Driving through Lagos, you will often see houses with "Beware 419" or "This House is NOT for Sale" painted in large on their walls.
I asked my Nigerian friend what this meant. She said 419 is the criminal code for fraud. Foreigners in Lagos looking to buy or rent houses are taken by fraudulent estate agents to see nice villas. They get a nice tour of the hours (thanks to a corrupt servant), sign a lease or agreement, pay a deposit (usually up to a year's rent), and then receive the keys. When the real owners turn up, all hell breaks loose.
This is a whole industry. Ironically, one of my friend's uncles did this as a living.
Nigeria is an interesting country. The scam letters, faxes, and emails are nothing compared to the incredible behaviour of some people on the ground.
However... don't get the wrong idea about Nigeria and Africa in general. The vast majority of people are, like everywhere else, decent and hard working. Getting up at 5am, getting home at 9pm, this is the standard rule for most employees. Given the lack of any long-term prospects for most people (a bank once told me a 'long-term' loan, for an established business, was 3 months) it's actually not surprising people turn to fraud and corruption.
I tried to invent something like this in 1994 or so. There are so many advantages to the concept, not just because it replaces a fold-out keyboard. You can chose your layout arbitrarily. Put the Enter key anywhere. Make a DVORAK. You can make the whole keyboard larger or smaller as you like. Place the keyboard on your knees when you're in a cramped plane seat.
This combined with direct retinal stimulated displays would make for more portable computing.
One idea I had to recognise finger positions (and I've also seen this announced since then) was for a sensor wristband that could learn what you were typing from measuring the nervous signals and tendon positions through the wrist.
Roll on the day when we can throw away those real keyboards! It will be about 50 years too late.
The article looks real, but is probably about 5 years too late. I don't know of many people who use external modems. As for routers: the theoretical upper limit is 10Mbs, so my 100Mbps network is safe.
This device and the many like it are all fun in their own context (e.g. the RIM devices are great for corporate use in the US but lousy for anything else). My little Nokia 5510 for instance shows that it's simple to add a full keyboard to a standard GSM/SMS device.
But it still looks like the killer device will be one that is based on existing networks but is fully programmable, with a half-decent keyboard and screen.
What I'm _really_ dying to make is a mobile controller for my home P2P box. I think of a search while I'm on the train... I send off a message to my P2P box, which does a search and returns the results. I choose one or two and tell it to start downloading.
I believe I can do this today with SMS and two phones, one of which is linked to my P2P box. But it would be so much nicer with a mobile Gnutella app!
I think technology only becomes really popular when it can be used to do illicit things.
There are screens made by companies like Siemens that work well in daylight. Try Google.
We've used 10" and 15" LCDs in kiosks meant for outdoor use. Our supplier added a reflective film that enhances the screens still further. This is apparently possible even on notebook screens.
The downside is that these screens are so bright they can be unreadable at night. Imagine a car headlight shining into your eyes. Also the high intensity causes most colors to wash-out somewhat, especially when looking at the screen from above. Apart from that they are nicely usable indoors.
BT had patents in lots of places - the ones in the UK just expired long ago. By some mystical concordance (probably because it was lost in the mail for about a decade) the US patent is still valid.
There is still officially zero patentability for software in Europe. I've spoken to the EPO on several occasions about this and they have confirmed that software may not be patented under European law. It's also worth remarking that the estimated cost of one European patent is about EUR10,000.
Now, there is some discussion about whether EPO rules actually forbid software patents or simply make it very difficult. Some of their more obfusticated rules seem to imply that with enough effort you can patent software by describing an invention of some kind that just happens to be implemented in software.
My take on this is that software patents are possible if you have the money to throw around. It follows that larger corporations (don't we love to hate those guys) will have their main patents in place before the game is opened up.
I have the phone number for the EPO somewhere. Leuke mensen, als je Nederlands spreekt.
It's a very sensible thing to make since it's cheap and eliminates much of the nasty #ifdef 'portability' one sees in programs.
You can see an example of a multithreaded web server using a similar portability library on.
I remember showing this web server and its multithreaded / portability model to the IBM Apache team in December 1999 during the Bazaar at New York. Maybe they got some inspiration from it.
New York, August 2006: Noika Corporation, after selling all its IP assets for a nominal EUR1.00 to Cybiko Inc., has launched a EUR20bn lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation, asserting that Microsoft abused its Global Monopoly Status as accorded by the US Supreme Court decision of 2003 to wipe out competition in the lucrative personal communicator (PC) market.
Noika Corporation - now consisting of a single employee - asserts that Microsoft coerced OEM providers into illegally tampering with consumer demand. Whereas Microsoft's Global Monopoly Status allows it 75% of any market under WTO rules, Noika asserts that Microsoft manipulated the market to gain more than 97% of sales, causing the failure of most other PC companies.
A Microsoft spokeman said these charges were baseless. Meanwhile Microsoft's new CallBoy PC 2007 has been unveiled, promising new features such as 'instant reboot', 'smartprotect', and 'intellidial'.
Noika shares traded up 2 Euro cents at 12 Euro cents.
Agreed. Obasanjo's article looks facetious. He's saying 'Open Source does not make software more secure because (a) the numbers show otherwise and (b) CompSci literature tells us otherwise'.
Well. Has anyone here actually tried to use formal methods to make code more secure? Do we really believe that software complexity is finite? It's not. Only a statistical approach works: write better code, run harder tests, get more people to try to break the code, spend more effort on checking the code.
Any scientific study of how to make software secure should (must) follow scientific methods: take N groups of developers, build comparable systems, examine the differences and use controls to filter out side-effects. Simply saying 'More bugs were reported in open source code' is silly.
Microsoft is waging a war on open source, Linux, and the general notion of 'free' software. Paid journalism like this must be taken with extreme scepticism.
To see how Americans see themselves abroad. I remember the case of US pilots who had been captured by the MPLA in Angola in the 1980s. The then Reagan government was offended that these heroes would be held in an Angolan prison. The Angolans replied that these guys had bombed bridges and roads in a country with which their government was officially at peace.
Americans (and yes, Europeans) are generally detested in Africa, despised for their arrogance and tolerated because they are rich. Most of the suffering in Africa can be traced to the structures that have been set-up to extract oil, diamonds, or other minerals for the benefit of external parties. Corruption of governance, outright theft of entire countries, genocides, mass clearances from mineral-rich lands, small arms traffic, war, starvation... it's a vicious cycle that repeats over and over. The rich get richer and the poor suffer and die in conditions that most of us cannot imagine.
This film is of course a preparation for the coming US invasion of Somalia. Softening them up with movies is possibly kinder than using missiles. But don't confuse this film with entertainment. It's purpose is to blame the Somalians for their problems. Blame the victims, then hit them. It's a classic and horrifyingly effective strategy.
Getting a price tag for software development is like knowing how much you're going to pay to build for a new house. Software is incredibly expensive to build. Any professional needs to be able to say: it will take so and so long and that means such and such a price tag.
The risk and uncertainty stem IMHO from two factors: the importance and rarity of talent and skill (a really good programmer can work ten times faster and produce a finer result than a 'normal' programmer); secondly, the inventive nature of much software development. When you make something new it's impossible to know what surprises you will get.
The more one works with standard pieces and the less one depends on extremes of talent and skill, the more predictable software development is.
Simplicty takes time. Complexity is easy. Early phases of evolution always spawn fantasticly complex structures. Over time these get beaten down into simpler, stronger, and more subtle designs.
This is really a great opportunity for those who would try to dethrone Microsoft from its place as the software vendor of choice for many companies. Provide an alternative, use security as the winning card.
The challenge is to improve the existing structures, secure all the entry points into a network, assume that all contacts are potentially hostile, and generally turn the naive servers we use today into something resembling a real organism: alert, defensive, paranoid. Competition will then do the rest.
The xGPL licenses seem most useful for keeping source code out of predatory hands. However, the BSD licenses encourage the widest possible use.
The best way to keep control and yet get a wide distribution is to write your own specific license that allows use and modification within certain conditions - e.g. that all changes are provided back to you. Making money is also a very healthy idea. Finally, I don't believe that individuals and small organisations can seriously follow-up on license breakers. If someone wants to steal your product, idea, or code, they will. You simply need to make it easy for the honest majority to use your work.
My analysis: Microsoft will use every means it has to kill any serious competitor. Linux falls into that category, so MS will use marketing, lobbying, blackmail, etc. to keep Linux off the boardroom agenda. It's really simple: "Clause 23: deliberate infection of the coporate network by viral tools, packages, or other programs violates this support license". When you have your customer by the touchie-feelies, you can impose any conditions you like. Oh, the courts may eventually rule this illegal... yeah.
It's also irrelevant AFAICS because this war is moving towards the irrelevant. MS's strategy is to create a taxable infrastructure. It believe the future of IT is more centralisation, and it wants to control that.
I believe the future of IT is decentralisation based on smart peer-to-peer applications running on simple and cheap protocols such as email. The value of Linux and OSS in general is that is makes small and cheap (sub-$100) servers feasible.
A world of packet-switching microservers will eventually revolutionise business and render the corporate IT policies irrelevant.
The lesson that small budgets do not need to restrict your ambitions. Indeed, large budgets seem to constipate ambition. Small disposable satellites are a wonderful idea. Cheap communications can revolutionise societies. On a global scale the potential is... big.
Somewhere there are groups of people figuring out how to lower that launch cost from $100m to $1m.
Let's face it. Within a few years the profession of 'programmer' will be protected by law, and any practicing programmer will have to be certified by a recognised educational establishment and/or Microsoft. Programming for fun will be allowed only for personal reasons. Any software intended for commercial use will have to confirm to the appropriate certification act.
If this sounds outlandish, think about how we construct buildings. Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?
(This is a leading question, but one I think will be asked by parties seeking to regulate the IT domain).
Up to now, the law has been used by media companies to protect copyrighted information. But a law can be used imaginatively once the precedent has been set. Let's imagine that MS define their Passport protocol as 'copyrighted information' and then start to prosecute people who try to reverse-engineer it. Then, they use this protocol in various places in Windows - e.g. in file sharing and email.
It's good to hear that Microsoft are not quite that sneaky. It would be shocking to learn that they were involved somehow with the MPAA.
About MS using the DMCA to their advantage, has anyone actually thought about this, e.g. done a small study into the potential issues in (e.g.) a standard Linux distribution?
A small voice asks... what happens when Microsoft encrypt their email protocols, network file sharing protocols, office document formats, and then start prosecuting programmers who try to hack these protocols, say... to allow Linux to interoperate with Windows.
What if the whole affair about copyright and fair-use a red herring designed to distract attention from the real game: making it illegal to write software that competes in any way whatsoever with Microsoft's own work.
Seems to me... fast networking, collaborative computing, peer-to-peer information sharing, autonomous virus communities. We're heading towards a massive parallel global computing system controlled by no single entity.
Being distracted by irrelevancies is one thing, but switching between different projects and tasks can be very productive, if done right. First off, it is tiring to concentrate on one thing for too long. Secondly, when I work on different projects, the cross-fertilisation of ideas is often very useful. Lastly, in my experience, the cost of context switching between projects can be kept very low by using standard tools, similar environments, etc.
There is some evidence that people who learn to speak several languages at once learn faster than those who learn a single one.
Computers multitask stupidly. Many people multitask naturally and creatively. The trick is to make it easy, painless, and pleasant.
Any information on visibility in Africa?
on
Total Solar Eclipse
·
· Score: 1
I'm sitting in Lagos, Nigeria. Anyone know how good the eclipse will be here?
Slashdot Mirror
I asked my Nigerian friend what this meant. She said 419 is the criminal code for fraud. Foreigners in Lagos looking to buy or rent houses are taken by fraudulent estate agents to see nice villas. They get a nice tour of the hours (thanks to a corrupt servant), sign a lease or agreement, pay a deposit (usually up to a year's rent), and then receive the keys. When the real owners turn up, all hell breaks loose.
This is a whole industry. Ironically, one of my friend's uncles did this as a living.
Nigeria is an interesting country. The scam letters, faxes, and emails are nothing compared to the incredible behaviour of some people on the ground.
However... don't get the wrong idea about Nigeria and Africa in general. The vast majority of people are, like everywhere else, decent and hard working. Getting up at 5am, getting home at 9pm, this is the standard rule for most employees. Given the lack of any long-term prospects for most people (a bank once told me a 'long-term' loan, for an established business, was 3 months) it's actually not surprising people turn to fraud and corruption.
This combined with direct retinal stimulated displays would make for more portable computing.
One idea I had to recognise finger positions (and I've also seen this announced since then) was for a sensor wristband that could learn what you were typing from measuring the nervous signals and tendon positions through the wrist.
Roll on the day when we can throw away those real keyboards! It will be about 50 years too late.
The article looks real, but is probably about 5 years too late. I don't know of many people who use external modems. As for routers: the theoretical upper limit is 10Mbs, so my 100Mbps network is safe.
But it still looks like the killer device will be one that is based on existing networks but is fully programmable, with a half-decent keyboard and screen.
What I'm _really_ dying to make is a mobile controller for my home P2P box. I think of a search while I'm on the train... I send off a message to my P2P box, which does a search and returns the results. I choose one or two and tell it to start downloading.
I believe I can do this today with SMS and two phones, one of which is linked to my P2P box. But it would be so much nicer with a mobile Gnutella app!
I think technology only becomes really popular when it can be used to do illicit things.
We've used 10" and 15" LCDs in kiosks meant for outdoor use. Our supplier added a reflective film that enhances the screens still further. This is apparently possible even on notebook screens.
The downside is that these screens are so bright they can be unreadable at night. Imagine a car headlight shining into your eyes. Also the high intensity causes most colors to wash-out somewhat, especially when looking at the screen from above. Apart from that they are nicely usable indoors.
BT had patents in lots of places - the ones in the UK just expired long ago. By some mystical concordance (probably because it was lost in the mail for about a decade) the US patent is still valid.
(And obviously by 'Europe' I'm excluding the UK, which has had software patents in place as we know since BT's little joke with hyperlinks.)
Now, there is some discussion about whether EPO rules actually forbid software patents or simply make it very difficult. Some of their more obfusticated rules seem to imply that with enough effort you can patent software by describing an invention of some kind that just happens to be implemented in software.
My take on this is that software patents are possible if you have the money to throw around. It follows that larger corporations (don't we love to hate those guys) will have their main patents in place before the game is opened up.
I have the phone number for the EPO somewhere. Leuke mensen, als je Nederlands spreekt.
You can see an example of a multithreaded web server using a similar portability library on .
I remember showing this web server and its multithreaded / portability model to the IBM Apache team in December 1999 during the Bazaar at New York. Maybe they got some inspiration from it.
Noika Corporation - now consisting of a single employee - asserts that Microsoft coerced OEM providers into illegally tampering with consumer demand. Whereas Microsoft's Global Monopoly Status allows it 75% of any market under WTO rules, Noika asserts that Microsoft manipulated the market to gain more than 97% of sales, causing the failure of most other PC companies.
A Microsoft spokeman said these charges were baseless. Meanwhile Microsoft's new CallBoy PC 2007 has been unveiled, promising new features such as 'instant reboot', 'smartprotect', and 'intellidial'.
Noika shares traded up 2 Euro cents at 12 Euro cents.
Well. Has anyone here actually tried to use formal methods to make code more secure? Do we really believe that software complexity is finite? It's not. Only a statistical approach works: write better code, run harder tests, get more people to try to break the code, spend more effort on checking the code.
Any scientific study of how to make software secure should (must) follow scientific methods: take N groups of developers, build comparable systems, examine the differences and use controls to filter out side-effects. Simply saying 'More bugs were reported in open source code' is silly.
Microsoft is waging a war on open source, Linux, and the general notion of 'free' software. Paid journalism like this must be taken with extreme scepticism.
This article is so misplaced. "Scared of Linux, try our box?" just does not seem the right message for /. 'Check out the review!' smells like blurb.
Am I the only one who suspects someone is paying someone to get Infomercials onto Slashdot?
To see how Americans see themselves abroad. I remember the case of US pilots who had been captured by the MPLA in Angola in the 1980s. The then Reagan government was offended that these heroes would be held in an Angolan prison. The Angolans replied that these guys had bombed bridges and roads in a country with which their government was officially at peace.
Americans (and yes, Europeans) are generally detested in Africa, despised for their arrogance and tolerated because they are rich. Most of the suffering in Africa can be traced to the structures that have been set-up to extract oil, diamonds, or other minerals for the benefit of external parties. Corruption of governance, outright theft of entire countries, genocides, mass clearances from mineral-rich lands, small arms traffic, war, starvation... it's a vicious cycle that repeats over and over. The rich get richer and the poor suffer and die in conditions that most of us cannot imagine.
This film is of course a preparation for the coming US invasion of Somalia. Softening them up with movies is possibly kinder than using missiles. But don't confuse this film with entertainment. It's purpose is to blame the Somalians for their problems. Blame the victims, then hit them. It's a classic and horrifyingly effective strategy.
Getting a price tag for software development is like knowing how much you're going to pay to build for a new house. Software is incredibly expensive to build. Any professional needs to be able to say: it will take so and so long and that means such and such a price tag.
The risk and uncertainty stem IMHO from two factors: the importance and rarity of talent and skill (a really good programmer can work ten times faster and produce a finer result than a 'normal' programmer); secondly, the inventive nature of much software development. When you make something new it's impossible to know what surprises you will get.
The more one works with standard pieces and the less one depends on extremes of talent and skill, the more predictable software development is.
Simplicty takes time. Complexity is easy. Early phases of evolution always spawn fantasticly complex structures. Over time these get beaten down into simpler, stronger, and more subtle designs.
This is really a great opportunity for those who would try to dethrone Microsoft from its place as the software vendor of choice for many companies. Provide an alternative, use security as the winning card.
The challenge is to improve the existing structures, secure all the entry points into a network, assume that all contacts are potentially hostile, and generally turn the naive servers we use today into something resembling a real organism: alert, defensive, paranoid. Competition will then do the rest.
The xGPL licenses seem most useful for keeping source code out of predatory hands. However, the BSD licenses encourage the widest possible use.
The best way to keep control and yet get a wide distribution is to write your own specific license that allows use and modification within certain conditions - e.g. that all changes are provided back to you. Making money is also a very healthy idea. Finally, I don't believe that individuals and small organisations can seriously follow-up on license breakers. If someone wants to steal your product, idea, or code, they will. You simply need to make it easy for the honest majority to use your work.
My analysis: Microsoft will use every means it has to kill any serious competitor. Linux falls into that category, so MS will use marketing, lobbying, blackmail, etc. to keep Linux off the boardroom agenda. It's really simple: "Clause 23: deliberate infection of the coporate network by viral tools, packages, or other programs violates this support license". When you have your customer by the touchie-feelies, you can impose any conditions you like. Oh, the courts may eventually rule this illegal... yeah.
It's also irrelevant AFAICS because this war is moving towards the irrelevant. MS's strategy is to create a taxable infrastructure. It believe the future of IT is more centralisation, and it wants to control that.
I believe the future of IT is decentralisation based on smart peer-to-peer applications running on simple and cheap protocols such as email. The value of Linux and OSS in general is that is makes small and cheap (sub-$100) servers feasible.
A world of packet-switching microservers will eventually revolutionise business and render the corporate IT policies irrelevant.
Just my 5c.
The lesson that small budgets do not need to restrict your ambitions. Indeed, large budgets seem to constipate ambition. Small disposable satellites are a wonderful idea. Cheap communications can revolutionise societies. On a global scale the potential is... big.
Somewhere there are groups of people figuring out how to lower that launch cost from $100m to $1m.
Let's face it. Within a few years the profession of 'programmer' will be protected by law, and any practicing programmer will have to be certified by a recognised educational establishment and/or Microsoft. Programming for fun will be allowed only for personal reasons. Any software intended for commercial use will have to confirm to the appropriate certification act.
If this sounds outlandish, think about how we construct buildings. Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?
(This is a leading question, but one I think will be asked by parties seeking to regulate the IT domain).
At what point does this scenario get unrealistic?
About MS using the DMCA to their advantage, has anyone actually thought about this, e.g. done a small study into the potential issues in (e.g.) a standard Linux distribution?
What if the whole affair about copyright and fair-use a red herring designed to distract attention from the real game: making it illegal to write software that competes in any way whatsoever with Microsoft's own work.
Seems to me... fast networking, collaborative computing, peer-to-peer information sharing, autonomous virus communities. We're heading towards a massive parallel global computing system controlled by no single entity.
There is some evidence that people who learn to speak several languages at once learn faster than those who learn a single one.
Computers multitask stupidly. Many people multitask naturally and creatively. The trick is to make it easy, painless, and pleasant.
I'm sitting in Lagos, Nigeria. Anyone know how good the eclipse will be here?