Funny, I always thought the key to software security was to write good code in the first place. Automating a patch system to improve software security is like building automatic bandaid dispensers into children's clothing to make playgrounds safer. It's an extension of security-through-obscurity, at the expense of user freedom.
The majority of hack attacks happen immediately after a patch is announced, implying that announcing the patch announces the vulnerability. So MS is saying the problem isn't the vulnerabilities themselves, it's that hackers respond more quickly to the announcements than ordinary users do. Microsoft's solution is to speed up the response. So what if the users have to give up control of their computers? They're going to have to turn over the keys anyway when Palladium gets shoved down their throats, right?
Casting users as the weak link is ultimately a lame defense for the fix-it-later commercial software development philosophy. Rushing software out the door because the marketing dept has promised it to retailers who want to sell it before Xmas is not the only possible way to do development.
The free software world may not be perfect but it doesn't suffer from that particular disadvantage. One way to make your system more secure might be to run code that was released when the developers decided it was actually ready.
"Bitten by a radioactive gecko, Peter Parker..." Nawww, just doesn't sound right.
But seriously, the original gecko research was done at my old alma mater, Lewis & Clark College. The story of their discovery was covered last summer on Slashdot and elsewhere, but the source articles have expired and Lewis & Clark is getting no credit today. Bummer.
That according to some Buddhist beliefs, we are all a single being -- a god that is pretending to be a bunch of individuals, intentionally forgetting its true nature in order to learn, or maybe just for fun. In my book that would qualify as a simulation.
They forgot one biofeedback signal
on
Biofeedback Gaming
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Bladder pressure.
Speaking as one who, back in the days, used to be able to play Atari games until the scoreboard rolled over to zero. Eventually it became a matter of how long I could hold off bodily functions, and whether I could run to the bathroom and back without losing all my reserve lives.
Here's an excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars: "That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium, and that their utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions should be considered to be as valid as the utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions of people in any other forum, venue, location, or space."
Well I certainly wouldn't play RPGs if I had to worry about being charged with criminal assault for starting a brawl in a Greyhawk tavern as Zorgo the Rogue. The whole point of RPGs is to ESCAPE from reality into different worlds with their own rules. Let's not drag the real world into it, PUH-LEEEEEEEASE!!!
I just spent 45 minutes fruitlessly searching on Google for a paper written by an economist 5 or 6 years ago, in which he demonstrated that the overhead incurred by phone companies to meter and bill calls by the minute exceeds the actual cost of the service. His conclusion was that a flat rate for everybody would be more profitable for the telcos and would cost the public less overall. I often wonder about the value of all these schemes to make sure the right number of beans are in the right piles.
America is the only society I've lived in. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that modern industrialized society is a fantasyland. But yes, I really do believe all the things I said, and simply calling it "nonsense" isn't exactly a brilliant rebuttal.
Government. I certainly didn't invent the idea that America is, in effect, governed by a relatively small percentage of people who compete with each other to buy representation through campaign funding. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just people with ample funds acting in their own interests. There are plenty of books that make a much better case for this than I could here. One of them is The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast.
It's a reality that Congressmen can't get elected today without schmoozing corporations and interest groups for large amounts of campaign money. It's a reality that the people who provide this money expect something in return, and that it takes an exceptional person to defy the wishes of a big sponsors in order to do what is right for the general public. It's also a reality that campaign advertising and campaign news reporting are light on content and heavy on images and sounds. Generating gut impressions is simply easier than communicating complex issues. I think it's fairly obvious that our politicians, of necessity, do what the big money tells them to do and then camouflage it as something that's in the public interest. If you flatly reject that notion as nonsense or cynicism, then I admire your optimism but not your powers of observation.
Consumerism. A hundred years ago, most people bought most things with cash. If they needed something, they saved up for it. If they merely wanted something, they bought it with what they had left over after buying what they needed. Buying on credit was rare, and was usually an investment, as in farmers borrowing against next year's crops to buy seeds or replace broken tools. Being in debt was considered a bad thing, because of the reality that if hard times struck you could lose everything to creditors. Today, by contrast, the average American family carries $8000 in credit card debt alone, not including home mortgages and car loans. Until the latter half of the 20th century, this behavior wouldn't have been considered normal, wise, or even halfway intelligent.
It doesn't seem likely that after thousands of years people suddenly got stupid. I think it was a combination of other things. One was the development of modern advertising techniques in the 1950's. That was when advertising started to evolve from the bright young man thinking up the next great jingle to the modern, studied approach, employing PhD psychologists using advanced statistics, surveys, focus groups, etc. Television provided the perfect platform for this new advertising technology. The postwar economic boom supplied millions of eager consumers who had grown up during the Great Depression and suddenly had money to spend. After about a decade, when the consumption boom levelled off, companies charged into extending consumer credit to keep it going. Computers made it possible to do the massive amount of accounting required. It suddenly made sense for businesses to both allow and encourage ordinary people to go into debt up to their eyeballs. It also made sense to portray this behavior, which historically would have been considered foolish, as being sound, sensible and normal.
Short digression: Many people don't understand why the economy boomed after WWII. It's chalked up to a vague notion that a war stimulates the economy. What actually happened was simply that during WWII people saved up their money. Industrial production was massively diverted to the military, so consumer goods were scarce. There just wasn't all that much to buy, and the government actively discouraged consumption. Instead of buying things, people were supposed to buy war bonds, e
Many aspects of American life are fantasies hidden in plain sight. We Americans imagine ourselves living in a democracy, while our elected representatives represent the special interests who shovel money into the advertising machine. Election results measure the effectiveness of the advertising, not the will of the people. The very term "will of the people" means nothing anymore, because Americans are predominately ill-informed "consumers" whose opinions and decisions are essentially meaningless.
In everyday life we strive constantly to conform to fictional ideals of what is normal, and are constantly told that we are succeeding, as long as we keep spending more money than we can afford. All sense of perspective about ourselves has been replaced by an advertising-induced fantasy that we are smarter, wealthier and better looking than we really are. Our regulatory agencies, run by the industries they are supposed to regulate, have taught us to ignore the small print and consume products that are mere shadows of real things. Instead of lemonade, we happily drink "lemonade-flavored drink mix" that contains less actual lemon than furniture polish does. Our food industry spends billions figuring out how to make more things out of hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Yet our collective self-image is that we are those people on television -- smart, health-conscious, independent-minded folks who insist on quality. We're involved with our kids and savvy about our investments. We're not in debt up to our eyeballs, we're just leveraging our money. Our health-care system is the finest in the world. People in other countries who hate us are just envious. The list of American fantasies is endless, but at the top of it is the fantasy that collectively we have a life rather than just a lifestyle.
Sometimes it's more like you writing someone a letter and saying it's from me. I don't know how many spams I get with my name in the Sender address. That is and should be illegal.
I am not allowed to play games on my office PC during work hours. However, I once took a really boring week-long class at a hotel where there were some arcade games in the lobby. Taking a brisk walk during breaks didn't do much for me, but I found that spending a couple quarters shooting aliens really woke me up. Without those adrenalin shots I wouldn't have gotten half as much out of the afternoon sessions.
Yeah, like they really need this technology to save floundering DVD sales from those nasty pirates. According to this article the DVD Entertainment Group recently reported Q1 sales for 2003 are up 93% over last year. Here's the opening paragraph:
The DVD Entertainment Group reported another record quarter for DVD last month, with the industry shipping 231.7 million DVD titles to retail in the first three months of 2003 -- a 93 percent increase over shipments in the first quarter of last year.
So I ask you, when an industry is experiencing record sales growth, what better time to start really pissing off the customers who are buying all those DVDs?
Stupid patent announcements are geting to be like those News of the Weird items that get retired because they happen so often they are no longer weird. The people at the USPO seem to be determined to screw up the rest of the world for the benefit of a few greedy jerks who bother to fill out the proper forms. If anybody has any ideas for replacing or eliminating the patent office, now's the time to start your campaign.
You don't have to be doing anything illegal to get thrown out of a store. You can get thrown out of a store for doing anything they don't want you to do in there, like drinking a Slurpee.
When I look at the pictures on the site, I see a person in a chair with a keyboard and mouse in front of them and a monitor or two hanging from pipes overhead. Apart from surrounding yourself with a roll cage, I don't see how this is radically different from putting the same chair on a regular set of wheels, the keyboard and mouse on pull-out trays, and the monitor sitting on a stack of laser printer paper. Like now.
Anybody who publishes information about their business runs the risk that a competitor will get hold of the information and use it in some way. This has always been a fact of life in the physical world. As computers came online in recent decades many companies have maintained databases of information about competitors' products. The Internet doesn't change any of this.
Read the article. Bezos isn't trying to patent online selling. What he wants to patent is a system of selling used merchandise supplied by 3rd parties, whereby you could place an order for something that has not yet been posted for sale. Sort of like a want ad, but then when somebody offers that item for sale you get matched up automatically. It's more like the stock market than an online store.
The thing that bothers me about this is that the patent would not be on a piece of code but on the very practice of doing business in that way. Sort of like patenting the concept of a mortgage. Ridiculous.
The patent system seems to have turned into a kind of business hyperspace, a shortcut between point A and point B that bypasses normal activities like inventing better products, manufacturing and marketing them. Instead, you can step into this other dimension, redefine something as yours, and walk out the other side owning part of somebody else's business. It's only a matter of time before concepts like adjustable interest rates will be patented. If only I had patented "buy low, sell high."
RIAA Sues Penn State for Apology Infringement -- the RIAA has filed suit against Penn State University for unauthorized duplication of its recent apology. RIAA spokeswoman Hilary Rosen explained that apology piracy costs the industry billions each year. Senator Fritz Hollings was not available for comment.
This is not a professor-discovers-formula story. Sue Clayton is a filmmaker and composer who has apparently been teaching at a London university for 6 months. I would hardly call her "an academic." The story would be a lot more interesting if it gave a clue as to how the percentages are assigned. In another article Clayton is quoted as saying she analyzed the films "frame by frame," but that could mean anything. Plot is 10%? Of what exactly? Chalk this up to a filmmaker who finally has a captive audience.
I have been programming for 25 years and switched to web dev about 6 years ago. Living in Seattle, where there are even more unemployed programmers than latte stands, I have never had much trouble finding a job, including during the dotcom bust a couple years ago. I think the important thing is to have a history of constantly learning new stuff. I know guys who smugly spent the late 1990s raking in money doing Y2K conversions on old COBOL programs while I was making less money doing web pages. Those are the guys who are hard up for interesting jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I always thought the key to software security was to write good code in the first place. Automating a patch system to improve software security is like building automatic bandaid dispensers into children's clothing to make playgrounds safer. It's an extension of security-through-obscurity, at the expense of user freedom.
The majority of hack attacks happen immediately after a patch is announced, implying that announcing the patch announces the vulnerability. So MS is saying the problem isn't the vulnerabilities themselves, it's that hackers respond more quickly to the announcements than ordinary users do. Microsoft's solution is to speed up the response. So what if the users have to give up control of their computers? They're going to have to turn over the keys anyway when Palladium gets shoved down their throats, right?
Casting users as the weak link is ultimately a lame defense for the fix-it-later commercial software development philosophy. Rushing software out the door because the marketing dept has promised it to retailers who want to sell it before Xmas is not the only possible way to do development.
The free software world may not be perfect but it doesn't suffer from that particular disadvantage. One way to make your system more secure might be to run code that was released when the developers decided it was actually ready.
"Meanwhile, ePier announced a feature late last week that allows sellers to display their phone number on auction listings."
Look for the story in 6 months: EPier sues online auction sites over patented "seller phone number listing" technology.
"Bitten by a radioactive gecko, Peter Parker..." Nawww, just doesn't sound right.
But seriously, the original gecko research was done at my old alma mater, Lewis & Clark College. The story of their discovery was covered last summer on Slashdot and elsewhere , but the source articles have expired and Lewis & Clark is getting no credit today. Bummer.
That according to some Buddhist beliefs, we are all a single being -- a god that is pretending to be a bunch of individuals, intentionally forgetting its true nature in order to learn, or maybe just for fun. In my book that would qualify as a simulation.
Bladder pressure.
Speaking as one who, back in the days, used to be able to play Atari games until the scoreboard rolled over to zero. Eventually it became a matter of how long I could hold off bodily functions, and whether I could run to the bathroom and back without losing all my reserve lives.
Here's an excerpt from the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars: "That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium, and that their utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions should be considered to be as valid as the utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions of people in any other forum, venue, location, or space."
Well I certainly wouldn't play RPGs if I had to worry about being charged with criminal assault for starting a brawl in a Greyhawk tavern as Zorgo the Rogue. The whole point of RPGs is to ESCAPE from reality into different worlds with their own rules. Let's not drag the real world into it, PUH-LEEEEEEEASE!!!
I just spent 45 minutes fruitlessly searching on Google for a paper written by an economist 5 or 6 years ago, in which he demonstrated that the overhead incurred by phone companies to meter and bill calls by the minute exceeds the actual cost of the service. His conclusion was that a flat rate for everybody would be more profitable for the telcos and would cost the public less overall. I often wonder about the value of all these schemes to make sure the right number of beans are in the right piles.
Wait until the US military decides Galileo is a potential tool for terrorism.
America is the only society I've lived in. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that modern industrialized society is a fantasyland. But yes, I really do believe all the things I said, and simply calling it "nonsense" isn't exactly a brilliant rebuttal.
Government. I certainly didn't invent the idea that America is, in effect, governed by a relatively small percentage of people who compete with each other to buy representation through campaign funding. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just people with ample funds acting in their own interests. There are plenty of books that make a much better case for this than I could here. One of them is The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast.
It's a reality that Congressmen can't get elected today without schmoozing corporations and interest groups for large amounts of campaign money. It's a reality that the people who provide this money expect something in return, and that it takes an exceptional person to defy the wishes of a big sponsors in order to do what is right for the general public. It's also a reality that campaign advertising and campaign news reporting are light on content and heavy on images and sounds. Generating gut impressions is simply easier than communicating complex issues. I think it's fairly obvious that our politicians, of necessity, do what the big money tells them to do and then camouflage it as something that's in the public interest. If you flatly reject that notion as nonsense or cynicism, then I admire your optimism but not your powers of observation.
Consumerism. A hundred years ago, most people bought most things with cash. If they needed something, they saved up for it. If they merely wanted something, they bought it with what they had left over after buying what they needed. Buying on credit was rare, and was usually an investment, as in farmers borrowing against next year's crops to buy seeds or replace broken tools. Being in debt was considered a bad thing, because of the reality that if hard times struck you could lose everything to creditors. Today, by contrast, the average American family carries $8000 in credit card debt alone, not including home mortgages and car loans. Until the latter half of the 20th century, this behavior wouldn't have been considered normal, wise, or even halfway intelligent.
It doesn't seem likely that after thousands of years people suddenly got stupid. I think it was a combination of other things. One was the development of modern advertising techniques in the 1950's. That was when advertising started to evolve from the bright young man thinking up the next great jingle to the modern, studied approach, employing PhD psychologists using advanced statistics, surveys, focus groups, etc. Television provided the perfect platform for this new advertising technology. The postwar economic boom supplied millions of eager consumers who had grown up during the Great Depression and suddenly had money to spend. After about a decade, when the consumption boom levelled off, companies charged into extending consumer credit to keep it going. Computers made it possible to do the massive amount of accounting required. It suddenly made sense for businesses to both allow and encourage ordinary people to go into debt up to their eyeballs. It also made sense to portray this behavior, which historically would have been considered foolish, as being sound, sensible and normal.
Short digression: Many people don't understand why the economy boomed after WWII. It's chalked up to a vague notion that a war stimulates the economy. What actually happened was simply that during WWII people saved up their money. Industrial production was massively diverted to the military, so consumer goods were scarce. There just wasn't all that much to buy, and the government actively discouraged consumption. Instead of buying things, people were supposed to buy war bonds, e
As last words go, "You can't decompile a C++ program" can't hold a candle to, "Hey Honey, watch this!"
Go ahead and mod me off-topic, but it had to be said.
Many aspects of American life are fantasies hidden in plain sight. We Americans imagine ourselves living in a democracy, while our elected representatives represent the special interests who shovel money into the advertising machine. Election results measure the effectiveness of the advertising, not the will of the people. The very term "will of the people" means nothing anymore, because Americans are predominately ill-informed "consumers" whose opinions and decisions are essentially meaningless.
In everyday life we strive constantly to conform to fictional ideals of what is normal, and are constantly told that we are succeeding, as long as we keep spending more money than we can afford. All sense of perspective about ourselves has been replaced by an advertising-induced fantasy that we are smarter, wealthier and better looking than we really are. Our regulatory agencies, run by the industries they are supposed to regulate, have taught us to ignore the small print and consume products that are mere shadows of real things. Instead of lemonade, we happily drink "lemonade-flavored drink mix" that contains less actual lemon than furniture polish does. Our food industry spends billions figuring out how to make more things out of hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Yet our collective self-image is that we are those people on television -- smart, health-conscious, independent-minded folks who insist on quality. We're involved with our kids and savvy about our investments. We're not in debt up to our eyeballs, we're just leveraging our money. Our health-care system is the finest in the world. People in other countries who hate us are just envious. The list of American fantasies is endless, but at the top of it is the fantasy that collectively we have a life rather than just a lifestyle.
Sometimes it's more like you writing someone a letter and saying it's from me. I don't know how many spams I get with my name in the Sender address. That is and should be illegal.
I am not allowed to play games on my office PC during work hours. However, I once took a really boring week-long class at a hotel where there were some arcade games in the lobby. Taking a brisk walk during breaks didn't do much for me, but I found that spending a couple quarters shooting aliens really woke me up. Without those adrenalin shots I wouldn't have gotten half as much out of the afternoon sessions.
Yeah, like they really need this technology to save floundering DVD sales from those nasty pirates. According to this article the DVD Entertainment Group recently reported Q1 sales for 2003 are up 93% over last year. Here's the opening paragraph:
The DVD Entertainment Group reported another record quarter for DVD last month, with the industry shipping 231.7 million DVD titles to retail in the first three months of 2003 -- a 93 percent increase over shipments in the first quarter of last year.
So I ask you, when an industry is experiencing record sales growth, what better time to start really pissing off the customers who are buying all those DVDs?
Says it all.
Stupid patent announcements are geting to be like those News of the Weird items that get retired because they happen so often they are no longer weird. The people at the USPO seem to be determined to screw up the rest of the world for the benefit of a few greedy jerks who bother to fill out the proper forms. If anybody has any ideas for replacing or eliminating the patent office, now's the time to start your campaign.
You don't have to be doing anything illegal to get thrown out of a store. You can get thrown out of a store for doing anything they don't want you to do in there, like drinking a Slurpee.
When I look at the pictures on the site, I see a person in a chair with a keyboard and mouse in front of them and a monitor or two hanging from pipes overhead. Apart from surrounding yourself with a roll cage, I don't see how this is radically different from putting the same chair on a regular set of wheels, the keyboard and mouse on pull-out trays, and the monitor sitting on a stack of laser printer paper. Like now.
Anybody who publishes information about their business runs the risk that a competitor will get hold of the information and use it in some way. This has always been a fact of life in the physical world. As computers came online in recent decades many companies have maintained databases of information about competitors' products. The Internet doesn't change any of this.
Read the article. Bezos isn't trying to patent online selling. What he wants to patent is a system of selling used merchandise supplied by 3rd parties, whereby you could place an order for something that has not yet been posted for sale. Sort of like a want ad, but then when somebody offers that item for sale you get matched up automatically. It's more like the stock market than an online store.
The thing that bothers me about this is that the patent would not be on a piece of code but on the very practice of doing business in that way. Sort of like patenting the concept of a mortgage. Ridiculous.
The patent system seems to have turned into a kind of business hyperspace, a shortcut between point A and point B that bypasses normal activities like inventing better products, manufacturing and marketing them. Instead, you can step into this other dimension, redefine something as yours, and walk out the other side owning part of somebody else's business. It's only a matter of time before concepts like adjustable interest rates will be patented. If only I had patented "buy low, sell high."
Atticism: Concise and elegant writing.
Tomorrow's story:
RIAA Sues Penn State for Apology Infringement -- the RIAA has filed suit against Penn State University for unauthorized duplication of its recent apology. RIAA spokeswoman Hilary Rosen explained that apology piracy costs the industry billions each year. Senator Fritz Hollings was not available for comment.
This is not a professor-discovers-formula story. Sue Clayton is a filmmaker and composer who has apparently been teaching at a London university for 6 months. I would hardly call her "an academic." The story would be a lot more interesting if it gave a clue as to how the percentages are assigned. In another article Clayton is quoted as saying she analyzed the films "frame by frame," but that could mean anything. Plot is 10%? Of what exactly? Chalk this up to a filmmaker who finally has a captive audience.
I have been programming for 25 years and switched to web dev about 6 years ago. Living in Seattle, where there are even more unemployed programmers than latte stands, I have never had much trouble finding a job, including during the dotcom bust a couple years ago. I think the important thing is to have a history of constantly learning new stuff. I know guys who smugly spent the late 1990s raking in money doing Y2K conversions on old COBOL programs while I was making less money doing web pages. Those are the guys who are hard up for interesting jobs.