Ok, here's what you do. The emails he's sending contain a few bits of data that are critical. One is the IP address that he is using at the time he sends the email, and the other is the time (according to the mail server; both bits are in the header of the email) at which the mail is sent.
Get an attorney, and file a "John Doe" lawsuit against the thief...the goal here is to get a lawsuit, so that you can get a subpoena. And who are you subpoena'ing, and for what? The ISP the thief uses, for the logs of the phone number that was connected at that time, and the account information of the owner of that account. Turn that over to the police, and you should be good to go. That information is sufficient (explain it well to them) to get a search warrant and...voila! He's crispy.
K2 has a ski that works on a related principle. On skis, you want to get rid of or dampen low-frequency vibrations, so they built a system whereby a piezoelectric unit is actuated, turning some of the kinetic energy of the vibration into electricity, which then goes to an LED on the top of the ski. Then, the energy simply leaves the ski as light. The system seems to work very well...I've tried these skis and may actually buy a pair later this year, I liked them so much.
With the damage we do to our knees and hips walking and jogging on unnaturally hard surfaces like concrete and normal flooring, I wonder if there is any (minor as it may be) benefit to this sort of system from a shock-absorbing standpoint?
There is a system being used by the FBI (and probably some others) that you can feed enormous amounts of information, like habits of suspects under surveillance, and it will find patterns. If, for example, you have someone whom you suspect of being a spy (*cough*Hanssen*cough), you can cross-reference what you notice while surveilling them with the known habits (already entered, of course) of the diplomatic staff of the local embassy of the suspect nation. It's almost like SilentRunner for real life. With the pattern and context-matching ability of this stuff, I wonder if this is the system, or a component of it?
Um, these students/researchers aren't somehow brainwashed to prefer work for corporations over standard academic research. There's nothing being put in the water to make this happen. The fact is, corporations throw more money (or other enticements) into this than public forums do. And it's not likely that stopping them from doing so will magically make all sorts of public-domain research start happening again. It is not a zero-sum situation where removing one competitor will make the other competitor more successful somehow. Universities and academic foundations need to realize that they need to COMPETE with private industry if they want researchers to keep their findings in the public domain. I certainly am not going to expect a corporation to just give away the results of things it has driven or funded; that's just not how it works, nor is it how it was ever expected to work. That's the whole point of academic research in the first place.
I've seen an earlier version of this. It was a bit bulky, and it looks like the real change in Nomad over other older Microvision products is in the size. Still, it's not exactly like it doesn't occlude your vision. The unit does block your view a bit, kind of like looking through a very strange barrier; that's the only way I can describe it. You also have to line it up correctly, or else I imagine (they didn't turn it on until it was lined up right when I tried it) it must look pretty funky. They aim to make full-color versions, but the limitation there is the blue laser. It seems there isn't a suitably portable blue laser yet.
Wait, let's see if I get this right. Cybersquatter dude registers a misspelled domain name, so that he can sell it to the owner of the correctly spelled domain, right? And THAT is considered free speech?
Ohhh, I don't think so. I think the person with a real site who wants to catch the people who accidentally get the spelling wrong (but who intend to go to his/her site anyways) is the one who has something to say. The guy who is just sitting on a domain with a single static "Under Construction...buy our domain!" site does not, however, and could even be considered the real source of the problem. I love the ACLU, even though they can be annoying, but I wish they would realize once in a while that it's not necessarily the heavyweights in life who interfere with the rights of others.
I tried their client in the past, a couple of versions. It totally hosed my networking; I couldn't talk to anything with their client installed. I emailed them, asking what the problem was, telling them what protocols/clients I was running. Turns out the problem was that they don't support the configuration I had, meaning the use of IPX/SPX and Client32, which I needed to be able to access a large number of the network resources where I worked. They still, to my knowledge, have yet to support a configuration for windows that has anything besides just pure (well, in Microsoft's definition) TCP/IP. They don't seem to think there's a problem with that either.
A lot of people have mentioned the fog that exists in determining user response to print ads that is not present in banner ads, and how it's questionable whether print ads work. You'll note that I didn't say "Print ads work." I said "Nobody debates that ads in magazines work," meaning that it's accepted and widely leveraged as a means of advertising. Ergo, from the standpoint of the publisher (the real point here), they do work, because they bring in significant revenue. And while banner ads may or may not work as well from an advertiser standpoint (only to be seen as a failure because the low response rate is clearly documented), banner ads do not live up to the original expectations that were created. Like so many other things, they were supposed to be the magic bullet to render everything else obsolete, and did not achieve that; as a result, anything less is seen not in objective terms, but as a failure to reach a goal.
Part of the problem with the entire business model around online magazines has to do with advertising. Nobody debates that ads in magazines work, and those ads make up a significant part of revenue for the publishers. That's also why high-end geeks in influential positions get enough offers for free magazines that if they fill out all the forms they'd have enough paper to burn through a cold winter in Alaska and still stay warm. Simply put, the magazine can point to "x number of readers who make influential decisions" and thereby lure advertisers.
The other part of the problem is that a standard magazine uses a "push" method of distribution. You don't have to go check for the magazine, it comes to you when it's ready. It says, essentially, "Hey, I'm here...time to read me!" On the other hand, websites are not that way, with the singular exception of whichever site is set as your default page in your browser. Yes, you may have a few you check every day, but how many are you really going to want to have to remember?
This should be obvious to anyone who has ever looked at a unicode chart or has had to click "Cancel" when asked to install character support for any of the myriad languages that need language packs to be displayed in Windows. Ok, so they built a way to theoretically support all of these characters. This does not mean that I can read Japanese, however, and making it possible to see it in my browser will not change that fact, nor will it make Google searchable in Japanese, cause IRC to support katakana or hiragana characters (and just freaking forget kanji unless you want to chat with a graphics tablet). Unicode has purposes (besides making it easier to hack web servers, that is), but the hopes and dreams built around it are a classic case of throwing tech at a social barrier to try and make it go away.
I don't see how it's only programmers who have to worry about this. I'm a security consultant, and among other things, I've had to deal with:
-Being discouraged from presenting at security conferences (professional ones, not HOPE2K or DefCon)
-Having to fend off attempts by my current employer to seize intellectual claims of ownership to research that occurred before I began employment with this company
-Being told that any projects I was working on with other people on the side would become property of this company
-Being told that the solution to the above-mentioned problem was simply "Just don't put your name on it."
I think it's terrible that so many IT companies have started doing this, but it's really not just programmers who are suffering under it. And in a lot of ways, I can understand how some of the things that are a problem for me shouldn't be for a programmer either. After all, when you're hired to write code, that code naturally should belong to the company paying for it, just as I consider any reports or work to be the property of whoever funds them. But research I do on my own time, to keep my own skills up? Good lord! Based on that logic, this company owes a royalty to every company I ever worked at!
I find it hard to imagine that there is a single one of the 51 companies mentioned that is not mostly, if not entirely, contained within the 49 nations mentioned. I've seen things like this before, and they always seem to be trying to yell, "Big bad globalized corporations are going to take over!!!" without even considering that the GDP of nations is made up of the equivalent "GDP" of these companies. Someone should wake these people up and help them realize that yes, corporations do bad things at times, but no, we can't just get rid of them. They serve a purpose too...
Numerous infectious diseases carried by explorers.
For as far back as we've been able to travel with significant speed between dissimilar ecosystems, we have consistently failed to anticipate the tremendous impact of flora and fauna that often accompany those travels. As often as not, the cause is ignorance of the presence of these "passengers." I agree that politics may be a significant driving factor here, but honestly, looking back, have we learned nothing about just using a little bit of caution? If we feel like taking the martian rocks out for a walk in the sun here on earth, we can always do that later...there's no need to do it straight off the recovery site, and the past seems to be a good argument not to do so until we are absolutely sure what it would mean.
Owing to the potential for malfunctioning devices, misconfigured systems, etc. to generate traffic that might appear as a DoS attack under their definitions (they stuck to flooding attacks), I wonder if they drew a line, below which something did not qualify as an attack? And if so, where did they draw the line, and how many script kiddies' actions fell below it?
Yes, but frequency hopping involves an agreement between the two communicating systems as to how often to hop, within what range, and in what pattern. It is for this reason that you can't have interoperability; you can't use just any radio that talks on the same frequency range as a frequency-agile system to join in. And the only thing protecting the security of those communications is the restriction of sale of the devices (and the knowledge of how they establish communications). This is a bit more like a VPN than what they describe here, when you really think about the implementation.
The real difference between the frequency-hopping analogy and reality is the simple fact that unlike FH communications, the internet is supposed to be as interoperable as possible. A Mac can look at the same web page as a Solaris box, or even Windows (if it stays up long enough, obviously, for the page to load). This is accomplished through...wait for it...well-documented and widely disseminated standards. To make the comparison with frequency-hopping systems accurate, you'd need to have all or most transciever manufacturers decide on a few standards, then agree to make all of their systems so that they work with all other ones (by adhering to the standard). And once you do that, how well do you think frequency-hopping will hide what you're saying?
They keep moving around so many times a second that the bad guys can't find them. If a bad guy manages to ping an address that's a target, by the time he even types the "n" in "nmap" it's another address.
But the GOOD traffic can find them? How the hell does this thing know the difference? It sounds like they came up with a great way to hide a computer (especially if they end up trying to pretend to be someone else's IP range in the process), but they totally ignore the fundamental problem: how to tell good traffic from bad without a human having to examine it. This has to be some of the worst snake oil I have ever seen.
This is right, but the impact does not change. To say that desktop application suites for Linux are no more is completely off the mark; if that had any basis, then there wouldn't be any in the first place (after all, how much deader can something be than "didn't even exist yet"?). But...while the desktop applications are in their infancy, their Win32 competitors (ok, so just Microsoft) are significantly older...but not frozen in time. Hey, they just put that @#$&ing paper clip to death, I want to go buy a copy of Office XP just for that reason alone!:)
The server applications are mature because they had a head start. Many originated as server applications for other UNIX flavors. Also, there's a matter of public expectations...6 years ago, Linux wasn't quite in the spotlight as it's been the past couple of years, which gives a bit more time to get things right. Once you get attention, you are expected to deliver, right now. And by the time desktop apps develop that much, a lot of the public will have long since given up, unfortunately. I don't like it either, but it's how I see it.
Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.
This might be a hell of a good place to use a really fault-tolerant and flexible architecture, like a cell matrix. That way, upgrades need not be so significantly hardware-dependent, and repairs can often be a matter of routing around damaged processors (not to mention the lesser specificity of devices means it's easier to keep spares on hand).
I certainly don't blame them in the least...I wondered how much longer they'd keep the mirror up. One entertaining perousal through Attrition's "Going Postal" section shows you a combination of impatient hackers showering profanity at Munge, Jericho, and the rest of the crew for not being fast enough at mirroring sites (as if that was their purpose in life), right alongside threats of legal action by clueless victims of defacements. And the whole while, to keep the moral high ground, Attrition would turn down security work by anyone mirrored, no matter how much money was offered or how strong the plea for help.
I've seen a lot of discussion in the past year on the point of the Attrition mirror, including a session by Attrition themselves at DefCon last year, and this was clearly a long time coming. I'm sorry to see it end, but also in a sense happy for the fact that the guys who had to maintain the mirror will see some peace return to their lives.
This is not a new idea to security in general. Safes and vaults are rated in terms of "hours," meaning how many hours, at a minimum, that container will resist breach against the current state-of-the-art cracking methods. (Yes, it's called cracking there too.) I suggested applying a similar system to the report given for security assessments by my company, but quickly found out how impractical it would be.
The reason why you can do this with a safe is because there are so many known quantities. You know what the safe is made of, and how it is built, and the properties of both, with no hidden surprises. The vulnerabilities of both stay constant over time as well; you don't ever hear about a previously undiscovered buffer overflow in carbon steel:) And finally, the methods of attacking safes and vaults do not change quite so quickly as hacking methods evolve, so you can know authoritatively what would be done by an attacker, and account for all of it.
If you're smart, you'll take Henson's case as a warning. You'll think about what your own statements would look like, with their context totally removed, and in the harsh spotlight of a courtroom. Do you really need to post that joke, or wouldn't the judge find it funny?
Or, if you're actually brave, you'll refuse to cow under the perceived threat of rare circumstances like this. This is a horrible miscarriage of justice, but I find it hard to believe it to be a common occurrence. On the other hand, if I were to watch everything I say in a public forum from this day onwards because of this incident...well, that would be a common occurrence, and greatly magnify the damage caused by this. Furthermore, I have enough faith in this country and our Bill of Rights to think that the better choice is to accept the risk, and aim to set a precedent against such abuse of the law in the future.
Daaaamn...I always thought of the problems with key escrow as an issue of abuse by our own government, but for them to actually consider enabling surveillance by countries like China?? Incredible. For all of their yelling and screaming about how France and other countries are spying on businesses for the benefit of their own domestic corporations, they were thinking about giving other countries the keys to the kingdom. As if we needed another reason to be distrustful of those whose job it is to look after us.
If they take the pro-handyman bias TOO far, we might end up with Tim "The Toolman" Taylor up there. God knows what he could possibly mess up in space...
"Honey...check out what I did with the communications dish! It was so wimpy, so I direct-fed it power from one of the redundant power feeds. Now you can microwave popcorn anywhere in Colorado!"
Although it isn't documentation, and gets used for somewhat different purposes, law firms have a similar need. They don't look at it in terms of CVS, however, and the documents they deal in tend to evolve more slowly, but also pass through more hands in general. Furthermore, particularly with documents relating to negotiations, version control AND change tracking are an absolute requirement. Just the hint of a notion that a firm is not able to know precisely what changed between one draft and another can result in a catastrophic loss of credibility when negotiating.
They refer to it as "document management." While a big part of that is also a matter of FINDING the documents (think of alllll that paper), the most challenging part remains tracking changes. You might want to contact a company that I've dealt with in the past who makes a fantastic system (sorry, it's not open source) called iManage. It's overkill for what you need, but you may be able to show them another market they haven't thought of, and develop something with them to suit your purposes.
And no, I don't work for iManage, have any stock (if they are traded, even), or anything of the sorts. I just really liked the product when I helped implement it a few years ago, and know it does a good job.
Re:We're not exactly treated like migrant workers.
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Ahh, but you see, you've hit the nail on the head. First of all, carpal tunnel syndrome was at best a new discovery during the time you describe...that is not something a union could address. These days, it's being dealt with much more effectively now that it's actually understood.
Second of all, you were able to start your own business with the skills you have. Was that really an option for the typical unskilled laborer working in the mills? We are not dependent on our employers to the same degree as the workers of days past, or even the industrial workers of the present. An autoworker cannot go off and start his own company doing what he did on a factory production line, but a developer can freelance or start his own firm entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Get an attorney, and file a "John Doe" lawsuit against the thief...the goal here is to get a lawsuit, so that you can get a subpoena. And who are you subpoena'ing, and for what? The ISP the thief uses, for the logs of the phone number that was connected at that time, and the account information of the owner of that account. Turn that over to the police, and you should be good to go. That information is sufficient (explain it well to them) to get a search warrant and...voila! He's crispy.
Happy hunting!
With the damage we do to our knees and hips walking and jogging on unnaturally hard surfaces like concrete and normal flooring, I wonder if there is any (minor as it may be) benefit to this sort of system from a shock-absorbing standpoint?
There is a system being used by the FBI (and probably some others) that you can feed enormous amounts of information, like habits of suspects under surveillance, and it will find patterns. If, for example, you have someone whom you suspect of being a spy (*cough*Hanssen*cough), you can cross-reference what you notice while surveilling them with the known habits (already entered, of course) of the diplomatic staff of the local embassy of the suspect nation. It's almost like SilentRunner for real life. With the pattern and context-matching ability of this stuff, I wonder if this is the system, or a component of it?
Um, these students/researchers aren't somehow brainwashed to prefer work for corporations over standard academic research. There's nothing being put in the water to make this happen. The fact is, corporations throw more money (or other enticements) into this than public forums do. And it's not likely that stopping them from doing so will magically make all sorts of public-domain research start happening again. It is not a zero-sum situation where removing one competitor will make the other competitor more successful somehow. Universities and academic foundations need to realize that they need to COMPETE with private industry if they want researchers to keep their findings in the public domain. I certainly am not going to expect a corporation to just give away the results of things it has driven or funded; that's just not how it works, nor is it how it was ever expected to work. That's the whole point of academic research in the first place.
I've seen an earlier version of this. It was a bit bulky, and it looks like the real change in Nomad over other older Microvision products is in the size. Still, it's not exactly like it doesn't occlude your vision. The unit does block your view a bit, kind of like looking through a very strange barrier; that's the only way I can describe it. You also have to line it up correctly, or else I imagine (they didn't turn it on until it was lined up right when I tried it) it must look pretty funky. They aim to make full-color versions, but the limitation there is the blue laser. It seems there isn't a suitably portable blue laser yet.
Ohhh, I don't think so. I think the person with a real site who wants to catch the people who accidentally get the spelling wrong (but who intend to go to his/her site anyways) is the one who has something to say. The guy who is just sitting on a domain with a single static "Under Construction...buy our domain!" site does not, however, and could even be considered the real source of the problem. I love the ACLU, even though they can be annoying, but I wish they would realize once in a while that it's not necessarily the heavyweights in life who interfere with the rights of others.
I tried their client in the past, a couple of versions. It totally hosed my networking; I couldn't talk to anything with their client installed. I emailed them, asking what the problem was, telling them what protocols/clients I was running. Turns out the problem was that they don't support the configuration I had, meaning the use of IPX/SPX and Client32, which I needed to be able to access a large number of the network resources where I worked. They still, to my knowledge, have yet to support a configuration for windows that has anything besides just pure (well, in Microsoft's definition) TCP/IP. They don't seem to think there's a problem with that either.
A lot of people have mentioned the fog that exists in determining user response to print ads that is not present in banner ads, and how it's questionable whether print ads work. You'll note that I didn't say "Print ads work." I said "Nobody debates that ads in magazines work," meaning that it's accepted and widely leveraged as a means of advertising. Ergo, from the standpoint of the publisher (the real point here), they do work, because they bring in significant revenue. And while banner ads may or may not work as well from an advertiser standpoint (only to be seen as a failure because the low response rate is clearly documented), banner ads do not live up to the original expectations that were created. Like so many other things, they were supposed to be the magic bullet to render everything else obsolete, and did not achieve that; as a result, anything less is seen not in objective terms, but as a failure to reach a goal.
The other part of the problem is that a standard magazine uses a "push" method of distribution. You don't have to go check for the magazine, it comes to you when it's ready. It says, essentially, "Hey, I'm here...time to read me!" On the other hand, websites are not that way, with the singular exception of whichever site is set as your default page in your browser. Yes, you may have a few you check every day, but how many are you really going to want to have to remember?
This should be obvious to anyone who has ever looked at a unicode chart or has had to click "Cancel" when asked to install character support for any of the myriad languages that need language packs to be displayed in Windows. Ok, so they built a way to theoretically support all of these characters. This does not mean that I can read Japanese, however, and making it possible to see it in my browser will not change that fact, nor will it make Google searchable in Japanese, cause IRC to support katakana or hiragana characters (and just freaking forget kanji unless you want to chat with a graphics tablet). Unicode has purposes (besides making it easier to hack web servers, that is), but the hopes and dreams built around it are a classic case of throwing tech at a social barrier to try and make it go away.
-Being discouraged from presenting at security conferences (professional ones, not HOPE2K or DefCon)
-Having to fend off attempts by my current employer to seize intellectual claims of ownership to research that occurred before I began employment with this company
-Being told that any projects I was working on with other people on the side would become property of this company
-Being told that the solution to the above-mentioned problem was simply "Just don't put your name on it."
I think it's terrible that so many IT companies have started doing this, but it's really not just programmers who are suffering under it. And in a lot of ways, I can understand how some of the things that are a problem for me shouldn't be for a programmer either. After all, when you're hired to write code, that code naturally should belong to the company paying for it, just as I consider any reports or work to be the property of whoever funds them. But research I do on my own time, to keep my own skills up? Good lord! Based on that logic, this company owes a royalty to every company I ever worked at!
I find it hard to imagine that there is a single one of the 51 companies mentioned that is not mostly, if not entirely, contained within the 49 nations mentioned. I've seen things like this before, and they always seem to be trying to yell, "Big bad globalized corporations are going to take over!!!" without even considering that the GDP of nations is made up of the equivalent "GDP" of these companies. Someone should wake these people up and help them realize that yes, corporations do bad things at times, but no, we can't just get rid of them. They serve a purpose too...
Rabbits in Australia.
The banana slug.
The gypsy moth.
Numerous infectious diseases carried by explorers.
For as far back as we've been able to travel with significant speed between dissimilar ecosystems, we have consistently failed to anticipate the tremendous impact of flora and fauna that often accompany those travels. As often as not, the cause is ignorance of the presence of these "passengers." I agree that politics may be a significant driving factor here, but honestly, looking back, have we learned nothing about just using a little bit of caution? If we feel like taking the martian rocks out for a walk in the sun here on earth, we can always do that later...there's no need to do it straight off the recovery site, and the past seems to be a good argument not to do so until we are absolutely sure what it would mean.
Owing to the potential for malfunctioning devices, misconfigured systems, etc. to generate traffic that might appear as a DoS attack under their definitions (they stuck to flooding attacks), I wonder if they drew a line, below which something did not qualify as an attack? And if so, where did they draw the line, and how many script kiddies' actions fell below it?
The real difference between the frequency-hopping analogy and reality is the simple fact that unlike FH communications, the internet is supposed to be as interoperable as possible. A Mac can look at the same web page as a Solaris box, or even Windows (if it stays up long enough, obviously, for the page to load). This is accomplished through...wait for it...well-documented and widely disseminated standards. To make the comparison with frequency-hopping systems accurate, you'd need to have all or most transciever manufacturers decide on a few standards, then agree to make all of their systems so that they work with all other ones (by adhering to the standard). And once you do that, how well do you think frequency-hopping will hide what you're saying?
They keep moving around so many times a second that the bad guys can't find them. If a bad guy manages to ping an address that's a target, by the time he even types the "n" in "nmap" it's another address.
But the GOOD traffic can find them? How the hell does this thing know the difference? It sounds like they came up with a great way to hide a computer (especially if they end up trying to pretend to be someone else's IP range in the process), but they totally ignore the fundamental problem: how to tell good traffic from bad without a human having to examine it. This has to be some of the worst snake oil I have ever seen.
The server applications are mature because they had a head start. Many originated as server applications for other UNIX flavors. Also, there's a matter of public expectations...6 years ago, Linux wasn't quite in the spotlight as it's been the past couple of years, which gives a bit more time to get things right. Once you get attention, you are expected to deliver, right now. And by the time desktop apps develop that much, a lot of the public will have long since given up, unfortunately. I don't like it either, but it's how I see it.
This might be a hell of a good place to use a really fault-tolerant and flexible architecture, like a cell matrix. That way, upgrades need not be so significantly hardware-dependent, and repairs can often be a matter of routing around damaged processors (not to mention the lesser specificity of devices means it's easier to keep spares on hand).
I've seen a lot of discussion in the past year on the point of the Attrition mirror, including a session by Attrition themselves at DefCon last year, and this was clearly a long time coming. I'm sorry to see it end, but also in a sense happy for the fact that the guys who had to maintain the mirror will see some peace return to their lives.
The reason why you can do this with a safe is because there are so many known quantities. You know what the safe is made of, and how it is built, and the properties of both, with no hidden surprises. The vulnerabilities of both stay constant over time as well; you don't ever hear about a previously undiscovered buffer overflow in carbon steel :) And finally, the methods of attacking safes and vaults do not change quite so quickly as hacking methods evolve, so you can know authoritatively what would be done by an attacker, and account for all of it.
Or, if you're actually brave, you'll refuse to cow under the perceived threat of rare circumstances like this. This is a horrible miscarriage of justice, but I find it hard to believe it to be a common occurrence. On the other hand, if I were to watch everything I say in a public forum from this day onwards because of this incident...well, that would be a common occurrence, and greatly magnify the damage caused by this. Furthermore, I have enough faith in this country and our Bill of Rights to think that the better choice is to accept the risk, and aim to set a precedent against such abuse of the law in the future.
Daaaamn...I always thought of the problems with key escrow as an issue of abuse by our own government, but for them to actually consider enabling surveillance by countries like China?? Incredible. For all of their yelling and screaming about how France and other countries are spying on businesses for the benefit of their own domestic corporations, they were thinking about giving other countries the keys to the kingdom. As if we needed another reason to be distrustful of those whose job it is to look after us.
"Honey...check out what I did with the communications dish! It was so wimpy, so I direct-fed it power from one of the redundant power feeds. Now you can microwave popcorn anywhere in Colorado!"
They refer to it as "document management." While a big part of that is also a matter of FINDING the documents (think of alllll that paper), the most challenging part remains tracking changes. You might want to contact a company that I've dealt with in the past who makes a fantastic system (sorry, it's not open source) called iManage. It's overkill for what you need, but you may be able to show them another market they haven't thought of, and develop something with them to suit your purposes.
And no, I don't work for iManage, have any stock (if they are traded, even), or anything of the sorts. I just really liked the product when I helped implement it a few years ago, and know it does a good job.
Second of all, you were able to start your own business with the skills you have. Was that really an option for the typical unskilled laborer working in the mills? We are not dependent on our employers to the same degree as the workers of days past, or even the industrial workers of the present. An autoworker cannot go off and start his own company doing what he did on a factory production line, but a developer can freelance or start his own firm entirely.