article.)
Oops, another friend closer to the action said the Cisco stuff is accurate too.
As for the powerbook in her lap, that was posed by the photographer. It was the UCB Unix machines which were hacked.
I get a kick out of people who proclaim that anyone who uses GPL or believes the tenets of the GPL is somehow restricting other people's rights.
It depends on your starting point.
In the current world, with government-defined and -enforced intellectual property, the GPL adds to your rights. You start out with no right to copy, and are licensed the write to copy and modify and distribute, while retaining the same license. Pretty much any other license increases your freedom as well, no matter how restricted it is, because you start out with no rights to the software. A 'restrictive' license can only be deemed such in comparison with less reestrictive licenses.
Where it gets weird is that IIRC Stallman doesn't believe in legally defined intellectual property at all. Meaning that his ideal world has nothing but public domain software. And in that world, one could take someone else's free source and sell modified binaries and keep those modifications private, just like everyone's fear about BSD or public domain code. Compared to that world, the GPL is restrictive. One could wonder if Stallman's position is coherent, but I don't feel like re-reading his essays to check for sure, so I'll leave that debate to others.
But I suspect that a lot of people who object to the GPL agree, either consciously or unconsciously, that the world should be like that public domain world -- or like a BSD world, where authors have to be acknowledged. There you are, working on a BSD kernel, and want to copy a Linux device driver, and are foiled again by the GPL, and you imagine the Ideal World, where any information out there could be copied at will -- well, then, the GPL will seem damn restrictive. And the BSD people don't want to switch to GPL because they feel they're closer to the Ideal (and because they can't, in the case of something like the NetBSD kernel -- too many accreted licenses.)
Of course, if I'm right, people like this really should be releasing into the public domain, and not burdening others with hauling authorship information around.
Not having released any programs myself, I don't know what I'd do. I've imagined using public domain, to be consistent. My imagination informs me it would take some effort to buck the trend.
Supporting "old Sun workstations" is contradictory to FreeBSD's raison d'etre, which is to provide free Unix optimized for the most commonly used architecture. Since FreeBSD's founding that has been 386-style. If there's a mass migration of hardware used, theoretically FreeBSD would follow.
But supporting random hardware isn't a goal, so "going nowhere" isn't a problem. Supporting everything is NetBSD's job, with OpenBSD doing what it can (limited by available developers and hardware access.)
Longer spiel: it supports strong encryption mostly transparently to the user: a keypair is generated the first time you use it (without PGP's keyboard input) and public keys are passed around like baseball cards by the clients, without users ever worrying. Trust model is a simple rooted tree.
Default UI is most similar to zephyr, which gale was a reaction to. gale is multidomain, and in theory more scalable across the internet. Encryption for secrecy mostly operates with private messages; public messages have equal standing, and those live in hierarchical categories, which look like Usenet newsgroups, but the subscription is hierarchical: subbing to 'rec.arts' would catch all 'rec.arts.tv' and 'rec.arts.books' traffic.
Encryption still comes into play with public messages in signing for authentication.
There is a graphical python/Tk client.
Status: it works perfectly fine for private messages, and there's a buzzing little community with people from Caltech, MIT, CMU, and a few companies, so the multidomain stuff works fine, although there are occasionally hiccups in finding people's public keys, I think usually releated to firewalls. The theoretical scalability is hampered by bugs making multiple servers know about each other dangerous (looping problems), plus the whole concept of public categories is being reworked.
So it's not ready to be used by a million people, at least not a million people all talking together as opposed to isolated cells, but it does work fine for small cells (I think some companies are using it internally) and has neat features, particularly automatic encryption and authentication, and the hierarchical public categories.
But we have no idea just how pessimistic the estimates should be. We have one data point. Maybe a planet on which life can exist is rarer than we think. Or life starting at all is a fluke, even with an ocean of organic compounds. Or it's a fluke because it needs to start on a calm Mars-like planet and then get ejected to an Earth-like planet for long-term survival. Or the invention of photosynthesis usually ice ages the entire planet (we came close, in the Varangian period.) Or multicellular life is unlikely, or intelligent life, or technological life...
We have no real idea what probabilities to give to any of these events. Some of us look at Earth's history, events and timings between events, and develop gut feelings for the numbers. But we have nothing to test them on. Not now.
Based on traditional citation analysis, PageRank has made the search provider an instant hit on the Web,
And I can vouch for having seen in Science mention of exactly such citation analysis, identifying important papers by how many other papers cited them. OTOH, AIUI Google is more complex than a simple citation count, since the contribution from the citing papers is weighted by how important those papers themselves are, based on their own citations... I haven't heard that traditional citation analysis does that. But I don't know that much about the details.
So the donation to the non-profit is received untaxed. Then he draws out a salary... and guess what, it's taxed! More paperwork, no savings.
Now, at some point enough money can be received so that he can draw out a salary, which he pays taxes on, but there's lots of other money usable for buying computers or paying office rent or other 'business' expenses. But if at the moment most of the money is going into salaries there's not much point in non-profit hassle.
No. A directory in ports contains a Makefile, and perhaps some patching information. The 'make' process includes fetching the source, patching it, and building it.
So you do have to get the source for stuff you install; keeping it is up to you. I imagine source tends to take up less space than binaries. Doing 'make clean' to clean up object files can be useful.:)
But note that *BSD does have a concept of binary packages. OpenBSD ports now work by creating a package on your machine, then installing that; I imagine you can install packages off the net, although I haven't looked at that. And FreeBSD is said to have a build-server farm, building packages for all the ports every night. So I imagine binary packages are just as availables as for Linux.
Also note that "4500 ports" means 4500 different source programs handled, not lots of varying packages per source program.
I have seen kamikaze used in non-Japanese contexts, to refer to suicide attacks. Twice in the past week: once was someone talking about some character in "Batman Beyond", once was me talking about a new treatment for gliomas using stem cells -- and I used it as a verb!
But the original example erred simply in using Japanese as a major source language. The basic point, that English dictionaries are full of loanwords we take for granted, is valid. Pizza, odor, vision, computer, program, machine, engine, develop, soda, diploma, degree, company, corporation, yacht, waffle, booze, dollar, crap, tattoo... none of these are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Although claiming French words as loands might be cheating; one could argue that English is a creole of Anglo-Saxon and French. But we still have a lot from Latin and Greek directly, and Italian. And Scandinavian. And Dutch.
The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters... It also stores things in perfect quality.
That's a rather extraordinary claim. Can you provide a reference? Or any theoretical reason to believe it?
As for comparing a new AI to raising a child... there's probably much truth in that. OTOH, it seems likely that the human brain is not a tabula rasa, but has predilections for learning human language and recognizing human faces. Once we learn more about how intelligence works, we might well be able to have more specifically built in. Then again, that researc process may depend on having a machine intelligence to perform controlled experiments on in the first place.
I have to agree about Xenocide. I think the O/C planet didn't work so much for me, but I don't really remember. What I do remember was that the book was fully of gem-like quotes, mostly from the conversation of the fathertree and the hive-queen. And that the ending was... yes, deus ex machina. I mean, you have what have been a bunch of highly political and philosophical novels, and suddenly magic physics comes in out of nowhere to save the day. Very unsatisfying, at least for me.
For random contrast, Look to Windward arguably had a deus ex machina ending. But the Culture has well-established machinae whose job it is to be dei, so it fits. Plus it didn't require magic, just someone being way too sneaky. But that's part of their job too.
Rebuilding... well, that should be within the Culture's power. We know people can be uploaded; I can imagine uploading and growing into a Mind. (Although the Minds themselves have various motivations designed into them; you might find yourself tweaked, to be safe.)
I generally figure all those humans are the ones who have chosen not to transcend, descended from other humans who made that choice. After all, they have four hundred lifespans as a current fashion trend.
Doing without spacecraft or computers isn't a feature of our known universe, but the Culture's universe has Subliming. Which the little bags of blood can also opt for.
Or the in-book suggestion, that the Culture will try to kick its own ass. I mean, really, who else is more qualified or more appropriate?
Re:I read this a while ago; not that impressed, al
on
Look to Windward
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· Score: 1
There's a suggestion -- a bare suggestion, possibly misleading -- that other Minds were responsible for the conflict. Culture civil war could be a change, if it blew up; we already had a taste in _Excession_, of course.
But whatever. I loved the book, and the sensawunda throughout it, including from the airspheres.
I think it is fair to assume that any packages that are part of a distribution have been checked for security issues before being made a part of that distribution.
The OpenBSD people regularly audit their kernel and utilities. Their packages are supposed to be checked for obvious problems, like use of strcpy or gets(), but are mostly not thoroughly reviewed. And in all the flamewars I've seen about OpenBSD I've never seen anyone claim that any other group was more thorough in seeking out bugs and security holes.
I think it is fair to assume you're being optimistic.
I was surprised that I didn't see this mentioned, as I've seen it in every newspaper article about European vs US cells. The US has the world's most developed landline system; whether this is because of old AT&T or the breakup or something else, I don't know. So, as one Wall Street Journal article put it a couple of years ago, a cell phone in Finland might be twice the cost of landlines, whereas in the US it'd be 7 times the cost of landlines.
In a way Europe has been leapfrogging, like Third World countries. Europe has phones, of course, but they weren't as pervasive or cheap or reliable as US ones. So cells look more attractive. And are easier to implement since Europe is denser, as people have mentioned.
I have yet to see this as a problem for the US. I like my DSL, and have my doubts that wireless can ever beat wires for large broadband.
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Your guess is perfectly accurate; a Berkeley department cluster, with Wren having no power beyond informing the sysadmins of the breakin, which she promptly did.
I've known Wren since college, and I share two (non-Berkeley) systems compromised by "Stakkato", and much of the article was spot on. The Cisco stuff I don't know anything about, but the hacker had broken into clusters at Berkeley and Caltech, and a private shared machine, and bragged about much much more. People we knew near Caltech security didn't say much, but indicated that the wave of breakins was in fact widespread and worrisome. IT people I know at Indiana University with TeraGrid connections also indicated at the time that much was going on. E-mails forwarded from the hacker showed much immaturity and petty malice, on top of deleting her home directory ("computer file directory" in the article.)
Oops, another friend closer to the action said the Cisco stuff is accurate too.
As for the powerbook in her lap, that was posed by the photographer. It was the UCB Unix machines which were hacked.
It depends on your starting point.
In the current world, with government-defined and -enforced intellectual property, the GPL adds to your rights. You start out with no right to copy, and are licensed the write to copy and modify and distribute, while retaining the same license. Pretty much any other license increases your freedom as well, no matter how restricted it is, because you start out with no rights to the software. A 'restrictive' license can only be deemed such in comparison with less reestrictive licenses.
Where it gets weird is that IIRC Stallman doesn't believe in legally defined intellectual property at all. Meaning that his ideal world has nothing but public domain software. And in that world, one could take someone else's free source and sell modified binaries and keep those modifications private, just like everyone's fear about BSD or public domain code. Compared to that world, the GPL is restrictive. One could wonder if Stallman's position is coherent, but I don't feel like re-reading his essays to check for sure, so I'll leave that debate to others.
But I suspect that a lot of people who object to the GPL agree, either consciously or unconsciously, that the world should be like that public domain world -- or like a BSD world, where authors have to be acknowledged. There you are, working on a BSD kernel, and want to copy a Linux device driver, and are foiled again by the GPL, and you imagine the Ideal World, where any information out there could be copied at will -- well, then, the GPL will seem damn restrictive. And the BSD people don't want to switch to GPL because they feel they're closer to the Ideal (and because they can't, in the case of something like the NetBSD kernel -- too many accreted licenses.)
Of course, if I'm right, people like this really should be releasing into the public domain, and not burdening others with hauling authorship information around.
Not having released any programs myself, I don't know what I'd do. I've imagined using public domain, to be consistent. My imagination informs me it would take some effort to buck the trend.
Supporting "old Sun workstations" is contradictory to FreeBSD's raison d'etre, which is to provide free Unix optimized for the most commonly used architecture. Since FreeBSD's founding that has been 386-style. If there's a mass migration of hardware used, theoretically FreeBSD would follow. But supporting random hardware isn't a goal, so "going nowhere" isn't a problem. Supporting everything is NetBSD's job, with OpenBSD doing what it can (limited by available developers and hardware access.)
Default UI is most similar to zephyr, which gale was a reaction to. gale is multidomain, and in theory more scalable across the internet. Encryption for secrecy mostly operates with private messages; public messages have equal standing, and those live in hierarchical categories, which look like Usenet newsgroups, but the subscription is hierarchical: subbing to 'rec.arts' would catch all 'rec.arts.tv' and 'rec.arts.books' traffic. Encryption still comes into play with public messages in signing for authentication.
There is a graphical python/Tk client.
Status: it works perfectly fine for private messages, and there's a buzzing little community with people from Caltech, MIT, CMU, and a few companies, so the multidomain stuff works fine, although there are occasionally hiccups in finding people's public keys, I think usually releated to firewalls. The theoretical scalability is hampered by bugs making multiple servers know about each other dangerous (looping problems), plus the whole concept of public categories is being reworked.
So it's not ready to be used by a million people, at least not a million people all talking together as opposed to isolated cells, but it does work fine for small cells (I think some companies are using it internally) and has neat features, particularly automatic encryption and authentication, and the hierarchical public categories.
More info at gale.org.
We have no real idea what probabilities to give to any of these events. Some of us look at Earth's history, events and timings between events, and develop gut feelings for the numbers. But we have nothing to test them on. Not now.
Besides, someone has to be first.
Based on traditional citation analysis, PageRank has made the search provider an instant hit on the Web,
And I can vouch for having seen in Science mention of exactly such citation analysis, identifying important papers by how many other papers cited them. OTOH, AIUI Google is more complex than a simple citation count, since the contribution from the citing papers is weighted by how important those papers themselves are, based on their own citations... I haven't heard that traditional citation analysis does that. But I don't know that much about the details.
Now, at some point enough money can be received so that he can draw out a salary, which he pays taxes on, but there's lots of other money usable for buying computers or paying office rent or other 'business' expenses. But if at the moment most of the money is going into salaries there's not much point in non-profit hassle.
So you do have to get the source for stuff you install; keeping it is up to you. I imagine source tends to take up less space than binaries. Doing 'make clean' to clean up object files can be useful. :)
But note that *BSD does have a concept of binary packages. OpenBSD ports now work by creating a package on your machine, then installing that; I imagine you can install packages off the net, although I haven't looked at that. And FreeBSD is said to have a build-server farm, building packages for all the ports every night. So I imagine binary packages are just as availables as for Linux.
Also note that "4500 ports" means 4500 different source programs handled, not lots of varying packages per source program.
But the original example erred simply in using Japanese as a major source language. The basic point, that English dictionaries are full of loanwords we take for granted, is valid. Pizza, odor, vision, computer, program, machine, engine, develop, soda, diploma, degree, company, corporation, yacht, waffle, booze, dollar, crap, tattoo... none of these are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Although claiming French words as loands might be cheating; one could argue that English is a creole of Anglo-Saxon and French. But we still have a lot from Latin and Greek directly, and Italian. And Scandinavian. And Dutch.
List of loanwords by language and period
That's a rather extraordinary claim. Can you provide a reference? Or any theoretical reason to believe it?
As for comparing a new AI to raising a child... there's probably much truth in that. OTOH, it seems likely that the human brain is not a tabula rasa, but has predilections for learning human language and recognizing human faces. Once we learn more about how intelligence works, we might well be able to have more specifically built in. Then again, that researc process may depend on having a machine intelligence to perform controlled experiments on in the first place.
For random contrast, Look to Windward arguably had a deus ex machina ending. But the Culture has well-established machinae whose job it is to be dei, so it fits. Plus it didn't require magic, just someone being way too sneaky. But that's part of their job too.
I generally figure all those humans are the ones who have chosen not to transcend, descended from other humans who made that choice. After all, they have four hundred lifespans as a current fashion trend.
Doing without spacecraft or computers isn't a feature of our known universe, but the Culture's universe has Subliming. Which the little bags of blood can also opt for.
Actually, only the prologue and epilogue are told in the first person. Reading the prologue online isn't all that informative in this case.
Or the in-book suggestion, that the Culture will try to kick its own ass. I mean, really, who else is more qualified or more appropriate?
But whatever. I loved the book, and the sensawunda throughout it, including from the airspheres.
The OpenBSD people regularly audit their kernel and utilities. Their packages are supposed to be checked for obvious problems, like use of strcpy or gets(), but are mostly not thoroughly reviewed. And in all the flamewars I've seen about OpenBSD I've never seen anyone claim that any other group was more thorough in seeking out bugs and security holes.
I think it is fair to assume you're being optimistic.
In a way Europe has been leapfrogging, like Third World countries. Europe has phones, of course, but they weren't as pervasive or cheap or reliable as US ones. So cells look more attractive. And are easier to implement since Europe is denser, as people have mentioned.
I have yet to see this as a problem for the US. I like my DSL, and have my doubts that wireless can ever beat wires for large broadband.