"In the wake of Vietnam, the US military were demoralised and prey to some fairly crazy ideas. They thought they could train 'super soldiers' with psychic powers. In this first extract from his revealing new book, Jon Ronson describes how their aspirations were perverted in the prisons of Iraq."
I should declare my own bais here. I think the USA is finished; the only question is how much damage it will cause the rest of the world in it's death throes in the next few decades.
Don't believe me? OK, just keep an eye on the US dollar vs Euro. The invisible hand is voting...
--
Underneath the blue skies
Beautiful empty dying dolls...
I must be sick in the head or something, but I fell in love with Perl reading the 'Learning Perl v4' llama on the tube in 96 - to me the elegance simplicity and yes beauty of the code really took my breath away. Good Perl code is one of the few things that aren't music that genuinely move me, tickle my aesthetic dangleberries as it were....
I mean... while (){ print; }... *sigh*
no really. I'm serious.
Granted I was programming in Visual Basic when I fell for Perl - frmo the ridiculous to the sublime really....
I refute that. A good programmer would not work on a project knowing perfectly well that it is riddled with fundamental security holes, poor design, marketing driven specifications and so on. For example, whilst I am sure that there are many very SKILLED programmers who have worked on Outlook, I would argue that they cannot be GOOD. There is an ethical dimension to professionalism.
Yes, I realise that by this criteria 'good' programmers are extremely hard to find. I cannot even call myself a good programmer; I've pushed prototype code into production despite knowing there were vast areas of untested, un-though through code that was/bound/ to contain significant vulnerabilities, because (bascially) I chose getting paid over finding a better gig. (I have however learned how to avoid getting into such situations in the first place - to some extent - and I always made sure the people who made the decisions were aware of the trade off they were making.
...and it is down to me.
Ever since a kindly friend explained the concept of Free software to me ten years ago, the question of Microsoft (as the exemplar of Propritariness and ruthless business practices) interacting with Free (and later OS) phenomena has been bounced around. Probably he and I talked about it back then. Would Microsoft be destroyed? Would they open-source Windows? Attempt to subvert the movement? FUD it to death? Suppose they ported Office to Linux? All these sorts of questions have been debated to death, especially on Slashdot. Well now we finally get to see how Microsoft treat Free software that they (think they) 'own'. Will they promote the Freedom aspect as a feature? Try to find loopholes in the license allowing them to fork a closed version? Quietly kill it and replace it with some bloated abomination? Perhaps they will themselves be virally assimilated, perhaps the power of the meme will turn the heads first of the engineers, then of the programmers, and then the project leads,.. revolution from within...
Wow, definitely time I got some sleep;)
I guess we'll know in a couple of years.
British security company? This wouldn't be the notorious (as publicity whore cowboys) London-based "security consultancy" run by a character called D.K. Matai, by any chance? If so, the value of this study is exactly zero. They put out a similar press release every few months and occasionally it gets picked up by a semi-mainstream news source (like Slashdot... or more commonly, mailing lists.) Search Need To Know for the gory details.
See the lengthy discusasion of this subject on NANOG a three weeks ago, when all these issues were flogged to death in a much more authoritative manner than will be the case in the comments around this post...
I'd say it's time for the esteemed Attourney General John Ashcroft to prosecute SCO and its executives for Racketeering.
No doubt Mr Ashcroft just cleared his diary after reading your comment. "That's it! How could I have been so blind? Why, these people are committing fraud in broad daylight. A million thanks to the good people of slashdot for setting me back on the path of wisdom and righteousness."
Hmmm, the case for Mars... I debate it every evening with myself. Usually, I win, and then step out into the back yard for a stretch, a smoke, and a last look at the stars - naturally including Mars, which these days is hovering at the foot of the garden in the twilight. Go out and have a look, you can't miss it - it's the brightest 'star' visible, and distinctly salmon coloured to the naked eye (unless you're colourblind, I guess?)
I still do vote, personally, but I gave up all interest in more direct involvement (local political party was talking about making me candidate in a few years. Mind you we had no chance whatever of winning so it's less impressive than it sounds) after going to college and *gasp* taking some drugs. Seriously. I thought, what's the point of working in politics when I could be fired a the drop of a hat when some old hippy turns up and says 'yeah, I remember him, he passed me a spliff at a party in 1990'. I realise standards are a bit more relaxed nowadays (not sure what the results were of the last poll of MPs about how many had taken cannabis at some point, but I remember it being a large number) but 10-15 years ago it was a definite career-killer. Plus, how could I ask people to vote for me when I was quite happy to break the law without my conscience bothering me? (apart from about the state of my lungs of course... )
Short anecdote. In my teenage years I got very interested in party politics; kept records of opinion polls, got up early on Sundays to hear the pbig political interview on TV, helped out with canvassing for my preferred party (this is in the UK. Do you have canvassing in the US? going door to door with a stack of literature & saying 'Please vote for Foobly Franknfurter on Thursday?') Hell I even screwed up my A levels in 1987 cos I was too busy helping out to revise.
A couple of years later I'd almost completely lost interest except in the soap-opera aspect of the political game. Organised party politics is a waste of time, designed to keep the middle-aged, early retirees and people on long-term invalidity benefit occupied. The others are power-crazed over ambitious types just like you find in any other occupation. (It's not the money, not in the UK anyway, where cabinet ministers only get about 70K sterling IIRC.)
The last year or so have made it clearer than ever that real power is in corporate boardrooms and the country clubs of the US, and proved the truism of the old adage "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal". I'm more and more cleaving to the Chomsky-esque view that the organised political scene is just a distraction, a meaningless soap-opera designed to keep us asking the more profound questions.
The ludicrous US turnout rates - what is it, 35% in/Presidential/ elections? - is only a few decades ahead of Europe IMHO. These people can't claim any sort of popular mandate. Basically what I'm trying to say is: it all sucks.
And he invented ssh, in the episiode 'aftermath' where he uses Orac to run commands on liberator and pipe the output back to the beach he's standing on.
This really is fantastic news, B7 was far far superior IMHO to Star Trek. In B7 the Federation are the baddies - an evil authoritarian fascist state ruled by a corrupt oligarchy, full of Borgia-esque backstabbing and politicing. The troopers are often sympathetic characters sketched in some depth (as opposed to disposable extras whose only role is saying "Arghhh!!!" and falling off something clutching their stomachs after getting shot. The crew are all highly imperfect; a lot of the drama comes from the dramatic tension between the imperfect rebels; Avon (untrustworhty, devious, very clever, arrogant as fsck) Blake the wannabe hero, cowardly drunk Vila, the moody Cally (ah! how I fancied Cally at the age of 10... me that is, not her), the stupid but amiable Gan, and so on. No shortage of 'dark'ness. The last episode features the entire crew but Avon dying in a brief shootout - much more realistic than 'small group of mercenaries overcomes entire galactic government'.
And samples of Zen saying 'Confirmed' and Orac's "state your program requirements... they will be implemented when capacity is available" make great Windows sound effects. If you're a sad fanboy like me that is;)
(yes folks that's where my login iD comes from)
Horizon has much more info.
A _CHIP_ on his shoulder??!! I should bleedin' well hope he's got a chip on his shoulder with SCO, the scum-sucking, low-life, degenerate, scabby, pea-brained, evil... *choke*
</fawlty>
>I'm sure this must be in a FAQ or been answered elsewhere, could someone explain to me please?
The **AA IP cartels routinely use the DMCA to issue some sort of legal paperwork straight to ISPs, saying "We believe your user, Joe Kazaa, is illegally distributing our copyright works. Please remove their website / net access under DMCA." - and the ISP is legally compelled to do so *without any due process*. Now many here are asserting that SCO are now in breach of copyright law; by breaking the GPL, they lose their right to distribute GPL'd works *at all*. So why doesn't some US-based author of stolen GPL'd programs get an order to force SCO to (at least) suspend distribution of GPL'd work, pending the outcome of the court case? That would also cover selling these junk paper "licenses" to Linux, hopefully hitting the stock price. This hasn't happened, so presumably there's a good reason why... anyone?
"...this is no movie... this is really HAPPENING!"
*shiver* - partly from the memory of the movie, partly for the Bush Junta...*
*not that I think this DNA thing is some sort of evil conspiracy by Wolfovitz et al. They do enough scary shit as it is...
> I would never, ever give a sample for a DNA
> analysis to anyone but a doctor.
>
Really? Well stay out of the UK then; if you're a criminal suspect for any reason, the police *will* take a swab from your cheek, and they *will* add it to the national DNA database. I believe there's about 2 million records in there at present.
And what will you do when a similar law gets passed over there? Go to jail for your beliefs? *snort* yeah right.... pardon my scepticism but I don't think *anyone* would voluntarily enter the US prison system. Well, mafia bosses who can arrange certain privileges excepted, of course.
I once worked at a doomed dotcom in London. Shortly before it went titsup, we had a visit from someone calling himself Delon Dotson. He claimed to have be co-founder of mp3.com and to have a patent on SSL. In fact, he claimed he received a royalty for every SSL transaction, to which we smiled superciliously and said we doubted it, as we used OpenSSL;)
Cut a long story short, we sent him packing. So, was this bloke for real? Or just a figment of our fevered boom-era brains?
I'm British, and speak only poor schoolboy French.
However since hooking up with my half-Russian, half-Serbian
girlfriend, I've found that by learning a dozen or so
basic words and phrases by rote, then trying to
use them conversationally, I've been able to pick
up a surprising amount. Serbo-croat was always supposed
to be a nightmare to learn, but it's waaay easier than English...
for instance, a pnoneme(?) a group of three or four
letters will always be pronounced the same way (cf
eg "ain" in English.) I'm rather hoping the Babel Fish
is never released; by learning the language you start
to subconsciously pick up something of the target
language's cognitive assumptions, and (in a small way)
to "think like" a native speaker.
Now/Russian/, there's a tricky language... but we
both play chess which is a good middle-man;)
The other options include "don't try to fix something that isn't broken." This is
pretty much the standard 'slow news day' Internet horror
story which CNN|the BBC | Fox | Time |whoever comes out with
once or twice a year. Identity thieves use IRC. Film at 11. The problem
that needs to be fixed is the ease with which people's IDs can be stolen, thanks
to lots of personal data being stored on various insecure systems. I mean, you know,
there are people out there buying things over the web using Visa cards from IE, to webservers running IIS... sorry, folks, Billy was lying: Windows
(well, Win 9x), and IE/Outlook/IIS are NOT safe at any speed.
Incidentally, did every get a good laugh from today's announcement of no less than EIGHT new IIS holes? Lo,they
are mostly present in the current version; and lo!(too), they were mostly(all?) discovered by OUTSIDE researchers, not Microsoft programmers on their month of 'intensive security auditing' their existing codebase (*giggle*)
Slashdot Mirror
The road to Abu Ghraib
I should declare my own bais here. I think the USA is finished; the only question is how much damage it will cause the rest of the world in it's death throes in the next few decades.
Don't believe me? OK, just keep an eye on the US dollar vs Euro. The invisible hand is voting...
--
Underneath the blue skies
Beautiful empty dying dolls...
I must be sick in the head or something, but I fell in love with Perl reading the 'Learning Perl v4' llama on the tube in 96 - to me the elegance simplicity and yes beauty of the code really took my breath away. Good Perl code is one of the few things that aren't music that genuinely move me, tickle my aesthetic dangleberries as it were.... I mean... while (){ print; }... *sigh* no really. I'm serious. Granted I was programming in Visual Basic when I fell for Perl - frmo the ridiculous to the sublime really....
I refute that. A good programmer would not work on a project knowing perfectly well that it is riddled with fundamental security holes, poor design, marketing driven specifications and so on. For example, whilst I am sure that there are many very SKILLED programmers who have worked on Outlook, I would argue that they cannot be GOOD. There is an ethical dimension to professionalism. Yes, I realise that by this criteria 'good' programmers are extremely hard to find. I cannot even call myself a good programmer; I've pushed prototype code into production despite knowing there were vast areas of untested, un-though through code that was /bound/ to contain significant vulnerabilities, because (bascially) I chose getting paid over finding a better gig. (I have however learned how to avoid getting into such situations in the first place - to some extent - and I always made sure the people who made the decisions were aware of the trade off they were making.
Wow, definitely time I got some sleep ;)
I guess we'll know in a couple of years.
British security company? This wouldn't be the notorious (as publicity whore cowboys) London-based "security consultancy" run by a character called D.K. Matai, by any chance? If so, the value of this study is exactly zero. They put out a similar press release every few months and occasionally it gets picked up by a semi-mainstream news source (like Slashdot... or more commonly, mailing lists.) Search Need To Know for the gory details.
See the lengthy discusasion of this subject on NANOG a three weeks ago, when all these issues were flogged to death in a much more authoritative manner than will be the case in the comments around this post...
I'm delighted - really! I'm a pen-tester...
This HAS to be a hoax. Windows95 ain't usable by any reasonable definition of the word.
No doubt Mr Ashcroft just cleared his diary after reading your comment. "That's it! How could I have been so blind? Why, these people are committing fraud in broad daylight. A million thanks to the good people of slashdot for setting me back on the path of wisdom and righteousness."
How do you reconcile working for Microsoft with your own personal ethical beliefs?
Hmmm, the case for Mars... I debate it every evening with myself. Usually, I win, and then step out into the back yard for a stretch, a smoke, and a last look at the stars - naturally including Mars, which these days is hovering at the foot of the garden in the twilight. Go out and have a look, you can't miss it - it's the brightest 'star' visible, and distinctly salmon coloured to the naked eye (unless you're colourblind, I guess?)
thank you.
sorry to break it to you, but those are truly awful. No, I haven't any better suggestions, I'm just calling it like I see it.
there goes my evening...
A couple of years later I'd almost completely lost interest except in the soap-opera aspect of the political game. Organised party politics is a waste of time, designed to keep the middle-aged, early retirees and people on long-term invalidity benefit occupied. The others are power-crazed over ambitious types just like you find in any other occupation. (It's not the money, not in the UK anyway, where cabinet ministers only get about 70K sterling IIRC.)
The last year or so have made it clearer than ever that real power is in corporate boardrooms and the country clubs of the US, and proved the truism of the old adage "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal". I'm more and more cleaving to the Chomsky-esque view that the organised political scene is just a distraction, a meaningless soap-opera designed to keep us asking the more profound questions.
The ludicrous US turnout rates - what is it, 35% in /Presidential/ elections? - is only a few decades ahead of Europe IMHO. These people can't claim any sort of popular mandate. Basically what I'm trying to say is: it all sucks.
This really is fantastic news, B7 was far far superior IMHO to Star Trek. In B7 the Federation are the baddies - an evil authoritarian fascist state ruled by a corrupt oligarchy, full of Borgia-esque backstabbing and politicing. The troopers are often sympathetic characters sketched in some depth (as opposed to disposable extras whose only role is saying "Arghhh!!!" and falling off something clutching their stomachs after getting shot. The crew are all highly imperfect; a lot of the drama comes from the dramatic tension between the imperfect rebels; Avon (untrustworhty, devious, very clever, arrogant as fsck) Blake the wannabe hero, cowardly drunk Vila, the moody Cally (ah! how I fancied Cally at the age of 10... me that is, not her), the stupid but amiable Gan, and so on. No shortage of 'dark'ness. The last episode features the entire crew but Avon dying in a brief shootout - much more realistic than 'small group of mercenaries overcomes entire galactic government'.
And samples of Zen saying 'Confirmed' and Orac's "state your program requirements... they will be implemented when capacity is available" make great Windows sound effects. If you're a sad fanboy like me that is ;)
(yes folks that's where my login iD comes from)
Horizon has much more info.
A _CHIP_ on his shoulder??!! I should bleedin' well hope he's got a chip on his shoulder with SCO, the scum-sucking, low-life, degenerate, scabby, pea-brained, evil... *choke*
</fawlty>
The **AA IP cartels routinely use the DMCA to issue some sort of legal paperwork straight to ISPs, saying "We believe your user, Joe Kazaa, is illegally distributing our copyright works. Please remove their website / net access under DMCA." - and the ISP is legally compelled to do so *without any due process*. Now many here are asserting that SCO are now in breach of copyright law; by breaking the GPL, they lose their right to distribute GPL'd works *at all*. So why doesn't some US-based author of stolen GPL'd programs get an order to force SCO to (at least) suspend distribution of GPL'd work, pending the outcome of the court case? That would also cover selling these junk paper "licenses" to Linux, hopefully hitting the stock price. This hasn't happened, so presumably there's a good reason why... anyone?
"...this is no movie... this is really HAPPENING!" *shiver* - partly from the memory of the movie, partly for the Bush Junta...* *not that I think this DNA thing is some sort of evil conspiracy by Wolfovitz et al. They do enough scary shit as it is...
> I would never, ever give a sample for a DNA > analysis to anyone but a doctor. > Really? Well stay out of the UK then; if you're a criminal suspect for any reason, the police *will* take a swab from your cheek, and they *will* add it to the national DNA database. I believe there's about 2 million records in there at present. And what will you do when a similar law gets passed over there? Go to jail for your beliefs? *snort* yeah right.... pardon my scepticism but I don't think *anyone* would voluntarily enter the US prison system. Well, mafia bosses who can arrange certain privileges excepted, of course.
Brad Pitt announced a new fork from the -AC kernel tree.
I once worked at a doomed dotcom in London. Shortly before it went titsup, we had a visit from someone calling himself Delon Dotson. He claimed to have be co-founder of mp3.com and to have a patent on SSL. In fact, he claimed he received a royalty for every SSL transaction, to which we smiled superciliously and said we doubted it, as we used OpenSSL ;)
Cut a long story short, we sent him packing. So, was this bloke for real? Or just a figment of our fevered boom-era brains?
I'm British, and speak only poor schoolboy French. However since hooking up with my half-Russian, half-Serbian girlfriend, I've found that by learning a dozen or so basic words and phrases by rote, then trying to use them conversationally, I've been able to pick up a surprising amount. Serbo-croat was always supposed to be a nightmare to learn, but it's waaay easier than English... for instance, a pnoneme(?) a group of three or four letters will always be pronounced the same way (cf eg "ain" in English.) I'm rather hoping the Babel Fish is never released; by learning the language you start to subconsciously pick up something of the target language's cognitive assumptions, and (in a small way) to "think like" a native speaker. Now /Russian/, there's a tricky language... but we
both play chess which is a good middle-man ;)
Incidentally, did every get a good laugh from today's announcement of no less than EIGHT new IIS holes? Lo,they are mostly present in the current version; and lo!(too), they were mostly(all?) discovered by OUTSIDE researchers, not Microsoft programmers on their month of 'intensive security auditing' their existing codebase (*giggle*)