Mucking around with company's internal memos is something of a "below the belt" attack in modern corporate warfare. Yes, it happens in all out warfare and when companies are backed against the wall and are struggling to keep the creditors away. But the problem is that every company has internal memos that would be mission critical, quarter close affecting content if it ever gets out communications that occur precisely because if they don't occur, company's blindfold themselves and crash and burn.
Thus only the internally honest survive.
Oh dear God, can you imagine the anticompetitive, anticonsumer, antirecording, pro government manipulation("go bribe that senator with a junket") style messages that fly around the RIAA?
It's a nuclear attack, and a very, very dumb one. The RIAA's internal memos implicate, likely criminally, very large, very powerful, and very vulnerable(deep pockets) corporations. Meanwhile, Napster just screws itself.
There's a reason we don't see this happen much. We're all about to see why.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Bottom line, there are too many lawyers trained in Intellectual Property law for IP to disappear. It would take the concerted will of government to overturn or ignore IP law, and the bottom line is there's just too much lobbyist money for that to ever happen.
Gibson is underestimating the degree to which MP3's have been allowed to prosper, so as to force the hands of the courts, the houses, the lobbyists, and the competitors. He should know just how devious corporate behavior can be; the back story to most of his multinational conglomerates would probably look like the TimeWarnerAOL agglomerations of today at this point in his timeline.
I'd say more, but I've got some work to take care of. More later, hopefully.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I remember when I first found out about the "Y2K Beta Test", A.K.A. when one of the major cities in New Zealand lost power.
Now lemme clarify. I'm not talking about that piddly little 24 hour blackout that hit San Francisco last year and caused all sorts of havoc and fingerpointing or whatnot.
Nah, the same kiwi's(and I say that with awe and respect) who pretty much invented all that is extreme also had probably the biggest blackout in modern times:
Months.
Big city.
No power.
I remember reading this incredible diary documenting what the city went through(gigantic oil tankers turned into floating generators; power backup systems that survived their "smoke tests" but were never meant to run for weeks on end, etc.) but I can't find it. The best I can see is this link, which does a pretty good job of explaining what happened for those many, many, many months.
I'll leave it to people here to discuss whether it could happen here, but lemme tell you: It has happened, and oh, it did suck.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
it's standard business practice to keep your product center stage in any corporate event you sponsor. Trying to twist this into some big evil plot to control the world is just wrong, and makes you look stupid in the process.
AC,
On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.
On the other, you've got a direct threat against a source of funding.
Intel demanded that Harvard disable student-critical functionality in return for cash. That they demanded any institution pimp out its reason for being on the basis of a cash grant is evil; that they did this to Harvard was the height of idiocy.
I keep on bringing it up(cue broken record), but it's reminiscent of Microsoft revoking Compaq's right to sell Windows, or forcing IBM to buy Win95 off the street: To attack anyone else liket this, it's evil marketing practices. To attack major multinationals such as Compaq or IBM like that, it's just stupid.
You're absolutely right, AC--they thought of themselves as keeping their product center stage. The problem was they forget both where they were(an educational institution with a primary purpose distinctly different from selling stuff, i.e. a trade show) and, even worse, exactly where they were. Screwing with Academia is one thing, screwing with Harvard is far stupider.
They'll learn.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
The point is not that Intel took some hits from demanding that these iMacs be convered. The point is that any other college budget approver, looking to see what he can do to optimize funding, may fear purchasing an iMac because Intel may pass them over.
That's the idea. Buy Apple, and your students suffer. Buy Intel, and your bribe is on its way.
There's a strong difference, of course, between the certainly legitimate and healthy educational activism of Intel and straight bribery. What Intel's staff failed to recognize was that by harassing Harvard's staff, they converted whatever positive good will they could get from the event into a negative, tainted force.
Fear can buy you alot. Respect buys you more. That's a hard lesson to learn; hopefully Intel will learn from this. Paranoid responsibility is valuable. Paranoid violence leads to the very press-connected Harvard getting harassed. Oops.
They'll learn. It's in their character--or at least, it was. If it still ain't, well, AMD can pop open some champagne glasses...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Somebody mentioned Error Correction algorithms, which brought to mind one of the few algorithms I've ever heard of that really hasn't been superceded since its debut: The Reed-Solomon Error Correction system.
My memory of it is a bit shaky(I studied it somewhat a few years back when I picked up a copy of Digital Audio Processing), but it essentially specifies an method by which an arbitrary number of bits in any block can be in error and the algorithm itself will A) Detect that error in the bitstream and B) Correct that error, if the number of misread bits is within the specifiable boundries of the algorithm. So you have situations where merely n extra bytes appending to an m byte block will automatically correct for some amount of error *anywhere* within that block.
Also a nice touch is that one can easily specify a specific number of bits which may have identical values--it turns out that CD's cannot write more than eleven 0's in a row--the head loses the ability to follow the "groove". No problem at all for this code.
This is essentially <i>the</i> system by which arbitrary-quality error correction is implemented. I'm not saying that the selection of algorithms was in error--but Reed Solomon does deserve some kind of honorary mention.
Oh well, at least it gets a better treatment than the Discrete Cosine Transform, which (literally) was <i>rejected by the NSF because it was considered too simple.</i> The DCT is at the core of both JPEGs(it compresses into a quantizable domain 8x8 blocks of YUV domain pixels) and MP3's(compresses into a quantizable domain each of 32 frequency subbands into 18 frequency coeffecients).
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
"fight to the death anything that threatens its intellectual property".
[WARNING: Rant follows. That I'm ending up writing this right after I wrote this very pro-Microsoft technical defense on Kuro5hin just makes me angrier.]
Death, eh? Exactly what kind of death are they referring to?
Perhaps they're talking about the infamous "Écran bleu de la mort", better known as the Blue Screen Of Death? Quite a few companies have been dying slow, ignomious deaths due to their inability to avoid these failures. Take Novell. It's the year 2000, and they still don't have a version of their Novell Client software that won't eventually and near-irrevocably cause to die(ooh!) some poor Windows 9x machine that just wants to connect to a Novell server.
Lets see now. We've got a Microsoft developer's impending death here...we've got the individual users' Win9x machines quite dead...Microsoft themselves? Hm, they're doing just fine. Not Dead Yet. Doing Just Fine. They sure seem to know how to add a core networking layer to Win9x; why should anybody else be able to?
Actually, why should anyone else be able to do anything without delivering unto Microsoft that which the stockholders demand? Using Windows 2000 to host your secure website means you've got to pay $3,000.00 to them for the right to do so. Sounds like any small business trying to sell a few t-shirts just got priced out of the market--oops, death of a little guy who suspiciously ain't Microsoft. Oh, I should be fair though. Microsoft doesn't require you to spend $3000.00 for a license; they'd be happy to just limit you to a small number of simultaneous purchases. That way, if your small business gets Slashdotted one day, and an unexpected number of people come in to buy some product, Windows 2000 will send your customers away, as you just didn't pay enough of a (protection) fee to Microsoft.
When your expensive server hardware running an expensive server operating system dies on customers because you didn't buy an expensive enough access license, lemme tell you, it ain't Microsoft who's hurting there. It ain't Microsoft who lost any sales--sure, that server may get wiped out and be replaced by Linux. But that's after that first sale. You might say Microsoft could at least experience some pain by loss of future sales, because either a) Some business(like yours) would crumble because it couldn't recoup their losses, or b) Some business(like yours) would never again buy a Microsoft server. The former posits yet another death--this time, again, of somebody Other Than Microsoft--but lets examine the latter. How easy is it to migrate away from Microsoft?
Not at all, and getting harder. Frontpage Extensions are an explicit play at tying the desktop OS to the server OS--make a business dependent on the integration, and reap the rewards when they go down in flames trying to live without it. Yes, Linux is getting support for Frontpage Extensions. But we have to wonder how long such cross platform compatibilities will be allowed--Microsoft's already banned interoperability with one file format on patent grounds(don't try to parse ASF if you're anyone else but MS; I suppose DOC is next).
The bottom line in my mind is that, when Microsoft starts talking about fighting to the death, they mean it--they've had no problem using their financial might to crush anyone who isn't convenient to them, and that appears to include their own customers, developers, and end users.
If there's one thing tragic here, it's that good, honestly respectible technical work gets disgraced because of its association to truly ugly business practices.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I vote that from now on anyone who uses the pseudo-word "boxen" should be hit in the head with a sledgehammer. It was never funny. It was never clever. As a matter of fact, it's quite stupid. Please stop or I'll kill you.
AC--
Box phonetically equivocates to baw-ks. Boxes phonetically converts to Baw-k-ses, a moderately more linguistically annoying phrase, since you've got to loop yourself from the s sound, to an "eh" sound, back to the "ess". The resolution pluralization became Boxen.
I doubt it was ever intended to be funny or clever. It's just easier to transition from "ks" to "en" than it is to transition from "ks", add a short "eh", then back to "es".
Good example--when going from "Rack" to the plural, you turn "Rack" to "Racks"/"Rax". You can't make the same conversion though for Box, because you've already got that ks/x sound in there. Thus you get something like Boxen.
If you think I've taken this analysis too far, you're the geek who threatened to, and I quote, "kill" somebody over your dislike for a five letter work ending in N instead of S. Not that I took you seriously:-) It's all cool. Lots of people get worked up when they don't get enough seks.;-)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
The Chinese Lottery is essentially a crypto term referring to the following concept: Each of China's billion residents is given a set top box for their TV. The boxen each receive a block to attack(this can be broadcast simply by continually outputting a stream of if(serial == "12345"){block="0xAABB1234")). The cost of the attack is borne in small chunks by whatever the market will bear to pay for a set top box, plus each individual paying for the electricity(which is of less value, presumably, than the amortized value of each block being cracked).
Then whoever's box cracks the code displays a message, "You've just won a million dollars. Please call this number to claim it." The government collects the box and gives some sum to the winner. Then they take back most of that sum through taxation(OK that's not part of the Chinese Lottery, but it's part of *every* lottery), and everyone's happy.
Now consider that most of these settop boxen will end up actually having phone connections to the media owners, so that Pay Per View can be implemented. Now the owner of the box doesn't need to be paid off or even informed that his machine was being used to crack some code, and that the cost of that cracking was being borne by his electricity bill. The result of the crack can be sent down the pipe at will.
All they need is the ability to execute code...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Willie Brown and the Poison Pill
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Copyrant
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· Score: 2
Some more thoughts on this:
Anybody else here Californian?
Willie Brown is essentially about as close to a political demigod as it gets--probably about as close to sausage with a smile as ya get, but even if you don't like how he gets things done, you can't deny the man knows politics, charisma, and everything in between.
Anyway, The Real Slick Willie (couldn't resist) is infamous for the stunt he pulled after term limits forced him to leave his ultra-powered position in the state legislature.
He destroyed his own position.
Realizing that he wasn't going to move up in the heirarchy and keep the level of power he was accustomed to if he moved up the political ladder, he decided to move down--he went from the head of one of the largest state's assembly to Mayor of San Francisco. Less real power in some respects, but he still gets to rule as the king he's accustomed to being.
But the problem with moving down on the totem pole is that somebody else gets to take your place, having learned all your tactics and probably itching to use 'em against you.
Didn't happen to Willie, though--as his last set of acts, Brown stripped his position procedurely of all of its power in the assembly. If he couldn't keep his power, he sure as heck wasn't going to let anyone else use it against him.
Thus it's in Microsoft's best interest to behave as abusively as possible--beyond just pissing Judge Jackson off, illustrating the damages an intelligent monopoly can do with a mere file format patent guarantees that, when Microsoft is no longer on top, they'll be able to use the precedent they set themselves to make sure they get to access file formats, bridge themselves into monopoly markets, etc. Ask around Silicon Valley--there's a general consensus that a number of Microsoft greatest enemies are primarily jealous of their power(rather than disgusted by their tactics).
Look, it was obvious Microsoft knew they'd lose. We've had a few years here of Loss Management--and they've made billions doing it.
It's just like Willie. If you gotta go, then go--but don't let anybody take your place, and don't let the mystique die. There is power in all positions.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
You've just lost the ability to start from a clean install of Windows. You've been sold a castrated version of Windows. You're being asked to spend $100 at CompUSA or Fry's or wherever else if you dare try to upgrade your system. What do you do. What do you do?
I'll tell ya what I'm doing. I'm mailing my employer's purchasing division and making sure they know the costs of purchasing any castrated versions of Windows. You should too.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky Cisco Systems, Advanced Network Services http://www.doxpara.com
You actually bungled your post by not including a single example of somebody who disagrees with you. I'm serious--I have no idea who this Intelligensia is that disagrees with your arguments; most of what I've heard which decries online culture seems to focus on the ephemeral nature of it--small emails, lousy grammar, everything archived temporarily, nothing archived permanently. Gaming itself has nothing to do with this cultural loss, though online gaming does introduce interpersonal communication and thus these worries. But you didn't really disagree with these cultural concerns, did you?
Outside of people screaming that games are too violent(Joe Leiberman's campaign comes to mind, and he's a congressman--not particularly intelligensia;-) is there somebody really making a case that games aren't ever artistic?
Besides not including any reference to somebody who diagrees with you, you also posted this the day after Game Over magazine--pretty much the highest quality review site out there--put up Decency in Multiplayer Gaming--amazingly enough, a pragmatically harsh view of what you're talking about. They also gave a singularly awful rating to Panty Raider, which is more of a commentary on the paucity of pornography in games than anything else. Supply and demand is about the only reason we've paid an ounce of attention to that game.
Games should be taken seriously, and they have become a fascinating art form--what else so intrinisically bridges mathematics, computer science, physics, art, game theory, self-optimizing systems/AI, and mythological structure? The problem with your post is that you never really identified anyone who actively disagrees. I hate to say it, Jon, because overall you've avoided this problem...but ascribing opinions to a group without a single shred of evidence that such opinions are generally held by any individual ostensibly within the group(let alone by the group as a whole!) is, unfortunately, unprofessional. Such is the domain of demogogues and propagandists--I'd like to think we're better than that.
After all, as Weasel Boy pointed out, we are the intelligentsia.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Software cannot be claimed to come with a machine if no independent package of that software ships with it.
If software doesn't install, the package is incomplete. If the package is incomplete, advertising for that software is fraudulent. Last I checked, fraud was a crime which, among other things, invalidated most contracts. Since the EULA likely describes capabilities which Microsoft would have fraudulently removed from the software, such EULA could arguably be rendered null and void.
The fact that installer-castrated operating systems are inherently more risky to remove(since you suddenly need to wipe out more than just the operating system Microsoft sold you to reinstall what you've already purchased!) actually makes this the most intriguing form of product bundling we've seen yet from Microsoft: They're actually bundling Windows now with the data that you create with it. If you try to remove Windows, and ever wish to return, you will now lose all the documents, the email, the graphics, the Internet Bookmarks...you will lose everything.
Windows thus becomes bundled with your own data. It's brilliantly devious, really.
It's also doomed to fail. Coming from somebody who spent two years repairing Windows systems(c:\windows\options\cabs is a lifesaver, incidentally), let me personally state that Win9x systems do not need Linux's help to fall over, die, and require reinstallation. If such reinstallation could not be done without either losing everything or moving the hard drive into another machine for disk-to-disk copying(what, you think you're going to go into Windows and backup to another machine on the network, when Windows now refuses to boot?), Microsoft would probably face a mass revolt from the thousands of MCSE's they trained quite well to do just that very thing.
Revolting MCSEs happen to be a disturbingly dangerous demographic for Microsoft. The Win2K uprising was actually surprisingly bloody.
Hmmm. This is getting fun to watch. Tech soap is always classic.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Microsoft: Subversive Lawmaking?
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Copyrant
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· Score: 5
I must say, I'm beginning to see an interesting pattern here. Bizarre? Yes. This is maybe the oddest explanation I've come up with in some time, but it's about the only thing I've seen that makes sense.
There's a normal syllogism that often seems to go with stories about Microsoft on Slashdot:
Microsoft does bad things. Microsoft did this. Therefore, this is bad.
The strange thing is...it's usually valid. Microsoft has a very strong penchant for abusing the market(both the consumer, and if you believe what's been said about their stock manipulation, Wall Street too), and it's this tendancy which Slashdot has a tendancy to report upon.
Now, here's what gets really strange: Microsoft has been executing breathlessly aggressive schemes for market domination while being directly under the thumb of the US Government, whose ire was finally raised by the horde of very well connected companies that Microsoft abused. (I'm actually beginning to realize IBM being forced to buy Windows 95 off the street was a bigger deal, government-wise, than Compaq losing the right to sell Windows 98 for a day.) Neither the Kerberos scam, the SOAP harassment(which ended up with IBM open sourcing their implementation), nor this ultimate example of product bundling had any right to happen right now. Six months ago? Even then, maybe. But not now.
Microsoft does bad things. Microsoft did this. Therefore, this is bad.
Microsoft's sins are widely publicized as bad. Microsoft can select its sins. Therefore, Microsoft can select that which is widely publicized as bad.
That's a position of power. It's Machiavellian beyond belief, but it's a definite position of power.
The most rational explanation for Microsoft's behavior has generally been that they wanted to goad Judge Jackson into implementing an overly harsh penalty--and bragging about it. Indeed, they may have succeeded in that, as Jackson commented the penalty was more severe than that which would have been ("justly") reached by arbitration. So, we've already got a theory that argues Microsoft is intentionally erring so as to exploit Jackson's emotions(exploits didn't begin with Winnuke!).
Ah! But what errors to make? That, my friends, is where things get interesting. Any thoughts? I've got a few, but I've said enough for the moment;-)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I had completely forgotten that. Did they "try" to do this, or was Compaq unable to sell Windows for a time? Are we talking "3.1" ? </i>
Did it. The "smoking gun" letter made it on Cnet. I used to have a link to it; I was going to reference it in a public rebuttal to an anti-linux screed from Ed Muth. Better rebuttals came out before I finished, and I pretty much decided the horse was dead enough;-)
This was Windows 98, incidentally. No IE icon in Win 3.1.
No, you have to f*ck with some <i>big</i> companies before you get to have the Supreme Court agree to break you up...
Anyway, Compaq capitulated. IBM was the company that had to buy Windows 95 off the street(10x the cost of OEM!) because they had the gall to sell OS/2.
Computer industry pricing structures are oddly similar to the prices that HMO's and other insurance companies get on medical care. I'll have to investigate this more...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Resaerch http://www.doxpara.com
IE actually grew from Spyglass's version of Mosiac, but it's so ridiculously unfair to deny the order of magnitude improvement that IE3 was. For crying out loud, it had the first good JVM *anywhere*.
IE would have destroyed Netscape without the dirty tricks. Problem was, they got greedy and tried to both co-opt HTML(thus dooming IE4) and enforce compliance By Any Means Necessary.
They just didn't need to.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
"Linux people say Microsoft can't code. Microsoft agrees--that's why their business practices are so desperate. Believing their code could not survive the rigors of a fair marketplace--even with the unprecedented technical coup that was Internet Explorer 3--Microsoft went so far as to <i>revoke the right of Compaq to sell Windows</i> under the (mistaken) impression that, unless users had the Microsoft browser crammed down their throat, they'd never switch. The supreme irony is that Internet Explorer genuinely is the better product, and never required such vicious tactics to achieve dominance."
People really forget how amazing IE3 was. It was truly incredible.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Microsoft has consistenly leveraged its size and its popularity in both its OS and its various document management tools("document" including MPEG-4 video streams, mind you.)
Lets say a breakup is completed. Exactly what prevents this leverage from being executed?
So Microsoft Office gets ported to new platforms...this is new? Microsoft has been willing to port its code to popular alternatives to their Windows OS for quite some time--they're even starting to do a semi-decent job of it on the Mac. After all, why let any other Office vendor take over a market?
Splitting Microsoft will probably have the effect of making somewhat riskier steps(i.e. Media Player for an Operating System that MS/OS is seeking to prevent from gaining market acceptance) more feasable. But overall, I can't imagine either corporate culture changing significantly merely because of a simple division.
The split does not solve problems. At best, the split helps enforce whatever primary remedies Jackson can put into place--and considering the culture of MS is at least partially, "We know what's right, and we're smart enough to get around any loosely worded agreement that prevents us from doing that right", compliance is going to be damn near impossible without some truly intrusive measures.
Splitting the company isn't intrusive. It's just a bureaucratic structure.
My first thought would have to be, no matter how the split occurs, an outside board needs to be able to demand with force of law that any programmatically interesting function that's been left undocumented be remedied. The NT authentication functions, required for remote management, come to mind. This is a good example of Microsoft's technical acumen obscured by their business distrust.
It's funny, some Linux people say Microsoft can't code, can't innovate, can't do anything right. And Microsoft agrees. It must be so depressing to work in an office where your code is presumed to be so bad by your own coworkers that they'd go so far as to revoke Compaq's write to sell Windows just because they couldn't imagine that the product was good enough to eventually dominate a market on its own merits.
We shouldn't be directing our regulatory furor against the coders--honestly, they've done some damn good work over there at Microsoft, and about all they've got for it was ten instances of "innovation" per paragraph, followed by chants of "by any means necessary". Microsoft's business side needs to be muzzled--and the bottom line is, splitting one ravenous horde into two still leaves you with two ravenous hordes.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
At my previous job (sysadmin) I installed Redhat 6.0 on a 27GB IBM ATA/66 hard disk without any problem. Just make sure you're set the specific hard disk in the BIOS to LBA.., and it works perfectly!
(Yes, I'm the same Effugas who submitted the original question.)
Wow, you've all come up with some fascinating commentary. I'll probably be looking at it for quite some time, digesting everything that I've seen(and been sent via email, for those who wish to be more private).
There is some question of why it matters whether or not you own something. My concerns aren't particularly materialistic, folks--do you plan to ever send your kids to college? Do you plan to work until the day you drop dead? Do you hope and pray to never become sick, because the moment your health insurance falls out from under you(and you know it will), it's all over?
There's something to be said about a nest egg, or about amassing something after years of life. How strange is it to think that, maybe, just maybe a vicious end run around inheritance taxes is just to never have anything to inherit--all that which would otherwise go to the state ends up in the hands of an organization that can never die.
Law of unintended consequences, no?
Corporations aren't necessarily good nor evil, but one has to wonder about whether, in certain regions, an economic upturn and subsequent increase in quality of life is being paid for with the college tuitions of our children.
It's not about taking it with you. It's about taking care of yourself and not needing to beg for handouts or bailouts.
I'll be blunt--I simply don't know how all this is going to come together. But I do understand that, in the long term, oppression is just as privitizable as everybody else--you just need to lease out the freedom, and define the terms of that leasing as arbitrarily as you can get away with.
I'll write more on this later. Too much work to do...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Ian is scheduled for a hearing June 5. If charged, David Lake says his son will plead not guilty "and prove that there is a basis for everything said on his Web site."
Oh my god.
These are going to be the most incredible court records in Utah history. I cannot be the only person imagining a Clinton Impeachment like mass subpeona'ing of anything that could prove the truth or falsity of the various claims.
"I did not have sex with that prepubescent girl. Momma says it ain't sex if we do it like that." Can't wait to start hearing that out of fifteen year old boys, on the stand, in a suit that's not big enough but "it's the good one".
What's just cruel is that this is bound to be more the work of parents than the kids themselves, and there are likely more than a few girls who--shocker of schockers--actually are sexually active who are going to have to watch a court ordered sexual inquisition brought on by their hapless parents who couldn't imagine that Their Daughters---theirs! What could they have done wrong as Parents(TM)!--would in anyway deserve such labels.
I've got the popcorn right here. This should be rather fun to watch, if your definition of fun is "watching the forces of the legal system brought to bear against a 16 year old boy who called some other kids bad names, like football players and cheerleaders never ever do."
Fug.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Earth escape speed is about 25 mi/sec. This speed, however, will still leave the object in solar orbit at earth's distance. To make the object fall into the sun, you have to accelerate it to the orbital speed of the earth around the sun, about 67 mi/sec. This delta-v requires far more fuel than any spacecraft can possibly carry to low earth orbit.
Ah-duh. Makes perfect sense. Forgot about the much, much bigger "dent in the fabric" that we were already spinning in.
Perhaps a better failure state for various satellites, rather than crashing into the earth, is to crash into the Sun(or even to simply travel off into space?)
The presumption is this: The passage of time creates additional technologies for discerning signal from noise in radio signals. Thus, missions could be designed to have failure states that allow for the presumption that, in case of gyroscopic failure that would otherwise lead to an earth crash recovery model, a "send it out there and hope we can still interpret its signals" mode could be used.
Of course, this would never function for anything in a low earth orbit or even in geosync, due to the requirements for enough fuel to escape our orbit, but there's might be at least a few satellites barely in orbit such that a maximum burn of all reserved fuel in a given direction would allow escaping our orbit entirely.
Thoughts? I'm no rocket scientist, and I fully admit that.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Slashdot Mirror
Ohhhhh, no.
RIAA didn't just go there.
Mucking around with company's internal memos is something of a "below the belt" attack in modern corporate warfare. Yes, it happens in all out warfare and when companies are backed against the wall and are struggling to keep the creditors away. But the problem is that every company has internal memos that would be mission critical, quarter close affecting content if it ever gets out communications that occur precisely because if they don't occur, company's blindfold themselves and crash and burn.
Thus only the internally honest survive.
Oh dear God, can you imagine the anticompetitive, anticonsumer, antirecording, pro government manipulation("go bribe that senator with a junket") style messages that fly around the RIAA?
It's a nuclear attack, and a very, very dumb one. The RIAA's internal memos implicate, likely criminally, very large, very powerful, and very vulnerable(deep pockets) corporations. Meanwhile, Napster just screws itself.
There's a reason we don't see this happen much. We're all about to see why.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Actually, Shannon was one of the sodomites.
;-)
Was he? Good company for Turing, I suppose
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Bottom line, there are too many lawyers trained in Intellectual Property law for IP to disappear. It would take the concerted will of government to overturn or ignore IP law, and the bottom line is there's just too much lobbyist money for that to ever happen.
Gibson is underestimating the degree to which MP3's have been allowed to prosper, so as to force the hands of the courts, the houses, the lobbyists, and the competitors. He should know just how devious corporate behavior can be; the back story to most of his multinational conglomerates would probably look like the TimeWarnerAOL agglomerations of today at this point in his timeline.
I'd say more, but I've got some work to take care of. More later, hopefully.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I remember when I first found out about the "Y2K Beta Test", A.K.A. when one of the major cities in New Zealand lost power.
Now lemme clarify. I'm not talking about that piddly little 24 hour blackout that hit San Francisco last year and caused all sorts of havoc and fingerpointing or whatnot.
Nah, the same kiwi's(and I say that with awe and respect) who pretty much invented all that is extreme also had probably the biggest blackout in modern times:
Months.
Big city.
No power.
I remember reading this incredible diary documenting what the city went through(gigantic oil tankers turned into floating generators; power backup systems that survived their "smoke tests" but were never meant to run for weeks on end, etc.) but I can't find it. The best I can see is this link, which does a pretty good job of explaining what happened for those many, many, many months.
I'll leave it to people here to discuss whether it could happen here, but lemme tell you: It has happened, and oh, it did suck.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
it's standard business practice to keep your product center stage in any corporate event you sponsor. Trying to twist this into some big evil plot to control the world is just wrong, and makes you look stupid in the process.
AC,
On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.
On the other, you've got a direct threat against a source of funding.
Intel demanded that Harvard disable student-critical functionality in return for cash. That they demanded any institution pimp out its reason for being on the basis of a cash grant is evil; that they did this to Harvard was the height of idiocy.
I keep on bringing it up(cue broken record), but it's reminiscent of Microsoft revoking Compaq's right to sell Windows, or forcing IBM to buy Win95 off the street: To attack anyone else liket this, it's evil marketing practices. To attack major multinationals such as Compaq or IBM like that, it's just stupid.
You're absolutely right, AC--they thought of themselves as keeping their product center stage. The problem was they forget both where they were(an educational institution with a primary purpose distinctly different from selling stuff, i.e. a trade show) and, even worse, exactly where they were. Screwing with Academia is one thing, screwing with Harvard is far stupider.
They'll learn.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The point is not that Intel took some hits from demanding that these iMacs be convered. The point is that any other college budget approver, looking to see what he can do to optimize funding, may fear purchasing an iMac because Intel may pass them over.
That's the idea. Buy Apple, and your students suffer. Buy Intel, and your bribe is on its way.
There's a strong difference, of course, between the certainly legitimate and healthy educational activism of Intel and straight bribery. What Intel's staff failed to recognize was that by harassing Harvard's staff, they converted whatever positive good will they could get from the event into a negative, tainted force.
Fear can buy you alot. Respect buys you more. That's a hard lesson to learn; hopefully Intel will learn from this. Paranoid responsibility is valuable. Paranoid violence leads to the very press-connected Harvard getting harassed. Oops.
They'll learn. It's in their character--or at least, it was. If it still ain't, well, AMD can pop open some champagne glasses...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Somebody mentioned Error Correction algorithms, which brought to mind one of the few algorithms I've ever heard of that really hasn't been superceded since its debut: The Reed-Solomon Error Correction system.
My memory of it is a bit shaky(I studied it somewhat a few years back when I picked up a copy of Digital Audio Processing), but it essentially specifies an method by which an arbitrary number of bits in any block can be in error and the algorithm itself will A) Detect that error in the bitstream and B) Correct that error, if the number of misread bits is within the specifiable boundries of the algorithm. So you have situations where merely n extra bytes appending to an m byte block will automatically correct for some amount of error *anywhere* within that block.
Also a nice touch is that one can easily specify a specific number of bits which may have identical values--it turns out that CD's cannot write more than eleven 0's in a row--the head loses the ability to follow the "groove". No problem at all for this code.
This is essentially <i>the</i> system by which arbitrary-quality error correction is implemented. I'm not saying that the selection of algorithms was in error--but Reed Solomon does deserve some kind of honorary mention.
Oh well, at least it gets a better treatment than the Discrete Cosine Transform, which (literally) was <i>rejected by the NSF because it was considered too simple.</i> The DCT is at the core of both JPEGs(it compresses into a quantizable domain 8x8 blocks of YUV domain pixels) and MP3's(compresses into a quantizable domain each of 32 frequency subbands into 18 frequency coeffecients).
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
"fight to the death anything that threatens its intellectual property".
[WARNING: Rant follows. That I'm ending up writing this right after I wrote this very pro-Microsoft technical defense on Kuro5hin just makes me angrier.]
Death, eh? Exactly what kind of death are they referring to?
Perhaps they're talking about the infamous "Écran bleu de la mort", better known as the Blue Screen Of Death? Quite a few companies have been dying slow, ignomious deaths due to their inability to avoid these failures. Take Novell. It's the year 2000, and they still don't have a version of their Novell Client software that won't eventually and near-irrevocably cause to die(ooh!) some poor Windows 9x machine that just wants to connect to a Novell server.
Lets see now. We've got a Microsoft developer's impending death here...we've got the individual users' Win9x machines quite dead...Microsoft themselves? Hm, they're doing just fine. Not Dead Yet. Doing Just Fine. They sure seem to know how to add a core networking layer to Win9x; why should anybody else be able to?
Actually, why should anyone else be able to do anything without delivering unto Microsoft that which the stockholders demand? Using Windows 2000 to host your secure website means you've got to pay $3,000.00 to them for the right to do so. Sounds like any small business trying to sell a few t-shirts just got priced out of the market--oops, death of a little guy who suspiciously ain't Microsoft. Oh, I should be fair though. Microsoft doesn't require you to spend $3000.00 for a license; they'd be happy to just limit you to a small number of simultaneous purchases. That way, if your small business gets Slashdotted one day, and an unexpected number of people come in to buy some product, Windows 2000 will send your customers away, as you just didn't pay enough of a (protection) fee to Microsoft.
When your expensive server hardware running an expensive server operating system dies on customers because you didn't buy an expensive enough access license, lemme tell you, it ain't Microsoft who's hurting there. It ain't Microsoft who lost any sales--sure, that server may get wiped out and be replaced by Linux. But that's after that first sale. You might say Microsoft could at least experience some pain by loss of future sales, because either a) Some business(like yours) would crumble because it couldn't recoup their losses, or b) Some business(like yours) would never again buy a Microsoft server. The former posits yet another death--this time, again, of somebody Other Than Microsoft--but lets examine the latter. How easy is it to migrate away from Microsoft?
Not at all, and getting harder. Frontpage Extensions are an explicit play at tying the desktop OS to the server OS--make a business dependent on the integration, and reap the rewards when they go down in flames trying to live without it. Yes, Linux is getting support for Frontpage Extensions. But we have to wonder how long such cross platform compatibilities will be allowed--Microsoft's already banned interoperability with one file format on patent grounds(don't try to parse ASF if you're anyone else but MS; I suppose DOC is next).
The bottom line in my mind is that, when Microsoft starts talking about fighting to the death, they mean it--they've had no problem using their financial might to crush anyone who isn't convenient to them, and that appears to include their own customers, developers, and end users.
If there's one thing tragic here, it's that good, honestly respectible technical work gets disgraced because of its association to truly ugly business practices.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I vote that from now on anyone who uses the pseudo-word "boxen" should be hit in the head with a sledgehammer. It was never funny. It was never clever. As a matter of fact, it's quite stupid. Please stop or I'll kill you.
:-) It's all cool. Lots of people get worked up when they don't get enough seks. ;-)
AC--
Box phonetically equivocates to baw-ks. Boxes phonetically converts to Baw-k-ses, a moderately more linguistically annoying phrase, since you've got to loop yourself from the s sound, to an "eh" sound, back to the "ess". The resolution pluralization became Boxen.
I doubt it was ever intended to be funny or clever. It's just easier to transition from "ks" to "en" than it is to transition from "ks", add a short "eh", then back to "es".
Good example--when going from "Rack" to the plural, you turn "Rack" to "Racks"/"Rax". You can't make the same conversion though for Box, because you've already got that ks/x sound in there. Thus you get something like Boxen.
If you think I've taken this analysis too far, you're the geek who threatened to, and I quote, "kill" somebody over your dislike for a five letter work ending in N instead of S. Not that I took you seriously
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
...Only there's no payoff.
The Chinese Lottery is essentially a crypto term referring to the following concept: Each of China's billion residents is given a set top box for their TV. The boxen each receive a block to attack(this can be broadcast simply by continually outputting a stream of if(serial == "12345"){block="0xAABB1234")). The cost of the attack is borne in small chunks by whatever the market will bear to pay for a set top box, plus each individual paying for the electricity(which is of less value, presumably, than the amortized value of each block being cracked).
Then whoever's box cracks the code displays a message, "You've just won a million dollars. Please call this number to claim it." The government collects the box and gives some sum to the winner. Then they take back most of that sum through taxation(OK that's not part of the Chinese Lottery, but it's part of *every* lottery), and everyone's happy.
Now consider that most of these settop boxen will end up actually having phone connections to the media owners, so that Pay Per View can be implemented. Now the owner of the box doesn't need to be paid off or even informed that his machine was being used to crack some code, and that the cost of that cracking was being borne by his electricity bill. The result of the crack can be sent down the pipe at will.
All they need is the ability to execute code...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Some more thoughts on this:
Anybody else here Californian?
Willie Brown is essentially about as close to a political demigod as it gets--probably about as close to sausage with a smile as ya get, but even if you don't like how he gets things done, you can't deny the man knows politics, charisma, and everything in between.
Anyway, The Real Slick Willie (couldn't resist) is infamous for the stunt he pulled after term limits forced him to leave his ultra-powered position in the state legislature.
He destroyed his own position.
Realizing that he wasn't going to move up in the heirarchy and keep the level of power he was accustomed to if he moved up the political ladder, he decided to move down--he went from the head of one of the largest state's assembly to Mayor of San Francisco. Less real power in some respects, but he still gets to rule as the king he's accustomed to being.
But the problem with moving down on the totem pole is that somebody else gets to take your place, having learned all your tactics and probably itching to use 'em against you.
Didn't happen to Willie, though--as his last set of acts, Brown stripped his position procedurely of all of its power in the assembly. If he couldn't keep his power, he sure as heck wasn't going to let anyone else use it against him.
Thus it's in Microsoft's best interest to behave as abusively as possible--beyond just pissing Judge Jackson off, illustrating the damages an intelligent monopoly can do with a mere file format patent guarantees that, when Microsoft is no longer on top, they'll be able to use the precedent they set themselves to make sure they get to access file formats, bridge themselves into monopoly markets, etc. Ask around Silicon Valley--there's a general consensus that a number of Microsoft greatest enemies are primarily jealous of their power(rather than disgusted by their tactics).
Look, it was obvious Microsoft knew they'd lose. We've had a few years here of Loss Management--and they've made billions doing it.
It's just like Willie. If you gotta go, then go--but don't let anybody take your place, and don't let the mystique die. There is power in all positions.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Two Words:
DriveImage Professional. </i>
Two Words:
New Hardware.
You've just lost the ability to start from a clean install of Windows. You've been sold a castrated version of Windows. You're being asked to spend $100 at CompUSA or Fry's or wherever else if you dare try to upgrade your system. What do you do. What do you do?
I'll tell ya what I'm doing. I'm mailing my employer's purchasing division and making sure they know the costs of purchasing any castrated versions of Windows. You should too.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
Cisco Systems, Advanced Network Services
http://www.doxpara.com
Jon--
;-) is there somebody really making a case that games aren't ever artistic?
You actually bungled your post by not including a single example of somebody who disagrees with you. I'm serious--I have no idea who this Intelligensia is that disagrees with your arguments; most of what I've heard which decries online culture seems to focus on the ephemeral nature of it--small emails, lousy grammar, everything archived temporarily, nothing archived permanently. Gaming itself has nothing to do with this cultural loss, though online gaming does introduce interpersonal communication and thus these worries. But you didn't really disagree with these cultural concerns, did you?
Outside of people screaming that games are too violent(Joe Leiberman's campaign comes to mind, and he's a congressman--not particularly intelligensia
Besides not including any reference to somebody who diagrees with you, you also posted this the day after Game Over magazine--pretty much the highest quality review site out there--put up Decency in Multiplayer Gaming--amazingly enough, a pragmatically harsh view of what you're talking about. They also gave a singularly awful rating to Panty Raider, which is more of a commentary on the paucity of pornography in games than anything else. Supply and demand is about the only reason we've paid an ounce of attention to that game.
Games should be taken seriously, and they have become a fascinating art form--what else so intrinisically bridges mathematics, computer science, physics, art, game theory, self-optimizing systems/AI, and mythological structure? The problem with your post is that you never really identified anyone who actively disagrees. I hate to say it, Jon, because overall you've avoided this problem...but ascribing opinions to a group without a single shred of evidence that such opinions are generally held by any individual ostensibly within the group(let alone by the group as a whole!) is, unfortunately, unprofessional. Such is the domain of demogogues and propagandists--I'd like to think we're better than that.
After all, as Weasel Boy pointed out, we are the intelligentsia.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Software cannot be claimed to come with a machine if no independent package of that software ships with it.
If software doesn't install, the package is incomplete. If the package is incomplete, advertising for that software is fraudulent. Last I checked, fraud was a crime which, among other things, invalidated most contracts. Since the EULA likely describes capabilities which Microsoft would have fraudulently removed from the software, such EULA could arguably be rendered null and void.
The fact that installer-castrated operating systems are inherently more risky to remove(since you suddenly need to wipe out more than just the operating system Microsoft sold you to reinstall what you've already purchased!) actually makes this the most intriguing form of product bundling we've seen yet from Microsoft: They're actually bundling Windows now with the data that you create with it. If you try to remove Windows, and ever wish to return, you will now lose all the documents, the email, the graphics, the Internet Bookmarks...you will lose everything.
Windows thus becomes bundled with your own data. It's brilliantly devious, really.
It's also doomed to fail. Coming from somebody who spent two years repairing Windows systems(c:\windows\options\cabs is a lifesaver, incidentally), let me personally state that Win9x systems do not need Linux's help to fall over, die, and require reinstallation. If such reinstallation could not be done without either losing everything or moving the hard drive into another machine for disk-to-disk copying(what, you think you're going to go into Windows and backup to another machine on the network, when Windows now refuses to boot?), Microsoft would probably face a mass revolt from the thousands of MCSE's they trained quite well to do just that very thing.
Revolting MCSEs happen to be a disturbingly dangerous demographic for Microsoft. The Win2K uprising was actually surprisingly bloody.
Hmmm. This is getting fun to watch. Tech soap is always classic.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I must say, I'm beginning to see an interesting pattern here. Bizarre? Yes. This is maybe the oddest explanation I've come up with in some time, but it's about the only thing I've seen that makes sense.
;-)
There's a normal syllogism that often seems to go with stories about Microsoft on Slashdot:
Microsoft does bad things.
Microsoft did this.
Therefore, this is bad.
The strange thing is...it's usually valid. Microsoft has a very strong penchant for abusing the market(both the consumer, and if you believe what's been said about their stock manipulation, Wall Street too), and it's this tendancy which Slashdot has a tendancy to report upon.
Now, here's what gets really strange: Microsoft has been executing breathlessly aggressive schemes for market domination while being directly under the thumb of the US Government, whose ire was finally raised by the horde of very well connected companies that Microsoft abused. (I'm actually beginning to realize IBM being forced to buy Windows 95 off the street was a bigger deal, government-wise, than Compaq losing the right to sell Windows 98 for a day.) Neither the Kerberos scam, the SOAP harassment(which ended up with IBM open sourcing their implementation), nor this ultimate example of product bundling had any right to happen right now. Six months ago? Even then, maybe. But not now.
Microsoft does bad things.
Microsoft did this.
Therefore, this is bad.
Microsoft's sins are widely publicized as bad.
Microsoft can select its sins.
Therefore, Microsoft can select that which is widely publicized as bad.
That's a position of power. It's Machiavellian beyond belief, but it's a definite position of power.
The most rational explanation for Microsoft's behavior has generally been that they wanted to goad Judge Jackson into implementing an overly harsh penalty--and bragging about it. Indeed, they may have succeeded in that, as Jackson commented the penalty was more severe than that which would have been ("justly") reached by arbitration. So, we've already got a theory that argues Microsoft is intentionally erring so as to exploit Jackson's emotions(exploits didn't begin with Winnuke!).
Ah! But what errors to make? That, my friends, is where things get interesting. Any thoughts? I've got a few, but I've said enough for the moment
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I had completely forgotten that. Did they "try" to do this, or was Compaq unable to sell Windows
;-)
for a time? Are we talking "3.1" ? </i>
Did it. The "smoking gun" letter made it on Cnet. I used to have a link to it; I was going to reference it in a public rebuttal to an anti-linux screed from Ed Muth. Better rebuttals came out before I finished, and I pretty much decided the horse was dead enough
This was Windows 98, incidentally. No IE icon in Win 3.1.
No, you have to f*ck with some <i>big</i> companies before you get to have the Supreme Court agree to break you up...
Anyway, Compaq capitulated. IBM was the company that had to buy Windows 95 off the street(10x the cost of OEM!) because they had the gall to sell OS/2.
Computer industry pricing structures are oddly similar to the prices that HMO's and other insurance companies get on medical care. I'll have to investigate this more...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Resaerch
http://www.doxpara.com
IE is based on MOSAIC....
IE actually grew from Spyglass's version of Mosiac, but it's so ridiculously unfair to deny the order of magnitude improvement that IE3 was. For crying out loud, it had the first good JVM *anywhere*.
IE would have destroyed Netscape without the dirty tricks. Problem was, they got greedy and tried to both co-opt HTML(thus dooming IE4) and enforce compliance By Any Means Necessary.
They just didn't need to.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Fishbowl--
Here, lemme rephase into a sound bite:
"Linux people say Microsoft can't code. Microsoft agrees--that's why their business practices are so desperate. Believing their code could not survive the rigors of a fair marketplace--even with the unprecedented technical coup that was Internet Explorer 3--Microsoft went so far as to <i>revoke the right of Compaq to sell Windows</i> under the (mistaken) impression that, unless users had the Microsoft browser crammed down their throat, they'd never switch. The supreme irony is that Internet Explorer genuinely is the better product, and never required such vicious tactics to achieve dominance."
People really forget how amazing IE3 was. It was truly incredible.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Microsoft has consistenly leveraged its size and its popularity in both its OS and its various document management tools("document" including MPEG-4 video streams, mind you.)
Lets say a breakup is completed. Exactly what prevents this leverage from being executed?
So Microsoft Office gets ported to new platforms...this is new? Microsoft has been willing to port its code to popular alternatives to their Windows OS for quite some time--they're even starting to do a semi-decent job of it on the Mac. After all, why let any other Office vendor take over a market?
Splitting Microsoft will probably have the effect of making somewhat riskier steps(i.e. Media Player for an Operating System that MS/OS is seeking to prevent from gaining market acceptance) more feasable. But overall, I can't imagine either corporate culture changing significantly merely because of a simple division.
The split does not solve problems. At best, the split helps enforce whatever primary remedies Jackson can put into place--and considering the culture of MS is at least partially, "We know what's right, and we're smart enough to get around any loosely worded agreement that prevents us from doing that right", compliance is going to be damn near impossible without some truly intrusive measures.
Splitting the company isn't intrusive. It's just a bureaucratic structure.
My first thought would have to be, no matter how the split occurs, an outside board needs to be able to demand with force of law that any programmatically interesting function that's been left undocumented be remedied. The NT authentication functions, required for remote management, come to mind. This is a good example of Microsoft's technical acumen obscured by their business distrust.
It's funny, some Linux people say Microsoft can't code, can't innovate, can't do anything right. And Microsoft agrees. It must be so depressing to work in an office where your code is presumed to be so bad by your own coworkers that they'd go so far as to revoke Compaq's write to sell Windows just because they couldn't imagine that the product was good enough to eventually dominate a market on its own merits.
We shouldn't be directing our regulatory furor against the coders--honestly, they've done some damn good work over there at Microsoft, and about all they've got for it was ten instances of "innovation" per paragraph, followed by chants of "by any means necessary". Microsoft's business side needs to be muzzled--and the bottom line is, splitting one ravenous horde into two still leaves you with two ravenous hordes.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
At my previous job (sysadmin) I installed Redhat 6.0 on a 27GB IBM ATA/66 hard disk without any problem. Just make sure you're set the specific hard disk in the BIOS to LBA.., and it works perfectly!
32GB limit in the 2.2 kernel. Fixed in 2.2.14.
--Dan
"Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to future technology Standard!"
:-)
Sorry, guys. I'm a Linux guy, but that's not appropriate--at least when it comes to hard drive standards.
Redhat 6.0(or Mandrake 6) won't even <i>boot</i> off of a Maxtor 40GB UDMA/66 drive. Doesn't even degrade gracefully: It Don't Boot.
Don't know about 6.1. I just used a boot floppy to get me to the point where I could upgrade to a more flexible kernel revision.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubble
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
(Yes, I'm the same Effugas who submitted the original question.)
Wow, you've all come up with some fascinating commentary. I'll probably be looking at it for quite some time, digesting everything that I've seen(and been sent via email, for those who wish to be more private).
There is some question of why it matters whether or not you own something. My concerns aren't particularly materialistic, folks--do you plan to ever send your kids to college? Do you plan to work until the day you drop dead? Do you hope and pray to never become sick, because the moment your health insurance falls out from under you(and you know it will), it's all over?
There's something to be said about a nest egg, or about amassing something after years of life. How strange is it to think that, maybe, just maybe a vicious end run around inheritance taxes is just to never have anything to inherit--all that which would otherwise go to the state ends up in the hands of an organization that can never die.
Law of unintended consequences, no?
Corporations aren't necessarily good nor evil, but one has to wonder about whether, in certain regions, an economic upturn and subsequent increase in quality of life is being paid for with the college tuitions of our children.
It's not about taking it with you. It's about taking care of yourself and not needing to beg for handouts or bailouts.
I'll be blunt--I simply don't know how all this is going to come together. But I do understand that, in the long term, oppression is just as privitizable as everybody else--you just need to lease out the freedom, and define the terms of that leasing as arbitrarily as you can get away with.
I'll write more on this later. Too much work to do...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Ian is scheduled for a hearing June 5. If charged, David Lake says his son will plead not guilty "and prove that there is a basis for everything said on his Web site."
Oh my god.
These are going to be the most incredible court records in Utah history. I cannot be the only person imagining a Clinton Impeachment like mass subpeona'ing of anything that could prove the truth or falsity of the various claims.
"I did not have sex with that prepubescent girl. Momma says it ain't sex if we do it like that." Can't wait to start hearing that out of fifteen year old boys, on the stand, in a suit that's not big enough but "it's the good one".
What's just cruel is that this is bound to be more the work of parents than the kids themselves, and there are likely more than a few girls who--shocker of schockers--actually are sexually active who are going to have to watch a court ordered sexual inquisition brought on by their hapless parents who couldn't imagine that Their Daughters---theirs! What could they have done wrong as Parents(TM)!--would in anyway deserve such labels.
I've got the popcorn right here. This should be rather fun to watch, if your definition of fun is "watching the forces of the legal system brought to bear against a 16 year old boy who called some other kids bad names, like football players and cheerleaders never ever do."
Fug.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Earth escape speed is about 25 mi/sec. This speed, however, will still leave the object in solar orbit at earth's distance. To make the object fall into the sun, you have to accelerate it to the orbital speed of the earth around the sun, about 67 mi/sec. This delta-v requires far more fuel than any spacecraft can possibly carry to low earth orbit.
Ah-duh. Makes perfect sense. Forgot about the much, much bigger "dent in the fabric" that we were already spinning in.
--Dan
Perhaps a better failure state for various satellites, rather than crashing into the earth, is to crash into the Sun(or even to simply travel off into space?)
The presumption is this: The passage of time creates additional technologies for discerning signal from noise in radio signals. Thus, missions could be designed to have failure states that allow for the presumption that, in case of gyroscopic failure that would otherwise lead to an earth crash recovery model, a "send it out there and hope we can still interpret its signals" mode could be used.
Of course, this would never function for anything in a low earth orbit or even in geosync, due to the requirements for enough fuel to escape our orbit, but there's might be at least a few satellites barely in orbit such that a maximum burn of all reserved fuel in a given direction would allow escaping our orbit entirely.
Thoughts? I'm no rocket scientist, and I fully admit that.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com