now with moar than $100 billion in frictionless laundered money. That's what we call.colocation!
FBI has shutoff all non-terror resources basically
on
The Great Cyberheist
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The thing is that the FBI has basically diverted all their white collar crime resources, and probably whatever might be used to track hacking / financial crime stuff, into stupid counter-terror campaigns. This whole mess is really a permutation of white-collar crime.
They haven't sent a single greater-than-pawn level obvious fraudulent white collar criminal to prison in like a decade. They catch a couple hackers running large creditcard schemes but they haven't done jack about the industrial espionage, which as you note is going 'all the while.'
I am mainly just sad that all this context is lost, the one primary thing feds are good at is 'making an example' and making sure that it appears to be a broad enough example that they are getting to the core of the matter.
Bad news brewing in here http://cryptome.org/dodi/fm-3-28.zip New Army Field Manual draft -- all this stuff is coming home as NORTHCOM-commanded Full Spectrum Dominance type doctrine. Please read this new revised Army field manual to have a better idea.
These domestic military operations are rapidly expanding - in recent weeks, mass scanning/stops in NY state and now in CA border areas. You *need* to study the details before something like the G20 descends on your city -- I have seen these domestic military crackdown ops up close and personal and it's really, really bad.
K I skimmed this whole thread, the core problem & solution are elusive. Part of it is a decline in the 'harmony' of Linux app/desktop design integration, part is the information 'rot' of obsolete threads found on Google. The Gentoo wikis are pretty much the only bright spot here, no one can even cite a good GUI linux app documentation.
I'm not a Linux expert but I spend a lot of time dealing with Drupal which is also GPLed and regarded as a tough learning curve. They have dedicated a ton of effort into not just the documentation and forums but also U of M usability research. I met Dries at the U of M before they went in and looked at how peoples eyeballs scattered in panic because a RED ALERT BOX was worried their user creation password was not secure enough. They got a draft usability plan out of the research: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9252 - and even video of eyes mapped around the screen. In this case the information, inline documentation really, came in perceived as too hot by being RED so they changed it in Drupal 7 to light orange bkgnd. You structure the information to direct attention appropriately and then deliver snippets when the environment changes.
Think about it: we have totally divorced 'documentation' from even considering how important little snippets of text are, delivered correctly *with the correct level of detail* AND *the ability to seek up down and laterally in the conceptual environment*, instead thinking of man vs info vs annoying old threads. Probably the most important documentation, definitely for non-GUI Linux, are the small, less-than-ten-line, instructions and advisories that come before prompts. And usually these have HTTP links included for big deals. If everyone tripled their effort here it would work a lot better than just cleaning up the disastrously wrong (or certainly obsolete) design of man and info pages. Could familiar man pages spit out more examples and not exhaustive list of flags? (well it has to if you believe man must only be one page of stuff with all the programmer hooks, signals &etc. Where's the non-programmer material to be found then?)
Good wiki pages for software documentation usually break text into similar less-than-ten line sections, and do so in an up-down-lateral hierarchy of headers. Fortunately this can get exported and stashed into the app. If you had wiki paragraphs XML tagged to land in certain dialog boxes and other points, you could pipe wikified micro-documentation into the apps, even desktop apps. Hell if you just put a "WIKI??" button right there in the modal dialog box or prompt at least half the users would get it immediately. If a clever crew was handling this 'help string wiki' it would work out fine probably.But you'd have to control yr wiki or yr enemies would put in bad Windows YES/NO dialog boxes' help ("Do you want to print or save? YES/NO") just to mess w you.
Anything you present an end user should be structured in the newspaper article style - a pyramid structure leading with 'what does this do? how can i do the 3-5 basic things? why does this matter? what is this related to?' Beyond that you should be able to reach an overview of that part of the system architecture. Like apache2ctl would get you to rc and rc.conf and note what the runlevel is and why / which daemons are at runlevels.
There should be a clear ontology between nodes and levels of information. There is usually no explicit way to back out from a command to where the command fits in the system, or something you can run to lookup what a weird file does. maybe also the Apple 'receipt' type file that is a breadcrumb for packages could be used as a way to pull out documentation from different versions, another big gripe/snag here. There is not a lot of unity between Linux packaging systems and documentation and window managers. Obviously packaging info is already quite helpful but once things are installed it doesn't 'appear' anywhere useful, to other apps (imagine special warnings fo
I worked for a few years in independent & corporate journalism, going from an independent (generally centrist) newsletter/news aggregation into a corporate newspaper company.
The culture clash between the digital style and the old print style was really right in the middle of things. And another key revenue factor that you can't get online: legally mandated classifieds, or 'public notice publishing,' in particular residential foreclosures.
If you're an electronic publisher you can't really capture the revenue stream from these government-mandated notices. They are a 20th century legacy and a major revenue source for smaller papers.
It is very successful to work on small niche audiences and develop long-running ad relationships with a few people. Going with bigger news 'targets' is a really tough proposition right now. Better to build sites in Drupal than try to make money in journalism, that's my new tack:-)
I heard about a backpack-sized setup that you can get which takes a video input, compresses to HD quality, then splits the outgoing signal onto six separate cell phone data links (three are 3G, three are standard).
This was pretty expensive for 30 hours/month service but in theory would let you do high quality video without a satellite uplink or other special gear.
Presumably stitching the data streams back together is a pretty big hat trick especially with low latency.
Everyone should check this out. A group called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC) ran a website that supported putting the seriously nasty Huntington Life Sciences animal testing corporation out of business. They were quite successful but now the SHAC7 are getting crushed via the ridiculous Animal Enterprise Terrorism laws & etc. This seems a lot worse than the Texas situation because this is about anti-corporate political websites rather than simple social networking harassment. See http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/shac-7-conviction-upheld-on-appeal/2307/ . A really, really dangerous appeals court ruling came out that should scare the hell out of anyone that wants to effectively organize against corporate trolls via the Internet:
The conviction of the SHAC 7–animal rights activists hit with “terrorism” charges for publishing a website and vocally, unapologetically supporting direct action–has been upheld by a U.S. appellate court. It is a landmark free speech ruling that lowers the threshold of what types of conduct are protected by the First Amendment, and upholds a law that is so broad that it targets civil disobedience as “terrorism.”
As a brief introduction: The “SHAC 7” of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty ran an effective campaign that had the sole purpose of putting Huntingdon Life Sciences, a notorious animal testing company, out of business. The campaign pressured corporations to sever ties with the lab. The SHAC 7 were never accused of breaking windows or releasing animals from labs, but they supported those who did. They published a website which posted news of both legal and illegal tactics, and supported all of it. The website had also posted names and addresses of individuals connected to the corporations targeted.....Supporting and facilitating non-violent civil disobedience is not protected speech.
As part of their campaign, SHAC supporters were emailed about “electronic civil disobedience.” The email and message board posts included instructions on how electronically “sit in” on corporate web sites through emails, faxes and phone calls.
Now, one of the benchmarks in First Amendment law is what is called the Brandenburg standard. It holds that even the most controversial and inflammatory speech is protected as long as it not likely to incite “imminent and lawless action.” That is a very high threshold. In this court ruling—which, to the best of my knowledge and the attorneys I have spoken with is the first of its kind—the written word can be construed as promoting, or resulting in, imminent and lawless action.
To put it more plainly: Vocally supporting civil disobedience, explaining what it involves, and encouraging/facilitating people to take part is not protected speech.
This is so important let me say it again, another way: People who write about civil disobedience and encourage people to take part can be found convicted of a crime even if they do not take part in the civil disobedience.
Another thing happening is extreme Grand Jury fishing expeditions against green activists - we had a grand jury thing go down in Minneapolis just this week. See http://tc.indymedia.org/ for the latest on this.
Here's a nifty story I did for Politics in Minnesota based on the docs about Minnesota's mostly-mandatory infant DNA screening program. It turns out that the State owns the DNA intellectual property rights but the Mayo owns the derivative works, according to the contract. Who knew?
ledes: A new round of documents obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) regarding the state's Newborn Screening Program (NBS) show interesting implications about the difference between its role catching certain dangerous genetic diseases, and the various genetic research and testing programs that the samples ultimately get sent to. There's quite a difference between the "trip-wire" disease screening program and the DNA studies; the role of DNA research as intellectual property suddenly pops up.
The study project authorizations approved by the Department of Health involve DNA research; critics of the policies around the newborn DNA samples want to know what happens to all the genetic data, and who might profit from it. Two big players around here, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, do work on the blood samples. The operative contracts, which include defining the "intellectual property" of what could almost be called the "derivative works" of newborn DNA, of the U of M and Mayo were obtained by lawyer Nathan Hansen, working in concert with the Citizens Council on Health Care, via Data Practices requests.
Here is the University's newborn screening contract and the Mayo's [PDFs]. Fans of cellular rights might find the parts on the State apparently owning their chromosomes a bit profound! [PIM combined all of Hansen's PDFs, now searchable via OCR...]
"In sum total: The FBI has the evidence already. The shape of spy scandals to get exposed depends on who runs the Intelligence committees, and Reyes seems like the only good choice" etc.
An excellent overview of the techniques and methods of mass data mining.
The question is whether all that stuff they collected (and the galaxy of contractors is REALLY well explained) can count as exculpatory evidence in big cases. (IE if you're accused of being a terrorist, then Booz Allen Hamilton ought to cough everything up.)
Which is why i loaned my copy to rnc8.org - the RNC Welcoming Committee "furtherance of terrorism" defendants!
OK so you guys should check this out - Lockheed Martin is attempting to build an RFID-centered tracking system on I-35 and I94 called NAFTRACS under the NASCO (north american super corridor coaltion) nonprofit 'front company' aka 'systems integrator' or super-contractor. this system entails dozens of RFID data collection points and the cosntruction of "total transportation domain awareness centers of excellence" (really!) which would integrate all this information.
The whole thing got exposed via Minnesota Data Practices Act @ the MnDOT - it is an extension of the CINTRA 'NAFTA superhighway' in Texas.
This surfaced in my day job - we have 700 pages that spell out everything from PR emails to the grant applications to the whole damn design of the system.
Check it out yourself. As i like to say, "these are the droids you're looking for!" Obviously such a system can be extended to provide total big brother tracking and a mileage tax, as well as competitive advantage for Lockheed, which announced they would resell the shipping data as marketable information (Walmart subscribes to its competitors supply chain dataflow).
Ok my question is can this/. community isolate or expose the methods of what the NSA has been doing, and has the NSA been feeding these data mining systems into other areas of the government or military?
Specifically you guys should look at US NORTHCOM (northern command), Homeland Security dept, and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency. I strongly suspect that these groups put together have fed illegally obtained data into the law enforcement apparatus (the NGA and NORTHCOM had a presence at the Republican National Convention here in Minnesota - these are military agencies!)
NGA's website talks a lot about the data feeds they create for the NORTHCOM/DHS National Incident Management System (NIMS). We could easily find that various events like raids were generated via illegal data mining... Where is the manifestation of law enforcement ACTIVITY from data mining collection??
How to approach this systematically, that is what I'm asking you folks about.
Here's the problem folks: the FCC refuses to acknowledge electronic devices' emissions having any effect on the human body besides thermal. I.E. cellphones must only cause your tissue to heat to a certain level. However, the FCC refuses to regulate the other possible effects of this radiation. Period. This, of course, is of pivotal importance to the high tech and telecom industries, because it lets them keep their products within the 'no effects' category without any government intervention.
Personally, I get dizzy from 45 minute cell phone calls and have to shake it off. By that time the phone is certainly warm. Its other effects? Officially, the government passes the buck!
Check this: the devious Stanford Research Institute (which was, indeed, contracted by the CIA to do remote viewing research in the 1970s, see Operation STARGATE) wrote a very interesting thing about the "Changing Images of Man," the kind of thing spit out by ominous acid-dropping elite scientist types. http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/scientists_on_acid_the_story_behind_changing_images_of_man/ In this marvelous example of 1970s establishmentarian utopianism, there is a good deal of info about studies in "electromagnetic pollution." Think of that: the very phrase is totally alien to us now, even though we are subjected to so much more than we used to be. Their main study cited was about a lady who got schizophrenic-style symptoms; it turned out she had an unshielded power conduit in her wall that was filling her apartment with powerful EM radiation. Once the power conduit was properly shielded, her health problems abated.
If these cats knew it could affect people then (since of course our bodies operate within a kind of electromagnetic flux), why aren't there more substantive studies today?!
For some time I had a WiFi router right next to the head of my bed; I would stare at it as it blinked at me, thinking of all the energy going thru my head. I was happy to have it go away. I don't use WiFi in my home, though of course it leaches in. I strongly feel that longterm studies about cellphone use are coming up rather ominous, especially for younger people whose thinner skulls are less resistant to the microwaves. What is everyone going to feel like after 30 years of intense WiFi and especially cellphone exposure?!
It is important to realize that law enforcement has decided that Facebook or MySpace 'friend' status is an acceptable threshold to connect people that they want to make subjects of investigation, i.e. the status of 'friending' meets some legal or procedural threshold to open a file on someone. This is going to be an important element of political pressure upon radical and social change organizations, in particular.
If for example, Person A is hosting some radical political meeting, and is friends with Person B on MySpace, then the government can initiate an investigation of Person B because they seem to be 'associated.' This of course is much easier for lazy agents to carry out, and additionally it is 'open source' information in the legal sense as well. (we are not even including the vaunted Facebook/CIA venture capital backdoor business or whatever people speculate about)
This is a VERY big deal but has not been examined. VERY big - it is going on now. We are all getting more and more 'control files' developed by them (and their contractor buddies) to control us, and this type of data is elemental. There has been no reckoning about what it means.
Also informants and provocateurs also now are getting things like MySpace pages. That has been the case here in Minnesota, in particular. Part of their personas.
All of this is now being called I2 or Identity Intelligence, a new school of INT like SIGINT, etc.
Anyone on this thread should drop what they're doing and check out 'Kill the Messenger', a documentary produced for Canal+ Television by some French guys. They followed Sibel Edmonds around for a while and spelled out the basic scene here. Its an hour long on googlevideo:
Essentially here is my understanding of what this weird scandal means: Sibel edmonds was hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11 to digest the backlog of foreign-language wiretaps run by the counter intelligence division. However Sibel also could listen to English-language conversations recorded on those lines. Within three months she heard extensive conspiracies involving the American Turkish Council, which were being actively covered up by Melek Can Dickerson, who was working alongside Sibel in the translation unit.
However, there was also evidence that the FBI was tracking an international criminal network that includes the big name neocons (Feith and Perle among others) which was funnelling and covering for nuclear secrets pilfered from the national nuclear laboratories (ever notice their shitty security?) and routed to brokers in Pakistan, Turkey and Israel.
Additionally the Turks were caught by the FBI wiretaps doing cash/secret handoffs from the ATC to the State Department. Once 9/11 occurred, it seems that then-State Dept official Marc Grossman was helping get foreign spies who had foreknowledge of 9/11 out of the United States, after the FBI had become very interested in talking to these guys. The wiretaps and intelligence fragments finger real people - and Kill the Messenger details how Sibel was momentarily a famous 9/11 whistleblower because of this. 60 Minutes ran a special with very heavily edited footage and has never released the raw footage of the interview. (yes in fact even the highly controversial Israeli art student 9/11 conspiracy theory appears to fit here)
Finally, this criminal network was deeply opposed to the CIA's counter proliferation operations - attempting to block turkey and pakistan from getting more nuke bits. So therefore Scooter Libby fits in quite differently than widely known. He used to be a lawyer for billionaire israeli-american fugitive Marc Rich, the moneyman for arms trafficker Viktor Bout. These guys seem to roughly be part of this same network. There is apparently an FBI recorded conversation of Marc Grossman tipping off the Turks/and/or Pakis to Brewster Jennings' status as a covert front company. This was certainly treasonous!
Also there is an important revolving door dimension: lobbyists, retired generals, military industrial complex. Turkey is able to convert laundered drug money into funding for the military industrial purchases - its something like 25% of GDP.
this is all a great example of an orwellian cryptocracy getting tangled up in all the criminal evidence it observes. oops. kinda like the federal reserve logging all that drug money moving around.
i realize all of this sounds quite bottom-of-the-barrel everything and the kitchen sink kind of super conspiracy. But hey, it does in fact have odd threads that go back to the weirdest events of the Bush administration - and before. Sorry. I'm offering this stuff in good faith: there is just too much material to ignore.
I'm pointing out that the ones with the real computer skills were generally the least problematic in school before the program started, but they also used whatever software they could find at home. With the program in place, these kids would still bring the software into the school, to the alarm of an adminstration fearing the BSA. So the program put them in that position... The same kids who were copying things were the ones who tended to help out when the computers got messed up, so yes I would still call them "good" people.
It was an ethical quandary I really didn't want my senior year. let me put it that way.
After thinking about the experience some more, I have to add a few more things. Firstly my bro and sis never refer to the tech kids today as "bitches" as such (i shouldnt have put that), but they have been treated very rudely and it upset them. It makes me angry since I have to deal with the public in a computer lab, and I always try to be very polite, it upsets me when these kids deem their knowledge and their positions to somehow elevate them from common courtesy and all that.
Also I would say that the adults on staff have mostly tried to be basically good people, trying to make the program work. What they were principally concerned about was *legal liability* arising from what kids might do with the laptops. The school program was supposed to be an example, but what if the RIAA came in trying to make an example by finding thousands of illegal Mp3s etc on the computers? The school feared it, which is a great deal of what drove them to control things.
As i sit here and try to recall what we actually legitimately did in class on the computers, it seems rather dim now. It meant we didn't have to truck down to the overcrowded computer labs every time that we wanted to look up information. Also it meant we were obligated to check our email once a day. Oftentimes it really devolved into a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and I just don't like that program very much.
On the plus side, it makes it a lot easier for my siblings to write papers and that kind of thing now, because they don't have to fight over the family computer. There are, for example, Spanish and French teaching programs on the computers as well.
It was good in the sense that it gave everyone some level of technical proficiency, but it was profoundly irritating and unpleasant for the kids who didn't like computers that much or hated Macs in general. There were not a ton of Mac converts from the class, in particular because of the hardware failures.
Perhaps this is the future of education, I really don't know. It was a very stressful adjustment, but since that year the administration has allowed the kids more space--and blocked instant messenger, which is probably a good idea in the long run. (see "furtive conspiracies" above)
Would it help public school kids get ahead, especially considering how their families may not have the technical resources like mine did? That's a pretty good question. I feel sorry for all those kids with the new Dells, though. Dells are sooo unreliable, hahahaha Michael Dell you have such an inferiority complex against Steve Jobs, and there's nothing you can do to overcome it.
I graduated from high school in 2001. My senior year, my private K-12 prep school in St. Paul MN, Mounds park academy, started an apple iBook program (only grades 9-12) that continues today. Despite my fervent support of Macs, i was dead set against the program because i thought it was an expensive distraction. (we also started horrible block scheduling the year before, which drove me nuts). We got the Clamshell models, but these have now been replaced by the white iBooks. (software licensing was WAY expensive)
Overall it was useless much of the time, but it also taught everyone in our class the fundamentals of TCP/IP, an important skill in the Modern Age. As we were seniors, the administration didn't pick on us too much, but they tried very hard to crack down on the younger kids, particularly boys. They didn't want people installing games, of course, but they also decided to ban the use of the CD-ROM drives, a bizarrely unenforceable rule given that we took the computers home every day (these rules are No More). Since the Techs would often erase a computer as a first resort when fixing it (spotting warez along the way), I had to step in and deal with things all the time.
There was a real problem with understanding how the "private space" of an object owned by the school actually worked. I recall being commanded not to tell people that the MacOS had a handy "Encrypt..." command in the File menu.
The unfortunate irony of the program was that the kids who were formerly the most obedient in school--ie the geek types--were placed in a position of violating rules left and right if they wanted to set up their computers in a comfortable sort of way with the usual warez etc. So the good kids got in trouble, and some otherwise harmless guys basically got caught in enforcement feedback loops that disheartened or chased them right out of the school.
Also it was interesting to run AirPort packet sniffing and watch AIM conversations and unencrypted email passwords. Since then, instant messengers have been blocked. There were a lot of technical snags that year--infuriating and time wasting. As I tend to be easily distracted sometimes, the magic boxes were all too tempting.
One of the best moments was when I made a comment on Slashdot about AirPort packet sniffing at the very beginning of Statistics class, and by the end of class it reached the vaunted 5, joy of joys.
The older iBooks had kind of crummy CD trays, where the outer plastic shell would break off too easily, not to mention all the cracked screens. Generally students have to pay for all replacements and repairs, which are very expensive. Power cords get lost frequently, and laptops have been stolen from time to time.
We had a rather moody senior class, and it was disheartening to come into our senior lounge to see everyone silent inside the screens, oftentimes communicating by AIM across the room to make furtive conspiracies. Did we trade off natural interaction for this cold mode of operation?
Fortunately, the subsequent classes of kids adjusted to the laptops more socially, and they have not "run amok" in that sense. However, where the old geek population that was there when i was a freshman was more rebellious and linux oriented, these new geeks are very obedient, obnoxious condescending bitches, according to my younger brother and sister who are now sophomores at the school.
The whole program was driven by an urge to keep MPA at the cutting edge of innovation bla bla bla. I was really impressed by teachers who came up with innovative ideas but i really wished we didn't have to be the damn guinea pigs. I started my website in those days, and it was fun to have everyone reading it all the time, but then when i got uncontrollably angry i said hasty things and got in big trouble. Hazards of the new territory.
Here's a creepy chunk of nearly-forgotten war news: with an eye towards Michael Powell's FCC potential actions against the bloated radio corporation, Clear Channel actually funded and hosted its own "Rally for America" pro war functions all over the place... Tom Delay even spoke at one. Here's one story on it. Plenty more on Google. This, clearly, is a situation of corporations manipulating the public, blar blar blar... It's extremely creepy, and it will be a lovely pattern for NewsCorp and the rest to emulate when we take on the Persians and Chinese in 2007.
I dont really care that one weather guy is lying but Clear Channel on the whole is a horrible project that has obliterated good radio in Mpls/St. Paul. I've heard that their sprawl is only possible because they buy radio stations on the collateral of the other stations they own. If they can't keep buying and gutting stations they might implode from debt. Hence the cost cutting virtualization all around. Thanks for the Free Market, Michael "Totally Objective Communications Arbitrator Not His Poppa's Boy" Powell!
Yes the day of MS assembly viruses will soon be upon us. Corruptible registers overflow, spilling electrons all over the place. But some gamers will come to enjoy that 'buzz-worthy' feature.
It's just been reported by the AP that the kid is from St. Paul, Minn. This is kind of funny, as I work in IT in Minneapolis, and we've been speculating that the whole mess was written by Indonesian hackers or unemployed techies in California, rather than the locals. It is odd that some of the newspaper reports said that the Seattle FBI office was investigating the virus, rather than the Minneapolis office, which is of course the only FBI office competent enough to catch Al-Qaeda terrorists prior to 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
now with moar than $100 billion in frictionless laundered money. That's what we call .colocation!
The thing is that the FBI has basically diverted all their white collar crime resources, and probably whatever might be used to track hacking / financial crime stuff, into stupid counter-terror campaigns. This whole mess is really a permutation of white-collar crime.
They haven't sent a single greater-than-pawn level obvious fraudulent white collar criminal to prison in like a decade. They catch a couple hackers running large creditcard schemes but they haven't done jack about the industrial espionage, which as you note is going 'all the while.'
I am mainly just sad that all this context is lost, the one primary thing feds are good at is 'making an example' and making sure that it appears to be a broad enough example that they are getting to the core of the matter.
it's like 8000 packages full of all your base jokes and infinite basic loops. These monkeys been chuggin too much Red Bull!
Posted earlier http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/25607235096 "Burn all the books you want, Nazi punks. We already have a copy. | CNN http://bit.ly/acJnX9 " :P
Oh you lolsome cypherpunks
Bad news brewing in here
http://cryptome.org/dodi/fm-3-28.zip
New Army Field Manual draft -- all this stuff is coming home as NORTHCOM-commanded Full Spectrum Dominance type doctrine. Please read this new revised Army field manual to have a better idea.
These domestic military operations are rapidly expanding - in recent weeks, mass scanning/stops in NY state and now in CA border areas. You *need* to study the details before something like the G20 descends on your city -- I have seen these domestic military crackdown ops up close and personal and it's really, really bad.
K I skimmed this whole thread, the core problem & solution are elusive. Part of it is a decline in the 'harmony' of Linux app/desktop design integration, part is the information 'rot' of obsolete threads found on Google. The Gentoo wikis are pretty much the only bright spot here, no one can even cite a good GUI linux app documentation.
I'm not a Linux expert but I spend a lot of time dealing with Drupal which is also GPLed and regarded as a tough learning curve. They have dedicated a ton of effort into not just the documentation and forums but also U of M usability research. I met Dries at the U of M before they went in and looked at how peoples eyeballs scattered in panic because a RED ALERT BOX was worried their user creation password was not secure enough. They got a draft usability plan out of the research:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/9252 - and even video of eyes mapped around the screen.
In this case the information, inline documentation really, came in perceived as too hot by being RED so they changed it in Drupal 7 to light orange bkgnd. You structure the information to direct attention appropriately and then deliver snippets when the environment changes.
Think about it: we have totally divorced 'documentation' from even considering how important little snippets of text are, delivered correctly *with the correct level of detail* AND *the ability to seek up down and laterally in the conceptual environment*, instead thinking of man vs info vs annoying old threads. Probably the most important documentation, definitely for non-GUI Linux, are the small, less-than-ten-line, instructions and advisories that come before prompts. And usually these have HTTP links included for big deals. If everyone tripled their effort here it would work a lot better than just cleaning up the disastrously wrong (or certainly obsolete) design of man and info pages. Could familiar man pages spit out more examples and not exhaustive list of flags? (well it has to if you believe man must only be one page of stuff with all the programmer hooks, signals &etc. Where's the non-programmer material to be found then?)
Good wiki pages for software documentation usually break text into similar less-than-ten line sections, and do so in an up-down-lateral hierarchy of headers. Fortunately this can get exported and stashed into the app. If you had wiki paragraphs XML tagged to land in certain dialog boxes and other points, you could pipe wikified micro-documentation into the apps, even desktop apps. Hell if you just put a "WIKI??" button right there in the modal dialog box or prompt at least half the users would get it immediately. If a clever crew was handling this 'help string wiki' it would work out fine probably.But you'd have to control yr wiki or yr enemies would put in bad Windows YES/NO dialog boxes' help ("Do you want to print or save? YES/NO") just to mess w you.
Anything you present an end user should be structured in the newspaper article style - a pyramid structure leading with 'what does this do? how can i do the 3-5 basic things? why does this matter? what is this related to?' Beyond that you should be able to reach an overview of that part of the system architecture. Like apache2ctl would get you to rc and rc.conf and note what the runlevel is and why / which daemons are at runlevels.
There should be a clear ontology between nodes and levels of information. There is usually no explicit way to back out from a command to where the command fits in the system, or something you can run to lookup what a weird file does. maybe also the Apple 'receipt' type file that is a breadcrumb for packages could be used as a way to pull out documentation from different versions, another big gripe/snag here. There is not a lot of unity between Linux packaging systems and documentation and window managers. Obviously packaging info is already quite helpful but once things are installed it doesn't 'appear' anywhere useful, to other apps (imagine special warnings fo
I worked for a few years in independent & corporate journalism, going from an independent (generally centrist) newsletter/news aggregation into a corporate newspaper company.
The culture clash between the digital style and the old print style was really right in the middle of things. And another key revenue factor that you can't get online: legally mandated classifieds, or 'public notice publishing,' in particular residential foreclosures.
If you're an electronic publisher you can't really capture the revenue stream from these government-mandated notices. They are a 20th century legacy and a major revenue source for smaller papers.
It is very successful to work on small niche audiences and develop long-running ad relationships with a few people. Going with bigger news 'targets' is a really tough proposition right now. Better to build sites in Drupal than try to make money in journalism, that's my new tack :-)
I heard about a backpack-sized setup that you can get which takes a video input, compresses to HD quality, then splits the outgoing signal onto six separate cell phone data links (three are 3G, three are standard).
This was pretty expensive for 30 hours/month service but in theory would let you do high quality video without a satellite uplink or other special gear.
Presumably stitching the data streams back together is a pretty big hat trick especially with low latency.
Everyone should check this out. A group called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC) ran a website that supported putting the seriously nasty Huntington Life Sciences animal testing corporation out of business. They were quite successful but now the SHAC7 are getting crushed via the ridiculous Animal Enterprise Terrorism laws & etc. This seems a lot worse than the Texas situation because this is about anti-corporate political websites rather than simple social networking harassment. See http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/shac-7-conviction-upheld-on-appeal/2307/ . A really, really dangerous appeals court ruling came out that should scare the hell out of anyone that wants to effectively organize against corporate trolls via the Internet:
Another thing happening is extreme Grand Jury fishing expeditions against green activists - we had a grand jury thing go down in Minneapolis just this week. See http://tc.indymedia.org/ for the latest on this.
Here's a nifty story I did for Politics in Minnesota based on the docs about Minnesota's mostly-mandatory infant DNA screening program. It turns out that the State owns the DNA intellectual property rights but the Mayo owns the derivative works, according to the contract. Who knew?
The original headline was "Freedom of consent, total galactose & intellectual property: Minnesota's infant DNA Mayo-Gopher industrial complex". see
http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/2009/may29/3251/freedom-consent-total-galactose-intellectual-property-minnesotas-infant-dna-mayo-gop
Get 100 MB super-multifile-PDF here - OCR'd
http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/files/infant-dna-combined-doc.pdf
ledes:
A new round of documents obtained from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) regarding the state's Newborn Screening Program (NBS) show interesting implications about the difference between its role catching certain dangerous genetic diseases, and the various genetic research and testing programs that the samples ultimately get sent to. There's quite a difference between the "trip-wire" disease screening program and the DNA studies; the role of DNA research as intellectual property suddenly pops up.
The study project authorizations approved by the Department of Health involve DNA research; critics of the policies around the newborn DNA samples want to know what happens to all the genetic data, and who might profit from it. Two big players around here, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, do work on the blood samples. The operative contracts, which include defining the "intellectual property" of what could almost be called the "derivative works" of newborn DNA, of the U of M and Mayo were obtained by lawyer Nathan Hansen, working in concert with the Citizens Council on Health Care, via Data Practices requests.
Here is the University's newborn screening contract and the Mayo's [PDFs]. Fans of cellular rights might find the parts on the State apparently owning their chromosomes a bit profound! [PIM combined all of Hansen's PDFs, now searchable via OCR...]
I am rather pleased with myself for correctly parsing this story in 2006. It was clear to some at the time what was really going on.
"In sum total: The FBI has the evidence already. The shape of spy scandals to get exposed depends on who runs the Intelligence committees, and Reyes seems like the only good choice" etc.
An excellent overview of the techniques and methods of mass data mining.
The question is whether all that stuff they collected (and the galaxy of contractors is REALLY well explained) can count as exculpatory evidence in big cases. (IE if you're accused of being a terrorist, then Booz Allen Hamilton ought to cough everything up.)
Which is why i loaned my copy to rnc8.org - the RNC Welcoming Committee "furtherance of terrorism" defendants!
Hiyo, i posted below the deeper stuff behind the Texas operation
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1128199&cid=26859903
long story short, in MN they want to extend to us this RFID based tracking system, and all the docs got wrenched out of the bureaucracy. 700 pages explaining exactly how this total tracking platform would work. story here
http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/2008/aug/19/now-searchable-mndot-nasco-nafta-superhighway-document-stash
PDF (searchable OCR) here
http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/files/nasco-documents-ocr.pdf
Please check this out - thanks
OK so you guys should check this out - Lockheed Martin is attempting to build an RFID-centered tracking system on I-35 and I94 called NAFTRACS under the NASCO (north american super corridor coaltion) nonprofit 'front company' aka 'systems integrator' or super-contractor. this system entails dozens of RFID data collection points and the cosntruction of "total transportation domain awareness centers of excellence" (really!) which would integrate all this information.
The whole thing got exposed via Minnesota Data Practices Act @ the MnDOT - it is an extension of the CINTRA 'NAFTA superhighway' in Texas.
This surfaced in my day job - we have 700 pages that spell out everything from PR emails to the grant applications to the whole damn design of the system.
Check it out yourself. As i like to say, "these are the droids you're looking for!" Obviously such a system can be extended to provide total big brother tracking and a mileage tax, as well as competitive advantage for Lockheed, which announced they would resell the shipping data as marketable information (Walmart subscribes to its competitors supply chain dataflow).
VERY big - please pass the word - its a perfect example of the domesticization of military industrial tracking systems (actually a clone of Lockheeds military container tracking sytem Global Transport Network etc). READ this stuff (I even OCR'd it)
http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/2008/aug/19/now-searchable-mndot-nasco-nafta-superhighway-document-stash
43 MB PDF searchable! http://www.politicsinminnesota.com/files/nasco-documents-ocr.pdf
Ok my question is can this /. community isolate or expose the methods of what the NSA has been doing, and has the NSA been feeding these data mining systems into other areas of the government or military?
Specifically you guys should look at US NORTHCOM (northern command), Homeland Security dept, and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency. I strongly suspect that these groups put together have fed illegally obtained data into the law enforcement apparatus (the NGA and NORTHCOM had a presence at the Republican National Convention here in Minnesota - these are military agencies!)
NGA's website talks a lot about the data feeds they create for the NORTHCOM/DHS National Incident Management System (NIMS). We could easily find that various events like raids were generated via illegal data mining... Where is the manifestation of law enforcement ACTIVITY from data mining collection??
How to approach this systematically, that is what I'm asking you folks about.
Here's the problem folks: the FCC refuses to acknowledge electronic devices' emissions having any effect on the human body besides thermal. I.E. cellphones must only cause your tissue to heat to a certain level. However, the FCC refuses to regulate the other possible effects of this radiation. Period. This, of course, is of pivotal importance to the high tech and telecom industries, because it lets them keep their products within the 'no effects' category without any government intervention.
Personally, I get dizzy from 45 minute cell phone calls and have to shake it off. By that time the phone is certainly warm. Its other effects? Officially, the government passes the buck!
Check this: the devious Stanford Research Institute (which was, indeed, contracted by the CIA to do remote viewing research in the 1970s, see Operation STARGATE) wrote a very interesting thing about the "Changing Images of Man," the kind of thing spit out by ominous acid-dropping elite scientist types.
http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/scientists_on_acid_the_story_behind_changing_images_of_man/
In this marvelous example of 1970s establishmentarian utopianism, there is a good deal of info about studies in "electromagnetic pollution." Think of that: the very phrase is totally alien to us now, even though we are subjected to so much more than we used to be. Their main study cited was about a lady who got schizophrenic-style symptoms; it turned out she had an unshielded power conduit in her wall that was filling her apartment with powerful EM radiation. Once the power conduit was properly shielded, her health problems abated.
If these cats knew it could affect people then (since of course our bodies operate within a kind of electromagnetic flux), why aren't there more substantive studies today?!
For some time I had a WiFi router right next to the head of my bed; I would stare at it as it blinked at me, thinking of all the energy going thru my head. I was happy to have it go away. I don't use WiFi in my home, though of course it leaches in. I strongly feel that longterm studies about cellphone use are coming up rather ominous, especially for younger people whose thinner skulls are less resistant to the microwaves. What is everyone going to feel like after 30 years of intense WiFi and especially cellphone exposure?!
It is important to realize that law enforcement has decided that Facebook or MySpace 'friend' status is an acceptable threshold to connect people that they want to make subjects of investigation, i.e. the status of 'friending' meets some legal or procedural threshold to open a file on someone. This is going to be an important element of political pressure upon radical and social change organizations, in particular.
If for example, Person A is hosting some radical political meeting, and is friends with Person B on MySpace, then the government can initiate an investigation of Person B because they seem to be 'associated.' This of course is much easier for lazy agents to carry out, and additionally it is 'open source' information in the legal sense as well. (we are not even including the vaunted Facebook/CIA venture capital backdoor business or whatever people speculate about)
This is a VERY big deal but has not been examined. VERY big - it is going on now. We are all getting more and more 'control files' developed by them (and their contractor buddies) to control us, and this type of data is elemental. There has been no reckoning about what it means.
Also informants and provocateurs also now are getting things like MySpace pages. That has been the case here in Minnesota, in particular. Part of their personas.
All of this is now being called I2 or Identity Intelligence, a new school of INT like SIGINT, etc.
Anyone on this thread should drop what they're doing and check out 'Kill the Messenger', a documentary produced for Canal+ Television by some French guys. They followed Sibel Edmonds around for a while and spelled out the basic scene here. Its an hour long on googlevideo:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1991080575212848283&q=kill+the+messenger&total=348&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Also i have a special section on my website dedicated to the subject, tho the page is pretty half assed: http://www.hongpong.com/sibel_edmonds_9_11_the_turkish_spy_scandal
Essentially here is my understanding of what this weird scandal means:
Sibel edmonds was hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11 to digest the backlog of foreign-language wiretaps run by the counter intelligence division. However Sibel also could listen to English-language conversations recorded on those lines. Within three months she heard extensive conspiracies involving the American Turkish Council, which were being actively covered up by Melek Can Dickerson, who was working alongside Sibel in the translation unit.
However, there was also evidence that the FBI was tracking an international criminal network that includes the big name neocons (Feith and Perle among others) which was funnelling and covering for nuclear secrets pilfered from the national nuclear laboratories (ever notice their shitty security?) and routed to brokers in Pakistan, Turkey and Israel.
Additionally the Turks were caught by the FBI wiretaps doing cash/secret handoffs from the ATC to the State Department. Once 9/11 occurred, it seems that then-State Dept official Marc Grossman was helping get foreign spies who had foreknowledge of 9/11 out of the United States, after the FBI had become very interested in talking to these guys. The wiretaps and intelligence fragments finger real people - and Kill the Messenger details how Sibel was momentarily a famous 9/11 whistleblower because of this. 60 Minutes ran a special with very heavily edited footage and has never released the raw footage of the interview. (yes in fact even the highly controversial Israeli art student 9/11 conspiracy theory appears to fit here)
Finally, this criminal network was deeply opposed to the CIA's counter proliferation operations - attempting to block turkey and pakistan from getting more nuke bits. So therefore Scooter Libby fits in quite differently than widely known. He used to be a lawyer for billionaire israeli-american fugitive Marc Rich, the moneyman for arms trafficker Viktor Bout. These guys seem to roughly be part of this same network. There is apparently an FBI recorded conversation of Marc Grossman tipping off the Turks/and/or Pakis to Brewster Jennings' status as a covert front company. This was certainly treasonous!
Also there is an important revolving door dimension: lobbyists, retired generals, military industrial complex. Turkey is able to convert laundered drug money into funding for the military industrial purchases - its something like 25% of GDP.
this is all a great example of an orwellian cryptocracy getting tangled up in all the criminal evidence it observes. oops. kinda like the federal reserve logging all that drug money moving around.
i realize all of this sounds quite bottom-of-the-barrel everything and the kitchen sink kind of super conspiracy. But hey, it does in fact have odd threads that go back to the weirdest events of the Bush administration - and before. Sorry. I'm offering this stuff in good faith: there is just too much material to ignore.
I'm pointing out that the ones with the real computer skills were generally the least problematic in school before the program started, but they also used whatever software they could find at home. With the program in place, these kids would still bring the software into the school, to the alarm of an adminstration fearing the BSA. So the program put them in that position... The same kids who were copying things were the ones who tended to help out when the computers got messed up, so yes I would still call them "good" people.
It was an ethical quandary I really didn't want my senior year. let me put it that way.
After thinking about the experience some more, I have to add a few more things. Firstly my bro and sis never refer to the tech kids today as "bitches" as such (i shouldnt have put that), but they have been treated very rudely and it upset them. It makes me angry since I have to deal with the public in a computer lab, and I always try to be very polite, it upsets me when these kids deem their knowledge and their positions to somehow elevate them from common courtesy and all that.
Also I would say that the adults on staff have mostly tried to be basically good people, trying to make the program work. What they were principally concerned about was *legal liability* arising from what kids might do with the laptops. The school program was supposed to be an example, but what if the RIAA came in trying to make an example by finding thousands of illegal Mp3s etc on the computers? The school feared it, which is a great deal of what drove them to control things.
As i sit here and try to recall what we actually legitimately did in class on the computers, it seems rather dim now. It meant we didn't have to truck down to the overcrowded computer labs every time that we wanted to look up information. Also it meant we were obligated to check our email once a day. Oftentimes it really devolved into a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and I just don't like that program very much.
On the plus side, it makes it a lot easier for my siblings to write papers and that kind of thing now, because they don't have to fight over the family computer. There are, for example, Spanish and French teaching programs on the computers as well.
It was good in the sense that it gave everyone some level of technical proficiency, but it was profoundly irritating and unpleasant for the kids who didn't like computers that much or hated Macs in general. There were not a ton of Mac converts from the class, in particular because of the hardware failures.
Perhaps this is the future of education, I really don't know. It was a very stressful adjustment, but since that year the administration has allowed the kids more space--and blocked instant messenger, which is probably a good idea in the long run. (see "furtive conspiracies" above)
Would it help public school kids get ahead, especially considering how their families may not have the technical resources like mine did? That's a pretty good question. I feel sorry for all those kids with the new Dells, though. Dells are sooo unreliable, hahahaha Michael Dell you have such an inferiority complex against Steve Jobs, and there's nothing you can do to overcome it.
I graduated from high school in 2001. My senior year, my private K-12 prep school in St. Paul MN, Mounds park academy, started an apple iBook program (only grades 9-12) that continues today. Despite my fervent support of Macs, i was dead set against the program because i thought it was an expensive distraction. (we also started horrible block scheduling the year before, which drove me nuts). We got the Clamshell models, but these have now been replaced by the white iBooks. (software licensing was WAY expensive)
Overall it was useless much of the time, but it also taught everyone in our class the fundamentals of TCP/IP, an important skill in the Modern Age. As we were seniors, the administration didn't pick on us too much, but they tried very hard to crack down on the younger kids, particularly boys. They didn't want people installing games, of course, but they also decided to ban the use of the CD-ROM drives, a bizarrely unenforceable rule given that we took the computers home every day (these rules are No More). Since the Techs would often erase a computer as a first resort when fixing it (spotting warez along the way), I had to step in and deal with things all the time.
There was a real problem with understanding how the "private space" of an object owned by the school actually worked. I recall being commanded not to tell people that the MacOS had a handy "Encrypt..." command in the File menu.
The unfortunate irony of the program was that the kids who were formerly the most obedient in school--ie the geek types--were placed in a position of violating rules left and right if they wanted to set up their computers in a comfortable sort of way with the usual warez etc. So the good kids got in trouble, and some otherwise harmless guys basically got caught in enforcement feedback loops that disheartened or chased them right out of the school.
Also it was interesting to run AirPort packet sniffing and watch AIM conversations and unencrypted email passwords. Since then, instant messengers have been blocked. There were a lot of technical snags that year--infuriating and time wasting. As I tend to be easily distracted sometimes, the magic boxes were all too tempting.
One of the best moments was when I made a comment on Slashdot about AirPort packet sniffing at the very beginning of Statistics class, and by the end of class it reached the vaunted 5, joy of joys.
The older iBooks had kind of crummy CD trays, where the outer plastic shell would break off too easily, not to mention all the cracked screens. Generally students have to pay for all replacements and repairs, which are very expensive. Power cords get lost frequently, and laptops have been stolen from time to time.
We had a rather moody senior class, and it was disheartening to come into our senior lounge to see everyone silent inside the screens, oftentimes communicating by AIM across the room to make furtive conspiracies. Did we trade off natural interaction for this cold mode of operation?
Fortunately, the subsequent classes of kids adjusted to the laptops more socially, and they have not "run amok" in that sense. However, where the old geek population that was there when i was a freshman was more rebellious and linux oriented, these new geeks are very obedient, obnoxious condescending bitches, according to my younger brother and sister who are now sophomores at the school.
The whole program was driven by an urge to keep MPA at the cutting edge of innovation bla bla bla. I was really impressed by teachers who came up with innovative ideas but i really wished we didn't have to be the damn guinea pigs. I started my website in those days, and it was fun to have everyone reading it all the time, but then when i got uncontrollably angry i said hasty things and got in big trouble. Hazards of the new territory.
I dont really care that one weather guy is lying but Clear Channel on the whole is a horrible project that has obliterated good radio in Mpls/St. Paul. I've heard that their sprawl is only possible because they buy radio stations on the collateral of the other stations they own. If they can't keep buying and gutting stations they might implode from debt. Hence the cost cutting virtualization all around. Thanks for the Free Market, Michael "Totally Objective Communications Arbitrator Not His Poppa's Boy" Powell!
Yes the day of MS assembly viruses will soon be upon us. Corruptible registers overflow, spilling electrons all over the place. But some gamers will come to enjoy that 'buzz-worthy' feature.
The New XBox. Because grounding is for pussies.
It's just been reported by the AP that the kid is from St. Paul, Minn. This is kind of funny, as I work in IT in Minneapolis, and we've been speculating that the whole mess was written by Indonesian hackers or unemployed techies in California, rather than the locals. It is odd that some of the newspaper reports said that the Seattle FBI office was investigating the virus, rather than the Minneapolis office, which is of course the only FBI office competent enough to catch Al-Qaeda terrorists prior to 9/11.
Oh great... now they will provide tiny little missiles to Iran.
>:-(