Guess : "Adam Rightmann" (if that is his name and not an ironic nom de plume) is an ascerbic Brit with a penchant for poking fun at the Catlick Church.
Yes and no. He probably is a Brit but the most likely target would be Southern US Protestants of the Pat 'Hatred' Robertson or Jerry 'Hatred' Falwell variety, the type who talk about the love of Christ etc. etc. but have hatred as their middle name.
I fear for the moderators who rated this 'Interesting', +1 Funny would have been a better choice. Do you Americans have no understanding of the concept of sarcasm?
I have done some work in the past with folk who have got into cult type organizations. First thing those organizations do is to tell their members to cut off all contact with the outside world. That is the same whether you are talking about religious cults or terrorist cults, of course some are both (Al Qaeda, Hammas).
As for folk who do 'counselling' I tend to find that such people are utter control freaks whose primary objective is not helping people, it is getting them hooked into some idiot set of beliefs.
Strange as it may seem there are many Christians such as myself who find such activities far more disturbing and dangerous than anything that happens between n consenting adults in bed.
There are plenty of bodies like ICANN that are appointed indirectly. The problem with ICANN is that first they don't appear to want to be accountable to anyone at all and second their decisions appear to be utterly clueless to every consituency they might be attempting to please.
One might think that they would work out a somewhat more cluefull approach to funding than to simply try to shake down the country TLDs for huge sums. ICANN has no credible threat to back its demands. If they drop.uk from the root the root moves for sure.
In fact the whole business about who controls the DNS really comes down to the DNS root server operators and in particular the ones with the serious servers for the task. ICANN do not own the IP addresses, the root server operators do.
Yes, but for some reason that's a common error. I've seen WEP expanded to 'Wireless Encryption Protocol' in a few places. It's just one of those things, it seems.
I don't know if the change is official yet but I have been deliberately trying to change the name.
The problems with WEP started with the name. It contains a broken metaphor and dooms the project to failure. First it asserts that privacy is the issue, ignoring integrity and access control is a typical rookie mistake
Second we have security by analogy. If X is secure and we provide the security characteristics of X we have security - NOT. Ross Andersson has some great examples here. I use WEP as my example. The problem is that the security threats faced in a wireless protocol are completely unrelated to those of a wired protocol. It is no longer necessary to have a physical connection to access the network.
Bodging the requirements means that WEP did not address important issues like how to deal with the sacked employee who is surfing the internal network from the car park.
Yet another problem is that to some people 'privacy' is simply a weaker form of confidentiality. I don't think that it was being considered in the comsec sense of a very challenging form of confidentiality where you attempt to disclose information but with strings attached.
The Ontario curriculum mandates that all students take 5 english courses while only taking 2 math courses.
While I believe that a person with a broader outlook will usually do better than a narrow specialist I actually oppose most curricular mandates at University.
There is simple no point in trying to teach people a subject they are not interested in.
That does not mean that there should not be requirements for various courses. For example I got very pissed off with postgrad physicists who simply refused to learn how to use a computer properly. Like it or not the computer is not the primary tool of practically all science the way that the microscope was the primary tool for biologists.
Most attempts at forcing a broad curriculum are led by narrow minded arts professors who think it is OK to be ignorant of science but that the arts are somehow more important. Learning a second language is a pointless requirement, all foreigners speak English and all journals worth a damn are published in English. I have worked at top institutions in Germany, France and the US without learning the local language.
When we all work together within our specialty, the world is more efficient. We don't need polymaths as their knowledge is typically broad and shallow.
Let us see, I have degrees in electronic engineering, nuclear physics. I have designed or contributed to the design of many of the technologies that allow you to read this post.
One of the reasons why I am a leading contributor to the development of security standards is precisely that I have in depth knowledge of fields besides computer science.
For example all of my specifications are designed with a comprehensive business model in mind. Whether the specification is to be free or not and whether the code is to be free or not it must still offer significant value to end users. This is a considerable challenge for network protocols which typically suffer from being at the wrong end of Metcalf's law, the part where the network is too small for joining to be attractive.
I am also familliar with contemporary trends in analytican and continental philosophy. My college tutor was Tony Hoare and so I am very familliar with the application of Russell's typed set theory and the logical positivist view of computing. I have also worked at the AI lab and so I am also familliar with contemporary philosophical thought, in particular hermeneutics. A good deal of the design of the Web is based on hermeneutics.
So no, your assertion that bredth equals shallowness is completely false and you will find at any elite academic institutions many individuals who are making world class contributions in areas that are not joined in the traditional academic structures.
To take yet another example, Richard Feynman made major contributions to the development of parallel computing devices - he needed them for his research. Tim Berners-Lee was also a physicist.
Contemporary academia suffers from over specialization and from artificial boundaries introduced by considerations of tenure and prestige.
Additionally we don't know what particular changes had to be made to the system in order to get this certification. You may recall the NT 4 certification that required removing network drivers
That was because they certified NT4 to orange book which does not have any definition of what network security is. everyone has to remove the network drivers to get orange book.
This is why orange book lost all credibility and the common criteria emerged.
After demanding the certification the federal agencies will still run NT4 on all their machines despite the fact that they need XP for certain federal mandates (Federal Bridge CA). This is because of the way their service contracts are structured with the network managers.
Where it == a change to how referrer information is sent. As there clearly is some benefits for the website developer/author for having the referrer info the situation after change could be an analogy to what is used with cookies:: the referrer info would be only sent if 1) the user is following a link (or similar mechanism) and 2) the link being followed resides in the same space.
The HTTP spec is not owned by the IETF. I have no intention to work on it in the near future, I am currently working on Web Services security.
The cookies model is the wrong one. We want to track across sites. It is important for the maintainer of CNN to be able to find out if the BBC has linked to their story.
The places where I would make changes is in the privacy area. The mechanism should be optional and be disabled by a switch. Referer links should never reveal the existence of a private document such as a bookmarks file.
However in terms of priorities I would put making popup windows optional much higher on the list. It should be possible to disable Javascript and Macromedia on a per site basis. IE is almost there in the later editions. I have killed a lot of popup ads by simply nominating their zone as being not authorized to run javascript. Jscript and Active-X should be managed the way images once were, the text would load and then you would press a button to load the images if you wanted them.
Bill Gates rolls out the "Tablet PC" concept every few years at his CES presentations, and it's always been a minor reinvention of the Apple Newton presented as if Microsoft had thought of it on their own. Reflowable
You just don't get it. The Newton was a piece of crud that failed because the technology was crap. Doonesbury and Scott Adams were not being unfair in their cartoons, 'Weave me a cone you cupid bat' is much closer to the intended text than most newton users ever got.
Bill keeps comming back to the tablet PC idea because he wants one. That is the reason why Microsoft does most of the things it does, his Billship has thought something is kewl and should exist at an affordable price.
Examples in the hardware area include the 'natural' keyboard and the force feedback joystick. These both existed before Gates pushed Microsoft into making them but they were expensive nich market products.
Most engineering is incremental development rather than a paradigm shift. Applying the same logic as is applied by the slashweenies, one could claim that Tim B-L only improved Ted Nelson's ideas in Xanadu. But this ignores the fact that Xanadu was unusuable and never even got to market in any form. Tim made major contributions that were critical to making the thing work.
Apple failed in a way many Microsoft competitors fail, they pumped too much of their research dollars into science fiction projects and too little into incremental development of their platform. From sacking Jobs through to rehiring him Apple was asleep at the switch on MacOS, even though protected memory and decent multitasking were clearly needed desperately.
Finaly, nobody seems to fault Lotus for buying in Notes from Iris who had originaly bought the technology from DEC.
Heh-heh! It's amazing how moronic some "security" is. I use an HTTP proxy (Privoxy [privoxy.org]) that not only blocks all ads, it allows me to set the Referer: on all outgoing requests to the base URL. Most of these sites just check that Referer: is a URL on their own site
I invented the referer field before the IMG tag was proposed. So no, that application was not one that was ever considered. Nor is it the way I would have solved the problem.
I always thought the way IMG works somewhat broken but I happened to be asleep for the 8 hours it was up for review.
It is not once or twice that you find URLs to "confidential" pages if you browse through your webserver logs. And... I bet 95% of web surfers do not even know that they are sending this information all the time. Is there really any reason why the default is to send the referer info?
My idea was to have a way to be able to construct backlinks from sites. At the time we had 100 users and the operating assumption was that all information put on the Web was public.
I did not write the code that implemented referer. However the security note I wrote did say that you should only send referer if you were actually following a link. The NCSA folk introduced the idea that it was a link to the 'last think you visited' which I consider to be buggy, there is no reason to reveal file: and bookmark: URLs.
We considered the privacy implications. Basically if someone wants to they can pass the linkage info explicitly via a query suffix.
There should be a toggle in my view, but folk seem to take a wierd view on security and privacy. Argument by analogy was the rule at the time. We can do BASIC password security because FTP does, DIGEST was written less than a week later, no interest of course because it was not compatible with the then rulling UNIX dogma of one way encrypted passwords, forget the fact that sending the password en-clair is a bigger problem. You can't have the password encrypted both on the wire and in storage without using public key which was patent encumbered at the time.
Oh yes, the mispelling was me. I am dyslexic. However we are petitioning to fix it. The next edition of the OED has the additional spelling referer which specifically describes my HTTP header. I am trying to get into the Guiness book of records first with the most serious spelling mistake ever.
It should be pointed out that the Oxford Union [oxford-union.org]
(which is where the debate was) isn't the same thing as the Oxford University Student Union [ousu.org]. Probably only really of importance to people in Oxford, who know this anyway, though:-)
Err why, most Oxford students have zero contact with OUSU. There is not much point to a student union with no facilities to administer.
Hitler credited the Oxford Union with starting World War II.
Incidentally, King and Country has only been passed once since the original debate. Anyone care to guess what the subject matter was?
I'd suggest a dual license. First under the GPL with the second license BSD-style for American based companies and for a fee for foreign companies.
so you want to encourage the EU to do likewise and start charging fees to US companies for the software they create? Like the Web for example, funded by an European research lab (I was paid direct by the EU as an EU fellow).
So just HOW do you suppose the GOP managed to fake Algore blatantly stating to Larry King that he invented the internet?
As has been repeated many times here the story was 'broken' by Declan McCullagh at wired news. He knew that in Senat speak 'took the initiative top create' means 'got the votes for the money to create'. However he chose to put out his own interpretation introducing the word 'invent'.
Then he went off to his girlfriend at the Cato institute for a quote which he then got Gingrich's office to comment on and posted a follow up story which completely omitted his role starting the meme.
It is a classic case of how to create a false story by deceptive interpretation of the facts rather than falsification of the facts. Everyone knows that the sotry is a lie but they can still keep using it as a snide humorous remark.
As for having any regrets working for Clinton or Gore, absolutely not, nor do I have any for the (more limited) work I did with Gingrich's staff. They were all democratically elected which is more than you can claim for his successor. I don't care what a politician screws so long as they are consenting and have no more than 2 legs and don't have feathers. There is no way I would lift a finger for 'President' Harken and 'Vice-President' Haliburton though.
The problem, as the original post indicates, is to ensure ongoing integrity, regardless of who is in office.
Quite right, to see what kind of politician we have running the country take a look at Governor Cashmore's diary. From the biography on the site:
American has had many scheming politicians but few as devious as Governor Cashmore. Free from both ideological commitments and moral scruples, Governor Cashmore believes that in a country where electors consider only their own self-interest, electors should do likewise.
Governor Cashmore's self interest consists of the pursuit of money, power and sex in roughly equal measure. He is happiest though when he manages to achieve all three at the same time, for example taking a 'bung' (campaign bribe) from an interest group and embezzling all or part of it to buy sex from a prostitute.
Governor Cashmore's constituents are perhaps fortunate that his lack of moral scruples allows him to also double-cross the corporations and interests who fund his campaigns, even if only for the purpose of keeping them dependent on him so that he can touch their purse in future years.
It is difficult to say what motivates Cashmore's compulsive quest for sexual gratification. Some might argue that his insatiable appetite for power in all forms motivates his interest in sex. Others might counter that his addiction to sex drives him to seek the ultimate aphrodisiac, power. Whatever the reason these interests are inseparable and the Governor documents his conquests in both fields, recording the conquest of a member of his campaign staff ('exercise') or a call from the President with equal satisfaction.
At such high speeds do you really want to spend heaps in order to go faster?
Only reason I can see is if you wanted to develop software for the capabilities of next years games hardware. Only reason for having a fast machine these days is to play tombraider.
The idea predates the electrical computer. In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes had a water computer that was used to construct a model of the British economy. The computer stretched over a large country mansion.
Konrad Zues' Z1 and Z2 machines were built somewhat later but used many of the same ideas, only in a much more compact space.
Of course now we will have a bunch of idiot libertarians blasting Keynes. However Keynes and his computer are the reason why Britain pulled out of the depression before the war while in the US depression turned to slump. The problem came when Keynsianism became an idelology after his death, the solution to every problem was deficit spending, just like today some idiots think that the solution to every problem (including a deficit) is tax cuts.
I guess I should comment as I was the first person to set up a politics Web site and originally proposed using the Web to the Clinton Gore '92 campaign.
The Web does not need to be simply another channel for PR. With Clinton-Gore the idea was partly PR but also what Mark Boncheck called Disintermediation. What we wanted to do was to have a clear channel between the politicians and the people, clear of press 'interpretation'.
The point is not that people are going to trust the politicians more than the press, they will not. However it does prevent the press from some of its wilder distortions. During the '92 campaign the media made much of 'fact checks', doing a reality check on the statements made by both sides. What they never told the people is that they relied 100% on press releases put out by the parties, this was an innovation of James Carville that the GOP quickly followed.
The point of Whitehouse.gov was that the people should have access to the same information as the journalists. That is why we put every whitehouse press release on the web site and through an email server and onto USEnet from day 1 of the administration. This was originally done at MIT and the site later moved to the EOP itself.
The two people mainly responsible for putting the government online were Gore and Gingrich. Gore genuinely believed in the Web and Internet, that is why the GOP had to invent the lie of his claiming to have invented it - to deny him the ability to discuss a major achievement.
Gingrich had a much harder challenge. The congress is divided in many ways, although the speaker controlls the house floor the committee chairs control their individual committees. Gingrich wanted the whole process of government to be transparent so the people could see what was going on. The committee chairs and the lobyists did not, any such democratising move would threaten their power. It would no longer be possible for last minute changes to be made to a bill in secret before it was rushed through committee. This is how many major legislative abuses take place. During the DMCA the lobyists for the RIAA inserted a clause to steal the returned rights of the artists. This was done behind closed doors without the knowledge of many committee members, let alone the people.
In comparison the UK hansard web site is genuinely open. The site was set up to eventually replace the printing and distribution of 'the vote' which is the collection of papers sent to MPs every day. As such the site has every bill and critically every proposed ammendment at the same time the members get it.
Yes but you forget that the point of slashtopia is not saving money or even doing things better, it is all about not feeding the beast of Redmond.
After a while this gets somewhat tiresome. Instead of choosing their battles the slashcrew behave like Fox news, making no attempt to hide their bias and mindlessly bashing their opponents for the sake of it.
If I was running Microsoft I would set up a site like slashdot since the core message of Microsoft is identical to that of Microsoft corporate communications, namely "Microsoft is the only company in this industry that counts for anything".
Sadly, it runs windows so no one will actually want to use one for real work
I agree, pretty piss-poor attitude here. I have always liked the design of the tiBook but there is simply no way I would switch to a Mac, I loath the horrid things, had to use one for a year at the AI lab because it was the host of my Symbolics card.
However in slashdot land it is ok to say you hate windows but say anything against the Apple which is just as proprietary and even more closed and you get modded as flamebait.
Methinks that the slashcrew are no longer as representative of the readership as once was. Not that I think that Windows users are any less bigotted about their platform than apple or linux users. Its the preaching that irritates me. Anyone who disagrees with the premise that Apple or Linux is the font of all goodness is clearly uninformed and needs education. They simply cannot bear the idea that there are people like myself with 20 years in the computer industry, who have written systems more successful than Apple, Linux and Windows combined and still disagree with them.
I expect Mac rip-offs from companies like Compaq and eMachines. But Porche? It's bad enough that they've designed a laptop for Best Buy. (What business is Porche in, anyhow?) But to just blatently rip off the TiBook design is pathetic
Porche were in the designer PC business long before apple. They did the design for the 'Turbo Pet' back in the early 80s. The design did not sell too well because CBM failled to move up to 16 bit and got crushed by the IBM Pc.
Porche has always been an outsourced design studion that builds cars on the side. They have also designed bikes and such. They do a lot of design work for VW and other auto makers, their main competitors are folk like Pininfarina in Italy.
It can "overturn" as many regulations as it wants, and states like Washington can continue to pass tougher anti-spam laws and these state laws will apply.
Well according to the Renquist court states rights mean that States have the right to opt out of federal regulations whenever they choose but not to impose regulations of their own that are tougher than federal regulations.
The Bush administration are currently challenging the right of California to regulate vehicle emissions despite the fact that the federal act explicitly allows California (but no other state) the right to regulate emissions. This is over California's intention to regulate SUVs as cars rather than light trucks. So a Ford excurion won't be exempt from gas guzzler tax just because it weighs over 6000 lbs.
So yes you might have a point about states rights in theory but in practice judicial perogative would allow the SPAMers to trump state laws if they can persuade the reptiles in Congress to give them a green light.
The nightmare for the DMA here is that if Congress ever does something about SPAM they are quite likely to regulate DMA spam as well, like making do not call lists compulsory.
Targetting SPAM practices like fake headers makes a much more sensible strategy for DMA in this instance than attempting an NRA like 'absolutely no compromise at any cost'. Particularly since their members compete with SPAM.
Not really. In the US cars are a known commodity. All you need to get the research, development, and manufacturing capability for is funding. Funding is, relatively, easy to come by in the US. You won't need to sell at Big 3 and Japanese volume to be wildly successful.
Libertopian cretins of the world unite! You have nothing to loose but your obsessive dogma.
Hate to burst your bubble here but the entire global car market has gone the same way as the US market so it is unlikely that US regulations are the issue. Further the US car market consolodated in the 1930s when there were no safety laws.
The cost of capital to develop new engines is immense. SAAB sold out to GM because they simply could not afford to design a new engine.
Even a company like Rolls Royce could not support itself as an independent company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. He probably is a Brit but the most likely target would be Southern US Protestants of the Pat 'Hatred' Robertson or Jerry 'Hatred' Falwell variety, the type who talk about the love of Christ etc. etc. but have hatred as their middle name.
I have done some work in the past with folk who have got into cult type organizations. First thing those organizations do is to tell their members to cut off all contact with the outside world. That is the same whether you are talking about religious cults or terrorist cults, of course some are both (Al Qaeda, Hammas).
As for folk who do 'counselling' I tend to find that such people are utter control freaks whose primary objective is not helping people, it is getting them hooked into some idiot set of beliefs.
Strange as it may seem there are many Christians such as myself who find such activities far more disturbing and dangerous than anything that happens between n consenting adults in bed.
There are plenty of bodies like ICANN that are appointed indirectly. The problem with ICANN is that first they don't appear to want to be accountable to anyone at all and second their decisions appear to be utterly clueless to every consituency they might be attempting to please.
One might think that they would work out a somewhat more cluefull approach to funding than to simply try to shake down the country TLDs for huge sums. ICANN has no credible threat to back its demands. If they drop .uk from the root the root moves for sure.
In fact the whole business about who controls the DNS really comes down to the DNS root server operators and in particular the ones with the serious servers for the task. ICANN do not own the IP addresses, the root server operators do.
I don't know if the change is official yet but I have been deliberately trying to change the name.
The problems with WEP started with the name. It contains a broken metaphor and dooms the project to failure. First it asserts that privacy is the issue, ignoring integrity and access control is a typical rookie mistake
Second we have security by analogy. If X is secure and we provide the security characteristics of X we have security - NOT. Ross Andersson has some great examples here. I use WEP as my example. The problem is that the security threats faced in a wireless protocol are completely unrelated to those of a wired protocol. It is no longer necessary to have a physical connection to access the network.
Bodging the requirements means that WEP did not address important issues like how to deal with the sacked employee who is surfing the internal network from the car park.
Yet another problem is that to some people 'privacy' is simply a weaker form of confidentiality. I don't think that it was being considered in the comsec sense of a very challenging form of confidentiality where you attempt to disclose information but with strings attached.
While I believe that a person with a broader outlook will usually do better than a narrow specialist I actually oppose most curricular mandates at University.
There is simple no point in trying to teach people a subject they are not interested in.
That does not mean that there should not be requirements for various courses. For example I got very pissed off with postgrad physicists who simply refused to learn how to use a computer properly. Like it or not the computer is not the primary tool of practically all science the way that the microscope was the primary tool for biologists.
Most attempts at forcing a broad curriculum are led by narrow minded arts professors who think it is OK to be ignorant of science but that the arts are somehow more important. Learning a second language is a pointless requirement, all foreigners speak English and all journals worth a damn are published in English. I have worked at top institutions in Germany, France and the US without learning the local language.
Pot, kettle, black
When we all work together within our specialty, the world is more efficient. We don't need polymaths as their knowledge is typically broad and shallow.
Let us see, I have degrees in electronic engineering, nuclear physics. I have designed or contributed to the design of many of the technologies that allow you to read this post.
One of the reasons why I am a leading contributor to the development of security standards is precisely that I have in depth knowledge of fields besides computer science.
For example all of my specifications are designed with a comprehensive business model in mind. Whether the specification is to be free or not and whether the code is to be free or not it must still offer significant value to end users. This is a considerable challenge for network protocols which typically suffer from being at the wrong end of Metcalf's law, the part where the network is too small for joining to be attractive.
I am also familliar with contemporary trends in analytican and continental philosophy. My college tutor was Tony Hoare and so I am very familliar with the application of Russell's typed set theory and the logical positivist view of computing. I have also worked at the AI lab and so I am also familliar with contemporary philosophical thought, in particular hermeneutics. A good deal of the design of the Web is based on hermeneutics.
So no, your assertion that bredth equals shallowness is completely false and you will find at any elite academic institutions many individuals who are making world class contributions in areas that are not joined in the traditional academic structures.
To take yet another example, Richard Feynman made major contributions to the development of parallel computing devices - he needed them for his research. Tim Berners-Lee was also a physicist.
Contemporary academia suffers from over specialization and from artificial boundaries introduced by considerations of tenure and prestige.
That was because they certified NT4 to orange book which does not have any definition of what network security is. everyone has to remove the network drivers to get orange book.
This is why orange book lost all credibility and the common criteria emerged.
After demanding the certification the federal agencies will still run NT4 on all their machines despite the fact that they need XP for certain federal mandates (Federal Bridge CA). This is because of the way their service contracts are structured with the network managers.
The HTTP spec is not owned by the IETF. I have no intention to work on it in the near future, I am currently working on Web Services security.
The cookies model is the wrong one. We want to track across sites. It is important for the maintainer of CNN to be able to find out if the BBC has linked to their story.
The places where I would make changes is in the privacy area. The mechanism should be optional and be disabled by a switch. Referer links should never reveal the existence of a private document such as a bookmarks file.
However in terms of priorities I would put making popup windows optional much higher on the list. It should be possible to disable Javascript and Macromedia on a per site basis. IE is almost there in the later editions. I have killed a lot of popup ads by simply nominating their zone as being not authorized to run javascript. Jscript and Active-X should be managed the way images once were, the text would load and then you would press a button to load the images if you wanted them.
You just don't get it. The Newton was a piece of crud that failed because the technology was crap. Doonesbury and Scott Adams were not being unfair in their cartoons, 'Weave me a cone you cupid bat' is much closer to the intended text than most newton users ever got.
Bill keeps comming back to the tablet PC idea because he wants one. That is the reason why Microsoft does most of the things it does, his Billship has thought something is kewl and should exist at an affordable price.
Examples in the hardware area include the 'natural' keyboard and the force feedback joystick. These both existed before Gates pushed Microsoft into making them but they were expensive nich market products.
Most engineering is incremental development rather than a paradigm shift. Applying the same logic as is applied by the slashweenies, one could claim that Tim B-L only improved Ted Nelson's ideas in Xanadu. But this ignores the fact that Xanadu was unusuable and never even got to market in any form. Tim made major contributions that were critical to making the thing work.
Apple failed in a way many Microsoft competitors fail, they pumped too much of their research dollars into science fiction projects and too little into incremental development of their platform. From sacking Jobs through to rehiring him Apple was asleep at the switch on MacOS, even though protected memory and decent multitasking were clearly needed desperately.
Finaly, nobody seems to fault Lotus for buying in Notes from Iris who had originaly bought the technology from DEC.
I invented the referer field before the IMG tag was proposed. So no, that application was not one that was ever considered. Nor is it the way I would have solved the problem.
I always thought the way IMG works somewhat broken but I happened to be asleep for the 8 hours it was up for review.
My idea was to have a way to be able to construct backlinks from sites. At the time we had 100 users and the operating assumption was that all information put on the Web was public.
I did not write the code that implemented referer. However the security note I wrote did say that you should only send referer if you were actually following a link. The NCSA folk introduced the idea that it was a link to the 'last think you visited' which I consider to be buggy, there is no reason to reveal file: and bookmark: URLs.
We considered the privacy implications. Basically if someone wants to they can pass the linkage info explicitly via a query suffix.
There should be a toggle in my view, but folk seem to take a wierd view on security and privacy. Argument by analogy was the rule at the time. We can do BASIC password security because FTP does, DIGEST was written less than a week later, no interest of course because it was not compatible with the then rulling UNIX dogma of one way encrypted passwords, forget the fact that sending the password en-clair is a bigger problem. You can't have the password encrypted both on the wire and in storage without using public key which was patent encumbered at the time.
Oh yes, the mispelling was me. I am dyslexic. However we are petitioning to fix it. The next edition of the OED has the additional spelling referer which specifically describes my HTTP header. I am trying to get into the Guiness book of records first with the most serious spelling mistake ever.
Which is why he started 'when I was in the Congress'. Gore got us the money to turn ARPANET into the Internet. Al also got us the money for ARPANET.
Err why, most Oxford students have zero contact with OUSU. There is not much point to a student union with no facilities to administer.
Hitler credited the Oxford Union with starting World War II.
Incidentally, King and Country has only been passed once since the original debate. Anyone care to guess what the subject matter was?
so you want to encourage the EU to do likewise and start charging fees to US companies for the software they create? Like the Web for example, funded by an European research lab (I was paid direct by the EU as an EU fellow).
Not really I was working on the Whitehouse publications server at the MIT AI lab as the security consultant.
So I worked with many of the people but not for them.
Governor Cashmore is not a Clinton, he is a Gingrich, he screws anything in a skirt and then lectures on the imorality of adultery.
As has been repeated many times here the story was 'broken' by Declan McCullagh at wired news. He knew that in Senat speak 'took the initiative top create' means 'got the votes for the money to create'. However he chose to put out his own interpretation introducing the word 'invent'.
Then he went off to his girlfriend at the Cato institute for a quote which he then got Gingrich's office to comment on and posted a follow up story which completely omitted his role starting the meme.
It is a classic case of how to create a false story by deceptive interpretation of the facts rather than falsification of the facts. Everyone knows that the sotry is a lie but they can still keep using it as a snide humorous remark.
As for having any regrets working for Clinton or Gore, absolutely not, nor do I have any for the (more limited) work I did with Gingrich's staff. They were all democratically elected which is more than you can claim for his successor. I don't care what a politician screws so long as they are consenting and have no more than 2 legs and don't have feathers. There is no way I would lift a finger for 'President' Harken and 'Vice-President' Haliburton though.
Quite right, to see what kind of politician we have running the country take a look at Governor Cashmore's diary. From the biography on the site:
American has had many scheming politicians but few as devious as Governor Cashmore. Free from both ideological commitments and moral scruples, Governor Cashmore believes that in a country where electors consider only their own self-interest, electors should do likewise.
Governor Cashmore's self interest consists of the pursuit of money, power and sex in roughly equal measure. He is happiest though when he manages to achieve all three at the same time, for example taking a 'bung' (campaign bribe) from an interest group and embezzling all or part of it to buy sex from a prostitute.
Governor Cashmore's constituents are perhaps fortunate that his lack of moral scruples allows him to also double-cross the corporations and interests who fund his campaigns, even if only for the purpose of keeping them dependent on him so that he can touch their purse in future years.
It is difficult to say what motivates Cashmore's compulsive quest for sexual gratification. Some might argue that his insatiable appetite for power in all forms motivates his interest in sex. Others might counter that his addiction to sex drives him to seek the ultimate aphrodisiac, power. Whatever the reason these interests are inseparable and the Governor documents his conquests in both fields, recording the conquest of a member of his campaign staff ('exercise') or a call from the President with equal satisfaction.
Only reason I can see is if you wanted to develop software for the capabilities of next years games hardware. Only reason for having a fast machine these days is to play tombraider.
Konrad Zues' Z1 and Z2 machines were built somewhat later but used many of the same ideas, only in a much more compact space.
Of course now we will have a bunch of idiot libertarians blasting Keynes. However Keynes and his computer are the reason why Britain pulled out of the depression before the war while in the US depression turned to slump. The problem came when Keynsianism became an idelology after his death, the solution to every problem was deficit spending, just like today some idiots think that the solution to every problem (including a deficit) is tax cuts.
The Web does not need to be simply another channel for PR. With Clinton-Gore the idea was partly PR but also what Mark Boncheck called Disintermediation. What we wanted to do was to have a clear channel between the politicians and the people, clear of press 'interpretation'.
The point is not that people are going to trust the politicians more than the press, they will not. However it does prevent the press from some of its wilder distortions. During the '92 campaign the media made much of 'fact checks', doing a reality check on the statements made by both sides. What they never told the people is that they relied 100% on press releases put out by the parties, this was an innovation of James Carville that the GOP quickly followed.
The point of Whitehouse.gov was that the people should have access to the same information as the journalists. That is why we put every whitehouse press release on the web site and through an email server and onto USEnet from day 1 of the administration. This was originally done at MIT and the site later moved to the EOP itself.
The two people mainly responsible for putting the government online were Gore and Gingrich. Gore genuinely believed in the Web and Internet, that is why the GOP had to invent the lie of his claiming to have invented it - to deny him the ability to discuss a major achievement.
Gingrich had a much harder challenge. The congress is divided in many ways, although the speaker controlls the house floor the committee chairs control their individual committees. Gingrich wanted the whole process of government to be transparent so the people could see what was going on. The committee chairs and the lobyists did not, any such democratising move would threaten their power. It would no longer be possible for last minute changes to be made to a bill in secret before it was rushed through committee. This is how many major legislative abuses take place. During the DMCA the lobyists for the RIAA inserted a clause to steal the returned rights of the artists. This was done behind closed doors without the knowledge of many committee members, let alone the people.
In comparison the UK hansard web site is genuinely open. The site was set up to eventually replace the printing and distribution of 'the vote' which is the collection of papers sent to MPs every day. As such the site has every bill and critically every proposed ammendment at the same time the members get it.
Yes but you forget that the point of slashtopia is not saving money or even doing things better, it is all about not feeding the beast of Redmond.
After a while this gets somewhat tiresome. Instead of choosing their battles the slashcrew behave like Fox news, making no attempt to hide their bias and mindlessly bashing their opponents for the sake of it.
If I was running Microsoft I would set up a site like slashdot since the core message of Microsoft is identical to that of Microsoft corporate communications, namely "Microsoft is the only company in this industry that counts for anything".
I agree, pretty piss-poor attitude here. I have always liked the design of the tiBook but there is simply no way I would switch to a Mac, I loath the horrid things, had to use one for a year at the AI lab because it was the host of my Symbolics card.
However in slashdot land it is ok to say you hate windows but say anything against the Apple which is just as proprietary and even more closed and you get modded as flamebait.
Methinks that the slashcrew are no longer as representative of the readership as once was. Not that I think that Windows users are any less bigotted about their platform than apple or linux users. Its the preaching that irritates me. Anyone who disagrees with the premise that Apple or Linux is the font of all goodness is clearly uninformed and needs education. They simply cannot bear the idea that there are people like myself with 20 years in the computer industry, who have written systems more successful than Apple, Linux and Windows combined and still disagree with them.
Porche were in the designer PC business long before apple. They did the design for the 'Turbo Pet' back in the early 80s. The design did not sell too well because CBM failled to move up to 16 bit and got crushed by the IBM Pc.
Porche has always been an outsourced design studion that builds cars on the side. They have also designed bikes and such. They do a lot of design work for VW and other auto makers, their main competitors are folk like Pininfarina in Italy.
Well according to the Renquist court states rights mean that States have the right to opt out of federal regulations whenever they choose but not to impose regulations of their own that are tougher than federal regulations.
The Bush administration are currently challenging the right of California to regulate vehicle emissions despite the fact that the federal act explicitly allows California (but no other state) the right to regulate emissions. This is over California's intention to regulate SUVs as cars rather than light trucks. So a Ford excurion won't be exempt from gas guzzler tax just because it weighs over 6000 lbs.
So yes you might have a point about states rights in theory but in practice judicial perogative would allow the SPAMers to trump state laws if they can persuade the reptiles in Congress to give them a green light.
The nightmare for the DMA here is that if Congress ever does something about SPAM they are quite likely to regulate DMA spam as well, like making do not call lists compulsory.
Targetting SPAM practices like fake headers makes a much more sensible strategy for DMA in this instance than attempting an NRA like 'absolutely no compromise at any cost'. Particularly since their members compete with SPAM.
Libertopian cretins of the world unite! You have nothing to loose but your obsessive dogma.
Hate to burst your bubble here but the entire global car market has gone the same way as the US market so it is unlikely that US regulations are the issue. Further the US car market consolodated in the 1930s when there were no safety laws.
The cost of capital to develop new engines is immense. SAAB sold out to GM because they simply could not afford to design a new engine.
Even a company like Rolls Royce could not support itself as an independent company.