It's not ad-hominem to point out that someone may have been paid to hold a certain opinion
That's not quite it. Literally the argument is 'X argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore Y is false.'
That is not quite the same as saying 'argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore we cannot conclude the truthfulness of Y on this evidence alone'.
In this particular case there is plenty of independent evidence to suggest that GPL3 is likely to mark a fracture between the 'Free software' movement and the 'Open source' movement.
Where the article gets it wrong is the implication that GPL3 marks a major revision of the viral nature of the GPL. That has been there since day one, if you don't understand that GPL is viral then you have not been listening to RMS. He has made it clear on numerous occasions that his intent in framing the GPL was to poison the well. It is less clear that he actually succeeded in achieving that goal.
Having been harangued by RMS in person on this point for some considerable time over our decision to put the CERN Web libraries, intellectual property etc. into the public domain rather than attempt a more restrictive license I can assure you that preventing commercial exploitation of any kind is one of his goals. At the time RMS was refusing to even use the Web, in part because we refused to pay homage to his precious ideals.
What GPL3 is likely to become though is the point at which folk in the open source movement realize 1) quite how radical the politics behind GPL are, 2) that they do not need to jump to attention because RMS demands that they should, 3) less restrictive licenses such as Apache and BSD may well fit their objectives better.
I certainly think that the open source movement can do a lot better if it has the courage to insist on its own ideals rather than allow itself to be dictated to. In particular license terms for open software should themselves be the result of an open and collaborative consultation process.
GPG stands for Gnu Privacy Guard. It's the Free(tm) replacement for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which was originally developed by RSA.
Given the lawsuits that RSA filed to stop PGP this statement could hardly be more wrong. Phil Zimmerman developed PGP as freeware, then released a commercial version of his code and reclaimed the name. GPG is a name chosen to describe the free version.
This crack is not particularly new, the first version of PGP had the problem. The only part of the message that is secure is the part between the begin and end signature bars. PGP/MIME fixes this problem but MIME creates new ones.
PGP Inc sells a fine PGP client that also does a pretty good S/MIME. I have no problem with the PGP protocol or a carefully designed, properly integrated plug in.
What I do have a problem with is the idea that effective security can be delivered as an ad-hoc bolt on to be lashed into place with some perl scripts. If you want to do end-to-end security you have to come to terms with the fact that the real end point is the user.
It unfortunately turns out that electricity power generation contributes a relatively small fraction of the total CO2 output. Hence, increasing the output from other sources (like Nuclear) won't really make much of a dent.
Power generation is a significant source of carbon emissions, but cars are about the same, planes are another big source. Nuclear power is 25% of the UK generating capacity. If that capacity is doubled then the emissions due to power generation are going to at most go down by a third if there are no carbon emissions from the nuclear cycle.
Then you have to take account of the fact that power demand is not constant, it varies throughout the day from a minimum of about 25% to a typical peak of 75% of absolute max capacity. The existing power stations run at full power all the time, if the capacity were doubled it would not be replacing plant operating at 100%.
So while the figures are correct they mean a lot less than is being claimed. The report is pretty much what you would expect the former chair of Frends of the Earth to write which is exactly who did write the report.
The reason the old nuclear lobby is ignored today is because they lied constantly. For years they claimed nuclear power was safe and virtually free. Thatcher believed that when she tried to privatize the plants and was shocked to discover that the figures were fiddled and numerous major safety incidents had been concealed from both the public and from ministers.
I might also mention the American Civil War, but at least a few good things came out of that one. Also some bad things, like one out of three American males dead. But hey, who's counting?
Good: ending slavery
Bad: Keeping the slave states in the union, thus tying the dead weight of the backwards, racist South to the industrial progressive North.
Just think of where the USA would be without the confederate states.
Out of curiousity, how many people do you have staffing any given election/vote count?
I don't recall, 30 or so per constituency but it certainly varies.
The main thing about paper ballots is that there is no variation in the ballot access by precinct. There is no way to pull the type of corruption the GOP pulled in Ohio, Ken Blackwell deliberately underequiping the polling booths in student areas so that there were people waiting to vote at 2am. There is no way to pull the type of corruption that Katherine 'faceache' Harris pulled in Florida where the optical scanning machines had different programming acording to whether the precinct was white or black. In the white precincts the machines sounded an alarm if the ballot misread and the voter got another chance. In the black precincts the machines just silently accepted the paper without making any response.
The way that elections are really stolen is to suppress turnout. Harris had an operation that was 'purging' the electoral rolls of people who had the same names and skin color as convicted fellons. The contract was awarded no bid to a crony.
Clean elections should not be a party issue. It looks to me as if the GOP is about to get burned really bad. There are 15 or so members of Congress likely to be taken out by various scandals, only one of which is a Democrat (from Louisiana natch.). Those 15 are all from the same districts at the center of the election fraud disputes and involve many of the same people. Harris is about to drop out of the Senate race in Florida now that it is clear she lied in her response to the Wade scandal. In Ohio the wife of Noe, the guy at the center of the 'coingate' scam was at the center of the election fix.
The type of people who fix elections are the type of people who take bribes and kickbacks in office. As a result of the sleaze scandals during the Major government Tony Blair has just celebrated his third election victory without even the hint of a challenge from the Conservative party. The same could easily happen in the US, even a polarized electorate can tip very heavily.
They use paper ballots in the UK with a population of 60 million. The issue is not the number of voters, its the number of elections. In the US there are frequently ten posts up for election, sometimes more. Then there are ballot measures and so on.
Counting paper ballots is not a big issue, we use bank tellers. I have run elections with several thousand people voting, it is not a huge issue. The general election counts are run in essentially the same way.
I am very skeptical of this particular OSS project. Not because I don't believe in publishing the actual code running on the machines running the count. I think that part is a no-brainer. Publishing the source is a small part of OSS though. The big problem is how you set up an audit trail without losing the secret ballot. Without that how do you know what code is running on the machine?
Beg your pardon? How is the DVD competition to the movie makers? Or are the Oscars presented by the cinema owners all of a sudden?
Well not to rehash the blog post, the Oscars are presented by the academy which pretty much shills for the middlemen in the process. So even though DVD is not likely to spell the end of big budget movies, the acting profession or obscenely highly paid actors they are not good news for the distributors.
sound up nice and loud? wow, I usually find it the opposite - too loud.
Most likely the projectionist never bothers to do a sound check at all. People absorb more sound than the typical movie theatre seat so with more people in the theatre you need more volume.
Poor projection quality has always been a problem but the last five times I went to the cinema there was a screw up every single time. The last time I went the projectionist had put an entire trailer in back to front. We must have been the fiftieth audience to see it but they hadn't bothered to fix it.
It is not unusual to go to see a baddly scratched print the week a film opens. Nobody bothers to splice the soundtrack properly so you get a huge bang when you come to the splices between reels.
The budgets of plenty of video games are in the movie class, the revenues are certainly larger. People are going to cinemas for a communal experience, why not an interactive experience? I blogged on this earlier.
This is exactly how Digg operates. Unfortunately, you are overestimating just how useful other readers are in determining which topics are important. Turns out, most people are idiots, and this is reflected in the stories that make it to the front page. The only real difference with Slashdot is that you can hold somebody accountable for the idiocy.
I think that the problem there are the layout of the site and the use of direct democracy as the basis for choosing stories. I think it is pretty clear that the Slashdot Karma system would collapse pretty soon if everyone had mod points all the time. Limiting the mod points (but not too much) is critical. Limiting the number of stories is critical if there is going to be a useful conversation in comments.
I think that you need to have structures in place that encourage accountability and excellence.
Good god, yes. I wish there was some wat to vote down these stories.
I wish that there was a way to eliminate the editors entirely and put everything on autopilot. Let the readers choose the stories, let the readers decide what topics are important.
But this is an example of the good side of having editors. Usually Slashdot is non-stop pumping for open source. It is the Fox News or the Air America of Open Source software. There may have been a point to that stance in the 1990s. Today it gets a little tiresome.
I never ever mention my competition in an interview. If I am asked a direct question I tell the interviewer the competitor will have to speak for themselves, then I bridge to the positive message I want to get out.
I regularly attend meetings with firefox developers and IE developers in the same room. You would be amazed at how well everyone gets on. If you talk to Linus or any of the people at the center of the successful OSS projects of the past ten years it is amazing how reasonable everyone is in an industry which does not exactly have a reputation for reasonableness.
There are well known ultras of course, but they tend not to write code. I can only think of one well known ultra who produced a significant body of code and that was a long time ago.
Ultras are a problem for every political movement. People think that the way to get attention is to be as extreme and as uncompromising as possible. If you are a libertarian, a leftie, an environmentalist you soon learn how easy it is to play that particular game.
Huh? I'm not implying that the Roman church uses the English Bible - they use Latin schtuff. I simply said the the Bible as Christians know it today (meaning English speaking Christians), is an English compilation of rather modern origin. If you can read Latin and felt offended, well then, I appologize.
Most English speaking churches (inbluding the Catholics) use the New English Bible published in 1961. But the selection of texts took place between 90 AD and 250 depending on who you ask.
The Roman church standardized on the Vulgate of 382 but this only took full effect somewhat later, after the emergence of Rome as a significant bishop.
Uhhhh, not quite. Constantine did some important stuff. For example he defined the Trinity at Nicea in 325, unified the Roman churches and outlawed the Pantheon, Egiptian, Persian and other churches. The Christian Bible as we know it today however, was compiled under the auspices of King James of Britain, France and Ireland, roundabout 1611.
Thats right, the Roman Catholic church has always preserved the traditional English Tridentine mass.
I never did understand the Christian aversion to the Beast. The Beast must come as part of Christ's second coming, prophecy says so. Why would they resist this?
It would have a negative effect on property values.
So that's it then. He wouldn't lie, and Microsoft wouldn't make him. An MS security employee says "over my dead body" on a blog. There's still a backdoor in there. Bet on it. Or do you think we were greeted as liberators in Iraq as well?
Ah George W. Bush is a liar and a fool therefore everyone must be a liar and a fool.
The fact that there are so many anti-Bush partisans about makes it even less likely that this type of conspiracy could be sustained. If Bush can't stop the NSA from leaking, he sure as heck can't stop Microsoft employees who are not even in the country.
It is possible that someone put in a backdoor without telling Niels, but that would be very very hard to do without the real build team knowing.
I remember a few years ago around 2003/2004 reading article after article that IT in USA is finished all the jobs will go to India, CHina and other. But here we are few years later and the IT job market is pretty good, atleast I think so. Its probably still tougher for somebody with no expierence than it was around 1999/2000. But I am no longer afraid I won't have a job in the IT sector... atleast under current conditions.
And I bet that the minute that IT people have internalized that fact the current wave of labor solidarity is going to evaporate and it will be back to libertarian flaming. Not that IT people like to admit that this issue affects them at all (see what happened to my first post in this thread).
There are two issues here, one is outsourcing, the second is outsourcing to the cheapest of the cheap. There are good customer service centers outside the US, but those are not the ones Dell uses. As a result they have an ultra-shitty reputation for customer service, particularly in the UK. Thats not good when computers are practically a disposable commodity that have a lifetime of about 2-4 years.
I think it's much easier for MS to sack him and then change the code.
I know Niels, he certainly would not have any difficulty getting another job. He was pretty well known before he went to Microsoft. He was the cryptographer who worked on Two-Fish with Bruce Schneier. Microsoft has been hiring pretty much all the top security talent they can over the past five years.
Cryptography and data security is pretty much a guild craft. If Niels made such a categoric statement and it turned out to be untrue his personal reputation would be severely damaged. Microsoft can't force him to lie for them and since he works in the Netherlands trying to would be most inadvisable.
Many of them lack the skills required to do this. Most botnet operators don't make their own bots. The ones that do are the ones you'll never hear about.
So far the perps have been very willing to share attacks. Now that there is money to be made and they are in competition there is a good reason not to share new goodies. It is in the interests of the professional botherders to have lots of script kiddies doing idiotic attacks, being caught and prosecuted. I bet they would even write bots that report the operator to the FBI directly if we gave them the idea.
It is in our interest to reduce the script kiddie hackers to the minimum so we can go after the big time criminals. Wasting police time and resources is a crime in itself. If people waste police time doing silly crimes then they should not whine when they get the book thrown at them.
Mitnick asked for it, there are plenty of others who will get the Mitnick treatment before people get the message that hacking isn't cool any more and if we catch you we will make sure you go to jail for a long time and then ban you from using computers for so long during probation that your technical skills will be completely worthless.
The way I think we have to shut down the bots is reverse firewalls. Reduce the value of the bot itself to the attacker. That and follow the money.
Well first off, don't assume that what the article says is taking place is actually what is taking place. If I knew a good way to catch bot herders I would not start by telling the bot herders how I am going about it.
The real botnet controllers are people. The DOJ has been arresting a few botherders recently, I blogged about this a week ago. I do not know how this is being done but I think its much more likely that they are following the money, not following the bits.
I still think that the way to bring bots under control is reverse firewalls. I am also interested in getting some sort of response scheme established so that people who are under attack can say so in a machine readable fashion.
There is no "double standard" neccessarily -- government ownership of a weapon (such as encryption) is a legitimate concern. Operating ports are not -- despite all of the politicians' hysterics -- a "key to our national security". That is and will be in the hands of US Coast Guard.
Most military analysts would disagree. Control of ports and port security has always been a major national security issue.
It appears that the reason that the snort issue is being examined but the ports issue is not is simply due to the administration failing to 1) shut down the obsolete cold war ban on export of crypto technology and 2) introduce new controls to ensure that port security is given the priority it needs.
If there is ever a nuclear attack on the US the device will be brought in on a ship, plane or truck. The administration does not want to admit the fact because they have to deliver $8 billion in pointless ABM contracts to deploy a system that has never passed a realistic test.
This is a spherical administration: They are a complete failure no matter which way you look at them.
English is the language that is most commonly taught as a second language. It used to be latin, now it is English. I have worked at several international organizations, the language used in every case was English.
Sorry to pop your bubble but six international languages are not as useful as one. There is only one country that is actually making a determined effort to promote its language as an international language and thats France. Even they are giving up.
At least you are honest about it. I was active for ten years in the Esperanto movement, even volunteering for a year in the central office of World Esperanto Association. Ultimately I left because I was sick of Esperantists paying lip service to ideas of language rights and language diversity--hey, it gets funding, right?--while at the same time preventing the use of any other language among Esperantists.
Esperanto is the BeeOS of languages, the world will be fine if everyone just changes to this completely new language that nobody speaks and nobody writes anything interesting in.
The only people who are going to learn esperanto are people who find it easy to learn new languages.
In practice there is a single international language, a creole of Norman French and Anglo Saxon called English. All the major commercial languages are creoles.
Pretty languages such as French and what is generally taught as Latin are the result of language being used as a means of social differentiation by the upper classes. English has added more words to its vocabulary in the past ten years than there are words in French.
Plantard never said he was a descendant of Christ, just the true king of france (or something of that nature). It was Holy Blood that made that conjecture, and Plantard came out stating it was a hoax when the christ connection was made.
He claimed to be the heir of the Merovingian dynasty and planted documents for others to uncover. He also claimed the priory had been started during the first crusade and introduced the knights templar. While denying these claims in public he was plotting with others to circulate them more widely. Each time they were rumbled they would invent an even more outrageous claim to explain the difference.
Since Leigh and Baigent are not admitting to being outright forgers and deceivers it would appear that Plantard and his fellow plotters are the most likely source of the claim the Merovingian dynasty was founded by Christ.
Ironically perhaps the priory in the da Vinci code appears to be drawn from Robert Graves' interpretations of the Greek myths rather than HBHG.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not quite it. Literally the argument is 'X argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore Y is false.'
That is not quite the same as saying 'argues Y, X is a bad person, therefore we cannot conclude the truthfulness of Y on this evidence alone'.
In this particular case there is plenty of independent evidence to suggest that GPL3 is likely to mark a fracture between the 'Free software' movement and the 'Open source' movement.
Where the article gets it wrong is the implication that GPL3 marks a major revision of the viral nature of the GPL. That has been there since day one, if you don't understand that GPL is viral then you have not been listening to RMS. He has made it clear on numerous occasions that his intent in framing the GPL was to poison the well. It is less clear that he actually succeeded in achieving that goal.
Having been harangued by RMS in person on this point for some considerable time over our decision to put the CERN Web libraries, intellectual property etc. into the public domain rather than attempt a more restrictive license I can assure you that preventing commercial exploitation of any kind is one of his goals. At the time RMS was refusing to even use the Web, in part because we refused to pay homage to his precious ideals.
What GPL3 is likely to become though is the point at which folk in the open source movement realize 1) quite how radical the politics behind GPL are, 2) that they do not need to jump to attention because RMS demands that they should, 3) less restrictive licenses such as Apache and BSD may well fit their objectives better.
I certainly think that the open source movement can do a lot better if it has the courage to insist on its own ideals rather than allow itself to be dictated to. In particular license terms for open software should themselves be the result of an open and collaborative consultation process.
Given the lawsuits that RSA filed to stop PGP this statement could hardly be more wrong. Phil Zimmerman developed PGP as freeware, then released a commercial version of his code and reclaimed the name. GPG is a name chosen to describe the free version.
This crack is not particularly new, the first version of PGP had the problem. The only part of the message that is secure is the part between the begin and end signature bars. PGP/MIME fixes this problem but MIME creates new ones.
PGP Inc sells a fine PGP client that also does a pretty good S/MIME. I have no problem with the PGP protocol or a carefully designed, properly integrated plug in.
What I do have a problem with is the idea that effective security can be delivered as an ad-hoc bolt on to be lashed into place with some perl scripts. If you want to do end-to-end security you have to come to terms with the fact that the real end point is the user.
Power generation is a significant source of carbon emissions, but cars are about the same, planes are another big source. Nuclear power is 25% of the UK generating capacity. If that capacity is doubled then the emissions due to power generation are going to at most go down by a third if there are no carbon emissions from the nuclear cycle.
Then you have to take account of the fact that power demand is not constant, it varies throughout the day from a minimum of about 25% to a typical peak of 75% of absolute max capacity. The existing power stations run at full power all the time, if the capacity were doubled it would not be replacing plant operating at 100%.
So while the figures are correct they mean a lot less than is being claimed. The report is pretty much what you would expect the former chair of Frends of the Earth to write which is exactly who did write the report.
The reason the old nuclear lobby is ignored today is because they lied constantly. For years they claimed nuclear power was safe and virtually free. Thatcher believed that when she tried to privatize the plants and was shocked to discover that the figures were fiddled and numerous major safety incidents had been concealed from both the public and from ministers.
Good: ending slavery
Bad: Keeping the slave states in the union, thus tying the dead weight of the backwards, racist South to the industrial progressive North.
Just think of where the USA would be without the confederate states.
I don't recall, 30 or so per constituency but it certainly varies.
The main thing about paper ballots is that there is no variation in the ballot access by precinct. There is no way to pull the type of corruption the GOP pulled in Ohio, Ken Blackwell deliberately underequiping the polling booths in student areas so that there were people waiting to vote at 2am. There is no way to pull the type of corruption that Katherine 'faceache' Harris pulled in Florida where the optical scanning machines had different programming acording to whether the precinct was white or black. In the white precincts the machines sounded an alarm if the ballot misread and the voter got another chance. In the black precincts the machines just silently accepted the paper without making any response.
The way that elections are really stolen is to suppress turnout. Harris had an operation that was 'purging' the electoral rolls of people who had the same names and skin color as convicted fellons. The contract was awarded no bid to a crony.
Clean elections should not be a party issue. It looks to me as if the GOP is about to get burned really bad. There are 15 or so members of Congress likely to be taken out by various scandals, only one of which is a Democrat (from Louisiana natch.). Those 15 are all from the same districts at the center of the election fraud disputes and involve many of the same people. Harris is about to drop out of the Senate race in Florida now that it is clear she lied in her response to the Wade scandal. In Ohio the wife of Noe, the guy at the center of the 'coingate' scam was at the center of the election fix.
The type of people who fix elections are the type of people who take bribes and kickbacks in office. As a result of the sleaze scandals during the Major government Tony Blair has just celebrated his third election victory without even the hint of a challenge from the Conservative party. The same could easily happen in the US, even a polarized electorate can tip very heavily.
Counting paper ballots is not a big issue, we use bank tellers. I have run elections with several thousand people voting, it is not a huge issue. The general election counts are run in essentially the same way.
I am very skeptical of this particular OSS project. Not because I don't believe in publishing the actual code running on the machines running the count. I think that part is a no-brainer. Publishing the source is a small part of OSS though. The big problem is how you set up an audit trail without losing the secret ballot. Without that how do you know what code is running on the machine?
Well not to rehash the blog post, the Oscars are presented by the academy which pretty much shills for the middlemen in the process. So even though DVD is not likely to spell the end of big budget movies, the acting profession or obscenely highly paid actors they are not good news for the distributors.
Most likely the projectionist never bothers to do a sound check at all. People absorb more sound than the typical movie theatre seat so with more people in the theatre you need more volume.
Poor projection quality has always been a problem but the last five times I went to the cinema there was a screw up every single time. The last time I went the projectionist had put an entire trailer in back to front. We must have been the fiftieth audience to see it but they hadn't bothered to fix it.
It is not unusual to go to see a baddly scratched print the week a film opens. Nobody bothers to splice the soundtrack properly so you get a huge bang when you come to the splices between reels.
The budgets of plenty of video games are in the movie class, the revenues are certainly larger. People are going to cinemas for a communal experience, why not an interactive experience? I blogged on this earlier.
I think that the problem there are the layout of the site and the use of direct democracy as the basis for choosing stories. I think it is pretty clear that the Slashdot Karma system would collapse pretty soon if everyone had mod points all the time. Limiting the mod points (but not too much) is critical. Limiting the number of stories is critical if there is going to be a useful conversation in comments.
I think that you need to have structures in place that encourage accountability and excellence.
I wish that there was a way to eliminate the editors entirely and put everything on autopilot. Let the readers choose the stories, let the readers decide what topics are important.
But this is an example of the good side of having editors. Usually Slashdot is non-stop pumping for open source. It is the Fox News or the Air America of Open Source software. There may have been a point to that stance in the 1990s. Today it gets a little tiresome.
I think that it is a mistake for Firefox to mention IE for the same reason that the Oscars presenters should not have mentioned the word DVD all night: running down the competition makes you look cheap and scared.
I never ever mention my competition in an interview. If I am asked a direct question I tell the interviewer the competitor will have to speak for themselves, then I bridge to the positive message I want to get out.
I regularly attend meetings with firefox developers and IE developers in the same room. You would be amazed at how well everyone gets on. If you talk to Linus or any of the people at the center of the successful OSS projects of the past ten years it is amazing how reasonable everyone is in an industry which does not exactly have a reputation for reasonableness.
There are well known ultras of course, but they tend not to write code. I can only think of one well known ultra who produced a significant body of code and that was a long time ago.
Ultras are a problem for every political movement. People think that the way to get attention is to be as extreme and as uncompromising as possible. If you are a libertarian, a leftie, an environmentalist you soon learn how easy it is to play that particular game.
Most English speaking churches (inbluding the Catholics) use the New English Bible published in 1961. But the selection of texts took place between 90 AD and 250 depending on who you ask.
The Roman church standardized on the Vulgate of 382 but this only took full effect somewhat later, after the emergence of Rome as a significant bishop.
OFFSHORE. A TAX BREAK... CAN'T DO THAT EITHER... TWENTY MILLION ILLEGAL MEXICANS
just wonder how many caps he would have used without the lameness filter.
Thats right, the Roman Catholic church has always preserved the traditional English Tridentine mass.
It would have a negative effect on property values.
Ah George W. Bush is a liar and a fool therefore everyone must be a liar and a fool.
The fact that there are so many anti-Bush partisans about makes it even less likely that this type of conspiracy could be sustained. If Bush can't stop the NSA from leaking, he sure as heck can't stop Microsoft employees who are not even in the country.
It is possible that someone put in a backdoor without telling Niels, but that would be very very hard to do without the real build team knowing.
And I bet that the minute that IT people have internalized that fact the current wave of labor solidarity is going to evaporate and it will be back to libertarian flaming. Not that IT people like to admit that this issue affects them at all (see what happened to my first post in this thread).
There are two issues here, one is outsourcing, the second is outsourcing to the cheapest of the cheap. There are good customer service centers outside the US, but those are not the ones Dell uses. As a result they have an ultra-shitty reputation for customer service, particularly in the UK. Thats not good when computers are practically a disposable commodity that have a lifetime of about 2-4 years.
So now we are expected to cry tears for the people who manage the IT systems being replaced?
I know Niels, he certainly would not have any difficulty getting another job. He was pretty well known before he went to Microsoft. He was the cryptographer who worked on Two-Fish with Bruce Schneier. Microsoft has been hiring pretty much all the top security talent they can over the past five years.
Cryptography and data security is pretty much a guild craft. If Niels made such a categoric statement and it turned out to be untrue his personal reputation would be severely damaged. Microsoft can't force him to lie for them and since he works in the Netherlands trying to would be most inadvisable.
So far the perps have been very willing to share attacks. Now that there is money to be made and they are in competition there is a good reason not to share new goodies. It is in the interests of the professional botherders to have lots of script kiddies doing idiotic attacks, being caught and prosecuted. I bet they would even write bots that report the operator to the FBI directly if we gave them the idea.
It is in our interest to reduce the script kiddie hackers to the minimum so we can go after the big time criminals. Wasting police time and resources is a crime in itself. If people waste police time doing silly crimes then they should not whine when they get the book thrown at them.
Mitnick asked for it, there are plenty of others who will get the Mitnick treatment before people get the message that hacking isn't cool any more and if we catch you we will make sure you go to jail for a long time and then ban you from using computers for so long during probation that your technical skills will be completely worthless.
The way I think we have to shut down the bots is reverse firewalls. Reduce the value of the bot itself to the attacker. That and follow the money.
The real botnet controllers are people. The DOJ has been arresting a few botherders recently, I blogged about this a week ago. I do not know how this is being done but I think its much more likely that they are following the money, not following the bits.
I still think that the way to bring bots under control is reverse firewalls. I am also interested in getting some sort of response scheme established so that people who are under attack can say so in a machine readable fashion.
Most military analysts would disagree. Control of ports and port security has always been a major national security issue.
It appears that the reason that the snort issue is being examined but the ports issue is not is simply due to the administration failing to 1) shut down the obsolete cold war ban on export of crypto technology and 2) introduce new controls to ensure that port security is given the priority it needs.
If there is ever a nuclear attack on the US the device will be brought in on a ship, plane or truck. The administration does not want to admit the fact because they have to deliver $8 billion in pointless ABM contracts to deploy a system that has never passed a realistic test.
This is a spherical administration: They are a complete failure no matter which way you look at them.
English is the language that is most commonly taught as a second language. It used to be latin, now it is English. I have worked at several international organizations, the language used in every case was English.
Sorry to pop your bubble but six international languages are not as useful as one. There is only one country that is actually making a determined effort to promote its language as an international language and thats France. Even they are giving up.
$150 buys you an entry level franchise in tin foil hat inc. You get 25% sales commission plus a 20% referal fee for associates you sign up.
Esperanto is the BeeOS of languages, the world will be fine if everyone just changes to this completely new language that nobody speaks and nobody writes anything interesting in.
The only people who are going to learn esperanto are people who find it easy to learn new languages.
In practice there is a single international language, a creole of Norman French and Anglo Saxon called English. All the major commercial languages are creoles.
Pretty languages such as French and what is generally taught as Latin are the result of language being used as a means of social differentiation by the upper classes. English has added more words to its vocabulary in the past ten years than there are words in French.
He claimed to be the heir of the Merovingian dynasty and planted documents for others to uncover. He also claimed the priory had been started during the first crusade and introduced the knights templar. While denying these claims in public he was plotting with others to circulate them more widely. Each time they were rumbled they would invent an even more outrageous claim to explain the difference.
Since Leigh and Baigent are not admitting to being outright forgers and deceivers it would appear that Plantard and his fellow plotters are the most likely source of the claim the Merovingian dynasty was founded by Christ.
Ironically perhaps the priory in the da Vinci code appears to be drawn from Robert Graves' interpretations of the Greek myths rather than HBHG.