Verio is censoring John Gilmore's email under pressure from anti-spammers.
Update (5 August 2001): After some interaction among me, Verio, and lawyers from Stanford Law School's Internet and Society law clinic, Verio agreed to not immediately terminate my service if I modified my mailer software to avoid forwarding large quantities of email from single addresses over short periods of time. This mailer change permits ordinary users to send a backlog of queued email, such as after reconnecting a Eudora laptop after a few days, but doesn't permit mass spamming. Verio was unwilling to concede their 'right' to decide I'm a bad guy at any moment and terminate my service, but they're on notice that I have reputable and capable legal representation, and will not hesitate to make both a big legal issue and a big press issue out of their censorship campaign if they try to impose it on me again.
Update (26 March 2001):
The block against outgoing mail suddenly dissolved without warning at 12:47 PM Monday. I don't know why it disappeared, whether it will be back, or whether they still plan to terminate my entire Internet service as previously announced.
Update (21 March 2001):
Verio plans to TERMINATE my T1 service on April 4, ending not just my outgoing email, but this web site, my customers' Internet service, etc. If this site disappears, see the mirror at http://cryptome.org
I am not a spammer, and have never sent any spam. I've had this same Internet connection since long before Verio even existed (they eventually acquired the ISP I cofounded). I've been paying them for the connection despite their billing department's incompetence about invoicing me for it. But under pressure from anti-spam organizations, Verio has blocked outgoing email from my machine. I am not able to send person-to-person email to my friends, my colleagues at EFF, or anyone else -- including you. Now they threaten to terminate my Internet service, which supplies not only me but my customers and users.
I think this is wrong, and that the anti-spam pressure tactics behind it are wrong. Any measure for stopping spam should have as its first goal "Allow and assist every non-spam message to reach its recipients." No current anti-spam policy I know of, including Verio's, SpamCop's, or MAPS's, even views this as a desirable goal, let alone implements it.
I'm pushing back by publicizing the problem, and meanwhile allowing their censorship to take effect. If you ever want to get an email from me again, it's time to speak up about this!
If you send me email, don't expect an email reply. Include some contact information for an uncensored medium, where the providers are common carriers, take no notice of the content of messages, and don't put arbitrary restrictions on what their customers are permitted to communicate. Leave me a phone number and/or a postal address.
The irony is that Verio now owns The Little Garden.
The Little Garden (with John Romkey, David Henkel-Wallace, and Steve Crocker):
A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. now merged into Verio. We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to businesses. We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers by our common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we provide to you, and we will not censor it." This enabled a whole crop of smaller resellers in various locales to buy from us and offer other services to the public (like modem-based Internet connections). These resellers contributed to our volume of Internet traffic, and enabled us to provide higher quality service at lower prices. TLGnet was sold to Best Internet Communications in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was then bought by Hiway Technologies, which was then bought by Verio.)
Here's a copy of the
terms and conditions
of The Little Garden (TLG), the ISP that I co-founded with Tom Jennings (creator of the FidoNet), and which I bought my T1 service from. (TLG was bought by Best, which was bought by Hiway, which was bought by Verio.) Here's an excerpt:
TLG exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the
information passing through TLG. You are free to communicate
commercial, noncommercial, personal, questionable, obnoxious,
annoying, or any other kind of information, misinformation, or
disinformation through our service. You are fully responsible for
the privacy of, content of, and liability for your own communications.
NEXTSTEP Software Available from Sun for Sparc Workstations
Provides Object Development Pathway to Industry-Standard OpenStep for Solaris
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. May 23, 1995 - Sun Microsystems Computer
Company (SMCC) and NeXT Computer, Inc. today announced a distribution
agreement under which Sun will provide NEXTSTEP(TM) object-oriented
software for SPARCstation(TM) model 4, 5 and 20 workstations. Aimed
at Fortune 1000 companies and other large, heterogeneous business
environments, the NEXTSTEP software running on SPARCstation desktops
provides Sun and NeXT customers with the proven object software and
high-performance processing needed today to rapidly develop and
deploy custom business applications throughout an enterprise. The
announcement also puts Sun customers on a fast track to Sun's
upcoming implementation of the advanced OpenStep(TM) object environment
as part of Project DOE(Distributed Objects Environment). DOE is an
extension to the Solarisoperating environment for rapidly developing
and deploying networkedobject applications. An OpenStep-compliant
desktop and development tools are integrated with DOE.
The people attacking Transgaming and myself didn't mention it, but they're understandably biased.
Dan Olson was a Loki employee.
And Zak's web server is run by another former Loki employee. In case you were wondering what "arm twisting" I was refering to, you can see for yourself. Zak has conveniently published links to the messages between us (but not including his apology), at:
http://www.icculus.org/~zakk/emails/
Transgaming figured out how to get DirectX working with Wine, which was crucial.
If you think Wine's been around since the "beginning of time", then you're pretty wet behind the ears. Which operating systems were porting games to in 1991?
Scott Draeker told me that Loki was quite interested in porting the Sims to Linux, and that they were working on a contract with Maxis for a very long time, which they finally failed to obtain. It was certainly their intention to port The Sims to Linux, yet they strung me along and changed their mind because they ran out of money.
If porting the top selling game to Linux is a bad business venture, then what does that say about Loki's business model in general, and the rest of the games Loki ported? They're horrible business ventures, which resulted in Loki declaring Chapter 11. The Sims was not to blame.
Porting The Sims to the Mac wasn't a bad idea -- it's the top selling game on that platform, too!
I designed and implemented the code that draws the people in The Sims myself, so I'm certainly familiar with it and qualified to port it. I would have ported the 3D code myself, but I wanted to coordinate with Loki on that part, so I stopped work on the 3D and audio while waiting for Loki to get back to me, which took them many months. In the mean time, while they were stringing me along, I worked on other projects, like Transmogrifier.
You're totally off-base in your accusations. I worked with Will Wright for three years implementing The Sims (also porting the framework and tools like Edith from the Mac to Windows), then later I ported The Sims to Linux twice. The first time was on my own time, to demonstrate that it could be done. The second time was for Maxis's internal use in The Sims Online, using the latest build of the source code, instead of the year-old code I originally ported. Then I optimized it and removed all the graphics and sound code, so they could run many "headless" server instances on the same machine. I finished that port and Maxis paid me for the work. Now the official source code of The Sims Online that's checked into Maxis's Perforce tree compiles on both Windows and Linux. It's a done deal.
You Loki fan-boys have a record of viciously attacking Transgaming and me on totally false pretenses.
You all are the epitomy of what's wrong with slashdot,
and it's because of people like you that Linux will never be taken seriously.
But at least your good buddy Zakk finally had the guts to apologized (not that it didn't take some arm twisting).
-Don
====
Mr. Hopkins,
I recognize that some of my comments were made in very poor taste and
implied untrue things about your character. For this I apologize, and
hope that this ordeal has not soured you even more to those who also
represent my position in a less verbal manner.
I'm quite concerned about Transgaming, specifically with the manner in
which they are operating. However, it was wrong of me to take out my
frustrations on you. It is possible that their Sims port will benefit
Linux in the long run, but none of us really know what the future holds.
All in all, I appreciate the effort you've put into native Linux ports,
and while we reach different conclusions on the matter, it is clear that
our concern for Linux gaming is something that we share.
5. Failing all that, IIRC, there already is a Mac OS (Classic) API for UNIX, or something like it. AFAICR, Adobe used it to produce their IRIX version of Photoshop. I'm not sure about that, though. It would defeat the whole point though, as they'd have to branch from the classic Mac OS Office.
That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library.
I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.
The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.
The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).
But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue.
The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.
Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented
Multi Player SimCity
using TCL/Tk on X11.
Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the
Sun Solaris and SGI Irix
platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster.
It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.
Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.
Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).
The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.
I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.
I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.
The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.
The Perl language was designed to maximise maintenance costs, and to keep your coders employed and busy with nickle and dime shit work for the rest of their lives.
Print it all out and burn it. That's the only way to deal with Perl code.
I hope you fired the irresponsible slob who decided to write that must code in Perl a long time ago.
"X-Eyes", indeed. Big Brother was written for the NeWS window system, by Jeremy Huxtable, long before X-Windows supported arbitrarily shaped windows. Read "man xeyes" if you don't believe me. The original X-Windows rip-off missed the point by drawing two eyes in a rectangular window, instead of making round windows. Lame-o!
Here are some more messages from 1991, from a discussion with
Mark Weiser about handwriting input and pie menus.
-Don
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1991 22:48:01 PST
From: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Subject: Re: a rumor?
To: Don Hopkins <hopkins@Eng.sun.com>
Xerox has stopped testing summer student interns in the research labs only.
The rest of Xerox still labors under its yoke. Its a win, for sure, but
there's still more to win.
Thanks for your help.
The information visualizer guys are into gestures, but not pies. They use a
rubout motion to delete, and stuff like that. I think the gesturing left and
right to close and open trees was more like that.
We ahve been playing with ways to use a stylus to get input without a keyboard
and without handwritng recognition. I hacked up a sort of 26 quadrant pie
menu, so that each word is a shape (letter-letter-letter, all connected
together, and drop ink as you move among the letters: you get a shape. Xerox
is a kind of lopsided "X"), and each letter is selected as you move through it,
and when you lift up and click down the stylus again you get a space. It has
some potential, but 26 quadrants is just to many.
Another possiblity is to put 13 inside 13, and use a state machine so you get
the inner circle letter unless you travel all the way through to the outside
circle, in which case you get that letter instead, etc. I haven't hack this
together yet, maybe tonight.
-mark
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 91 06:43:09 PST
From: hopkins@Eng.sun.com (Don Hopkins)
To: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Cc: hopkins
Subject: alphabetic pies
Have you tried two level 6x6 item pie menu tree for inputting the alphabet
(and then some)?
abc ghi mno
def jkl pqr
-X-
stu yz_ ___
vwx ___ ___
You could hang more submenus off of the _'s for numerics, less common
glyphs, etc. The SouthEast menu that's all _ could have any number of
items, and the South menu might have some special glyphs or submenus
in it. The important thing is that the glyphs are chunked in groups
of 6, which fits comfortably in your head.
You might also try a two level 6x8 item pies menu tree:
abc ijk qrs
d e l m t u
fgh nop vwx
-X-
yz_012etc
_ _ 9 3 ..
___ 8 4 etc
567
I was thinking about how to do a decimal pie menu tree. The obvious
thing is a 10 item pie. But what direction should 0 be, and should the
numbers go CW or CCW? But a 10 item menu is only really good for
inputting a single digit, or a fixed number of digits, not an
arbitrary string of digits (you need a way to terminate the string,
and using another mouse button is cheating). Well, most people are
familiar with a phone dial, so maybe that's one way to line it up. If
you lined the 10 digits up in the same direction as the numbers on the
phone dial, you would have a few extra directions to put extra menu
items, where there are not holes in the dial. (Hey, how many is that?
All the phones in my life have buttons! I guess I'm not as familiar
with the phone dial as I thought, but maybe my fingers would remember.
Let's say 13.) You could use the extra 3 directions for a decimal
point, and/or input editing commands, or commands that consume the
number you gestured as input. Or you could just keep selecting digits
deeper and deeper, and the system could be smart about only popping up
menus that would only allow you to select a number in range (e.g.
0-9999). Much better to disable menu items by dimming them than
removing them from the menu, because that would change the numbers
items in the menu, and ruin everything.
In a phone dial context, when you needed to input letters, it might be
nice to arrange an alphabetic pie like the letters on a phone dial,
with submenus of 3 menus items. But it probably wouldn't be as easy to
use or remember as the 6x6 alphabetic menu.
Here's an old message about handwriting and pen user interfaces, that I sent to the late
Mark Weiser
back in 1992. At the time, Mark was the director of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC, and before that was my undergraduate research advisor at the University of Maryland. The email addresses are backwards because I was in the UK at the time, where they also drive on the wrong side of the road.
From: Don Hopkins <hopkins@uk.ac.turing>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 92 22:33:08 BST
To: Mark Weiser <weiser.PARC@com.xerox>
Cc: hopkins@uk.ac.turing
Subject: cmu
Thanks! I sent email to Myers and phoned him up, and after a while he
remembered that I was the guy who sent him the pie menu video tapes [...]
I'm quite interested in his work, which
involves programming by example and demonstration, visual languages,
and constructing GUIs with graphical editors using inferencing and
constraints, instead of doing so much boiler plate programming.
I am quite interested in pen based stuff, but I don't want to work for
any of the companies currently making pen based products because they
are so short sighted and limited by perceived market demands and low
end technology. (IBM-PC based technology, MS-DOS, bad languages,
etc.) Go is using C with crude object oriented scaffolding, but their
ideas are sound, and they're at least using their own OS, however the
programming environment sucks, they just can't get away from MS-DOS.
Momemta is using smalltalk, which, as one of their engineers told me,
allowed them to catch up with Go in a very short time. But they
definitly have a set of problems of their own, like running on top of
MS-DOS and Windows. It's nice that they use smalltalk, but it's
rather slow, and more glitzy than well designed. There was a big
battle at Momemta between the programmer who's responsible for how
nice it is, and the engineering manager in charge or the project,
where the manager refused to use smalltalk because it was a
"homosexual programming language". Guess he never heard of Lisp! But
the programmer certainly proved his point, and the manager took all
the credit for making the decision to go with smalltalk. (That's what
the manager claimed at their product announcement, and I shook his
hand for using smalltalk, and when I told the programmer about that
later, boy was he pissed!) But you still can't program the damn thing
in smalltalk, *using the pen*! I guess that's one reason they also
have a keyboard. There were some other stupid user interface
decisions made as well -- my impression from talking to the programmer
was that the manager read some books on user interface design
principles, and enforced them to the letter without really
understanding them and knowing when they should not apply, and when to
just use common sense instead.
So far nobody I've heard of has a programming language you can use
with a pen, let alone a pen based user interface *written* in and
around such a language. What good is a pen computer with a scripting
language if you have to use a keyboard to program it? And if it's not
programmable, you might as well be using recipe cards. The pen has so
much potential, but everybody's trying to use these computers to
simulate a piece of paper running MS-DOS. I think it's all well and
fine to take advantage of metaphores people are used to (i.e. writing
on paper, or beating their head against MS-DOS) but if you limit
yourself to simulating paper then you've severly crippled the system,
especially when at the same time you severly break the metaphore
you're limiting yourself with by trying to be MS-DOS compatible. No
piece of paper ever locked up and asked me if I wanted to Abort,
Retry, or Ignore. As an example of how you could make a pen computer
easier to use by transcending the paper metaphore: when you write on a
piece of paper, the information that it stores is two-dimensional. The
time componant is completely collapsed and lost. This is not the case
with a pen computer, which can remember ink as a three dimensional
entity. Why should I be required to write in a fucking comb, if the
computer can tell where one letter ends and the next letter begins by
the *temporal* separation between letters instead of the visually
obvious and traditional spatial separation? Why hasn't anybody written
a handwriting recognizer that lets me keep my hand in one place and
just write overlapping letters or words without moving my hand back
and forth, looking at the page to see when I reach the right margin,
moving my hand back to the left margin and no further and down exactly
one line, and then writing another line making sure it's parallel with
the first? Why can't I just relax, and keep my hand in one place
while writing? (I discovered this handwriting technique when I would
fall asleep in class while still taking notes. I would wake up and
there would be a big ink blob where I kept writing but stopped moving
my hand back and forth.) Of course my hand is used to spacing letters
out when writing a word, but I think it would be pretty natural to
have an input field in a convenient location that I write a word into,
which is recognized, then zaps over to where the text input caret is
in my document, in a nice font, and the caret moves on, but the place
I'm writing stays in the same place. Just like how a keyboard works.
Imagine of you had to move the keyboard to the right a bit every time
you typed a character, and then move it down and all the way to to the
left whenever the cursor reached the right edge of the screen? Nobody
would put up with that. Why put up with such a horrible interface
using a pen computer? It's only *paper* that forces you to do that.
Well I doubt it would be possible to develop such a non-conformist
interface for a company that was rushing to market as fast as they
could. Let alone develop a pen based programming language and then
write a user interface around it. Did you read the article in Dr.
Dobbs Journal (the December UI issue, the same one with my pie menu
article) about the pen extension to X-Windows? What an total abortion!
I'm sure the next big market demand made on a company like Go or
Momenta will be to implement X-Windows for their machine. During the
time that every company with a pen computer is trying to do that very
same thing and failing miserably, but thinking it's OK because
everybody else is failing just as bad, and the users asked for it
anyway, so that's what they get, I would like to be doing something
completely different, not wasting my time with the latest fads,
stampeeds, and lemming dunks.
Coyote Hill, Palo Alto: Today Xerox was awarded a patent on their Proprietary Xerox User Interface Copier Technology. As a result, Xerox immediately filed patent infringement lawsuits against Apple for copying Xerox's user interface, Microsoft for copying Apple's user interface, and Sun for copying Microsoft's user interface.
Industry insiders predict that this new round of lawsuits could have an even more chilling effect on the economy than Xerox's previous lawsuits over their Proprietary Xerox Business Model Copier Technology. Bootleg copies of Xerox's unreleased Business Model Copier System were widely pirated and secretly used by many "dot com" start-ups, which fueled the inflation of the Internet Bubble. But when Xerox tried to enforce their Business Model Copier patent, it caused the failure to so many "dot com" companies, that the bubble popped.
There are some interesting alternatives to Graffiti and Unistrokes, which are much more
"Fitts' Law Friendly" and therefor faster and easier to use, and also more reliable.
"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either
PDF
or
PostScript,
which was published at the ACM
UIST'98 conference."
"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities
of previously separate mechanisms such as marking
menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can
be integrated fluidly."
I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented
"Finger Pies",
which are simply
pie menus that you can use with your finger!
To paraphrase
Ben Shneiderman:
Finger Pies work well for implementing
direct manipulation
user interfaces
on handheld personal
touch screen
devices,
in which the application provides meaningful,
engaging,
tightly coupled
feedback on the screen,
in response to your gesture.
By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of
direct engagement
in an
immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]
Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.
Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.
One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.
Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus.
So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.
Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.
Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.
-Don
Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video."
-http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html
Absolutely. The people who think Unix has always been secure were born yesterday.
I remember one hillarious Sun security hole, around SunOS 3.0 or so, that let you get a root shell by walking up to the console and holding down one of they keys until it autorepeated enough to fill up a buffer somewhere. Then you just hit the return key and it logged you in with a root shell!
Chris Torek, Mark Weiser, Steve Miller and I witnessed this behavior on Suns at the U of Maryland some time during the 80's.
My favorite boneheaded idiotic Unix security hole was the/etc/passwd "::0:0:::" bug.
It would conveniently open up a giant security hole whenever somebody accidentally left a blank line in/etc/passwd.
The next time anybody changed their password, the setuid root "passwd" program would read the old/etc/passwd file line by line using scanf("%s:%s:%d:%d:%s:%s:%s",...), without checking for errors, then write out the new password file using printf("%s:%s:%d:%d:%s:%s:%s",...). The blank line would read in as zero length strings and zeros, and would be written back out as "::0:0:::".
And of course what does "::0:0:::" mean in/etc/passwd? It defines a root-privileged user whose name is the null string! How convenient!
Then all anyone has to do to get root was to type:
% su ""
On the Pyramid (which ran a bizarre hybrid combination of BSD and System V), all you had to do to exploit this hole was to hit the return key at the "login:" prompt, and it would display the message of the day followed by the a root shell prompt "#".
People complain that Unix is difficult to use, and requires a lot of typing. But getting a root shell was certainly quite easy, requiring even fewer keystrokes on the Pyramid than the Sun.
Has Windows NT *EVER* been that easy and convenient to break into? I don't think so.
-Don
Unix has always had problems: X11 for example.
on
Solaris, AIX Login Hole
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Ivan Raikov stated "I'd say there's a subtle, but important difference between insecure by design and insecure due to a programmer's mistake."
Some times, "design" is 100% equivalent to "a programmer's mistake".
That is obviously the case with
X-Windows,
the world's first fully modular software disaster. It was a mistake to even design it. A mistake carried out to perfection. The defecto standard. Flaky and built to stay that way. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Form follows malfunction. Ignorance is our most important resource. It could be worse, but it'll take time. More than enough rope. Power tools for power fools. Putting new limits on productivity. The cutting edge of obsolescence. The art of incompetence. The defacto substandard. You'll envy the dead. Even your dog won't like it.
-Don
The RTM worm patch that just renamed the hole
on
Solaris, AIX Login Hole
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Don't just install the first security patch that comes across the net, and assume you're safe.
The day after Robert T Morris unleashed his worm on the internet on November 2, 1988, Keith Baaaaaaaahstic distributed instructions from the "Experimental Computing Facility, Center for Disease Control" on how to patch the sendmail binary by replacing the "D" in the "DEBUG" command with a null, thus disabling the worm.
Unfortunately the effect was actually to change the name of the "DEBUG" command to the null string! So telnetting to port 25 and simply hitting CR to send a blank line would actually put sendmail into debug mode!
Of course Sun Microsystems immediately installed this bogus patch, which I accidentally discovered, and reported to Sun. More than a year later I discussed it on the security mailing list... I hope that gave them enough time to fix the bug in the source code and recompile.
>> [...] updating the old X10 server for the ibm/pc to work with X11R4, etc.
Yeah, right. Might as well have them fill in the Grand Canyon using a
pair of tweezers. How about having Robert Morris implement the Gnu
kernel? I'm sure he's bright enough to come up with a very secure
system (much to rms's disgust). So secure that only he would know the
loopholes.
Morris would be dead meat if his daddy didn't work for the NSA.
One of the first patches for sendmail that was sent around to keep the
Internet worm out was to edit the sendmail binary changing the 'D' in
"DEBUG" to '\0', so the DEBUG command wouldn't work any more. Well
that stopped the worm, but it made the null string invoke the debug
command. I noticed this a couple days after the worm, when I telneted
to sun.com port 25, to EXPN a user name of somebody on a mailing list
I run, hit CR a couple of times to make sure sendmail was listening,
and did the EXPN. It spit back huge ammounts of debugging information!
Of course I promptly notified the appropriate people at Sun so they
could put the right fix in. Sheez.
-Don
====
Date: 3 Nov 88 10:54:57 GMT
From: bostic@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Fixes for the virus
Approved: ucb-fixes@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
Subject: Fixes for the virus
Index: usr.lib/sendmail/src/srvrsmtp.c 4BSD
There's a virus running around; the salient facts. A bug in
sendmail has been used to introduce a virus into a lot of
Internet UNIX systems. It has not been observed to damage the
host system, however, it's incredibly virulent, attempting to
introduce itself to every system it can find. It appears to
use rsh, broken passwords, and sendmail to introduce itself
into the target systems. It affects only VAXen and Suns, as
far as we know.
There are three changes that we believe will immunize your
system. They are attached.
Thanks to the Experimental Computing Facility, Center for
Disease Control for their assistance. (It's pretty late,
and they certainly deserved some thanks, somewhere!)
Fix:
[...]
If you don't have source, apply the following patch to your
sendmail binary. SAVE A COPY OF IT FIRST, IN CASE YOU MESS
UP! This is mildly tricky -- note, some versions of strings(1),
which we're going to use to find the offset of the string
"debug" in the binary print out the offsets in octal, not
decimal. Run the following shell line to decide how your
version of strings(1) works:
/bin/echo 'abcd' |/usr/ucb/strings -o
Note, make sure the eight control 'G's are preserved in this
line. If this command results in something like:
0000008 abcd
your strings(1) command prints out locations in decimal, else
it's octal.
The patch script for sendmail. NOTE, YOUR OFFSETS MAY VARY!!
This script assumes that your strings(1) command prints out
the offsets in decimal.
Script started on Thu Nov 3 02:08:14 1988
okeeffe:tmp {2} strings -o -a/usr/lib/sendmail | egrep debug
0096972 debug
okeeffe:tmp {3} adb -w/usr/lib/sendmail
?m 0 0xffffffff 0
0t10$d
radix=10 base ten
96972?s
96972: debug
96972?w 0
96972: 25701 = 0
okeeffe:tmp {4} ^D
script done on Thu Nov 3 02:09:31 1988
If your strings(1) command prints out the offsets in octal,
change the line "0t10$d" to "0t8$d".
After you've fixed sendmail, move both/bin/cc and/bin/ld to
something else. (The virus uses the cc and the ld commands
to rebuild itself to run on your system.)
Finally, kill any processes on your system that don't belong there.
Suspicious ones have "(sh)" or "xNNNNNNN" where the N's are random
digits, as the command name on the ps(1) output line.
One more thing, if you find files in/tmp or/usr/tmp that
have names like "xNNNNNN,l1.c", or "xNNNNNN,sun3.o", or
"xNNNNNNN,vax.o" where the N's are random digits, you've been
infected.
====
Keith sent out the following addendum to the patch, which prevents the null string bug, but Sun obviously didn't pay attention to it.
====
Date: 3 Nov 88 16:12:19 GMT
From: bostic@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Fixes for the virus, #2
Approved: ucb-fixes@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
Original-newsgroup: comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes
Index: usr.lib/sendmail/src/srvrsmtp.c 4BSD
Description:
This is a followup message, to clear up two points.
First off, a better value to use to PATCH your sendmail
executable is 0xff; if you're using the patch script,
change:
96972?w 0
to:
96972?w 65535
Secondly, note, if, when you run strings(1) on your sendmail
executable, greping for ``debug'', you don't get any output,
don't worry about the problem, your system is already (we
think) safe.
Alan Turing, Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincon
on
Looking At Turing
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Turing wasn't the only historically signifigant homosexual in history.
Eleanor Roosevelt certainly had a compassionate attitude about homosexuality: she was the first known bisexual First Lady.
I wonder if
Hillary Clinton
ever flirted with Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost in the Lincoln bedroom. That would be appropriate, because Lincoln was the first known gay president. Ever wonder where the Log Cabin Republicans got their name?
Walt Whitman (who had a serious crush on Lincoln) wrote a poetic tribute to Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!", in his book "Leaves of Grass" which Bill Clinton gave as a gift Monica Lewinsky. Steamy romantic stuff!)
On March 9, 1933, Eleanor wrote from the White House to Lorena: "My Pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can't kiss you [in person] so I kiss your picture good night and good morning,"
And, on December 5, 1933, Lorena wrote to Eleanor: " Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips."
Not the first, but in good company.
on
Looking At Turing
·
· Score: 2
Plato and Leonardo da Vinci were gay scientists too, among many others. Turing certainly wasn't the first gay scientist, but he's in good company.
-Don
Re:The classic five-star book on Turing
on
Looking At Turing
·
· Score: 4, Informative
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
[Five Stars]
February 17, 2001
One of the most important books I've ever read. Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a 'pure' mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).
His best-known work is his 1936 'Computable Numbers' paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England's WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world's first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.
Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not 'number crunchers', the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60's and 70's. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn't exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until 'rediscovered' decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His 'Turing test' of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.
Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and "go along" with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn't acknowledge some of his life's work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.
I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, "we didn't know he was a homosexual until after the war... if the security people had found out [and removed him]... we might have lost the war". This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.
I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing's life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I've ever read.
Protect their good name??! "BSML" is NOT a good name!!!
Hello! Earth to LabBook! BSML is a HORRIBLE name, if you want anyone to take you seriously! Any company that would actually name a serious commercial product "BSML" is totally nuts!
It's silly for them to go after someone who has been using the name BSML for years with its most obvious meaning: Bull Shit Markup Language!
They should use XML namespaces to prevent any problems of name clashes, not legal threats of trademark disparagement.
Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?
Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.
Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".
-Don
========
From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark
Don,
While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML
on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use
humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent
and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to
BSML from your website.
Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce,
advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.
New BSML Markup Tags
CRONKITE Extension
This tag marks authoritative text that the reader
should believe without question.
SALE Extension
This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale.
The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the
attention of the user.
COLORMAP Extension
This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's
colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap,
plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading
and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.
BLINK Extension
The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side
image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now
be blinked arbitrarily.
The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of
up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking
text in sequence.
The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence
and phase of blinking text.
Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker
can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.
Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers,
to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.
See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for
some excellent examples.
There are a few misguided people who passionately hate pie menus, like the guy who invented LED watches with the two buttons for setting the time, that you have to press again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
The same guy wants the web browser to have just one button, that you press every time you want to see a new web page. If you want to go back and see a page you've seen before, you have to keep pressing the button again and again, until you've seen every page on the web, then it cycles back around to the ones you've seen before.
Some people simply have a stake in computers being hard to use, and they feel threatened when something comes along that's better and easier than whatever else they put all their time into learning. That's why so many monolinguistic Perl programmers hate Python so much. They call it job security, but I call it self imposed hell.
Pie menus: It's not just a good idea, it's Fitts' Law!
The pie menus in The Sims use a combination of desaturation, darkening, and alpha blending to feather the edges of the menu.
Why transparency and the other effects?
I didn't want the pie menus to obscure too much of the scene behind them. You can see through the pie menu as the animation continues on in real time behind it. The head of the currently selected person is drawn in the center of the pie menu, and follows the cursor by looking at the currently selected item.
I found it necessary to somehow separate the head from the rest of the scene, otherwise it looked like a giant head was floating in a room of the house! Drawing a solid opaque menu background would obscure too much of the scene. But even a partially transparent menu background still did not visually separate the head from the background scene enough. It looked muddy and cluttered, instead of crisp and bright.
So instead of simply alpha blending, I actually made it desaturate the background (removes the color so it's gray scale), and darken it (like casting a colorless shadow).
I wanted the colorful head to look sharp and bright up against the dark gray background. So the effect looks at the Z buffer to clip out the head in the menu center, so it remains bright and colorful against the dark gray background. That gives it visual "pop" that separates the head from the background. The edges of the effect are feathered, so there's no sharp line dividing the inside and the outside of the menu (useless visual clutter).
The gray shadow just gradually tapers off with distance, suggesting that the pie menu active area extends to the edge of the screen, not confined to the borders of a circle. The labels are drawn with high contrast drop shadows around the pie menu, so they stand out and easy to read, partially overlapping the shadow so they're look like they're part of the menu.
There's special code to perform that particular combination of pixel filters in real time, to every frame just after the 3D rendering phase.
The pixelated censorship effect works the same way as the pie menu shadow, like a Photoshop filter run after the 3D rendering phase. There's a special suit type that's tagged as a "censorship" suit. It consists of bounding boxes attached to the varius bones of the skeleton that you can select to censor. So if you just want to censor the head, you attach the head censor suit to the head bone. The 3D character renderer transforms the 8 vertices but doesn't draw anything, and stashes the screen bounding box away for the pixelation filter to draw later. That's how it can censor just the crotch of naked men, but also the chests of naked girls gone wild.
Slashdot Mirror
From http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html:
The irony is that Verio now owns The Little Garden.
From http://www.toad.com/gnu:
From http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html:
-Don
-Don
-Don
From Google:
NEXTSTEP Software Available from Sun for Sparc Workstations
Provides Object Development Pathway to Industry-Standard OpenStep for Solaris
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. May 23, 1995 - Sun Microsystems Computer Company (SMCC) and NeXT Computer, Inc. today announced a distribution agreement under which Sun will provide NEXTSTEP(TM) object-oriented software for SPARCstation(TM) model 4, 5 and 20 workstations. Aimed at Fortune 1000 companies and other large, heterogeneous business environments, the NEXTSTEP software running on SPARCstation desktops provides Sun and NeXT customers with the proven object software and high-performance processing needed today to rapidly develop and deploy custom business applications throughout an enterprise. The announcement also puts Sun customers on a fast track to Sun's upcoming implementation of the advanced OpenStep(TM) object environment as part of Project DOE(Distributed Objects Environment). DOE is an extension to the Solarisoperating environment for rapidly developing and deploying networkedobject applications. An OpenStep-compliant desktop and development tools are integrated with DOE.
-Don
Scott Draeker told me that Loki was quite interested in porting the Sims to Linux, and that they were working on a contract with Maxis for a very long time, which they finally failed to obtain. It was certainly their intention to port The Sims to Linux, yet they strung me along and changed their mind because they ran out of money.
If porting the top selling game to Linux is a bad business venture, then what does that say about Loki's business model in general, and the rest of the games Loki ported? They're horrible business ventures, which resulted in Loki declaring Chapter 11. The Sims was not to blame. Porting The Sims to the Mac wasn't a bad idea -- it's the top selling game on that platform, too!
I designed and implemented the code that draws the people in The Sims myself, so I'm certainly familiar with it and qualified to port it. I would have ported the 3D code myself, but I wanted to coordinate with Loki on that part, so I stopped work on the 3D and audio while waiting for Loki to get back to me, which took them many months. In the mean time, while they were stringing me along, I worked on other projects, like Transmogrifier.
You're totally off-base in your accusations. I worked with Will Wright for three years implementing The Sims (also porting the framework and tools like Edith from the Mac to Windows), then later I ported The Sims to Linux twice. The first time was on my own time, to demonstrate that it could be done. The second time was for Maxis's internal use in The Sims Online, using the latest build of the source code, instead of the year-old code I originally ported. Then I optimized it and removed all the graphics and sound code, so they could run many "headless" server instances on the same machine. I finished that port and Maxis paid me for the work. Now the official source code of The Sims Online that's checked into Maxis's Perforce tree compiles on both Windows and Linux. It's a done deal.
You Loki fan-boys have a record of viciously attacking Transgaming and me on totally false pretenses. You all are the epitomy of what's wrong with slashdot, and it's because of people like you that Linux will never be taken seriously. But at least your good buddy Zakk finally had the guts to apologized (not that it didn't take some arm twisting).
-Don
====
Mr. Hopkins,
I recognize that some of my comments were made in very poor taste and implied untrue things about your character. For this I apologize, and hope that this ordeal has not soured you even more to those who also represent my position in a less verbal manner.
I'm quite concerned about Transgaming, specifically with the manner in which they are operating. However, it was wrong of me to take out my frustrations on you. It is possible that their Sims port will benefit Linux in the long run, but none of us really know what the future holds.
All in all, I appreciate the effort you've put into native Linux ports, and while we reach different conclusions on the matter, it is clear that our concern for Linux gaming is something that we share.
--
-zakk zakk@firebutton.org
zakk@icculus.org
That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.
The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.
The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).
But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.
Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.
Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.
Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.
Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).
The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.
I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.
I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.
The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.
-Don
-Don
The Perl language was designed to maximise maintenance costs, and to keep your coders employed and busy with nickle and dime shit work for the rest of their lives.
Print it all out and burn it. That's the only way to deal with Perl code.
I hope you fired the irresponsible slob who decided to write that must code in Perl a long time ago.
-Don
-Don
From: Jeremy Huxtable (jh@Ist.CO.UK)
Subject: Big brother
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Date: 1988-07-25 07:43:13 PST
Try this out on your NeWS server.....
%!
% eye.ps
%
% Jeremy Huxtable
%
% "Big Brother" implementation in PostScript.
% Create an Eyeball class from the Default window class.
[...]
-Don
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1991 22:48:01 PST
From: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Subject: Re: a rumor?
To: Don Hopkins <hopkins@Eng.sun.com>
Xerox has stopped testing summer student interns in the research labs only. The rest of Xerox still labors under its yoke. Its a win, for sure, but there's still more to win. Thanks for your help.
The information visualizer guys are into gestures, but not pies. They use a rubout motion to delete, and stuff like that. I think the gesturing left and right to close and open trees was more like that.
We ahve been playing with ways to use a stylus to get input without a keyboard and without handwritng recognition. I hacked up a sort of 26 quadrant pie menu, so that each word is a shape (letter-letter-letter, all connected together, and drop ink as you move among the letters: you get a shape. Xerox is a kind of lopsided "X"), and each letter is selected as you move through it, and when you lift up and click down the stylus again you get a space. It has some potential, but 26 quadrants is just to many.
Another possiblity is to put 13 inside 13, and use a state machine so you get the inner circle letter unless you travel all the way through to the outside circle, in which case you get that letter instead, etc. I haven't hack this together yet, maybe tonight.
-mark
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 91 06:43:09 PST
From: hopkins@Eng.sun.com (Don Hopkins)
To: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Cc: hopkins
Subject: alphabetic pies
Have you tried two level 6x6 item pie menu tree for inputting the alphabet (and then some)?
abc ghi mno
def jkl pqr
-X-
stu yz_ ___
vwx ___ ___
You could hang more submenus off of the _'s for numerics, less common glyphs, etc. The SouthEast menu that's all _ could have any number of items, and the South menu might have some special glyphs or submenus in it. The important thing is that the glyphs are chunked in groups of 6, which fits comfortably in your head.
You might also try a two level 6x8 item pies menu tree:
abc ijk qrs
.
d e l m t u
fgh nop vwx
-X-
yz_012etc
_ _ 9 3 .
___ 8 4 etc
567
I was thinking about how to do a decimal pie menu tree. The obvious thing is a 10 item pie. But what direction should 0 be, and should the numbers go CW or CCW? But a 10 item menu is only really good for inputting a single digit, or a fixed number of digits, not an arbitrary string of digits (you need a way to terminate the string, and using another mouse button is cheating). Well, most people are familiar with a phone dial, so maybe that's one way to line it up. If you lined the 10 digits up in the same direction as the numbers on the phone dial, you would have a few extra directions to put extra menu items, where there are not holes in the dial. (Hey, how many is that? All the phones in my life have buttons! I guess I'm not as familiar with the phone dial as I thought, but maybe my fingers would remember. Let's say 13.) You could use the extra 3 directions for a decimal point, and/or input editing commands, or commands that consume the number you gestured as input. Or you could just keep selecting digits deeper and deeper, and the system could be smart about only popping up menus that would only allow you to select a number in range (e.g. 0-9999). Much better to disable menu items by dimming them than removing them from the menu, because that would change the numbers items in the menu, and ruin everything.
In a phone dial context, when you needed to input letters, it might be nice to arrange an alphabetic pie like the letters on a phone dial, with submenus of 3 menus items. But it probably wouldn't be as easy to use or remember as the 6x6 alphabetic menu.
-Don
From: Don Hopkins <hopkins@uk.ac.turing>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 92 22:33:08 BST
To: Mark Weiser <weiser.PARC@com.xerox>
Cc: hopkins@uk.ac.turing
Subject: cmu
Thanks! I sent email to Myers and phoned him up, and after a while he remembered that I was the guy who sent him the pie menu video tapes [...] I'm quite interested in his work, which involves programming by example and demonstration, visual languages, and constructing GUIs with graphical editors using inferencing and constraints, instead of doing so much boiler plate programming.
I am quite interested in pen based stuff, but I don't want to work for any of the companies currently making pen based products because they are so short sighted and limited by perceived market demands and low end technology. (IBM-PC based technology, MS-DOS, bad languages, etc.) Go is using C with crude object oriented scaffolding, but their ideas are sound, and they're at least using their own OS, however the programming environment sucks, they just can't get away from MS-DOS. Momemta is using smalltalk, which, as one of their engineers told me, allowed them to catch up with Go in a very short time. But they definitly have a set of problems of their own, like running on top of MS-DOS and Windows. It's nice that they use smalltalk, but it's rather slow, and more glitzy than well designed. There was a big battle at Momemta between the programmer who's responsible for how nice it is, and the engineering manager in charge or the project, where the manager refused to use smalltalk because it was a "homosexual programming language". Guess he never heard of Lisp! But the programmer certainly proved his point, and the manager took all the credit for making the decision to go with smalltalk. (That's what the manager claimed at their product announcement, and I shook his hand for using smalltalk, and when I told the programmer about that later, boy was he pissed!) But you still can't program the damn thing in smalltalk, *using the pen*! I guess that's one reason they also have a keyboard. There were some other stupid user interface decisions made as well -- my impression from talking to the programmer was that the manager read some books on user interface design principles, and enforced them to the letter without really understanding them and knowing when they should not apply, and when to just use common sense instead.
So far nobody I've heard of has a programming language you can use with a pen, let alone a pen based user interface *written* in and around such a language. What good is a pen computer with a scripting language if you have to use a keyboard to program it? And if it's not programmable, you might as well be using recipe cards. The pen has so much potential, but everybody's trying to use these computers to simulate a piece of paper running MS-DOS. I think it's all well and fine to take advantage of metaphores people are used to (i.e. writing on paper, or beating their head against MS-DOS) but if you limit yourself to simulating paper then you've severly crippled the system, especially when at the same time you severly break the metaphore you're limiting yourself with by trying to be MS-DOS compatible. No piece of paper ever locked up and asked me if I wanted to Abort, Retry, or Ignore. As an example of how you could make a pen computer easier to use by transcending the paper metaphore: when you write on a piece of paper, the information that it stores is two-dimensional. The time componant is completely collapsed and lost. This is not the case with a pen computer, which can remember ink as a three dimensional entity. Why should I be required to write in a fucking comb, if the computer can tell where one letter ends and the next letter begins by the *temporal* separation between letters instead of the visually obvious and traditional spatial separation? Why hasn't anybody written a handwriting recognizer that lets me keep my hand in one place and just write overlapping letters or words without moving my hand back and forth, looking at the page to see when I reach the right margin, moving my hand back to the left margin and no further and down exactly one line, and then writing another line making sure it's parallel with the first? Why can't I just relax, and keep my hand in one place while writing? (I discovered this handwriting technique when I would fall asleep in class while still taking notes. I would wake up and there would be a big ink blob where I kept writing but stopped moving my hand back and forth.) Of course my hand is used to spacing letters out when writing a word, but I think it would be pretty natural to have an input field in a convenient location that I write a word into, which is recognized, then zaps over to where the text input caret is in my document, in a nice font, and the caret moves on, but the place I'm writing stays in the same place. Just like how a keyboard works. Imagine of you had to move the keyboard to the right a bit every time you typed a character, and then move it down and all the way to to the left whenever the cursor reached the right edge of the screen? Nobody would put up with that. Why put up with such a horrible interface using a pen computer? It's only *paper* that forces you to do that.
Well I doubt it would be possible to develop such a non-conformist interface for a company that was rushing to market as fast as they could. Let alone develop a pen based programming language and then write a user interface around it. Did you read the article in Dr. Dobbs Journal (the December UI issue, the same one with my pie menu article) about the pen extension to X-Windows? What an total abortion! I'm sure the next big market demand made on a company like Go or Momenta will be to implement X-Windows for their machine. During the time that every company with a pen computer is trying to do that very same thing and failing miserably, but thinking it's OK because everybody else is failing just as bad, and the users asked for it anyway, so that's what they get, I would like to be doing something completely different, not wasting my time with the latest fads, stampeeds, and lemming dunks.
-Don
Coyote Hill, Palo Alto: Today Xerox was awarded a patent on their Proprietary Xerox User Interface Copier Technology. As a result, Xerox immediately filed patent infringement lawsuits against Apple for copying Xerox's user interface, Microsoft for copying Apple's user interface, and Sun for copying Microsoft's user interface.
Industry insiders predict that this new round of lawsuits could have an even more chilling effect on the economy than Xerox's previous lawsuits over their Proprietary Xerox Business Model Copier Technology. Bootleg copies of Xerox's unreleased Business Model Copier System were widely pirated and secretly used by many "dot com" start-ups, which fueled the inflation of the Internet Bubble. But when Xerox tried to enforce their Business Model Copier patent, it caused the failure to so many "dot com" companies, that the bubble popped.
-Don
One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.
"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."
Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.
"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."
I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!
To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]
Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.
Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.
One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.
Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.
Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.
Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.
-Don
Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html
I remember one hillarious Sun security hole, around SunOS 3.0 or so, that let you get a root shell by walking up to the console and holding down one of they keys until it autorepeated enough to fill up a buffer somewhere. Then you just hit the return key and it logged you in with a root shell! Chris Torek, Mark Weiser, Steve Miller and I witnessed this behavior on Suns at the U of Maryland some time during the 80's.
My favorite boneheaded idiotic Unix security hole was the /etc/passwd "::0:0:::" bug.
It would conveniently open up a giant security hole whenever somebody accidentally left a blank line in /etc/passwd.
The next time anybody changed their password, the setuid root "passwd" program would read the old /etc/passwd file line by line using scanf("%s:%s:%d:%d:%s:%s:%s", ...), without checking for errors, then write out the new password file using printf("%s:%s:%d:%d:%s:%s:%s", ...). The blank line would read in as zero length strings and zeros, and would be written back out as "::0:0:::".
And of course what does "::0:0:::" mean in /etc/passwd? It defines a root-privileged user whose name is the null string! How convenient!
Then all anyone has to do to get root was to type:
% su ""
On the Pyramid (which ran a bizarre hybrid combination of BSD and System V), all you had to do to exploit this hole was to hit the return key at the "login:" prompt, and it would display the message of the day followed by the a root shell prompt "#".
People complain that Unix is difficult to use, and requires a lot of typing. But getting a root shell was certainly quite easy, requiring even fewer keystrokes on the Pyramid than the Sun.
Has Windows NT *EVER* been that easy and convenient to break into? I don't think so.
-Don
Some times, "design" is 100% equivalent to "a programmer's mistake".
That is obviously the case with X-Windows, the world's first fully modular software disaster. It was a mistake to even design it. A mistake carried out to perfection. The defecto standard. Flaky and built to stay that way. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Form follows malfunction. Ignorance is our most important resource. It could be worse, but it'll take time. More than enough rope. Power tools for power fools. Putting new limits on productivity. The cutting edge of obsolescence. The art of incompetence. The defacto substandard. You'll envy the dead. Even your dog won't like it.
-Don
The day after Robert T Morris unleashed his worm on the internet on November 2, 1988, Keith Baaaaaaaahstic distributed instructions from the "Experimental Computing Facility, Center for Disease Control" on how to patch the sendmail binary by replacing the "D" in the "DEBUG" command with a null, thus disabling the worm.
Unfortunately the effect was actually to change the name of the "DEBUG" command to the null string! So telnetting to port 25 and simply hitting CR to send a blank line would actually put sendmail into debug mode!
Of course Sun Microsystems immediately installed this bogus patch, which I accidentally discovered, and reported to Sun. More than a year later I discussed it on the security mailing list... I hope that gave them enough time to fix the bug in the source code and recompile.
-Don
====
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 90 01:02:15 -0500
From: don@cs.umd.edu (Don Hopkins)
Subject: Computer Abuse / Product Liability / Criminal Statutes / ECPA
To: blackcat@neuro.usc.edu
Cc: security@pyrite.rutgers.edu
>> [...] updating the old X10 server for the ibm/pc to work with X11R4, etc.
Yeah, right. Might as well have them fill in the Grand Canyon using a pair of tweezers. How about having Robert Morris implement the Gnu kernel? I'm sure he's bright enough to come up with a very secure system (much to rms's disgust). So secure that only he would know the loopholes.
Morris would be dead meat if his daddy didn't work for the NSA.
One of the first patches for sendmail that was sent around to keep the Internet worm out was to edit the sendmail binary changing the 'D' in "DEBUG" to '\0', so the DEBUG command wouldn't work any more. Well that stopped the worm, but it made the null string invoke the debug command. I noticed this a couple days after the worm, when I telneted to sun.com port 25, to EXPN a user name of somebody on a mailing list I run, hit CR a couple of times to make sure sendmail was listening, and did the EXPN. It spit back huge ammounts of debugging information! Of course I promptly notified the appropriate people at Sun so they could put the right fix in. Sheez.
-Don
====
Date: 3 Nov 88 10:54:57 GMT
From: bostic@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Fixes for the virus
Approved: ucb-fixes@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
Subject: Fixes for the virus
Index: usr.lib/sendmail/src/srvrsmtp.c 4BSD
There's a virus running around; the salient facts. A bug in sendmail has been used to introduce a virus into a lot of Internet UNIX systems. It has not been observed to damage the host system, however, it's incredibly virulent, attempting to introduce itself to every system it can find. It appears to use rsh, broken passwords, and sendmail to introduce itself into the target systems. It affects only VAXen and Suns, as far as we know.
There are three changes that we believe will immunize your system. They are attached.
Thanks to the Experimental Computing Facility, Center for Disease Control for their assistance. (It's pretty late, and they certainly deserved some thanks, somewhere!)
Fix:
[...]
If you don't have source, apply the following patch to your sendmail binary. SAVE A COPY OF IT FIRST, IN CASE YOU MESS UP! This is mildly tricky -- note, some versions of strings(1), which we're going to use to find the offset of the string "debug" in the binary print out the offsets in octal, not decimal. Run the following shell line to decide how your version of strings(1) works:
Note, make sure the eight control 'G's are preserved in this line. If this command results in something like:
0000008 abcd
your strings(1) command prints out locations in decimal, else it's octal.
The patch script for sendmail. NOTE, YOUR OFFSETS MAY VARY!! This script assumes that your strings(1) command prints out the offsets in decimal.
Script started on Thu Nov 3 02:08:14 1988 /usr/lib/sendmail | egrep debug /usr/lib/sendmail
okeeffe:tmp {2} strings -o -a
0096972 debug
okeeffe:tmp {3} adb -w
?m 0 0xffffffff 0
0t10$d
radix=10 base ten
96972?s
96972: debug
96972?w 0
96972: 25701 = 0
okeeffe:tmp {4} ^D
script done on Thu Nov 3 02:09:31 1988
If your strings(1) command prints out the offsets in octal, change the line "0t10$d" to "0t8$d".
After you've fixed sendmail, move both /bin/cc and /bin/ld to
something else. (The virus uses the cc and the ld commands
to rebuild itself to run on your system.)
Finally, kill any processes on your system that don't belong there. Suspicious ones have "(sh)" or "xNNNNNNN" where the N's are random digits, as the command name on the ps(1) output line.
One more thing, if you find files in /tmp or /usr/tmp that
have names like "xNNNNNN,l1.c", or "xNNNNNN,sun3.o", or
"xNNNNNNN,vax.o" where the N's are random digits, you've been
infected.
====
Keith sent out the following addendum to the patch, which prevents the null string bug, but Sun obviously didn't pay attention to it.
====
Date: 3 Nov 88 16:12:19 GMT
From: bostic@OKEEFFE.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Fixes for the virus, #2
Approved: ucb-fixes@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
Original-newsgroup: comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes
Index: usr.lib/sendmail/src/srvrsmtp.c 4BSD
Description:
This is a followup message, to clear up two points. First off, a better value to use to PATCH your sendmail executable is 0xff; if you're using the patch script, change:
96972?w 0
to:
96972?w 65535
Secondly, note, if, when you run strings(1) on your sendmail executable, greping for ``debug'', you don't get any output, don't worry about the problem, your system is already (we think) safe.
Eleanor Roosevelt certainly had a compassionate attitude about homosexuality: she was the first known bisexual First Lady.
I wonder if Hillary Clinton ever flirted with Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost in the Lincoln bedroom. That would be appropriate, because Lincoln was the first known gay president. Ever wonder where the Log Cabin Republicans got their name? Walt Whitman (who had a serious crush on Lincoln) wrote a poetic tribute to Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!", in his book "Leaves of Grass" which Bill Clinton gave as a gift Monica Lewinsky. Steamy romantic stuff!)
From An 'Outing' of Historical Proportions by Cliff Arnesen:
On March 9, 1933, Eleanor wrote from the White House to Lorena: "My Pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can't kiss you [in person] so I kiss your picture good night and good morning,"
And, on December 5, 1933, Lorena wrote to Eleanor: " Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips."
-Don
Much more information about Alan Turing and the book is on the web page created by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges: The Alan Turing Home Page.
From the Amazon review:
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
[Five Stars]
February 17, 2001
One of the most important books I've ever read. Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a 'pure' mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).
His best-known work is his 1936 'Computable Numbers' paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England's WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world's first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.
Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not 'number crunchers', the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60's and 70's. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn't exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until 'rediscovered' decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His 'Turing test' of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.
Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and "go along" with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn't acknowledge some of his life's work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.
I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, "we didn't know he was a homosexual until after the war... if the security people had found out [and removed him]... we might have lost the war". This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.
I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing's life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I've ever read.
-Tom Jennings
Check out the great review on Amazon by Fidonet founder and homo-anarchist Tom Jennings!
-Don
-Don
Hello! Earth to LabBook! BSML is a HORRIBLE name, if you want anyone to take you seriously! Any company that would actually name a serious commercial product "BSML" is totally nuts!
It's silly for them to go after someone who has been using the name BSML for years with its most obvious meaning: Bull Shit Markup Language!
They should use XML namespaces to prevent any problems of name clashes, not legal threats of trademark disparagement.
-Don
I received the following email message from the CFO of a company called LabBook, about my Bull Shit Markup Language (BSML) web page.
Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?
Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.
Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".
-Don
========
From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark
Don,
While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.
Thanks for your cooperation,
Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook
========
Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:
========
BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language
Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.
New BSML Markup Tags
CRONKITE Extension
This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.
SALE Extension
This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.
COLORMAP Extension
This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.
BLINK Extension
The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.
The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.
The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.
Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.
See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.
There are a few misguided people who passionately hate pie menus, like the guy who invented LED watches with the two buttons for setting the time, that you have to press again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
The same guy wants the web browser to have just one button, that you press every time you want to see a new web page. If you want to go back and see a page you've seen before, you have to keep pressing the button again and again, until you've seen every page on the web, then it cycles back around to the ones you've seen before.
Some people simply have a stake in computers being hard to use, and they feel threatened when something comes along that's better and easier than whatever else they put all their time into learning. That's why so many monolinguistic Perl programmers hate Python so much. They call it job security, but I call it self imposed hell.
Pie menus: It's not just a good idea, it's Fitts' Law!
-Don
The pie menus in The Sims use a combination of desaturation, darkening, and alpha blending to feather the edges of the menu.
Why transparency and the other effects? I didn't want the pie menus to obscure too much of the scene behind them. You can see through the pie menu as the animation continues on in real time behind it. The head of the currently selected person is drawn in the center of the pie menu, and follows the cursor by looking at the currently selected item.
I found it necessary to somehow separate the head from the rest of the scene, otherwise it looked like a giant head was floating in a room of the house! Drawing a solid opaque menu background would obscure too much of the scene. But even a partially transparent menu background still did not visually separate the head from the background scene enough. It looked muddy and cluttered, instead of crisp and bright.
So instead of simply alpha blending, I actually made it desaturate the background (removes the color so it's gray scale), and darken it (like casting a colorless shadow).
I wanted the colorful head to look sharp and bright up against the dark gray background. So the effect looks at the Z buffer to clip out the head in the menu center, so it remains bright and colorful against the dark gray background. That gives it visual "pop" that separates the head from the background. The edges of the effect are feathered, so there's no sharp line dividing the inside and the outside of the menu (useless visual clutter).
The gray shadow just gradually tapers off with distance, suggesting that the pie menu active area extends to the edge of the screen, not confined to the borders of a circle. The labels are drawn with high contrast drop shadows around the pie menu, so they stand out and easy to read, partially overlapping the shadow so they're look like they're part of the menu.
There's special code to perform that particular combination of pixel filters in real time, to every frame just after the 3D rendering phase.
The pixelated censorship effect works the same way as the pie menu shadow, like a Photoshop filter run after the 3D rendering phase. There's a special suit type that's tagged as a "censorship" suit. It consists of bounding boxes attached to the varius bones of the skeleton that you can select to censor. So if you just want to censor the head, you attach the head censor suit to the head bone. The 3D character renderer transforms the 8 vertices but doesn't draw anything, and stashes the screen bounding box away for the pixelation filter to draw later. That's how it can censor just the crotch of naked men, but also the chests of naked girls gone wild.
-Don