I'd think, in the modern era, that a shortwave receiver is a lot more rarely seen than a laptop computer.
And given that I've found and used internet cafes in oases in the Sahara Desert, in villages in Nepal, and in noisy, smoky discos in Siberia, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of alternatives in the modern world. And sneaking into the bathroom to listen to shortwave transmissions is a hell of a lot more suspicious than checking your yahoo email for love letters from a lady friend back home...
You could pass a hell of a lot of information with simple pre-arranged codes in photographs. Say, if you receive a photo of a woman in a purple dress it means you are to (for example) blow up someone's embassy... Sure it is low bandwidth, but how much bandwidth would spies need?
I don't see how you can expect to get paid for discovering a security flaw.
If you are willing to travel to the head offices of the company in question and explain, in person, what you have discovered, it is reasonable that the company would pay your travel expenses and a fee for your time.
Canadian Customs has "searched" my laptop twice. Once I sat at the border for about four hours while the tried to figure out how to use the finder. U.S. customs took my laptop (a MacBook Pro) out of the case and looked at it, but I think they decided they didn't want to spend the time with it.
I shudder at how long it would take the good customs folks to work their way through a Linux box, or a decently encrypted hard drive.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing. In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
not vodoo, but made for impressive demos
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
I worked at a company (mercifully long out of business) that was psychotically cheap.
Apparently one day they needed some screws, and rather than going to the hardware store and spending three bucks, they dragooned several people into spending most of a day removing "extra" screws from peecees around the office. I said they were psychotically cheap.
Anyway, two of the four screws attaching my motherboard to the case were removed. After that irregular modification, I could reboot my machine by smacking the case (apparently causing a short circuit). Some weeks later I was demoing the forgettable latest software revision of the company's product to some directors and other bigwigs. Of course, during the demo the software went a little crazy. I looked at the screen carefully, slid my right hand along the case like I was looking for something, and at a seemingly (to the audience) random point hit the case HARD.
The machine instantly rebooted, of course.
My technical virtuosity was never, ever questioned during the six months I remained at that company.
Just think of what database searches will be fired off before the next election. I'm sure the outgoing Bush administration will know more about the democratic challenger than even they know about themselves. And as this program was started in 2001 who knows if it was used last election or not. There was some mighty bad stuff about Kerry that leaked... Not that any politician would abuse a position of power for something as petty as getting re-elected.
This administration has demonstrated a willingness to leak classified information to discredit people politically inconvenient to it. Remember Valerie Plame? Even if you personally are squeaky clean, you can't possibly know if your kids, your brother, or your mom are. And phone records would be one heck of a hint to a good investigator on where to start digging for something embarassing.
The maximally cynical and paranoid part of me can't help but wonder if this can explain the curiously inept behavior of the Democrats over the last several years, and the similarly clueless behavior of the media. Not a lot of people would have to know about this NSA program to have quite a chilling effect.
It makes my head hurt to think about it.
The lava dome was was not blown out in the 1980 eruption. The upper thousand-plus feet of the mountain were blown out. A lava dome formed in the time period after the major eruptions of 1980 and that lava dome was blown out later, I think around 1985.
I'm probably not as worried as I should be about this.
One of the real problems driving this is that being an ISP or being a backbone provider is nowhere near as profitable as having cool content. The ISPs in various forms have been either trying to buy content or produce their own. Neither approach has been very successful. In my opinion that failure is due to the business models between pumping packets and producing content are pretty incompatible.
Now let's assume that the net isn't neutral. So every ISP will contact, say, Yahoo! and offer some kind of "enhanced services package" that will guarantee that packets to or from Yahoo! will get there faster.
My first question -- how does Yahoo! or any other customer measure whether they are getting any benefit from getting their packets faster? Given the service quality history that most ISPs have, I'd be pretty damned skeptical that they could get something running that could be specific enough to an actual entity they could bill, and keep it running. I'd also wonder how Yahoo! or any other business could justify paying such a tariff if they couldn't measure the benefit.
My second question -- how many "enhanced serice" deals can a company like Yahoo! manage? There are still quite literally thousands of ISPs in the world. There aren't that many backbone providers, but there are still quite a few. That is still a lot of contracts to manage. Note that having even dozens of such deals is going to make the measurement problem described in the first question even tougher.
It seems to me that this is going to be a very tough sell. The threat that they could favor content they produce themselves kind of begs the question -- they really haven't been able to produce persuasive content of their own, and even some of the spectacular mergers (e.g. AOL/Time Warner) haven't been what I'd call spectacular successes.
One place where this non-neutral net idea could "work" well is with foreign service providers, especially in poorer countries with fewer network access points. There it could be done by demanding a "tariff" from Yahoo! or Google or all access to those services could be effectively blocked in such a country. This could be a killer revenue source for poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional third-world countries, much like long-distance tarrifs are now.
The companies that are talking about tiered internet service are mainly ran by pointy-haired people who barely understand this whole internet thing and want to wish it away. Most people, in particular in the most profitable markets, have choices of internet service providers. The ISP who makes a policy change that makes Yahoo!, Google, or Ebay slow will lose customers. Same problem if a particular backbone provider does that to an ISP. The first business to try this is going to learn how easy it is to lose a lot of customers very quickly. There won't be a second time.
I'm even less worried about any persistent efforts by the United States government to snoop on me. Oh, they'll try. But it is doubtful they will ever be very effective at it. I'll admit it is technically possible to monitor all traffic on tcp port 25 that is going through any of the (relatively few) access points that route traffic internationally. With furious effort, you could even store a lot of it -- and think about how much of it would be p0rn spam. Of course, in the modern era, a lot of SMTP traffic is encrypted with SSL, some of it is over VPNs, and some of it might be accessed via other protocols. Some of that email might be accessed through webmail and it won't be immediately obvious how to fish the emails out. Yeah, Yahoo! and MSN might roll over and hand the emails over to a big bad government. But you'd have to be looking in a lot of places all of the time to build an effective police state on top of the Internet we have today. Given infinite resources and incredible competence it might be possible, just barely.
Oh, but did I mention instant messaging (with how many incompatible protocols)? Did I mention online fora?
Resources and competence seem to be rare goods in the U.S. Government these days. Why should halfhearted snooping be somehow special?
Remember, this is the same government that didn't connect the dots on 9-11. Remember, this is the same government that connected dots that weren't there in Iraq. Remember, this is the same government that botches monster iT projects (the FAA and the FBI) all the time. Remember, this is the same government that still hasn't translated all of the documents captured in Afghanistan. Remember, this is the same government that did a heck of a job on New Orleans. Remember, this is the same government that hasn't captured Osama, and took years to capture someone hiding in North Carolina.
My feelings are that Sony is a great hardware company being tormented by its music and movies divisions. Whatever genuis in Tokyo came up with the idea of acquiring media companies needs to be beaten. Badly.
There are some pretty substantial, um, language issues with this letter. It doesn't seem likely to me. There are sentences without a clear subject or verb, and ones with a subject and a verb have substantial agreement issues. There are still enough native english speakers at the U.S. state department that I doubt anything this sloppily written would actually get distributed.
Parts of the letter are also explaining things that the recipient already knows -- in particular, why would you need to tell Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that the U.K. currently has the presidency of the European Union? He of all people already know that. On the other hand, it adds context that third parties (like most Register readers) might not have.
I'm pretty sure whomever wrote this letter intended it to be published. I am pretty doubtful those parties collect a paycheck from the United States government.
Some things are really in the motherhood and apple-pie categories: revision control, a build system architecture, bug tracking, documentation of the codebase. A lot of other things like coding standards and naming conventions are, to me at least, less valuable. I'll articulate on why that is later on.
The real important point: All of these things are tools to used to produce something hopefully useful. Having a killer bug-tracking system or a great coding standard won't keep your company in business. It won't even guarantee that you'll produce a great product. Lots of successful companies have been arguably successful without those things. Lots of software we all use and love has rather repulsive code at its heart, and even the cleanest projects have their dank corners. I've worked for lots of companies that aren't around anymore that did have excellent coding standards and even followed them, though.
Far more important is making sure that the people writing the code and the people who know the requirements are able and willing to talk to each other. Preferably over many beers. This is even more important if they are the same people.
About coding conventions and comments: we humans tend to see what we expect to see when reading source code. I'm usually a naive, trusting person and if the comments say that the code does X, I assume that it does X. Even if it doesn't, really. And figuring out what it really does when the comments are out of sync of the code (and face it, that always happens -- smart people have been writing buggy code for decades now, and having the code out of sync with the comments is just another bug that there is no way to detect except through unpleasant experience) is often harder than dealing with no comments at all. On the other hand, if I come into a project and am handed 50k lines of C++ from someone just fired for an act of workplace violence and no comments except copyright notices I know I'd better put my thinking cap on and pay attention.
The claim is that this reaction requires a tiny amount of water (presumably for the hydrogen) to produce a tremendous amount of energy.
Just a practical question here: how can we have oceans if this bozo^h^h^h^hdude is right?
Bear with me here. If there is some magical state that you can push hydrogen (presumably bound up with oxygen in water) into that releases a bunch of energy, then it would seem to me that if you fed enough activation energy into a bunch of water you'd get energy back. So if you had a lot of water under a lot of pressure close to something hot, that should release a lot of energy... more energy than you started with. Maybe you'd even get a chain reaction. Cool.
[background: I am a frequent backcountry skier and have participated in avalanche rescues].
Gadgets are fun, but getting away from too many gadgets is one more reason to go skiing.
If multiple people are buried, you have much bigger problems than triage. With an avalanche transceiver, you find a buried victim by finding their transceiver -- well, duh. But this is done by measuring the relative signal strength, usually through an audible beep from the buried transceiver or sometimes from an LED display on the receiver. Of course, signal strength can vary bewilderingly depending on how deeply the victim is buried, the orientation of the antenna on the transmitting and receiving transceivers, and whether the victim and their pack are obscuring their transceiver.
This is complicated. It isn't something you can figure out in the minutes after an avalanche. Lots and lots of practice is required to get any degree of competence.
If you have multiple burials, you are almost always forced to go after the strongest signal first -- often you can't even "hear" the other signals until you find the strongest one. This implies to me that having vital signs is rarely going to enter into the decision-making process on whom to recover first.
For backcountry skiers, I usually feel that if you have a multiple burial situation you've already screwed up.
This might be of moderate use to avalanche control people (now there is a great job, explosives and skiing combined!), ski patrollers, heli-ski guides, and maybe mountain rescue organizations. As a product for the casual outdoorsperson I'm pretty skeptical.
While I (willingly) haven't collected a paycheck since Bill Clinton was president, I have had the mixed privilege of working for nine high-tech startups since 1983. Only one of them still exists.
Most programmers think of themselves more as artists than engineers. Most of the management models and software development models kicked around misunderstand this. Even more confusing, many people writing code aren't motivated by money -- and the fact that more people say that than actually beleive it makes it even more twisted.
Since it is hard to measure output, especially on software that isn't done, we usually just measure input. This is profoundly bogus, life isn't graded on effort. How many times have you heard someone brag, "we have four hundred engineers working on that problem!"?
That is like deciding a movie is better because of the cast is very large, or that a rock band is better because they have four hundred drummers.
Writing software is a pretty interesting activity. One of the rather wild things about it is that individual productivity varies by huge factors, probably as much as four orders of magnitude. My own experience (and I doubt many people have seen very few exceptions) is that on any given software project, a tiny minority, usually no more than four or five people, do nearly all of the work. Generally there is pretty strong agreement on who those four or five people are. The rest of the people either make minor contributions or make problems that the people actually doing the work have to clean up.
I've never worked at an organization that didn't emphasize that they hire, "only really good people." The question comes up, where do the 50% of people who are honestly below average end up working? I've never found this place.
For various reasons, size of a software development organization does matter. None of those reasons have anything to do with productivity or the quality of the end product (an important exception is how good Open Source projects parallelize debugging and testing). In a big company, a bigger development organization affords its managers nicer chairs and offices. In a start-up company, a bigger development organization impresses naive investors. In neither of these cases does a bigger development organization produce better software more quickly.
This is analogous to creative businesses like making movies, music, or writing books. I suspect in the end that salary distributions will be very similar -- a few people will make big bucks and have quite a bit of visibility, the vast majority will make pretty poor wages, and there will be a whole lot of wannabees waiting tables hoping for their big break. Companies will pitch having a few star programmers on their team to help lure more investment and interest in the product (think about how Julia Roberts or Nicholas Cage generate buzz for a movie just by being on the cast).
The current model for employing coders is a lot like the old "studio system" that Hollywood had before WWII. The current economic mess might be a force that will move the industry closer to the "star" system that Hollywood has today.
Some might argue that companies have a huge stake in controlling their programmers, since they are the only people who have the expertise to improve the products they have developed. But nobody would take a Terminator sequence seriously without Arnold, and Nirvana without Kurt Cobain is similarly unimaginable.
This might seem grossly unfair to the vast majority of programmers. It is. But there are people running loose portraying themselves as programmers who have:
Edited CVS repositories directly to "save time"
Deleted comments from source files to make the files compile more quickly
Bulk-converted all project source files to uppercase so they were easier to read
I haven't made any of these things up. One of the few benefits of a newer system is that people who do stuff like that would be sleeping on grates.
I'd amend that. There is lots of intellectual property theft in general.
About a dozen years ago, I worked for a small, heartless high-tech startup. The cash money pay
was good, my immediate manager was extremely
clueless, and the founders and senior management
had (for once) greatly overestimated the complexity of the development effort. This made
for an extremely leisurely work schedule that
(almost) made up for their other obnoxious
habits.
My first week there I was writing some code to
interpret the logfiles for their product, when
I needed to Read the Manual to figure something
out. While an MS C Compiler was installed on
my peecee, I didn't have copies of the manual
and figured they must be around someplace.
Twenty minutes later I discovered that (1) the
only copy of the manuals was in the (locked)
office of my boss, and (2) there was only one
C compiler for about a half-dozen coders. My boss was in meetings all day and didn't want
to be disturbed. It was a Friday so I went
home before lunch to start my weekend early.
On Monday morning I got the manuals from my
boss, fixed the code, and had this entertaining
conversation when I returned the manuals:
Me: We need a few more copies of the
compilers, at least so more than one coder
can read them at a time.
My Boss: We don't have the money for
that.
Me: So? We're violating the license
agreement. I'd hate to cross MS on something
like this.
My Boss: Don't worry, those agreements
are impossible to enforce.
I went back to my cube with much to think about.
Only a week before, I had signed a fearsome
stack of employment agreements with terrifying
and nasty language. The employee packet also
had an intimidating memo about employee's
stealing any company property -- it left me
with the impression that I'd end up in jail
if I accidentally took a pen home.
... and my boss said that "those kind of agreements are hard to enforce"???
Well, like I said my boss was clueless so I
kind of let it slide. But I noticed that for
a company with over thirty people, there was
only two or three legal copies of any word
processing or desktop publishing software
around the office.
Later that week there
was a big dust-up and two of the six engineers
quit. In order to patch up the morale a cozy
meeting was arranged that friday with the company president, my boss,
and the remains of the software group of which
I was a part.
At one point I brought up the software license
issues:
Me: Y'know, having only one C compiler
for four engineers is illegal. We really ought
to buy more copies.
President: We'd rather hire really good
people than buy software.
Me: So you're saying we should steal to support the company?
President: It isn't really stealing...
Me: I doubt Microsoft would agree with
you. What you're doing gives every employee
who walks out of here with a beef, like [the
two guys who just quit], a way to shut this
whole company down.
He didn't know how to answer that. My boss
gave me a dirty look. A few weeks later
a "working group" was set up, headed by my
boss, to identify what software we needed to
buy and buy it. This group met weekly for
over six months and probably after -- well
past when I left the company. As far as I
know, they never did spend any actual money
correcting the problem.
In the following months I noticed that a fair
amount of code in the company's products had
also been lifted from various places. Some of
it was harmless and easily corrected. Some of
it went a long way towards explaining why
the company was rather secretive about how it
had managed to build its products. I told
my boss about it and he basically blew me
off by adding it to the list of "issues"
(e.g. cases of intellectual property theft)
his "working group" was looking at.
I quit after less than six months on the job,
taking a well-deserved year being mostly
unemployed. The company failed a couple of
years later, warmly despised by its ex-employees,
customers, and probably anyone else who came into
contact with them.
My boss was probably more clueless than average,
but I don't think crap like this is at all
uncommon.
How do you fight this silliness?
If you are into persuasion, I'd try an argument
that goes something like this:
We're a technology company. Our primary
assets are intangible. One of those assets is
the intellectual property represented by the
source code to the software we sell.
Putting a dollar value on any such software
is highly subjective and very vulnerable to
perception, both positive and negative. We want
to avoid any negative impressions which might
cause difficulties, in particular during a due
diligence process such as during an acquisition,
business partnership, or when raising money from
investors.
Probably the best approach is pretty gentle.
Make friends with some people in your accounting
department. If you've already got a friend there,
so much the better. Tell your friend about this
problem, emphasizing what it might do to the
company's stock price or how much trouble it
might make during an acquisition. People tend
to lend more credence to information from someone
they know than from some person they never met
who comes to them with a story of gloom and doom.
Unfortunately, this becomes a lot harder in a larger company.
A less discreet approach might be to write a nice memo on paper on the above themes, print it out and sign and date it. Keep a copy for yourself, give a copy to your boss, and give a copy to your CFO or VP of Finance. Emphasize that
these kind of intellectual property violations
could cause problems with the value of the
company or the company's products.
A final approach is to discreetly contact
your company's auditors. Auditors have a bad
rap right now and are hence pretty stuffy
about any iffy situations. They are involved in
assigning a value to any assets a company has
(like software that might have a license violation) and they will probably be very interested in what you have to say. This can
make quite a bit of trouble for your company
if you aren't sure it can be fixed easily,
so be a bit careful with this approach. However,
it is less of an escalation than going public
with the embarassing information.
A friend of mine who visited the Soviet Union
in the early 1980s to do a bit of climbing told
quite a few tales about Ti climbing gear. He
even brought back an ice axe made of Ti. Very
light but it was rather crudely made.
Of course, nowadays companies like
Snow Peak
make all sorts of stuff out of Ti, stoves, pots
& pans, forks, spoons, and sporks. I even have
a spork.
Grivel
makes a bunch of Titanium mountaineering gear,
including nicer ice axes than that antedilivian
Soviet model I saw in British Columbia in 1982.
You should be quite satisfied that you can even get high-speed connectivity (not to mention, connectivity from multiple providers at once) where you're at. Here in the USA, the most technologically advanced society in the world, it's difficult if not impossible to get *any* high speed service outside a major metropolitan area. Before my cable monopoly upgraded its network, I couldn't get any service at all that wasn't long distance dialup.
So I suppose wireless networks don't count?
I play BBC world service and radio 1 over the internet for several hours per day. Other than that, I get two radio stations, one of which just went out of business.
Fast wireless internet is available in a lot of
places if you aren't so enterprising that you'd
do it yourself. And doing it yourself won't
cost you two weeks pay.
I'm in the middle of darkest America --50 miles
from the nearest Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut. If you
want real culture -- a decent university, a
topless bar, a Pottery Barn, or a punk rock
club with genuine graffiti on the walls you need to drive for four times that distance. I can't get a land-line for a telephone, and cable television is something that happens to other people. But I've got excellent line-of-sight and can hit a wireless ethernet repeater 18 miles away.
As for the main topic, I suspect one of the
reasons they make it so hard for people to
get providerless IPs and advertise routes is
that one idiot loose in a BGP configuration
can cause mysterious loss-of-connectivity
problems -- not just for themselves but for people all over the world. Some jerk at
university in Columbia booted up a Cisco,
entered some random network addresses because he
hadn't gotten any yet, and a bunch of C&W
customers in Seattle were cut off from about
half of the Internet for several weeks (the
problem is even harder to solve when someone
at an ISP makes a mistake!).
On the one hand, you can get paid
a lot of money to figure out and fix those
problems (and pay for wireless Internet
and a unabomber-style shack in the mountains).
On the other hand, most people would rather
prevent those problems from happening in the
first place. From personal experience, I
believe that 90 percent of the people who
muck around with routing protocols are
grossly unqualified to do so -- and that
includes me, I know I'm a damned fool.
The hordes of people who think they would
like to play with BGP are probably worse.
There has to be a better way. People want and
need back-up internet connections (heck, last
summer a forest fire and the resulting smoke and
melted antenna on a distant hilltop knocked me
off the net for three weeks). However, solving
that problem with providerless IPs, an autonomous
system number, and routing protocols is like
swatting mosquitoes with a 4x4.
Now for this article. Duh. These admins should be fired. I run 802.11b at my house with full encryption
and other security features on. I wouldn't let an access point in this building without securing it first.
This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem. These are probably the same people that don't
patch up to the security holes and wonder why they get hacked two years later.
I'll bet those sysadmins would be very surprised to discover that the 802.1b access points were even on their networks. This stuff
is too cheap and bone-head easy to install.
Apparently a lot of consultants of various types
like to pack them around with their laptops so
they don't have to futz with network cables whereever they happen to be working that day.
... and to think of it another way, if you were a
bad guy this is a pretty awesome way to put a tap
on someone's entire network without their knowledge. Sometimes it seems to me that wireless
LANs were invented by either law enforcement agencies or spies. Or both -- maybe they're in
cahoots.
This isn't merely a clue problem. There is a
control problem as well.
About ten years ago I worked out a nice nonconfrontational way to deal with this silliness.
On your first day at work, when they're handing all of the things you have to sign to you and issuing you rubber bands and a stapler, start reading the stuff. Read it slowly. Your new boss or the personnel doofus won't hang around waiting for you to finish. After perusing the documents
for a reasonable amount of time (20 minutes is good), return the stack of documents to the personnel guy. Just "forget" to sign the non-compete agreement.
Few personnel directors are anal enough to check
all of the documents.
Another variant that isn't so innocent but still plausible is to rip the signature page off the
agreement. This is especially good if you have
a chance to take the agreement home before you
sign it.
Make sure you sign the tax stuff well and legibly, because they are sure to look at that and you need it to get paid. If there
are any problems with those they will likely check
the other documents too.
It is even better if you arrange to have a pen that is on the edge of quitting, and sign one or two of the documents with that pen. That way
if they ever do check they'll just give you
the benefit of the doubt.
If someone ever notices that the agreement isn't signed, just act very puzzled and
say, "I'm sure I signed it." As long as you
let people think you're clueless, they'll give
you a lot of slack.
Another company I worked for never got an I-9
(where you have to give ID to prove you're an American) from me until almost two years after I left the company. That was real fun.
Look for MARS: The Living Planet
by Barry E. Digregorio with Dr. Gilbert Levin and
Dr. Patricia Ann Straat. Published by Frog, Ltd.
This book is informative but needlessly shrill. I personally don't think Digregorio did Levin any
favors writing this book. However, if you skip
the paranoid ravings about biological warfare
and contamination threats there are a couple of
good points scattered through the books.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know.
Auto accidents kill far, far more people than iPod accidents do. I can see that combinations of the two would be more dangerous.
Maybe the solution is to outlaw automobiles. Think of the benefits... less obesity, no auto accidents, reduced pollution and global warming risk...
I'd think, in the modern era, that a shortwave receiver is a lot more rarely seen than a laptop computer.
And given that I've found and used internet cafes in oases in the Sahara Desert, in villages in Nepal, and in noisy, smoky discos in Siberia, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of alternatives in the modern world. And sneaking into the bathroom to listen to shortwave transmissions is a hell of a lot more suspicious than checking your yahoo email for love letters from a lady friend back home...
You could pass a hell of a lot of information with simple pre-arranged codes in photographs. Say, if you receive a photo of a woman in a purple dress it means you are to (for example) blow up someone's embassy... Sure it is low bandwidth, but how much bandwidth would spies need?
I don't see how you can expect to get paid for discovering a security flaw.
If you are willing to travel to the head offices of the company in question and explain, in person, what you have discovered, it is reasonable that the company would pay your travel expenses and a fee for your time.
Because I enjoy visiting Canada, and if I make too much trouble I might be made much, much less welcome next time.
Canadian Customs has "searched" my laptop twice. Once I sat at the border for about four hours while the tried to figure out how to use the finder. U.S. customs took my laptop (a MacBook Pro) out of the case and looked at it, but I think they decided they didn't want to spend the time with it.
I shudder at how long it would take the good customs folks to work their way through a Linux box, or a decently encrypted hard drive.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing.
In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
I worked at a company (mercifully long out of business) that was psychotically cheap.
Apparently one day they needed some screws, and rather than going to the hardware store and spending three bucks, they dragooned several people into spending most of a day removing "extra" screws from peecees around the office. I said they were psychotically cheap.
Anyway, two of the four screws attaching my motherboard to the case were removed. After that irregular modification, I could reboot my machine by smacking the case (apparently causing a short circuit). Some weeks later I was demoing the forgettable latest software revision of the company's product to some directors and other bigwigs. Of course, during the demo the software went a little crazy. I looked at the screen carefully, slid my right hand along the case like I was looking for something, and at a seemingly (to the audience) random point hit the case HARD.
The machine instantly rebooted, of course.
My technical virtuosity was never, ever questioned during the six months I remained at that company.
The lava dome was was not blown out in the 1980 eruption. The upper thousand-plus feet of the mountain were blown out. A lava dome formed in the time period after the major eruptions of 1980 and that lava dome was blown out later, I think around 1985.
I'm probably not as worried as I should be about this.
One of the real problems driving this is that being an ISP or being a backbone provider is nowhere near as profitable as having cool content. The ISPs in various forms have been either trying to buy content or produce their own. Neither approach has been very successful. In my opinion that failure is due to the business models between pumping packets and producing content are pretty incompatible.
Now let's assume that the net isn't neutral. So every ISP will contact, say, Yahoo! and offer some kind of "enhanced services package" that will guarantee that packets to or from Yahoo! will get there faster.
My first question -- how does Yahoo! or any other customer measure whether they are getting any benefit from getting their packets faster? Given the service quality history that most ISPs have, I'd be pretty damned skeptical that they could get something running that could be specific enough to an actual entity they could bill, and keep it running. I'd also wonder how Yahoo! or any other business could justify paying such a tariff if they couldn't measure the benefit.
My second question -- how many "enhanced serice" deals can a company like Yahoo! manage? There are still quite literally thousands of ISPs in the world. There aren't that many backbone providers, but there are still quite a few. That is still a lot of contracts to manage. Note that having even dozens of such deals is going to make the measurement problem described in the first question even tougher.
It seems to me that this is going to be a very tough sell. The threat that they could favor content they produce themselves kind of begs the question -- they really haven't been able to produce persuasive content of their own, and even some of the spectacular mergers (e.g. AOL/Time Warner) haven't been what I'd call spectacular successes.
One place where this non-neutral net idea could "work" well is with foreign service providers, especially in poorer countries with fewer network access points. There it could be done by demanding a "tariff" from Yahoo! or Google or all access to those services could be effectively blocked in such a country. This could be a killer revenue source for poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional third-world countries, much like long-distance tarrifs are now.
The companies that are talking about tiered internet service are mainly ran by pointy-haired people who barely understand this whole internet thing and want to wish it away. Most people, in particular in the most profitable markets, have choices of internet service providers. The ISP who makes a policy change that makes Yahoo!, Google, or Ebay slow will lose customers. Same problem if a particular backbone provider does that to an ISP. The first business to try this is going to learn how easy it is to lose a lot of customers very quickly. There won't be a second time.
I'm even less worried about any persistent efforts by the United States government to snoop on me. Oh, they'll try. But it is doubtful they will ever be very effective at it. I'll admit it is technically possible to monitor all traffic on tcp port 25 that is going through any of the (relatively few) access points that route traffic internationally. With furious effort, you could even store a lot of it -- and think about how much of it would be p0rn spam. Of course, in the modern era, a lot of SMTP traffic is encrypted with SSL, some of it is over VPNs, and some of it might be accessed via other protocols. Some of that email might be accessed through webmail and it won't be immediately obvious how to fish the emails out. Yeah, Yahoo! and MSN might roll over and hand the emails over to a big bad government. But you'd have to be looking in a lot of places all of the time to build an effective police state on top of the Internet we have today. Given infinite resources and incredible competence it might be possible, just barely.
Oh, but did I mention instant messaging (with how many incompatible protocols)? Did I mention online fora?
Resources and competence seem to be rare goods in the U.S. Government these days. Why should halfhearted snooping be somehow special?
Remember, this is the same government that didn't connect the dots on 9-11.
Remember, this is the same government that connected dots that weren't there in Iraq.
Remember, this is the same government that botches monster iT projects (the FAA and the FBI) all the time.
Remember, this is the same government that still hasn't translated all of the documents captured in Afghanistan.
Remember, this is the same government that did a heck of a job on New Orleans.
Remember, this is the same government that hasn't captured Osama, and took years to capture someone hiding in North Carolina.
It seems to me that the best approach is to make any information from Google be of less than optimal quality.
It would be trivial to use generate quite literally millions of trivial search queries and poison any data mining attempts.
I'd be all for large numbers of searches for "pregnant teenage nurses in latex"
My feelings are that Sony is a great hardware company being tormented by its music and movies divisions. Whatever genuis in Tokyo came up with the idea of acquiring media companies needs to be beaten. Badly.
There are some pretty substantial, um, language issues with this letter. It doesn't seem likely to me. There are sentences without a clear subject or verb, and ones with a subject and a verb have substantial agreement issues. There are still enough native english speakers at the U.S. state department that I doubt anything this sloppily written would actually get distributed.
Parts of the letter are also explaining things that the recipient already knows -- in particular, why would you need to tell Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that the U.K. currently has the presidency of the European Union? He of all people already know that. On the other hand, it adds context that third parties (like most Register readers) might not have.
I'm pretty sure whomever wrote this letter intended it to be published. I am pretty doubtful those parties collect a paycheck from the United States government.
Some things are really in the motherhood and apple-pie categories: revision control, a build system architecture, bug tracking, documentation of the codebase. A lot of other things like coding standards and naming conventions are, to me at least, less valuable. I'll articulate on why that is later on.
The real important point: All of these things are tools to used to produce something hopefully useful. Having a killer bug-tracking system or a great coding standard won't keep your company in business. It won't even guarantee that you'll produce a great product. Lots of successful companies have been arguably successful without those things. Lots of software we all use and love has rather repulsive code at its heart, and even the cleanest projects have their dank corners. I've worked for lots of companies that aren't around anymore that did have excellent coding standards and even followed them, though.
Far more important is making sure that the people writing the code and the people who know the requirements are able and willing to talk to each other. Preferably over many beers. This is even more important if they are the same people.
About coding conventions and comments: we humans tend to see what we expect to see when reading source code. I'm usually a naive, trusting person and if the comments say that the code does X, I assume that it does X. Even if it doesn't, really. And figuring out what it really does when the comments are out of sync of the code (and face it, that always happens -- smart people have been writing buggy code for decades now, and having the code out of sync with the comments is just another bug that there is no way to detect except through unpleasant experience) is often harder than dealing with no comments at all. On the other hand, if I come into a project and am handed 50k lines of C++ from someone just fired for an act of workplace violence and no comments except copyright notices I know I'd better put my thinking cap on and pay attention.
The claim is that this reaction requires a tiny amount of water (presumably for the hydrogen) to produce a tremendous amount of energy.
Just a practical question here: how can we have oceans if this bozo^h^h^h^hdude is right?
Bear with me here. If there is some magical state that you can push hydrogen (presumably bound up with oxygen in water) into that releases a bunch of energy, then it would seem to me that if you fed enough activation energy into a bunch of water you'd get energy back. So if you had a lot of water under a lot of pressure close to something hot, that should release a lot of energy... more energy than you started with. Maybe you'd even get a chain reaction. Cool.
Two words come to mind: undersea volcanoes.
Gadgets are fun, but getting away from too many gadgets is one more reason to go skiing.
If multiple people are buried, you have much bigger problems than triage. With an avalanche transceiver, you find a buried victim by finding their transceiver -- well, duh. But this is done by measuring the relative signal strength, usually through an audible beep from the buried transceiver or sometimes from an LED display on the receiver. Of course, signal strength can vary bewilderingly depending on how deeply the victim is buried, the orientation of the antenna on the transmitting and receiving transceivers, and whether the victim and their pack are obscuring their transceiver.
This is complicated. It isn't something you can figure out in the minutes after an avalanche. Lots and lots of practice is required to get any degree of competence.
If you have multiple burials, you are almost always forced to go after the strongest signal first -- often you can't even "hear" the other signals until you find the strongest one. This implies to me that having vital signs is rarely going to enter into the decision-making process on whom to recover first.
For backcountry skiers, I usually feel that if you have a multiple burial situation you've already screwed up.
This might be of moderate use to avalanche control people (now there is a great job, explosives and skiing combined!), ski patrollers, heli-ski guides, and maybe mountain rescue organizations. As a product for the casual outdoorsperson I'm pretty skeptical.
Most programmers think of themselves more as artists than engineers. Most of the management models and software development models kicked around misunderstand this. Even more confusing, many people writing code aren't motivated by money -- and the fact that more people say that than actually beleive it makes it even more twisted.
Since it is hard to measure output, especially on software that isn't done, we usually just measure input. This is profoundly bogus, life isn't graded on effort. How many times have you heard someone brag, "we have four hundred engineers working on that problem!"?
That is like deciding a movie is better because of the cast is very large, or that a rock band is better because they have four hundred drummers.
Writing software is a pretty interesting activity. One of the rather wild things about it is that individual productivity varies by huge factors, probably as much as four orders of magnitude. My own experience (and I doubt many people have seen very few exceptions) is that on any given software project, a tiny minority, usually no more than four or five people, do nearly all of the work. Generally there is pretty strong agreement on who those four or five people are. The rest of the people either make minor contributions or make problems that the people actually doing the work have to clean up.
I've never worked at an organization that didn't emphasize that they hire, "only really good people." The question comes up, where do the 50% of people who are honestly below average end up working? I've never found this place.
For various reasons, size of a software development organization does matter. None of those reasons have anything to do with productivity or the quality of the end product (an important exception is how good Open Source projects parallelize debugging and testing). In a big company, a bigger development organization affords its managers nicer chairs and offices. In a start-up company, a bigger development organization impresses naive investors. In neither of these cases does a bigger development organization produce better software more quickly.
This is analogous to creative businesses like making movies, music, or writing books. I suspect in the end that salary distributions will be very similar -- a few people will make big bucks and have quite a bit of visibility, the vast majority will make pretty poor wages, and there will be a whole lot of wannabees waiting tables hoping for their big break. Companies will pitch having a few star programmers on their team to help lure more investment and interest in the product (think about how Julia Roberts or Nicholas Cage generate buzz for a movie just by being on the cast).
The current model for employing coders is a lot like the old "studio system" that Hollywood had before WWII. The current economic mess might be a force that will move the industry closer to the "star" system that Hollywood has today.
Some might argue that companies have a huge stake in controlling their programmers, since they are the only people who have the expertise to improve the products they have developed. But nobody would take a Terminator sequence seriously without Arnold, and Nirvana without Kurt Cobain is similarly unimaginable.
This might seem grossly unfair to the vast majority of programmers. It is. But there are people running loose portraying themselves as programmers who have:
- Edited CVS repositories directly to "save time"
- Deleted comments from source files to make the files compile more quickly
- Bulk-converted all project source files to uppercase so they were easier to read
I haven't made any of these things up. One of the few benefits of a newer system is that people who do stuff like that would be sleeping on grates.Exactly my sentiments.
About a dozen years ago, I worked for a small, heartless high-tech startup. The cash money pay was good, my immediate manager was extremely clueless, and the founders and senior management had (for once) greatly overestimated the complexity of the development effort. This made for an extremely leisurely work schedule that (almost) made up for their other obnoxious habits.
My first week there I was writing some code to interpret the logfiles for their product, when I needed to Read the Manual to figure something out. While an MS C Compiler was installed on my peecee, I didn't have copies of the manual and figured they must be around someplace.
Twenty minutes later I discovered that (1) the only copy of the manuals was in the (locked) office of my boss, and (2) there was only one C compiler for about a half-dozen coders. My boss was in meetings all day and didn't want to be disturbed. It was a Friday so I went home before lunch to start my weekend early.
On Monday morning I got the manuals from my boss, fixed the code, and had this entertaining conversation when I returned the manuals:
Me: We need a few more copies of the compilers, at least so more than one coder can read them at a time.
My Boss: We don't have the money for that.
Me: So? We're violating the license agreement. I'd hate to cross MS on something like this.
My Boss: Don't worry, those agreements are impossible to enforce.
I went back to my cube with much to think about. Only a week before, I had signed a fearsome stack of employment agreements with terrifying and nasty language. The employee packet also had an intimidating memo about employee's stealing any company property -- it left me with the impression that I'd end up in jail if I accidentally took a pen home.
Well, like I said my boss was clueless so I kind of let it slide. But I noticed that for a company with over thirty people, there was only two or three legal copies of any word processing or desktop publishing software around the office. Later that week there was a big dust-up and two of the six engineers quit. In order to patch up the morale a cozy meeting was arranged that friday with the company president, my boss, and the remains of the software group of which I was a part.
At one point I brought up the software license issues:
Me: Y'know, having only one C compiler for four engineers is illegal. We really ought to buy more copies.
President: We'd rather hire really good people than buy software.
Me: So you're saying we should steal to support the company?
President: It isn't really stealing...
Me: I doubt Microsoft would agree with you. What you're doing gives every employee who walks out of here with a beef, like [the two guys who just quit], a way to shut this whole company down.
He didn't know how to answer that. My boss gave me a dirty look. A few weeks later a "working group" was set up, headed by my boss, to identify what software we needed to buy and buy it. This group met weekly for over six months and probably after -- well past when I left the company. As far as I know, they never did spend any actual money correcting the problem.
In the following months I noticed that a fair amount of code in the company's products had also been lifted from various places. Some of it was harmless and easily corrected. Some of it went a long way towards explaining why the company was rather secretive about how it had managed to build its products. I told my boss about it and he basically blew me off by adding it to the list of "issues" (e.g. cases of intellectual property theft) his "working group" was looking at.
I quit after less than six months on the job, taking a well-deserved year being mostly unemployed. The company failed a couple of years later, warmly despised by its ex-employees, customers, and probably anyone else who came into contact with them.
My boss was probably more clueless than average, but I don't think crap like this is at all uncommon.
How do you fight this silliness?
If you are into persuasion, I'd try an argument that goes something like this:
We're a technology company. Our primary assets are intangible. One of those assets is the intellectual property represented by the source code to the software we sell. Putting a dollar value on any such software is highly subjective and very vulnerable to perception, both positive and negative. We want to avoid any negative impressions which might cause difficulties, in particular during a due diligence process such as during an acquisition, business partnership, or when raising money from investors.
Probably the best approach is pretty gentle. Make friends with some people in your accounting department. If you've already got a friend there, so much the better. Tell your friend about this problem, emphasizing what it might do to the company's stock price or how much trouble it might make during an acquisition. People tend to lend more credence to information from someone they know than from some person they never met who comes to them with a story of gloom and doom. Unfortunately, this becomes a lot harder in a larger company.
A less discreet approach might be to write a nice memo on paper on the above themes, print it out and sign and date it. Keep a copy for yourself, give a copy to your boss, and give a copy to your CFO or VP of Finance. Emphasize that these kind of intellectual property violations could cause problems with the value of the company or the company's products.
A final approach is to discreetly contact your company's auditors. Auditors have a bad rap right now and are hence pretty stuffy about any iffy situations. They are involved in assigning a value to any assets a company has (like software that might have a license violation) and they will probably be very interested in what you have to say. This can make quite a bit of trouble for your company if you aren't sure it can be fixed easily, so be a bit careful with this approach. However, it is less of an escalation than going public with the embarassing information.
Of course, nowadays companies like Snow Peak make all sorts of stuff out of Ti, stoves, pots & pans, forks, spoons, and sporks. I even have a spork.
Grivel makes a bunch of Titanium mountaineering gear, including nicer ice axes than that antedilivian Soviet model I saw in British Columbia in 1982.
So I suppose wireless networks don't count? I play BBC world service and radio 1 over the internet for several hours per day. Other than that, I get two radio stations, one of which just went out of business.
Fast wireless internet is available in a lot of places if you aren't so enterprising that you'd do it yourself. And doing it yourself won't cost you two weeks pay.
I'm in the middle of darkest America --50 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut. If you want real culture -- a decent university, a topless bar, a Pottery Barn, or a punk rock club with genuine graffiti on the walls you need to drive for four times that distance. I can't get a land-line for a telephone, and cable television is something that happens to other people. But I've got excellent line-of-sight and can hit a wireless ethernet repeater 18 miles away.
As for the main topic, I suspect one of the reasons they make it so hard for people to get providerless IPs and advertise routes is that one idiot loose in a BGP configuration can cause mysterious loss-of-connectivity problems -- not just for themselves but for people all over the world. Some jerk at university in Columbia booted up a Cisco, entered some random network addresses because he hadn't gotten any yet, and a bunch of C&W customers in Seattle were cut off from about half of the Internet for several weeks (the problem is even harder to solve when someone at an ISP makes a mistake!). On the one hand, you can get paid a lot of money to figure out and fix those problems (and pay for wireless Internet and a unabomber-style shack in the mountains). On the other hand, most people would rather prevent those problems from happening in the first place. From personal experience, I believe that 90 percent of the people who muck around with routing protocols are grossly unqualified to do so -- and that includes me, I know I'm a damned fool. The hordes of people who think they would like to play with BGP are probably worse.
There has to be a better way. People want and need back-up internet connections (heck, last summer a forest fire and the resulting smoke and melted antenna on a distant hilltop knocked me off the net for three weeks). However, solving that problem with providerless IPs, an autonomous system number, and routing protocols is like swatting mosquitoes with a 4x4.
Just my opinion.
I'll bet those sysadmins would be very surprised to discover that the 802.1b access points were even on their networks. This stuff is too cheap and bone-head easy to install. Apparently a lot of consultants of various types like to pack them around with their laptops so they don't have to futz with network cables whereever they happen to be working that day.
This isn't merely a clue problem. There is a control problem as well.
On your first day at work, when they're handing all of the things you have to sign to you and issuing you rubber bands and a stapler, start reading the stuff. Read it slowly. Your new boss or the personnel doofus won't hang around waiting for you to finish. After perusing the documents for a reasonable amount of time (20 minutes is good), return the stack of documents to the personnel guy. Just "forget" to sign the non-compete agreement.
Few personnel directors are anal enough to check all of the documents.
Another variant that isn't so innocent but still plausible is to rip the signature page off the agreement. This is especially good if you have a chance to take the agreement home before you sign it.
Make sure you sign the tax stuff well and legibly, because they are sure to look at that and you need it to get paid. If there are any problems with those they will likely check the other documents too.
It is even better if you arrange to have a pen that is on the edge of quitting, and sign one or two of the documents with that pen. That way if they ever do check they'll just give you the benefit of the doubt.
If someone ever notices that the agreement isn't signed, just act very puzzled and say, "I'm sure I signed it." As long as you let people think you're clueless, they'll give you a lot of slack.
Another company I worked for never got an I-9 (where you have to give ID to prove you're an American) from me until almost two years after I left the company. That was real fun.
This book is informative but needlessly shrill. I personally don't think Digregorio did Levin any favors writing this book. However, if you skip the paranoid ravings about biological warfare and contamination threats there are a couple of good points scattered through the books.
Read the book and find out.