Seriously... what the hell are we supposed to call them? Master/Slave is the most accurate way to describe the damn things! Maybe to be PC they'll just call them the dominant and submissive drives instead?
Actually not, the Master does not tell the slave what to do.
However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'.
Levity aside, there is a serious issue here. There is a lot of Political Correctness talk that is trivial, some that is serious and some that is downright evil.
The trivial stuff is mostly harmless. Sometimes what appears trivial on the surface is actually a major cause of resentment. The word 'redskin' was used in pretty much the same way that 'nigger' was. If you know that you can see how a football team called the Washington Redskins might be unpopular with native americans the way a team called the Atlanta Niggers would be unpopular with african americans.
I recently had someone make me rewrite a paper on spam control to call 'blacklists' 'blocklists'. I objected because changing the terminology obscures the connection between blacklist type activities and McCarthy type activities which is actually central to the debate as I see it.
The downright evil use of PC is when it is used as a partisan gottcha. The 'niggardly' episode is a case in point, the use of the phrase was not the reason the person got sacked, it was merely the excuse. The extreeme example of this was in the UK where the campaign agains Rushdie and the Satanic Verses began as a PC type protest, a small bunch saw the opportunity for self-promotion.
There is also the downright evil use of PC card in the reverse direction. Take the recent advert from the Republican National Committee that equates disagreement with the President on any grounds with 'support for terrorists'. Forgive me, but I would be astonished if any of the Democratic Nominees is running on a platform of support for Bin Laden. It is not clear exactly which policy consistutes 'support for terrorists', it could be beleiving in the constitution rather than John Ashcroft, it could be beleiving that the Iraq war was and is a mistake, for that matter it might even be believing that war profiteers like Halliburton should be investigtated. We don't know because the President's party isn't making it clear. What is clear however is that they seem to be bringing us a sort of fusion McCarthyism, part Lenin (originator of the line 'whoever is not for us is against us'), part political correctness, part opportunism, part desperation.
When will it be okay to use the word 'slave'? It has a fairly distinct meaning. Should the possible offence, in this case, almost non-existent, cause the word to be abolished altogether because of what people connote the word with?
The terminology in question is actually inacurate. There is no sense in which the 'master' drive in an IDE configuration controls or even sends commands to the slave. The drives appear in the BIOS as number 0 and 1. The only drive that is privilleged is drive 0, connector 0 which by convention is the master boot drive, but that is merely a convention, it could easily be configurable in the Bios.
As to the offense issue, it could be offensive if we still had a 'bring back slavery' movement or we had pro-slavery members of congress making coded references.
We don't have that for slavery but we still have that for segregation. Trent Lott is no longer Majority leader but he still serves in Congress and there are quite a few Republicans who play games that pander to racism and speak favorably of crypto-racist causes and crypto-racist groups. Nobody would dare praise the KKK these days, but the CCC, nudge, wink, geddit?
The US is still a country where black voters can be kept off the ballot through dishonesty, or do you think it a coincidence that the company chosen by Katherine Harris to purge the voter rolls of convicted fellons disqualified tens of thousands of legitimate qualified voters, most of whom just happened to be black? Is it coincidence that certain local police forced 'just happened' to mount roadblocks on roads that connected mostly black townships and the polls?
Of course these are not coincidences, the southern strategy is not dead. That is why at the next election we are going to be organizing monitoring groups to make sure that these election tactics cannot be repeated. We will be using the Internet to broadcast alerts about roadblocks, and we will be getting press and camera crews direct to the scene.
Right on. Centrino notebooks (like IBM's T40 even) are able to for 5-6hrs without breaking a sweat -- and the T40 is a full-fledged desktop killer.
I use my T30 as a desktop replacement. The only thing I ever use my desktop machine for is as a server. Seriously if you *need* a 64bit CPU as opposed to just gotta have the latest kewl toy you probably need more than this particular laptop provides.
At this point raw speed is much less interesting to me than aesthetics and integration. If someone would make a line of Wintel hardware that looks as good as the Apple stuff I would buy it. I am not giving up my right mouse button or learning the dopey 1980s style apple UI to do so.
Sony got close with the Vaio line, but pity about the finish, both of the VAIOs I bought ended up sprouting sticky tape to hold parts together. And if you are going to stick $0.25 power connectors on a laptop you should sell them for $0.25 as spare parts. Sony wanted $300 apiece for a repair that should take 10 minutes and a $0.25 part.
The recent progress with small power cells might well end up being the next real advance for the field. All they need to do is to find a better packaging for the refils than having folk walk arround carrying a can of lighter fluid.
Of course there is no competition; Novell is a software company whereas SCO is a litigation company.
When Caldera originally bought the UNIX IP I wondered if something of this sort might not end up happening, remembering the Microsoft littigation.
The parallels are closer than many in the Linux community generally admit. Linux is after all a much closer copy of and owes far more to Unix than MSDOS ever did to C/PM.
Caldera bought their rights to both DRDOS and UNIX through Novell. After an initial dismal attempt to sell the software as a business they then turned to littigation as the way to make it pay.
Only difference this time round is that it is the Linux community ox that is being gored.
I didn't think the original Caldera/Microsoft case had any merit either. Same tactics, barely credible claims of copied IP followed by protracted littigation where the plaintif seems to have no interest in moving the case forward, just making sure the case does not get dismissed or come to trial or get to a point where an external observer could judge the strength of Caldera's case.
And the reason for that, is that the three first years of Vietnam, the US only had a few advisors present. It's hard to get killed if you're not there. The US didn't really start getting heavily involved with combat troops until a couple of years into the conflict.
There were 15,000 'military advisors' when JFK was assasinated. That was steadily cranked up under LBJ and of course when gulf of Tonkin was manufactured that was the signal for all out quagmire.
If the Administration is not bothered by the number of casualties in the gulf why has it stopped broadcast of arrivals of coffins? The last time those were restricted was under Nixon, and for the same reason.
Iraq is far from 'Mission Accomplished'. Saddam is still at large, if the US left today the theocrats would take charge. Exactly what is the great success in replacing Saddam with an Ayatolah?
The only way out of this mess is to build the civil institutions that are necessary to support a democracy. That is going to be much harder for the US going it alone than it will be with the help of the UN that has been involved in practically every successful democratic transition since it was founded.
The United Nations is a worthless institution that has doomed itself to irrelevancy. In its entire history, the UN has acted in only 2 conflicts:
Right wing poppy-cock [in the original meaning of the word].
The security council is not the UN. Only fifteen members of the UN are on the security council and of those only five have significant power.
The UN has been involved in pretty much every conflict going on since it was founded. In particular you will find that almost without exception the UN has been involved in the peace negotiations in pretty much every case. The recent ending of the occupation of East Timor was entirely performed under UN direction.
As the French pointed out at the time, the UN does not have the military capability to stop the US invading Iraq. However having invaded the US is quite likely to end up regretting having done so and call on the UN to provide them with an exit strategy.
Since the start of the invasion more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq than were killed in the first three years of Vietnam. The Iraqi resistance has steadily increased in its effectiveness. This might have been anticipated and planned for but it was not.
The bottom line is that the Administration called the UN irrelevant when their plans for post invasion Iraq were limited to the routes for the victory parades. Now that it is clear that the situation there is not "a cakewalk" cooperation and consultation with the international community does not look such a terrible idea.
The ITU really isn't much more than a standards setting body. It is, however, an important one because ultimately the Canadian system has to be able to talk to the Irish system, the French to the Australian, the Cambodian to the Mexican, and without an impartial, respected, body in place that represents the technical interests of the industry as a whole, such a thing isn't going to work very well if at all.
Actually its more than that. The ITU has been incorporated into the United Nations (even though it actually predates it). As a result it is a diplomatic treaty organization and has diplomatic immunity. Useful when the main risk is harassment by lawsuit.
The other thing the ITU does besides setting standards is to perform a whole rack of registration functions. Slots for satelites in geosynchronous orbit are allocated by the ITU, as are radio frequencies. In other words pretty much what ICANN was set up to do.
I suspect that there wont be much movement unless the US directs ICANN to do something completely assinine like cutting off Cuba from the net if the Bushies think they need to impress the Florida voters.
Israel leads the world in Internet attacks, ergo I think the numbers here are probably skewed. It's probably best to perform research like this in a nation that's, um, a little less on the brink.
Israel is quite clearly different, but that does not mean that it is not worth looking at. Quite the reverse.
I doubt that Israel leads the world in number of attacks, but it is certainly leading in a particular type of attack - infrastructure warfare.
There has been an ongoing fight between Israelis and Palestinians for several years. The Palestinians certainly have one advantage here, Israel is a comparatively 'target rich' environment. Also the Israeli military periodically shuts down the West bank and there is nothing much to do inside except go on the Internet.
Thats not to say that the Israeli gangs are completely reactive. There is plenty of nastiness to go arround.
Re:Failure Reborn
on
Son of Concorde
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There is a reason why the modern concorde died, and it wasn't only because of the accidents that occured -- it had to do with the fact that there isn't a market for super high speed travel.
There was only one accident and in fact that had little to do with the end of service, the real issue was the Airbus consortium terminating support. The cost of maintenance would have soared. The fleet was way too small to be economic.
The real reason Concorde failed was that it carried too few passengers, used too much fuel and protectionism in the US blocked landing at the major airports until the consortium stopped manufacture.
The result was not as much of a disaster as often claimed. The development money on the first joint product went down the drain, but the collaboration led directly to airbus. With Boeing looking at a stale and aging product line and unable to get any new plane off the drawing board without a major subsidy through the pentagon, Airbus is now the dominant force in the market.
Airbus will be building a 1200 seat aircraft, which with the current glut of 600 seaters is probably the sweet spot in the market at this point.
The idea of supersonic cruisers keeps popping up and bobbing down. Eventually one will get built simply because there has to be something more interesting to build than yet another super-jumbo.
The idea that seems to crop up quite often in tendem with the superjumbo idea is the idea of lobbing satelites into space en-route. If someone could make that happen with an interesting size payload, I guess some military might sign of on the R&D.
That is probably what NASA should have built instead of the shuttle.
A shill for Qualcomm writes
In almost every respect, CDMA and CDMA2000 are technologically superior to GSM. And this has more to do with the fact that they simply represent the 10 years of progress in communications research. GSM was nearly state of the art at its time
Yeah right. Technologically superior from the carrier point of view. But absolutely no concern about the interests of the consumer, the ability to switch phones and carriers at will.
The GSM system may be slightly older, but it is winning because of the merits of the complete package. In particular the SIM card which meant that when my first motorola phone went wobbly I could borrow my wife's phone, stick in my chip and take all my business calls.
The landland to cellular portability is potentially big. Only problem is that it will take a while of telemarketers getting spanked hard from spamming the now cellular numbers before the transfer will be bearable. Every time I have got a new landline number we have had several months of credit agencies calling for the new number.
What I really want is a system that allows me to take calls from a landline if I am near and the cell otherwise, one that works well that is. I might even take an internet phone if there was really good fallback to a wireless phone if there was a connection problem.
And he DOES deserve jail time. Getting spam isnt quite the same emotional event as finding your wife in a bar making out with someone..
Depends on what you are in to. Some folk on the net are quite into going to bars to watch their wife making out. Mind you some of the same folk are also into restraint.
I don't think there is any group of people who get a kick out of receiving spam.
[Googles for "spam fetish"]
Well you live and learn. Apparently there IS a SPAM fetish involving the pink canned meat and 'golden showers', whatever those might be.
Of course the average password can be cracked in about 5 minutes if you have/etc/shadow and a copy of crack (that's what it's called, right, it's been so long since I've actually used it).
Five minutes per domain The fact you have fifty million domains makes the problem five orders of magnitude harder.
If you are going to search in a given domain there are much easier ways to do that.
The objective here is to make harvesting addresses from the list harder than other harvesting techniques. You do not need a huge level of security to avchieve that, harvesting is so easy.
What we are doing here is avoiding a lengthy detour through the law courts with spammers attacking the spam law on first ammendment grounds. I don't want to go that route for other reasons, it could end up with a judgement that is good for spam reduction and also good for John Ashcroft's attack on liberty.
Do you know how easy it is to break a few passwords on any decent sized/etc/shadow file? Do you know how much easier it is to do so if the passwords are people names, and logical variations thereof? Send me an encrypted list of 100,000 average email addresses, and I could probably tell you at least 50,000 in a day or two with a very simple dictionary attack.
That is because guessing passwords is much easier. Usernames are about as random as passwords (actually somewhat more so). Email addresses consist of a username plus a domain name.
There are 50 million domain names. So the email address dictionary attack is seven orders of magnitude harder.
Ever hear of a dictionary attack? Ever hear that you shouldn't choose a word in a dictionary or a name for your password? Now how many email addresses do you think are random strings of characters, and how many do you think are names or words, possibly with a number or two at the end?
When I first proposed this idea back in 1995 I discussed it with some folk who should know - my collegues at MIT. Yes there is a dictionary attack threat, but not very severe when you look at it.
The key is that the search space is actually thinly populated enough to make dictionary attack hard. Most usernames are 6 characters or more, many include numbers, that is about 26^6 worth of search space per domain. Of course this is not evenly populated, but the odd thing is that the usernames turn out to be more random than the average password. This is because random is not unguessable. Many usernames are surnames, many are compounds of initial plus surname, only a relative handfull are commonly used names and those tend to get grabbed fast. so you have a pretty big search space, millions of possibilities and that for each one of fifty million domains.
The same does not hold for do-not-call lists. The problem there is that something like 80% of the numbers available at active exchanges are already allocated. Most of the stock of unused numbers are on exchanges that have not yet been allocated. Since something like 30% of subscribers sign up for do not call the result is that dictonary attacks are easy.
And even if they MD5 each address or something not-totally-braindead, it turns into a us spammer hash-checking, finding it on the do-not-spam list, and selling it to a foreign counterpart as a quality address.
Actually this is not a big problem since there are hundreds of thousands of addresses that get hammered with spam that have never ever been valid. Alan DeKock has a whole domain stryker.com.ca that gets half a million spams a day and nobody knows why.
So it is not that difficult to protect the list. The FTC mixes in bogus addresses in with the genuine registered ones. It is pretty easy to reduce the value of the list for validation purposes.
Wrong. If you allow the spammers to see the MD5 hashes, they can do dictionary attacks quickly against them. Domain names, after all, are public, and the local parts are mostly, nonrandom.
It is still not very practical. There are 50 million or so domains. there are a few commonly used usernames, but after standard ones like root and postmaster they get thin pretty quickly.
It is possible to reverse engineer some addresses, but you can stop that by sticking fake entries into the list.
This is a security control, it is not necessary to prevent all possible attacks, just make reverse engineering the list a few orders of magnitude harder than standard harvesting techniques.
I will add a section to my internet draft on the issue.
(1.) U.S. Laws only reach as far as U.S. borders. Where does 95% of spam come from?
Boca Raton, Florida.
Actually something like 90% of the main spam kingpins live in the US and of those about a third live in Florida, most in Boca Raton.
There is a reason for this, what other trade can you think of based in the same region that attracts similar types of people?
These people are businessmen, just like Tony Soprano. Spam is only one thing they have in their portfolio of operations, usually the closest thing they come to being legit.
The point of having spam laws is to make sure the people with badges and guns can get the search warrants they need to crack down on the minor crime (spam) so they can take them down for the serious crimes (fraud, theft, money laundering, criminal trespass, computer misuse, etc.)
This won't hit the 419 Nigeria guys. But it will take out most of the domestic pests.
No, the best uses I've seen help with the flow between form elements when you Tab/Shift-Tab, focus/blur, etc... bring up hidden layers when you click a checkbox, bring the focus to a field when you mouse over a region but haven't started typing.
This could all have been handled much better with a declarative constraint based forms validation extension. Then the features you describe above could be built into the browser where they belong rather than being invented differently on every damn web site.
I'm in the same situation from an account I created like 5 years ago. However, I found that if click on the account settings link, it takes you to a web page with an options that says something to the effect of "This account is not mine." I clicked on that, and the page said they would stop sending any mail to my address.
That does not change the fact that I should not need to take any effort simply to ensure that Yahoo! keeps a promise that it has previously made.
Which only works if you can remember what the account you might have is. I don't know which account I made the mistake of giving an honest email address for. I am pretty sure it is not the one I use these days.
The point is that I ONLY gave Yahoo! my email address because they promised not to spam me. Now they have BROKEN that promise.
If they lie to their customers they are probably lying to their accountants and shareholders as well. With hindsight it is pretty easy to see that the manipulation of the California energy market by Enron should have been a warning that maybe they were manipulating other things.
Jim Cramer has a note on his monitor, 'financial irregularities means sell'. I suggest folk add another 'Broken undertakings means sell'
Netscape 3 has all the features I want in a browser, except one - it's buggy. It can format text and graphics. It does forms. It does ssl (security).
The SSL support in that version of Netscape is limited, buggy and breakable. SSL 2.0 has quite a few problems that were corrected in SSL 3.0 which was the first time an experienced professional cryptographer was responsible for the design.
This is a technology forum. If you want to use obsolete antiquated tools for the nostalgia benefit then go ahead. Just don't insist that the rest of us make allowances for your self inflicted handicaps.
There are plenty of cheap 56K modems available so whining over only having 28.8, that is your problem, don't try to make it my problem.
The problem I forsee with the jscript use, is a misuse of the mouse gesture jscripts by unethical sites.
I think that is the problem with Jscript full stop. why netscape thought it a good idea to allow any site an almost arbitrary level of control over my browser is beyond me.
The idea of doing mouse guestures or any other browser extension in JScript, except as a demo is idiotic. The whole value of these systems comes from consistency. Apple do know some things about UIs, the value in the Apple UI is that every program work the same way and you don't have to spend lots of time relearning.
If I go to one site that has mouse guestures and then another that does not or worse implements them a different way... yuk!
But back to the original issue, Jscript sucks. The command set should be partitioned according to the security considerations. Popping up a window has a significant security impact, it can be used to launch a trojan. The toolbars on the browser window are my toolbars, no web site should be able to disable them.
I use the feature of IE that allows Jscript to be turned off by default and enabled selectively site by site. But this is not as effective as it could be because you often come across idiotic sites using jscript for everything - including navigation. The idea being to force the site designers idea of a user interface down the user's throat.
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Actually not, the Master does not tell the slave what to do.
However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'.
Levity aside, there is a serious issue here. There is a lot of Political Correctness talk that is trivial, some that is serious and some that is downright evil.
The trivial stuff is mostly harmless. Sometimes what appears trivial on the surface is actually a major cause of resentment. The word 'redskin' was used in pretty much the same way that 'nigger' was. If you know that you can see how a football team called the Washington Redskins might be unpopular with native americans the way a team called the Atlanta Niggers would be unpopular with african americans.
I recently had someone make me rewrite a paper on spam control to call 'blacklists' 'blocklists'. I objected because changing the terminology obscures the connection between blacklist type activities and McCarthy type activities which is actually central to the debate as I see it.
The downright evil use of PC is when it is used as a partisan gottcha. The 'niggardly' episode is a case in point, the use of the phrase was not the reason the person got sacked, it was merely the excuse. The extreeme example of this was in the UK where the campaign agains Rushdie and the Satanic Verses began as a PC type protest, a small bunch saw the opportunity for self-promotion.
There is also the downright evil use of PC card in the reverse direction. Take the recent advert from the Republican National Committee that equates disagreement with the President on any grounds with 'support for terrorists'. Forgive me, but I would be astonished if any of the Democratic Nominees is running on a platform of support for Bin Laden. It is not clear exactly which policy consistutes 'support for terrorists', it could be beleiving in the constitution rather than John Ashcroft, it could be beleiving that the Iraq war was and is a mistake, for that matter it might even be believing that war profiteers like Halliburton should be investigtated. We don't know because the President's party isn't making it clear. What is clear however is that they seem to be bringing us a sort of fusion McCarthyism, part Lenin (originator of the line 'whoever is not for us is against us'), part political correctness, part opportunism, part desperation.
The terminology in question is actually inacurate. There is no sense in which the 'master' drive in an IDE configuration controls or even sends commands to the slave. The drives appear in the BIOS as number 0 and 1. The only drive that is privilleged is drive 0, connector 0 which by convention is the master boot drive, but that is merely a convention, it could easily be configurable in the Bios.
As to the offense issue, it could be offensive if we still had a 'bring back slavery' movement or we had pro-slavery members of congress making coded references.
We don't have that for slavery but we still have that for segregation. Trent Lott is no longer Majority leader but he still serves in Congress and there are quite a few Republicans who play games that pander to racism and speak favorably of crypto-racist causes and crypto-racist groups. Nobody would dare praise the KKK these days, but the CCC, nudge, wink, geddit?
The US is still a country where black voters can be kept off the ballot through dishonesty, or do you think it a coincidence that the company chosen by Katherine Harris to purge the voter rolls of convicted fellons disqualified tens of thousands of legitimate qualified voters, most of whom just happened to be black? Is it coincidence that certain local police forced 'just happened' to mount roadblocks on roads that connected mostly black townships and the polls?
Of course these are not coincidences, the southern strategy is not dead. That is why at the next election we are going to be organizing monitoring groups to make sure that these election tactics cannot be repeated. We will be using the Internet to broadcast alerts about roadblocks, and we will be getting press and camera crews direct to the scene.
I use my T30 as a desktop replacement. The only thing I ever use my desktop machine for is as a server. Seriously if you *need* a 64bit CPU as opposed to just gotta have the latest kewl toy you probably need more than this particular laptop provides.
At this point raw speed is much less interesting to me than aesthetics and integration. If someone would make a line of Wintel hardware that looks as good as the Apple stuff I would buy it. I am not giving up my right mouse button or learning the dopey 1980s style apple UI to do so.
Sony got close with the Vaio line, but pity about the finish, both of the VAIOs I bought ended up sprouting sticky tape to hold parts together. And if you are going to stick $0.25 power connectors on a laptop you should sell them for $0.25 as spare parts. Sony wanted $300 apiece for a repair that should take 10 minutes and a $0.25 part.
The recent progress with small power cells might well end up being the next real advance for the field. All they need to do is to find a better packaging for the refils than having folk walk arround carrying a can of lighter fluid.
When Caldera originally bought the UNIX IP I wondered if something of this sort might not end up happening, remembering the Microsoft littigation.
The parallels are closer than many in the Linux community generally admit. Linux is after all a much closer copy of and owes far more to Unix than MSDOS ever did to C/PM.
Caldera bought their rights to both DRDOS and UNIX through Novell. After an initial dismal attempt to sell the software as a business they then turned to littigation as the way to make it pay. Only difference this time round is that it is the Linux community ox that is being gored.
I didn't think the original Caldera/Microsoft case had any merit either. Same tactics, barely credible claims of copied IP followed by protracted littigation where the plaintif seems to have no interest in moving the case forward, just making sure the case does not get dismissed or come to trial or get to a point where an external observer could judge the strength of Caldera's case.
There were 15,000 'military advisors' when JFK was assasinated. That was steadily cranked up under LBJ and of course when gulf of Tonkin was manufactured that was the signal for all out quagmire.
If the Administration is not bothered by the number of casualties in the gulf why has it stopped broadcast of arrivals of coffins? The last time those were restricted was under Nixon, and for the same reason.
Iraq is far from 'Mission Accomplished'. Saddam is still at large, if the US left today the theocrats would take charge. Exactly what is the great success in replacing Saddam with an Ayatolah?
The only way out of this mess is to build the civil institutions that are necessary to support a democracy. That is going to be much harder for the US going it alone than it will be with the help of the UN that has been involved in practically every successful democratic transition since it was founded.
Right wing poppy-cock [in the original meaning of the word].
The security council is not the UN. Only fifteen members of the UN are on the security council and of those only five have significant power.
The UN has been involved in pretty much every conflict going on since it was founded. In particular you will find that almost without exception the UN has been involved in the peace negotiations in pretty much every case. The recent ending of the occupation of East Timor was entirely performed under UN direction.
As the French pointed out at the time, the UN does not have the military capability to stop the US invading Iraq. However having invaded the US is quite likely to end up regretting having done so and call on the UN to provide them with an exit strategy.
Since the start of the invasion more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq than were killed in the first three years of Vietnam. The Iraqi resistance has steadily increased in its effectiveness. This might have been anticipated and planned for but it was not.
The bottom line is that the Administration called the UN irrelevant when their plans for post invasion Iraq were limited to the routes for the victory parades. Now that it is clear that the situation there is not "a cakewalk" cooperation and consultation with the international community does not look such a terrible idea.
Actually its more than that. The ITU has been incorporated into the United Nations (even though it actually predates it). As a result it is a diplomatic treaty organization and has diplomatic immunity. Useful when the main risk is harassment by lawsuit.
The other thing the ITU does besides setting standards is to perform a whole rack of registration functions. Slots for satelites in geosynchronous orbit are allocated by the ITU, as are radio frequencies. In other words pretty much what ICANN was set up to do.
I suspect that there wont be much movement unless the US directs ICANN to do something completely assinine like cutting off Cuba from the net if the Bushies think they need to impress the Florida voters.
Israel is quite clearly different, but that does not mean that it is not worth looking at. Quite the reverse.
I doubt that Israel leads the world in number of attacks, but it is certainly leading in a particular type of attack - infrastructure warfare.
There has been an ongoing fight between Israelis and Palestinians for several years. The Palestinians certainly have one advantage here, Israel is a comparatively 'target rich' environment. Also the Israeli military periodically shuts down the West bank and there is nothing much to do inside except go on the Internet.
Thats not to say that the Israeli gangs are completely reactive. There is plenty of nastiness to go arround.
There was only one accident and in fact that had little to do with the end of service, the real issue was the Airbus consortium terminating support. The cost of maintenance would have soared. The fleet was way too small to be economic.
The real reason Concorde failed was that it carried too few passengers, used too much fuel and protectionism in the US blocked landing at the major airports until the consortium stopped manufacture.
The result was not as much of a disaster as often claimed. The development money on the first joint product went down the drain, but the collaboration led directly to airbus. With Boeing looking at a stale and aging product line and unable to get any new plane off the drawing board without a major subsidy through the pentagon, Airbus is now the dominant force in the market.
Airbus will be building a 1200 seat aircraft, which with the current glut of 600 seaters is probably the sweet spot in the market at this point.
The idea of supersonic cruisers keeps popping up and bobbing down. Eventually one will get built simply because there has to be something more interesting to build than yet another super-jumbo.
The idea that seems to crop up quite often in tendem with the superjumbo idea is the idea of lobbing satelites into space en-route. If someone could make that happen with an interesting size payload, I guess some military might sign of on the R&D.
That is probably what NASA should have built instead of the shuttle.
Yeah right. Technologically superior from the carrier point of view. But absolutely no concern about the interests of the consumer, the ability to switch phones and carriers at will.
The GSM system may be slightly older, but it is winning because of the merits of the complete package. In particular the SIM card which meant that when my first motorola phone went wobbly I could borrow my wife's phone, stick in my chip and take all my business calls.
The landland to cellular portability is potentially big. Only problem is that it will take a while of telemarketers getting spanked hard from spamming the now cellular numbers before the transfer will be bearable. Every time I have got a new landline number we have had several months of credit agencies calling for the new number.
What I really want is a system that allows me to take calls from a landline if I am near and the cell otherwise, one that works well that is. I might even take an internet phone if there was really good fallback to a wireless phone if there was a connection problem.
Depends on what you are in to. Some folk on the net are quite into going to bars to watch their wife making out. Mind you some of the same folk are also into restraint.
I don't think there is any group of people who get a kick out of receiving spam.
[Googles for "spam fetish"]
Well you live and learn. Apparently there IS a SPAM fetish involving the pink canned meat and 'golden showers', whatever those might be.
Five minutes per domain The fact you have fifty million domains makes the problem five orders of magnitude harder.
If you are going to search in a given domain there are much easier ways to do that.
The objective here is to make harvesting addresses from the list harder than other harvesting techniques. You do not need a huge level of security to avchieve that, harvesting is so easy.
What we are doing here is avoiding a lengthy detour through the law courts with spammers attacking the spam law on first ammendment grounds. I don't want to go that route for other reasons, it could end up with a judgement that is good for spam reduction and also good for John Ashcroft's attack on liberty.
That is because guessing passwords is much easier. Usernames are about as random as passwords (actually somewhat more so). Email addresses consist of a username plus a domain name.
There are 50 million domain names. So the email address dictionary attack is seven orders of magnitude harder.
When I first proposed this idea back in 1995 I discussed it with some folk who should know - my collegues at MIT. Yes there is a dictionary attack threat, but not very severe when you look at it.
The key is that the search space is actually thinly populated enough to make dictionary attack hard. Most usernames are 6 characters or more, many include numbers, that is about 26^6 worth of search space per domain. Of course this is not evenly populated, but the odd thing is that the usernames turn out to be more random than the average password. This is because random is not unguessable. Many usernames are surnames, many are compounds of initial plus surname, only a relative handfull are commonly used names and those tend to get grabbed fast. so you have a pretty big search space, millions of possibilities and that for each one of fifty million domains.
The same does not hold for do-not-call lists. The problem there is that something like 80% of the numbers available at active exchanges are already allocated. Most of the stock of unused numbers are on exchanges that have not yet been allocated. Since something like 30% of subscribers sign up for do not call the result is that dictonary attacks are easy.
Actually this is not a big problem since there are hundreds of thousands of addresses that get hammered with spam that have never ever been valid. Alan DeKock has a whole domain stryker.com.ca that gets half a million spams a day and nobody knows why.
So it is not that difficult to protect the list. The FTC mixes in bogus addresses in with the genuine registered ones. It is pretty easy to reduce the value of the list for validation purposes.
It is still not very practical. There are 50 million or so domains. there are a few commonly used usernames, but after standard ones like root and postmaster they get thin pretty quickly.
It is possible to reverse engineer some addresses, but you can stop that by sticking fake entries into the list.
This is a security control, it is not necessary to prevent all possible attacks, just make reverse engineering the list a few orders of magnitude harder than standard harvesting techniques.
I will add a section to my internet draft on the issue.
Boca Raton, Florida.
Actually something like 90% of the main spam kingpins live in the US and of those about a third live in Florida, most in Boca Raton.
There is a reason for this, what other trade can you think of based in the same region that attracts similar types of people?
These people are businessmen, just like Tony Soprano. Spam is only one thing they have in their portfolio of operations, usually the closest thing they come to being legit.
The point of having spam laws is to make sure the people with badges and guns can get the search warrants they need to crack down on the minor crime (spam) so they can take them down for the serious crimes (fraud, theft, money laundering, criminal trespass, computer misuse, etc.)
This won't hit the 419 Nigeria guys. But it will take out most of the domestic pests.
A bit late, my point is that Netscape could have collaborated with the Web developer community and the W3C and ended up with a better result.
This could all have been handled much better with a declarative constraint based forms validation extension. Then the features you describe above could be built into the browser where they belong rather than being invented differently on every damn web site.
Not true, I said it at the time, repeatedly and at great length, in person to many Netscape employees.
I also told them their random number generator had a problem and they ignored me on that one as well.
Given where I was at the time and what I was doing...
I wasn't the only person either...
That does not change the fact that I should not need to take any effort simply to ensure that Yahoo! keeps a promise that it has previously made.
Which only works if you can remember what the account you might have is. I don't know which account I made the mistake of giving an honest email address for. I am pretty sure it is not the one I use these days.
The point is that I ONLY gave Yahoo! my email address because they promised not to spam me. Now they have BROKEN that promise.
If they lie to their customers they are probably lying to their accountants and shareholders as well. With hindsight it is pretty easy to see that the manipulation of the California energy market by Enron should have been a warning that maybe they were manipulating other things.
Jim Cramer has a note on his monitor, 'financial irregularities means sell'. I suggest folk add another 'Broken undertakings means sell'
My computer, my property. Not your computer, not your property.
Someone save us from the insufferable arrogance of jumped up web dweebs who think that their work is 'art' rather than commodity communication.
The SSL support in that version of Netscape is limited, buggy and breakable. SSL 2.0 has quite a few problems that were corrected in SSL 3.0 which was the first time an experienced professional cryptographer was responsible for the design.
This is a technology forum. If you want to use obsolete antiquated tools for the nostalgia benefit then go ahead. Just don't insist that the rest of us make allowances for your self inflicted handicaps.
There are plenty of cheap 56K modems available so whining over only having 28.8, that is your problem, don't try to make it my problem.
I think that is the problem with Jscript full stop. why netscape thought it a good idea to allow any site an almost arbitrary level of control over my browser is beyond me.
The idea of doing mouse guestures or any other browser extension in JScript, except as a demo is idiotic. The whole value of these systems comes from consistency. Apple do know some things about UIs, the value in the Apple UI is that every program work the same way and you don't have to spend lots of time relearning.
If I go to one site that has mouse guestures and then another that does not or worse implements them a different way ... yuk!
But back to the original issue, Jscript sucks. The command set should be partitioned according to the security considerations. Popping up a window has a significant security impact, it can be used to launch a trojan. The toolbars on the browser window are my toolbars, no web site should be able to disable them.
I use the feature of IE that allows Jscript to be turned off by default and enabled selectively site by site. But this is not as effective as it could be because you often come across idiotic sites using jscript for everything - including navigation. The idea being to force the site designers idea of a user interface down the user's throat.