Sort of. You define a 32-bit space for now, then use something like UTF-8 to encode it.
Personally, I think UTF-8 is just a wee bit inefficient. I worked out a scheme long ago that defines a theoretically infinite namespace, and encodes 7-bit ASCII exactly the same as it is now. If anyone cares, it's as simple as this:
A "character" is defined as a sequence of bytes ("octets" for the RFC-phile) that
ends with a value which has the most-significant bit clear.
(If you treat byte as unsigned, this means nonnegative; if signed, it's < 128, whichever test you'd prefer to code. I have my preference...)
This gives 2^(7 * n)possible characters of length n:
128.
16,384, cumulative 16,512.
2,097,152, cumulative 2,113,664.
268,435,456, cumulative 270,549,120.
34,359,738,368, cumulative 34,630,287,488.
4,398,046,511,232, cumulative 4,432,676,798,720.
...
As you can see, 3 bytes allow encoding that covers pretty much every estimate I've seen here.
The system can be arbitrarily extended any time it's necessary, and existing agents that understand the fundamental rule would know how to parse these extended characters; although they would not know how to present the characters, they would be able to present an appropriate token indicating this fact, rather than displaying gibberish composed of the 8-bit "ascii" encoding they do understand.
Took the words from my mouth. I remember seeing footage of several test craft blow up. Apollo 1 and Challenger are exceptions precisely because we test the crap out of things most of the time.
Doesn't XP require some kind of "activation code" in order to install? At least I think I read something to that effect somewhere around here... something about needing to "reactivate" the software if hardware changes "too much". Yeah, I'm pretty sure MS doesn't care who gets copies of XP.
This has no appreciable practical use besides the "geek" factor.
Really? How about if we get development tools that let people make Linux-based games for the PSx? Without having to pay Sony any licensing fees.
There is a device (DexDrive, IIRC) that hooks up to a serial port on a computer that allows PS1 saved games to be up/downloaded to the HD. I saw it priced at 10 bucks at Electronics Boutique. A creative person might use this as a "floppy" to store the.rc file for a brute-force crypto crack, and the output of same.
The same device could be used to store a scene description file and the corresponding animated.GIF output of a rendering engine (like POV-Ray).
And that's jut off the top of my head without even thinking about it.
First, you cannot use a non-Passport identity within HailStorm, and at
least for now, that means that using HailStorm requires a
Microsoft-hosted identity.
A single authority for identity, without which one cannot transact any business: Sounds a lot like the thirteenth chapter of Revelation:
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and
bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the
name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Yeah, I'd say that's scary. Maybe we can use this image to motivate some folks to oppose the juggernaut.
[Most of us use both hands to type usernames and passwords, which we retain in our brains right behind the forehead. Pretty decent description for something written 2K years ago.]
Distributing the root makes it possible to have collisions when multiple authorities try to register the same domain names. The only way that the Internet works is that there are unambiguous means to address hosts, whether via IP addresses or DNS. That means that somebody has to decide who a particular domain name resolves to.
The only way we can maintain uniqueness without monopoly power is to add new TLDs, each with its own independent authority to incorporate competition into the scheme. I'd like AlterNIC to have the.alt TLD, for example.
Has anyone actually taken into consideration that Echelon could fall into the wrong hands, that of hackers or people who would use it for their own evil purposes.
I've been saying this for years, starting with Clipper. I should be able to encrypt my communications (like, say, discussion that touches on the route my daughter walks home from school) without being supected of illegal activities. The idea that governments will only use this power for good is laughable (except to the families and victims of that power when it's abused, who don't think it's one damn bit funny). We've seen the videotapes, and know that power is abused.
We know about the use of the FBI and IRS to intimidate certain people.
Why do these people think we actually believe This Is For Our Own Good?
I didn't have a problem accessing it with Netscape 6.
I just tried it with Opera 5.11, and got a message saying
We have made the Government Gateway compatible with as many browsers as possible, on both PCs and
Macintoshes. However, because we need to maintain maximum security on this web site, we cannot support
older versions of browsers. To use the Government Gateway, you must have:
a PC, with Windows 95 or later, or Windows NT 4.0 or later
with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later
or Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or later
OR an Apple Macintosh with Mac OS version 7.5 or later
with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0 or later
or Netscape Navigator version 4.xx or later
a working Internet connection
the 128-bit security add-in, for your version of the browser
Please note that you cannot currently use Netscape 6 to access the Government Gateway, due to issues with the support for digital certificates in this new version.
Then I told Opera to identify itself as MSIE 5.0, and still got the message. Still no luck. I've got all the scripting turned on they ask for. Dammit. Somebody vote these guys out!
It's rare that you see someone giving up rather than sueing
Yes, it is. I think they were put in a no-win situation, because failure to "defend" their trademark could cause them to lose it, the way Bayer lost "asprin". As their site indicates,
Rollerblade,
Kleenex,
and
Xerox
were nearly lost as well. But since they're being gracious about it, perhaps/. ought to grant this request of theirs [emphasis mine]:
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.
How about a thumbnail image of the Python players as Vikings? Or would that be an IP problem all over again? With either Python (Monty) Pictures, Ltd. or the
Minnesota Vikings, for all I know.
I know: a stack of those brown envelopes that look all official like they're from a government agency, but when you open them up - just a sales pitch?
For example, with Ethernet, the 6-byte (48-bit) MAC address is usually filled with the hex bits "fffe" in the middle -- the MAC address
01:23:45:67:89:ab
results in the EUI64 address
01:23:45:ff:fe:67:89:ab
which again gives the host bits for the IPv6 address.
::0123:45ff:fe67:89ab
Huh? Wouldn't it be much better to make this at the beginning, like:
::fffe:0123:4567:89ab
Or better yet, use those the first two or three F's for subnet addresses. Let's get real here: 33 bits are enough to uniquely identify every single human in the world. So prepending a MAC supertype of a few bits should do just fine. What point is there in arbitrarily sticking it in the middle, and basically forcing everyone to waste these bits?
It's an evil, vast corporate conspiracy to track our usage patterns even when we avoid the Evil Empire!
Only if you allow such software to run on your system.
But consider some good things we can do with this technology, like improving security. Instead of just knowing someone's userid is zaphodb and password is P4nG4l4ct1cG4rgl3Bl4st3r, you have to get the timing of the keystrokes within tolerances built up for that person's profile! Even an "escrowed" password, or one given up under duress, would be worthless if not entered with the right rhythm. And I know my rhythm is going to be messed up with armed thugs watching me....
A friend and I were hammering out how this would work at a LUG meeting a month or two ago. You need hooks in SSH to transmit keystroke timings along with the userid/password, so that this can be done for remote access. Most likely, when the timing is the only thing wrong, an additional challenge would be raised (rather like logging in as mere_user and su'ing to root) with the hidden option to enter a special duress code that would lock the system down tighter or even melt it down entirely, while it gives every indication on the surface that a successful login had occurred.
isn't this just a variant on
'security through obscurity'?
A bit, yes. The problem is that you have to have a way for the Right People to be able to find each other. the article alludes to some kind of bottleneck from a central server making connections for the clients. Can you spell "DOS"?
In a sense, the server is acting as a sort of firewall. (Kindasorta.) If you can persuade the server that you're OK, you get the IP. So the security is in the server. Breach that, and what's next?
Probably. The problem is that it adds to an existing word, obviously trading on recognition of that word. It'd be like a soft-drink company trying to sell Cocaca-Cola. Nope. Gotta change it a bit.
Let's see... Since Aimster makes use of the Buddy List feature of a Messaging system, why don't they call it BMster instead? That would put AOL's lawyers in the position of claiming that their product resembles a BM.
Come to think of it, that's not hard to imagine....
just about everything will be tweaked to make it better than the previous versions.
I'm not so sure I like the Strategic Resources thing. The idea that controlling a single square of the board makes it impossible for anyone else in the world to, say, mine iron, is frankly silly. Maybe I just misunderstod the review.
The bit about Culture needs some more explaining. I always assumed that the elimination of all Happiness-producing improvements when I conquer a rival city was a good approximation of them not having the same culture. But after a few generations have passed, and we've built temples to our god(s), and Colosseums to play our sports..., all of those people should be assimilated into the culture reasonably well.
I think Ford has a right to be a little frightened and want it GONE.
If I were the Webmeister at ford.com, I'd have the server respond to the domain name in question with a special page explaining that said domain name is not in any way associated with Ford Motor Company or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates, with
a link to Ford's home page, GM's home page,
and a copy of the whois for that domain name with a link (and probably a 15-second refresh tag) to 2600. Then Ford comes out being the Good Guy instead of overly litigious.
It's time to get behind development of good steganographic protocols to make it flat imposssible to know if information had been exchanged, much less the content of that exchange.
If we start allowing worms such as this one back on our systems,
Who ever said anything about "allowing" anything? The beauty of this approach is that people who have secured their boxen against attack don't need them fixed by this worm anyway. You only "allow" this worm if you "allow" the others, in which case you're already in trouble.
A friend had decribed to me how one wily Windows worm worked. Instead of spamming everyone in the address book all at once, it just waited until you sent mail to someone, and then sent them a second message with the worm attached. To prevent dupes, it kept a list of everyone it had sent itself to in a file, in the clear. We thought it would be Way Kewl to write a worm that disinfected a system, and e-mailed itself to everyone the original worm had gone to. It's nice to see that someone has actually implemented a variant of this.
The only change here is that now you're allowed to have the input
handle add a little something to the output before it flushes the buffer.
That's done with the prompts property. If an input handle has that property,
its value is written to $*OUT just before the input handle reads. So
we can replace:
But there's a huge assumption going on here. When I write a Perl script, and want to prompt the user for, say, a parameter that was left off the command line, I do not use STDOUT for this, because the output of the program may be piped elsewhere. I know for sure that I redirect the output of my scripts to files or other scripts all the time.
In cases like this, I use STDERR for my prompting, because
it's not as likely to be redirected
even if it is, the user will read this as an error, which it basically is.
This is where someone should tell me it's OK, because there's Another Way To Do It where prompts binds STDERR instead.
It can't be. This is so simple: The laws enacted by Congress (and state legislatures), and the regulations promulgated by various agencies under those laws, do not become active until they are published. Every county commission or city council has a designated Official Newspaper in which it must pay (under a contract that gets them reduced rates, of course) for such publication before an ordinance can take effect.
Not only the laws and regulations themselves, but every word of debate that goes into them is free as in speech (with rare National Security exceptions) because of the Freedom of Information Act (and state Sunshine laws). This is not just a matter of a law that is easily amended. There's this thing called the, um, Constitution:
[Art. I, 5 2] Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to
time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgement
require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either house
on any question shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be
entered on the journal.
Add to this the injuctions against ex post facto laws or bills of attainder, and some other language best left to the pros (IANAL), and you've got a strong basis for the presumption that the text of a law is effectively in the public domain.
Yep. I interviewed for a job where the PTB decided to standardize on Office 97 and Windows 95 (with a few 98 machines) for their workstations. They indicated some concern that they might have to upgrade in the future. I told them that there was no reason to do so. Worst case, they need one copy of The Latest & Greatest to use to read new-format files, then save them back to something they can use. Alternatively, they can just email people back with a "I can't open this attachment - please export in ___ format" boilerplate.
Maybe I'll get the gig, and have a chance to implement a back-translator as part of my Grand Plan to have the mail server (already running Linux, because a friend there has established the beachhead) pull off attachments and defang Office documents of their (potentially Trojan) macros before Joe Average User inside the firewall ever sees them. I'll leave the original version in the Quarantine directory on the mail server in case anyone needs it, of course...
Re:The problem with open source^H^H^H evolving
on
Apocalypse 2
·
· Score: 1
...is that they lose what made them so attractive in the first place. I fell in love with Perl because it didn't require a lot of preamble to code something simple.
Reading the Apocalypses, I get the distinct impression that Perl isn't going to work that way any more. Everything will be declared and typed with methods and new syntax that breaks old code. And when it came to figuring out how to make Perl 6 know whether old or new syntax were in effect, instead of using something really simple like declaring a version number, he uses an implicit versioning based on an entirely different keyword.
But what do I know? I still write code that Perl 4 can interpret, for crying out loud....
Re:Let your feet do the walking ...
on
Juno And Privacy
·
· Score: 1
If you don't like it - don't sign it.
I won't. I've never "signed" anything with those folks, even though I've had Juno on my computer for years. I thought it was a convenient way to maintain a persistent Iddress despite what ISP I use. Now that I have my own domain name, I have redirection tools to accomplish the same objective; inertia has kept me directing much of that traffic to my Juno account. Not only do I have an account with them, but The Bride of Monster and Monsterette 1 each have two of them. (M2 had one before they instituted a minimum age requirement.)
M1 has also been doing Hotmail a while (pre-MS), and when I read the new TOS, I informed her it was time to do something similar. The day I must choose to accept unknown "computational software" like this or quit using Juno is the day I do the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think UTF-8 is just a wee bit inefficient. I worked out a scheme long ago that defines a theoretically infinite namespace, and encodes 7-bit ASCII exactly the same as it is now. If anyone cares, it's as simple as this:
This gives 2^(7 * n)possible characters of length n:- 128.
- 16,384, cumulative 16,512.
- 2,097,152, cumulative 2,113,664.
- 268,435,456, cumulative 270,549,120.
- 34,359,738,368, cumulative 34,630,287,488.
- 4,398,046,511,232, cumulative 4,432,676,798,720.
...
As you can see, 3 bytes allow encoding that covers pretty much every estimate I've seen here.The system can be arbitrarily extended any time it's necessary, and existing agents that understand the fundamental rule would know how to parse these extended characters; although they would not know how to present the characters, they would be able to present an appropriate token indicating this fact, rather than displaying gibberish composed of the 8-bit "ascii" encoding they do understand.
Took the words from my mouth. I remember seeing footage of several test craft blow up. Apollo 1 and Challenger are exceptions precisely because we test the crap out of things most of the time.
Doesn't XP require some kind of "activation code" in order to install? At least I think I read something to that effect somewhere around here... something about needing to "reactivate" the software if hardware changes "too much". Yeah, I'm pretty sure MS doesn't care who gets copies of XP.
Oh. By that standard, /. "is of no practical use". So why are we here?
There is a device (DexDrive, IIRC) that hooks up to a serial port on a computer that allows PS1 saved games to be up/downloaded to the HD. I saw it priced at 10 bucks at Electronics Boutique. A creative person might use this as a "floppy" to store the .rc file for a brute-force crypto crack, and the output of same.
The same device could be used to store a scene description file and the corresponding animated .GIF output of a rendering engine (like POV-Ray).
And that's jut off the top of my head without even thinking about it.
[Most of us use both hands to type usernames and passwords, which we retain in our brains right behind the forehead. Pretty decent description for something written 2K years ago.]
The only way we can maintain uniqueness without monopoly power is to add new TLDs, each with its own independent authority to incorporate competition into the scheme. I'd like AlterNIC to have the .alt TLD, for example.
...David Duchovny a chance to say: "See? I told you!" right before I get assimilated....
Why do these people think we actually believe This Is For Our Own Good?
I know: a stack of those brown envelopes that look all official like they're from a government agency, but when you open them up - just a sales pitch?
Or better yet, use those the first two or three F's for subnet addresses. Let's get real here: 33 bits are enough to uniquely identify every single human in the world. So prepending a MAC supertype of a few bits should do just fine. What point is there in arbitrarily sticking it in the middle, and basically forcing everyone to waste these bits?
But consider some good things we can do with this technology, like improving security. Instead of just knowing someone's userid is zaphodb and password is P4nG4l4ct1cG4rgl3Bl4st3r, you have to get the timing of the keystrokes within tolerances built up for that person's profile! Even an "escrowed" password, or one given up under duress, would be worthless if not entered with the right rhythm. And I know my rhythm is going to be messed up with armed thugs watching me....
A friend and I were hammering out how this would work at a LUG meeting a month or two ago. You need hooks in SSH to transmit keystroke timings along with the userid/password, so that this can be done for remote access. Most likely, when the timing is the only thing wrong, an additional challenge would be raised (rather like logging in as mere_user and su'ing to root) with the hidden option to enter a special duress code that would lock the system down tighter or even melt it down entirely, while it gives every indication on the surface that a successful login had occurred.
In a sense, the server is acting as a sort of firewall. (Kindasorta.) If you can persuade the server that you're OK, you get the IP. So the security is in the server. Breach that, and what's next?
Let's see... Since Aimster makes use of the Buddy List feature of a Messaging system, why don't they call it BMster instead? That would put AOL's lawyers in the position of claiming that their product resembles a BM.
Come to think of it, that's not hard to imagine....
The bit about Culture needs some more explaining. I always assumed that the elimination of all Happiness-producing improvements when I conquer a rival city was a good approximation of them not having the same culture. But after a few generations have passed, and we've built temples to our god(s), and Colosseums to play our sports..., all of those people should be assimilated into the culture reasonably well.
It's time to get behind development of good steganographic protocols to make it flat imposssible to know if information had been exchanged, much less the content of that exchange.
A friend had decribed to me how one wily Windows worm worked. Instead of spamming everyone in the address book all at once, it just waited until you sent mail to someone, and then sent them a second message with the worm attached. To prevent dupes, it kept a list of everyone it had sent itself to in a file, in the clear. We thought it would be Way Kewl to write a worm that disinfected a system, and e-mailed itself to everyone the original worm had gone to. It's nice to see that someone has actually implemented a variant of this.
In cases like this, I use STDERR for my prompting, because
This is where someone should tell me it's OK, because there's Another Way To Do It where prompts binds STDERR instead.
Not only the laws and regulations themselves, but every word of debate that goes into them is free as in speech (with rare National Security exceptions) because of the Freedom of Information Act (and state Sunshine laws). This is not just a matter of a law that is easily amended. There's this thing called the, um, Constitution:
Add to this the injuctions against ex post facto laws or bills of attainder, and some other language best left to the pros (IANAL), and you've got a strong basis for the presumption that the text of a law is effectively in the public domain.Maybe I'll get the gig, and have a chance to implement a back-translator as part of my Grand Plan to have the mail server (already running Linux, because a friend there has established the beachhead) pull off attachments and defang Office documents of their (potentially Trojan) macros before Joe Average User inside the firewall ever sees them. I'll leave the original version in the Quarantine directory on the mail server in case anyone needs it, of course...
Reading the Apocalypses, I get the distinct impression that Perl isn't going to work that way any more. Everything will be declared and typed with methods and new syntax that breaks old code. And when it came to figuring out how to make Perl 6 know whether old or new syntax were in effect, instead of using something really simple like declaring a version number, he uses an implicit versioning based on an entirely different keyword.
But what do I know? I still write code that Perl 4 can interpret, for crying out loud....
M1 has also been doing Hotmail a while (pre-MS), and when I read the new TOS, I informed her it was time to do something similar. The day I must choose to accept unknown "computational software" like this or quit using Juno is the day I do the latter.