More importantly most insecurity arises because of users, not the encryption mechanism you use. Yeah if you are the NSA or something then all this matters. But for most users typical encryption is fine. When things get cracked it is because of dumb ass things you did that gave away your key or so forth. Now if you are a careful user, that's not a big deal. If you are in a corporate environment and the secretary has to remember all these keys, chances are there will be notes written down in insecure places and so forth.
It always amazes me how much focus for security is placed on code rather than users. It's like firewalls. You could have the best firewall in the world, but chances are the typical user buying it will install it in an insecure fashion.
How true. But lets be honest. The writing was on the wall when AOL started connecting people to the internet. All the sorts of things about the Internet that I loved from college are no longer there. Even all the philosophical or political conversations aren't fun on mailing lists or the like. Why? Because after a while you've heard all the arguments and so forth. It becomes repetitive. There is this sense of "been there, done that."
Having said that though, for some resources it is better than ever. I can look up phone numbers. There is far more news than 5 years ago. I can order tickets online. Amazon still works great and it wasn't around back when I started. I find that now I tend to use the internet as a tool, as opposed to just browsing for fun. (Except for slashdot, of course)
If you have a graphics tablet you can actually do that electronically as well. It is just that "pen computing" for regular PCs isn't that common. (And I'm not about to shell out $200 for one)
Paper also gets lost and is a pain to make 100 copies for everyone in the division. Further there are the problems of joint-editing, getting confused about what version is which (unless you remember to time-stamp every page) and so forth.
Paper is generally much better for reading, due to resolution and "handling" but not for much else. Often when composing I print out my documents, grab a couple of pens and edit that way. (Even with source code) But for everything else it is all electronic.
We actually got them on the phone. (My friend likes to get spammers on the phone via long distance and listens to them gab while he programs. He then says, "hey - you're a spammer. You wasted my time, now I've wasted yours. Enjoy the long distance charges")
Anyway my friend got bored and actually told him that he knew he was a spammer etc. It was kind of funny all the denials and so forth. (I ought to get my friend to write the full story for you all as it was kind of funny and I'm sure I've screwed up part of the story)
News documents seem to summarize better than most sorts of documents. I wrote a general summarizer for the company I work for and was frankly amazed at the output for news stories. (Pretty much like this) When you combine a summarizer with a categorizer (either rule based or a more general statistical categorizer) then you can get some really fantastic results.
Check out the web page www.lextek.com and I wrote a little simple demo that lets you past any text to summarize. It's a toolkit that pretty much lets you do what these guys do. The demo doesn't use a categorizer for any pre-processing, but it kind of interesting for some projects.
VCD are rather popular overseas, aren't they? Laserdisk never really failed, but remained niche because of the price, not because it was a "gonzo" format. Divx just sucked and offered no advantage over DVD and a lot of negatives.
Actually that is pretty funny. (The web site, not the vandalism) This guy isn't protesting an oppressive government. This guy is unable to distinguish the difference between the real world and the X-files. As soon as someone protesting the government starts mentioning UFOs and the Illuminati then you know the guy isn't playing with a full deck.
I respectively disagree. First off, as I said, I think a lot of people enter the sciences because of the "gee whiz" aspect. Hell, I'll fully admit that I wanted a job at some "secret" government facility because I loved James Bond movies when I was a little kid. Yet that desire made it so I took the chemistry, physics and math classes and ended up at LANL. (Which I left because the one things the James Bond films don't show is a mind numbing bureaucracy - which made the films far more unrealistic than just having a powersource for a high power laser that fits in a watch)
The point is though that this gee-whiz factor often has to come prior to the work for the knowledge. Teachers learn this all the time. How many of those cool high school demos do you think the kids could have done on their own? (Hell - how many could even grab the chemicals anymore) The motivation has to come first.
One thing that I think modern kids miss out on are those old chemistry sets they used to sell at Sears. Now 90% of the chemicals are considered unsafe to sell. Hell, probably 20% you need some justification to even buy from a chemical supply house now. Yet I'll be forever grateful for those "toys" that included a lot of bomb directions in them. (With the only caveat - a warning on the box that it was a toy intended for ages 11 and up)
Actually this is a good question. I think if a domestic government service monitors a domestic private service they need a warrant. However a foreign government can monitor without a warrant. That limits what it can do - for instance it can't monitor all the packets on the local ISP, for instance. But there's still a lot that can be done. Further the government can monitor public info - which is what the content of a web page is.
The way the CIA, FBI and so forth get around some of the domestic restrictions is to get an organization like the RCMP (the Canadian mounties) to monitor a domestic group and then share the information. This goes on quite a bit.
How much this guy was monitored in terms of who was accessing his web page is the big question. However given what was on his web page and his prior activities, I'd be surprised if the FBI couldn't convince a federal judge to approve a tap or whatever. Especially after 9/11 since the kid really does seem to fit the profile of a terrorist.
Actually this already happened, I believe. A lot of the bomb making instructions you find on the web don't work. More significantly some of the directions will lead to you going "boom" as you make it. Anyone who assembles a bomb off of stuff they find on the net (or the other "tools") without knowing some chemistry is an idiot.
I don't know if the government did this or just folks looking to have a laugh or even citizens looking to foil the bin Ladens of the world. However it is the case that a lot of books are dangerous.
Actually while I think this idiot ought to go to jail, I disagree with you that bomb making knowledge ought to be considered a crime. A couple of us here at work were talking about that yesterday. A lot of people went into science (physics, chemistry and even engineering) because we had fun when kids making things that went bang. We started out with the old baking soda volcanoes and moved on to mixing sugar and sulpheric acid and then to nitrogen triodine and so forth. Soon some were making rockets and one friend actually built an LOX rocket that he got permission to launch from a local airforce test base.
Now I can 100% understand being more careful in this after 9/11. I think we have to worry about what effects our fun can have on idiots who want to use them for violence. (Which appears to include this kid) But at the same time I think we have to allow for people to be curious about chemistry and so forth. I think that free speech has to include speech we don't like. So I think discussions of guns, bombs and so forth have to be allowed.
It's my version of a legal denial of service. Turn about it fair play. What was it those other activist idiots were calling this thing? A virtual sit-in? This is slash-dot's virtual sit in.
He was a hacker who promoted explosives and violence. Further he was a hacker who was promoting the violent overthrow of the government. No offense, but the police would have been idiots to go in unarmed. It's not like they used the weapons. The arrest went well. But they didn't know that.
What if it turned out the kind had schitzophrenic and was armed with those bombs that he was publishing? Yeah he probably wasn't, but how did the police know that? Its not like they violated any rights. They served a warrant and tried to do so in as safe a manner as possible.
Come on, if Slashdotters decided energy policy it would be based on the original "Napster" business model. Come to think of it, perhaps that wasn't that different from what Enron did.
The problem is that DVHS offers advantages only to people with HDTV. But right now that is a very small minority. DVD offered not only far superior picture quality to VHS, but also better sound and random access. DVHS loses that all important ability of random access and has for the regular viewer no advantage over DVD.
Damn but that brings back memories. I hadn't considered Crisis Mountain in years. Great game. And who can forget the first version of Castlewolfstenstein? (With yet an other sequel) Unfortunately he hasn't ported the original Wizardry or Utlima - the grand-daddies of all turn based RPGs.
The thing I worry about is "*need* more than one button." Mac gives you the choice. Any two button mouse works right off. (I use a Microsoft optical mouse on mine) Yeah not all applications use it well, but that is changing. The latest version of OSX made me happy with the scroll bar and second mouse button.
I've not used the OSX version, but I believe QuickKeys does what you need. (Remapping the keyboard) Further you can even map Applescripts or recorded "clicks and typing" to keys. Check it out. I'm mainly Win2K right now, but if I start using OSX as my primary machine I'd break out QuickKeys right away.
Apple has problems still, but I doubt they'll be out of business. Their biggest problem right now is the damn PPC chips can't compete with Intel or AMD chips. If they figure out how to get better chips then a lot of their problems will disappear. For one thing I don't think platform matters as much as it did even 2 years ago. 80% of what most people do involves the web. The Mac ships with a good development system. It has Word/Excel. It has lots of Unix based databases. It's easy to port Unix software to it. If they continue to clean up Darwin then it'll have all the software advantages of Linux with the interface advantages of the Mac. I think MS will still have the major market share, but I can see Apple promoting OSX as the Unix for the rest of us. Their problem right now is that Linux runs on cheap ass hardware and OSX runs of overpriced underpowered hardware. If they can't cure that then they will be in trouble.
Cool. That's a beautiful area of Arizona - about time your ski hills could open. Here in Utah it's been snowing for a week. (About time for us as well, given the past few years)
It would probably be SOP that you can't use any hard drive on the private network that is used on a public network (i.e. internet). Further it would be trivial to limit the computers so that they aren't hooked up to modems.
I suspect that this network would be used for moderate intelligence information, IRS information, and government email. It really makes sense to me.
I should add that there are already lots of secure networks. All Bush is suggesting is something like this for workflow information and government traffic. (i.e. sharing information between law organizations, INS, etc.) Stuff like that shouldn't be put on a public network.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly most insecurity arises because of users, not the encryption mechanism you use. Yeah if you are the NSA or something then all this matters. But for most users typical encryption is fine. When things get cracked it is because of dumb ass things you did that gave away your key or so forth. Now if you are a careful user, that's not a big deal. If you are in a corporate environment and the secretary has to remember all these keys, chances are there will be notes written down in insecure places and so forth.
It always amazes me how much focus for security is placed on code rather than users. It's like firewalls. You could have the best firewall in the world, but chances are the typical user buying it will install it in an insecure fashion.
Having said that though, for some resources it is better than ever. I can look up phone numbers. There is far more news than 5 years ago. I can order tickets online. Amazon still works great and it wasn't around back when I started. I find that now I tend to use the internet as a tool, as opposed to just browsing for fun. (Except for slashdot, of course)
If you have a graphics tablet you can actually do that electronically as well. It is just that "pen computing" for regular PCs isn't that common. (And I'm not about to shell out $200 for one)
Right. . . So did you get the memo about the new cover sheets?
Paper also gets lost and is a pain to make 100 copies for everyone in the division. Further there are the problems of joint-editing, getting confused about what version is which (unless you remember to time-stamp every page) and so forth.
Paper is generally much better for reading, due to resolution and "handling" but not for much else. Often when composing I print out my documents, grab a couple of pens and edit that way. (Even with source code) But for everything else it is all electronic.
We actually got them on the phone. (My friend likes to get spammers on the phone via long distance and listens to them gab while he programs. He then says, "hey - you're a spammer. You wasted my time, now I've wasted yours. Enjoy the long distance charges")
Anyway my friend got bored and actually told him that he knew he was a spammer etc. It was kind of funny all the denials and so forth. (I ought to get my friend to write the full story for you all as it was kind of funny and I'm sure I've screwed up part of the story)
He said he didn't see the film in its final form. He said he saw a rough cut. I'd expect that a lot of FX shots aren't done, color adjusted, etc.
News documents seem to summarize better than most sorts of documents. I wrote a general summarizer for the company I work for and was frankly amazed at the output for news stories. (Pretty much like this) When you combine a summarizer with a categorizer (either rule based or a more general statistical categorizer) then you can get some really fantastic results.
Check out the web page www.lextek.com and I wrote a little simple demo that lets you past any text to summarize. It's a toolkit that pretty much lets you do what these guys do. The demo doesn't use a categorizer for any pre-processing, but it kind of interesting for some projects.
VCD are rather popular overseas, aren't they? Laserdisk never really failed, but remained niche because of the price, not because it was a "gonzo" format. Divx just sucked and offered no advantage over DVD and a lot of negatives.
Actually that is pretty funny. (The web site, not the vandalism) This guy isn't protesting an oppressive government. This guy is unable to distinguish the difference between the real world and the X-files. As soon as someone protesting the government starts mentioning UFOs and the Illuminati then you know the guy isn't playing with a full deck.
I respectively disagree. First off, as I said, I think a lot of people enter the sciences because of the "gee whiz" aspect. Hell, I'll fully admit that I wanted a job at some "secret" government facility because I loved James Bond movies when I was a little kid. Yet that desire made it so I took the chemistry, physics and math classes and ended up at LANL. (Which I left because the one things the James Bond films don't show is a mind numbing bureaucracy - which made the films far more unrealistic than just having a powersource for a high power laser that fits in a watch)
The point is though that this gee-whiz factor often has to come prior to the work for the knowledge. Teachers learn this all the time. How many of those cool high school demos do you think the kids could have done on their own? (Hell - how many could even grab the chemicals anymore) The motivation has to come first.
One thing that I think modern kids miss out on are those old chemistry sets they used to sell at Sears. Now 90% of the chemicals are considered unsafe to sell. Hell, probably 20% you need some justification to even buy from a chemical supply house now. Yet I'll be forever grateful for those "toys" that included a lot of bomb directions in them. (With the only caveat - a warning on the box that it was a toy intended for ages 11 and up)
Actually this is a good question. I think if a domestic government service monitors a domestic private service they need a warrant. However a foreign government can monitor without a warrant. That limits what it can do - for instance it can't monitor all the packets on the local ISP, for instance. But there's still a lot that can be done. Further the government can monitor public info - which is what the content of a web page is.
The way the CIA, FBI and so forth get around some of the domestic restrictions is to get an organization like the RCMP (the Canadian mounties) to monitor a domestic group and then share the information. This goes on quite a bit.
How much this guy was monitored in terms of who was accessing his web page is the big question. However given what was on his web page and his prior activities, I'd be surprised if the FBI couldn't convince a federal judge to approve a tap or whatever. Especially after 9/11 since the kid really does seem to fit the profile of a terrorist.
Actually this already happened, I believe. A lot of the bomb making instructions you find on the web don't work. More significantly some of the directions will lead to you going "boom" as you make it. Anyone who assembles a bomb off of stuff they find on the net (or the other "tools") without knowing some chemistry is an idiot.
I don't know if the government did this or just folks looking to have a laugh or even citizens looking to foil the bin Ladens of the world. However it is the case that a lot of books are dangerous.
Actually while I think this idiot ought to go to jail, I disagree with you that bomb making knowledge ought to be considered a crime. A couple of us here at work were talking about that yesterday. A lot of people went into science (physics, chemistry and even engineering) because we had fun when kids making things that went bang. We started out with the old baking soda volcanoes and moved on to mixing sugar and sulpheric acid and then to nitrogen triodine and so forth. Soon some were making rockets and one friend actually built an LOX rocket that he got permission to launch from a local airforce test base.
Now I can 100% understand being more careful in this after 9/11. I think we have to worry about what effects our fun can have on idiots who want to use them for violence. (Which appears to include this kid) But at the same time I think we have to allow for people to be curious about chemistry and so forth. I think that free speech has to include speech we don't like. So I think discussions of guns, bombs and so forth have to be allowed.
It's my version of a legal denial of service. Turn about it fair play. What was it those other activist idiots were calling this thing? A virtual sit-in? This is slash-dot's virtual sit in.
He was a hacker who promoted explosives and violence. Further he was a hacker who was promoting the violent overthrow of the government. No offense, but the police would have been idiots to go in unarmed. It's not like they used the weapons. The arrest went well. But they didn't know that.
What if it turned out the kind had schitzophrenic and was armed with those bombs that he was publishing? Yeah he probably wasn't, but how did the police know that? Its not like they violated any rights. They served a warrant and tried to do so in as safe a manner as possible.
Geeze.
Come on, if Slashdotters decided energy policy it would be based on the original "Napster" business model. Come to think of it, perhaps that wasn't that different from what Enron did.
The problem is that DVHS offers advantages only to people with HDTV. But right now that is a very small minority. DVD offered not only far superior picture quality to VHS, but also better sound and random access. DVHS loses that all important ability of random access and has for the regular viewer no advantage over DVD.
Damn but that brings back memories. I hadn't considered Crisis Mountain in years. Great game. And who can forget the first version of Castlewolfstenstein? (With yet an other sequel) Unfortunately he hasn't ported the original Wizardry or Utlima - the grand-daddies of all turn based RPGs.
The thing I worry about is "*need* more than one button." Mac gives you the choice. Any two button mouse works right off. (I use a Microsoft optical mouse on mine) Yeah not all applications use it well, but that is changing. The latest version of OSX made me happy with the scroll bar and second mouse button.
I've not used the OSX version, but I believe QuickKeys does what you need. (Remapping the keyboard) Further you can even map Applescripts or recorded "clicks and typing" to keys. Check it out. I'm mainly Win2K right now, but if I start using OSX as my primary machine I'd break out QuickKeys right away.
Apple has problems still, but I doubt they'll be out of business. Their biggest problem right now is the damn PPC chips can't compete with Intel or AMD chips. If they figure out how to get better chips then a lot of their problems will disappear. For one thing I don't think platform matters as much as it did even 2 years ago. 80% of what most people do involves the web. The Mac ships with a good development system. It has Word/Excel. It has lots of Unix based databases. It's easy to port Unix software to it. If they continue to clean up Darwin then it'll have all the software advantages of Linux with the interface advantages of the Mac. I think MS will still have the major market share, but I can see Apple promoting OSX as the Unix for the rest of us. Their problem right now is that Linux runs on cheap ass hardware and OSX runs of overpriced underpowered hardware. If they can't cure that then they will be in trouble.
Cool. That's a beautiful area of Arizona - about time your ski hills could open. Here in Utah it's been snowing for a week. (About time for us as well, given the past few years)
The problem is that $1B of MS Software might well cost MS a few thousand dollars. (The price of the CD-Roms)
A better alternative is to make Microsoft buy competitor's computers for the schools. (i.e. Macintosh OSX systems)
It would probably be SOP that you can't use any hard drive on the private network that is used on a public network (i.e. internet). Further it would be trivial to limit the computers so that they aren't hooked up to modems.
I suspect that this network would be used for moderate intelligence information, IRS information, and government email. It really makes sense to me.
I should add that there are already lots of secure networks. All Bush is suggesting is something like this for workflow information and government traffic. (i.e. sharing information between law organizations, INS, etc.) Stuff like that shouldn't be put on a public network.