Sometimes you just open up your news aggregator and you do a double take because you see what looks like the same article twice in a row.
No, I didn't buy this account. I'm just old. Old enough to remember reading Slashdot when it still ran off an DEC Alpha (I think) hosted at the Color Group in Holland, MI. Old enough that I remember when "Open Source" was discussed on Slashdot as a new thing back in 1998. I'm not sure, it might've still been Chips & Dips back then, sometimes it's hard to remember. Anyway, I had a turnip on my belt, as was the style at the time...
It's good that this post linked back to the original Engadget posting, but when you do something like this, you should quote it. The title and first two sentences are also word for word from the Engadget article. Not cool. Not cool at all.
I remember visiting Slashdot the day that accounts first went live in 1998. I think they went live around 8am CDT, but for some reason I didn't claim my account until around noon. Now I'm forever saddled with a shameful four digit uid. At least it contains the number of the beast. So, that first day there were at least 2665 accounts registered by about noon.
So aside from being a visual disaster and not providing all of the background numbers, how is this different from what Nate Silver has been doing for the last four years? Okay, it allows you to assign a swing, but it's a lot more opaque and seems a lot less robust than what Silver has been doing over at fivethirtyeight.
There's lots of various options for building an easy standup desk, especially if you're close to an Ikea. An easy solution is to stop by Ikea and pick up some Malm side tables and trim to height. That worked well enough for a while, eventually I wanted something better.
The solution was to pick up a used Ikea Jerker desk off Craigslist. I work at that most of the time and when my feet need a rest I'll switch to a small table that's close by. Total cost: $50 and it works great.
That said, it weirds out some people at work how I work standing up. I can't imagine what they'll think once I move in a treadmill.
There's some deep irony here. After the Nevada primary Angle changed her website to make her seem more consistent with the mainstream values of the Republican party. The Reid campaign, sensing an opportunity, archived her old website and put it online at http://www.therealsharronangle.com/ This, of course, really irked the Angle campaign who attempted to use copyright law against the Nevada state Democratic party to squash the publication of the site.
And while the students do pay some local taxes (sales taxes, etc) other people who work in Pittsburgh pay those taxes, plus they also pay income taxes.
This is not true. One of the problems with Pittsburgh is the number of people who work in the city but don't live in the city, so they can't charge them income tax. For example, the income tax in the city of Pittsburgh is 3%, elsewhere in Allegheny county it's 1%. I know lots of people who live just outside of the city (for example, Wilkinsburg) because it saves them 2% of their paycheck. It's also interesting that Pittsburgh only taxes income that is taxable by the state, this excludes grad student stipends.
The only way around this is to levy a non-income based tax on workers. Which is what they do with the stupidly regressive occupation tax that knocks $52 off everyones paychecks throughout the year. This is actually becoming almost standard in western PA with Robinson and Washington County recently adding it.
I'm not saying this occupation tax is fair, in fact, I think it's stupid and backwards for Pittsburgh, but there are lots of problems with the Pittsburgh tax base. Of course, when your mayor is, well, less than stellar, that causes problems.
Apparently upgrading your computer can cause all sorts of strange problems that the OS developer couldn't have anticipated. Why just last night my Ubuntu box ate itself when I upgraded to Karmic. Oh wait, this is supposed to be an attempt at a Windows bashing story circa 1998. Okay, move along with the reality distortion field...
Seriously, this passes for news? One support firm says to wait until Windows 7 SP1? The same firm will probably say wait for Windows 7 SP2 once SP1 comes out. In fact, they'll probably caution people against Windows 7 SP1 because of the upgrade process (remember XP SP2 and SP3?). Also, have folks actually looked at this support firm that most people have never heard of? Their web page (http://www.rescuecom.com/) doesn't inspire the greatest confidence. Love the stock photos and the fact they say they'll hook me up with anything.
The fact is Windows 7 is one of the best operating systems from Microsoft ever*. It's solid, it works, it's fast, it's pretty, it has the best multimedia support of any OS, and like it or not, it's going to be the new standard. However, a legacy of bad decisions by partner companies, manufacturers, and even Microsoft has left existing systems with problems -- drivers with memory leaks, crapware, and the occasional security hole. Moving your grandma to Linux because Windows 7 had problems installing on her crapware loaded PC isn't the solution, nor is moving her to a Mac, plan9, haiku, inferno, *bsd, OS/2 warp, xenix, dr-dos, vms, minix, or system z.
Although, if you migrate your grandma to System Z please provide a writeup of how you managed to do it. I've been trying to get my grandma to understand the z/vm hypervisor for years...
* If it helps out, feel free to insert the phrase "Imma let you finish, but..." prior to this sentence
The subject basically says it all. If you're conducting a study, either for academia or industry, do yourself a favor and take a good research methods class. I can't count then number of promising studies I've rejected for publication because their methods were poor. While Dr. Jacobson makes some good points, most of them are pretty obvious to anyone who has taken a good class on creating experiments with humans -- for example, deception is a cornerstone of many human studies. Also, for you budding young scientists, make sure you get IRB approval before conducting your study. I reviewed a paper where the authors were clearly from a University and I had questions about the ethics of their methods so I asked for the IRB data for the study...whoops, they never got it. The paper was withdrawn by the authors shortly after.
1) The iPhone is the biggest selling single phone on the market, hell they've a 1/3 of the whole market with one device
The OP misspoke slightly, but sometimes stuff can get confusing. The iPhone is the biggest selling phone in the United States, yes, even more than the freebie RAZR (cite). They had 28% back in February of 2008 and now have 30% as of December 2, 2008 -- although the later figure seems more suspect (cite, cite). The supply drop of iPhone-2Gs in the 1Q diminished their numbers quite a bit. Also, the market is smart phones, not just touch screen ones. The largest player in smart phones in the US is Blackberry -- which, well, has been having a less than stellar time with the attempt at the touch screen Storm.
cable company is REQUIRED by fcc to give customers cable boxes with firewire out.
myth tv can control almost all firewire boxes just fine.
While it is currently true that the FCC has regulations regarding the availability of firewire controllable cable boxes, the regulations do NOT state that the encryption level must be changed. I used a cable box with firewire for two years in MythTV setup. The only channel I received over firewire that was not available via unencrypted QAM was Universal HD, and I'm pretty sure that was a mistake. All the other channels that were encrypted over QAM were still encrypted on firewire.
The only alternative that you have right now is the Hauppauge HD-PVR, which captures analog component and transcodes it to H.264. Of course, this device isn't fully supported yet. It's an exciting future, but not quite there.
Even at the point that where the HD-PVR becomes fully functional, you'll still need to drive it with a cable box.
There is also question about how long the firewire "standard" will remain. At the recent FCC hearing on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Intel made it very clear that they were pushing for IP based technologies and thought that the firewire standard had failed.
From my quick analysis beyond the article, it seems like there really isn't much to see here other than Thomas Hawk raising a stink about being kicked out of the museum. This has received fairly good coverage on sfist.com.
I was at the museum on Friday and saw this whole thing go down. Thomas Hawk's account of what happened is unabashedly one-sided. What he neglects to mention is that he was standing on a balcony with his camera pointed down, aiming directly into the shirt/cleavage of one of the female employees working at the museum. Simon Blint asked Thomas Hawk to stop taking photos in order to protect his staff from a creepy perv, not because he was using a dSLR or for whatever BS reason Thomas Hawk claims.
I'm sorry folks, but if you think this is censorship, you're 100% wrong. This isn't censorship, this isn't about 9/11, this isn't about terrorism. It's about people doing malsocial actions that make the other visitors and staff of a museum feel uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable because of false terrorism threats, but uncomfortable because he's being kinda creepy.
A few months ago I switched from using VMWare Workstation 5 and VMWare Server for virtualization to VirtualBox. This choice was driven by a couple of factors:
1. VMWare's lack of support for newer versions of Ubuntu, requiring downloading some weird patch and hoping it works. It usually did, but still annoying.
2. Licensing issues with VMWare server periodically expiring and taking down my web server virtual machine, which I otherwise would ignore.
I've got to say, I've been pretty impressed with VirtualBox -- it's not quite as feature filled, and getting some of the networking stuff working requires additional steps -- especially for bridged networking, but it seems to work nicely. On average, however, the VirtualBox VM takes a bit more CPU on the host than the VMWare ones.
So, most of the stuff had been good so far, with the exception of audio recording issues in OneNote. That is, until I gained certified status as an enemy of the state in the FSF's eyes and picked up an iPhone 3G. Apparently, there are some weird USB issues with iPhones that make syncing not exactly trivial -- in fact, it doesn't work at all. iTunes doesn't even recognize my phone. From what I've read VMWare player 6 can handle the iPhone. I haven't decided if a once a week reboot to sync my phone is worthy of switching back, but it certainly something that is a downside.
Larry Lessig notes that you can't print the letter, thanks to the wonders of the rights management in Acrobat. When combined with the fact that the letter is scanned in, it makes it rather difficult to quote or distribute portions of the letter without sending the whole thing -- either that or we go back to the bad old days where everything needed to be retyped, bringing the possibility of typos and all that. Fortunately, for us Linux geeks (and I'd imagine the rest of the world that installs the software), pdftops will happily convert it to a postscript for easy printing. This is despite the fact that neither Acrobat nor Evince will print the pdf. I'd imagine that XPDF suffers from the same issue.
Rule number 1 about naming a project -- do a google search. If something else that might be pretty related comes up pretty easily, you've picked a crappy name. In this case Sabayon is already used as the name for GNOME profile editor. It seems like this has been around much longer too.
Rule number 2 about naming a project -- when naming a project, try to get a domain name that reflects the project. I'm confused about how I would know from a URL like http://www.lxnaydesign.net/ that it would be about Sabayon linux.
Remember to play nice boys and girls. And for the Sabayon Linux folks, don't worry, Mozilla made the same mistake a few years ago. Clear up the confusion and move on -- it looks like you've got a pretty slick little distro going.
You might be interested to follow the money trail behind there. There are two major money sources behind this legislation (well, probably more, but it takes time to mine OpenSecrets): The national association of broadcasters and the national cable and telecommunications association. Together these groups have given over $300,000 to the people who signed this letter over the past two election cycles. That's an average of more than $15,000 per congressman. It's scary that I can buy a congressman's support on a bill for less than the cost of my Mazda. Of particular note is how representative Upton, the man who the letter was directed to has already received over $35,000 in this and the previous election cycle from these interests.
More analysis and complete listings can be found at this entry in my weblog.
Anyway, so in response, I called my congressman, Mike Doyle (PA-14), and asked to speak to the tech person to understand his position on the broadcast flag. It's important to note that not all legislators who signed the letter support the flag on the same level. I was informed that Doyle supported it to keep copy protected content off the internet, but still wanted to allow time shifting and burning to DVD, copying to PSP etc. Good, but misguided. If your legislator takes this stance, I highly suggest referencing the Darkent Paper from Microsoft Research. Basically, it says that DRM will fail in these endeavors. Also, when you call, try not to sound like a loony. Being able to cite specific examples of how it will hurt you is good (e.g. I travel a lot and this will prevent me from watching shows on my PSP or are you willing to explain to grandma why she can't tape Monday night football to watch it the next morning because she can't stay up past 10pm).
Seems to me that this technology has been available on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD for quite some time now in the form of Howl. It's an opensource library that supports Rendezvous/Zero Conf. I've used it for a while now to do all sorts of fun stuff. In fact, the responder portion of it even runs on the WRT54G boxes.
The only difference here is that this is the blessed client by Apple.
So just to reiterate, this isn't CMU proper that got hacked, it's the business school. They're off on their own little planet on the far corner of campus and run on their own schedule and everything else. It's like going to a completely different world overthere because you've got folks who dress nicely and what not.
CERT is not really related to Tepper (the business school) in any way. In fact, CERT and the SEI are barely even related to CMU, they're off in their own little building a few blocks away and have their own security and networking. To associate the b-school getting hack to a failure of CERT would be like saying the CIA was vulnerable because the department of argiculture got hacked. It's just bad journalism to make an insinuation along those lines. CMU is a fairly large organization and it has its share of folks who understand computers and share of folks who are dolts.
On to the other question, why were SSNs on there? Well, CMU is still stupidly using them as your student ID number. Up until this year they were encoded on your magnetic stript of your student ID card. You can change it, but they look at you funny when you ask to do that.
So why would CMU even need SSNs? Well, like most institutions you've got to do a lot with financial aid to students. If you're doing financial aid and credit you need to use SSNs, simple as that. Tepper has its own financial aid department and thus probably needed the SSNs for that.
This is just another point that the credit industry probably needs an overhaul more than anything else. Allowing someone to get credit by simply providing the SSN and a few other easy questions seems a bit reckles.
I was a little saddened after seeing the pictures and getting all stoked for ultra-high-res pictures like what Spirit and Opportunity are sending back, but I don't think it's in the cards.
The uplink from Huygens to Cassini was only 8kb (don't remember if it was bit or bytes, in any case, not a wide channel) and there was only about a 2 hour window to transfer to data before the batteries on Huygens went dead. I consider 2 hours pretty remarkable given the extreme conditions is going in to and the fact that the batteries have been waiting for seven years. The technology also dates to at least 1997, probably earlier (to provide time to check for reliability against radiation fun from space).
Supposedly there are some 350 or so pictures, so at 32Kb a piece (at least what the ESA is putting up), I don't think we're going to see anything much higher.
The delicious firefox plugin from http://delicious.mozdev.org/ is a little better than this because you can right click on a page and see who else has bookmarked without going to the page. It also gives tons of other nice feature, such as caching of you del.icio.us bookmarks for a sidebar. It's really nice.
Just a quick FYI, TOR is an onion routing system, meaning that the data is passed between TOR proxies until it reaches it's destination. This means that eventually you still need to fetch the data from a server, which means that the server can still be put under attack or taken down.
FreeNet is much more robust as you inject content and then it is stored in many nodes. Thus, it can't be taken down. Furthemore, in FreeNet different parts of the data are obtained from different sources, preventing more work that could be done with traffic analysis.
To say that TOR is like FreeNet is to seriously discount the features of FreeNet. TOR is a system for running Onion proxies. FreeNet is a completely anonymized hosting and content distribution system.
Take a look at this article that I wrote up after I posted instructions on how to use lpd to spool mp3s. I was even lucky enough to get some of the logs from the mirrors for analysis. You can see the original slashdot article here.
Even if the file is generated on the fly, you still can avoid having to retransmit it by utilizing the etag and the if-none-match header. Basically this is a hash of the file contents that overrides the if-modified-since header. Simple solution: make wordpress generate an etag for the file and then compare it.
Anyway, you're right, it's not a bandwidth issue, for the most part its a software issue. I'm tracking some weblogs for research and crawl the RSS feeds once a day. Most sites only update their feed once every few days (individual weblogs we're talking about here), but don't handle either if-modified-since or if-none-match. This is largely because the software that generates the RSS feed does so on the fly.
I was running into similar problems on my site using Pyblosxom. The solution was just a little Cron magic combined with some mod_rewrite foo. Now the feed gets updated at most once an hour and all those remote sites can cache to their hearts content.
But what information on my credit report is known to me that is not known to my immediate family members, my employer, my physician's office, etc.?
When I requested my credit reports before I got married they asked some questions that even I had problems answering. An example of a few I remember are: You currently have a student loan issued by which of the following banks? Bank A. Bank B. Bank C. None of the Above. Or another was What was the address you lived at when you received credit card XXXX?
These are good questions and I'm sure they've gove through a lot of work try and figure out how to ensure your credit report only goes to the appropriate person. While there are reasons to be leary of the credit reporting industry this is NOT one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes you just open up your news aggregator and you do a double take because you see what looks like the same article twice in a row.
No, I didn't buy this account. I'm just old. Old enough to remember reading Slashdot when it still ran off an DEC Alpha (I think) hosted at the Color Group in Holland, MI. Old enough that I remember when "Open Source" was discussed on Slashdot as a new thing back in 1998. I'm not sure, it might've still been Chips & Dips back then, sometimes it's hard to remember. Anyway, I had a turnip on my belt, as was the style at the time...
It's good that this post linked back to the original Engadget posting, but when you do something like this, you should quote it. The title and first two sentences are also word for word from the Engadget article. Not cool. Not cool at all.
I remember visiting Slashdot the day that accounts first went live in 1998. I think they went live around 8am CDT, but for some reason I didn't claim my account until around noon. Now I'm forever saddled with a shameful four digit uid. At least it contains the number of the beast. So, that first day there were at least 2665 accounts registered by about noon.
So aside from being a visual disaster and not providing all of the background numbers, how is this different from what Nate Silver has been doing for the last four years? Okay, it allows you to assign a swing, but it's a lot more opaque and seems a lot less robust than what Silver has been doing over at fivethirtyeight.
There's lots of various options for building an easy standup desk, especially if you're close to an Ikea. An easy solution is to stop by Ikea and pick up some Malm side tables and trim to height. That worked well enough for a while, eventually I wanted something better.
The solution was to pick up a used Ikea Jerker desk off Craigslist. I work at that most of the time and when my feet need a rest I'll switch to a small table that's close by. Total cost: $50 and it works great.
That said, it weirds out some people at work how I work standing up. I can't imagine what they'll think once I move in a treadmill.
There's some deep irony here. After the Nevada primary Angle changed her website to make her seem more consistent with the mainstream values of the Republican party. The Reid campaign, sensing an opportunity, archived her old website and put it online at http://www.therealsharronangle.com/ This, of course, really irked the Angle campaign who attempted to use copyright law against the Nevada state Democratic party to squash the publication of the site.
And while the students do pay some local taxes (sales taxes, etc) other people who work in Pittsburgh pay those taxes, plus they also pay income taxes.
This is not true. One of the problems with Pittsburgh is the number of people who work in the city but don't live in the city, so they can't charge them income tax. For example, the income tax in the city of Pittsburgh is 3%, elsewhere in Allegheny county it's 1%. I know lots of people who live just outside of the city (for example, Wilkinsburg) because it saves them 2% of their paycheck. It's also interesting that Pittsburgh only taxes income that is taxable by the state, this excludes grad student stipends.
The only way around this is to levy a non-income based tax on workers. Which is what they do with the stupidly regressive occupation tax that knocks $52 off everyones paychecks throughout the year. This is actually becoming almost standard in western PA with Robinson and Washington County recently adding it.
I'm not saying this occupation tax is fair, in fact, I think it's stupid and backwards for Pittsburgh, but there are lots of problems with the Pittsburgh tax base. Of course, when your mayor is, well, less than stellar, that causes problems.
Apparently upgrading your computer can cause all sorts of strange problems that the OS developer couldn't have anticipated. Why just last night my Ubuntu box ate itself when I upgraded to Karmic. Oh wait, this is supposed to be an attempt at a Windows bashing story circa 1998. Okay, move along with the reality distortion field...
Seriously, this passes for news? One support firm says to wait until Windows 7 SP1? The same firm will probably say wait for Windows 7 SP2 once SP1 comes out. In fact, they'll probably caution people against Windows 7 SP1 because of the upgrade process (remember XP SP2 and SP3?). Also, have folks actually looked at this support firm that most people have never heard of? Their web page (http://www.rescuecom.com/) doesn't inspire the greatest confidence. Love the stock photos and the fact they say they'll hook me up with anything.
The fact is Windows 7 is one of the best operating systems from Microsoft ever*. It's solid, it works, it's fast, it's pretty, it has the best multimedia support of any OS, and like it or not, it's going to be the new standard. However, a legacy of bad decisions by partner companies, manufacturers, and even Microsoft has left existing systems with problems -- drivers with memory leaks, crapware, and the occasional security hole. Moving your grandma to Linux because Windows 7 had problems installing on her crapware loaded PC isn't the solution, nor is moving her to a Mac, plan9, haiku, inferno, *bsd, OS/2 warp, xenix, dr-dos, vms, minix, or system z.
Although, if you migrate your grandma to System Z please provide a writeup of how you managed to do it. I've been trying to get my grandma to understand the z/vm hypervisor for years...
* If it helps out, feel free to insert the phrase "Imma let you finish, but..." prior to this sentence
The subject basically says it all. If you're conducting a study, either for academia or industry, do yourself a favor and take a good research methods class. I can't count then number of promising studies I've rejected for publication because their methods were poor. While Dr. Jacobson makes some good points, most of them are pretty obvious to anyone who has taken a good class on creating experiments with humans -- for example, deception is a cornerstone of many human studies. Also, for you budding young scientists, make sure you get IRB approval before conducting your study. I reviewed a paper where the authors were clearly from a University and I had questions about the ethics of their methods so I asked for the IRB data for the study...whoops, they never got it. The paper was withdrawn by the authors shortly after.
1) The iPhone is the biggest selling single phone on the market, hell they've a 1/3 of the whole market with one device
The OP misspoke slightly, but sometimes stuff can get confusing. The iPhone is the biggest selling phone in the United States, yes, even more than the freebie RAZR (cite). They had 28% back in February of 2008 and now have 30% as of December 2, 2008 -- although the later figure seems more suspect (cite, cite). The supply drop of iPhone-2Gs in the 1Q diminished their numbers quite a bit. Also, the market is smart phones, not just touch screen ones. The largest player in smart phones in the US is Blackberry -- which, well, has been having a less than stellar time with the attempt at the touch screen Storm.
While it is currently true that the FCC has regulations regarding the availability of firewire controllable cable boxes, the regulations do NOT state that the encryption level must be changed. I used a cable box with firewire for two years in MythTV setup. The only channel I received over firewire that was not available via unencrypted QAM was Universal HD, and I'm pretty sure that was a mistake. All the other channels that were encrypted over QAM were still encrypted on firewire.
The only alternative that you have right now is the Hauppauge HD-PVR, which captures analog component and transcodes it to H.264. Of course, this device isn't fully supported yet. It's an exciting future, but not quite there.
Even at the point that where the HD-PVR becomes fully functional, you'll still need to drive it with a cable box.
There is also question about how long the firewire "standard" will remain. At the recent FCC hearing on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, Intel made it very clear that they were pushing for IP based technologies and thought that the firewire standard had failed.
From my quick analysis beyond the article, it seems like there really isn't much to see here other than Thomas Hawk raising a stink about being kicked out of the museum. This has received fairly good coverage on sfist.com.
In particular, in the first story you'll see a comment from another visitor who witnessed the event which points out that he was acting like a possible perv:
Of course, Mr. Hawk isn't just stopping with raising a minor internet stink, he's trying to get Simon Blint fired.
I'm sorry folks, but if you think this is censorship, you're 100% wrong. This isn't censorship, this isn't about 9/11, this isn't about terrorism. It's about people doing malsocial actions that make the other visitors and staff of a museum feel uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable because of false terrorism threats, but uncomfortable because he's being kinda creepy.
A few months ago I switched from using VMWare Workstation 5 and VMWare Server for virtualization to VirtualBox. This choice was driven by a couple of factors:
1. VMWare's lack of support for newer versions of Ubuntu, requiring downloading some weird patch and hoping it works. It usually did, but still annoying.
2. Licensing issues with VMWare server periodically expiring and taking down my web server virtual machine, which I otherwise would ignore.
I've got to say, I've been pretty impressed with VirtualBox -- it's not quite as feature filled, and getting some of the networking stuff working requires additional steps -- especially for bridged networking, but it seems to work nicely. On average, however, the VirtualBox VM takes a bit more CPU on the host than the VMWare ones.
So, most of the stuff had been good so far, with the exception of audio recording issues in OneNote. That is, until I gained certified status as an enemy of the state in the FSF's eyes and picked up an iPhone 3G. Apparently, there are some weird USB issues with iPhones that make syncing not exactly trivial -- in fact, it doesn't work at all. iTunes doesn't even recognize my phone. From what I've read VMWare player 6 can handle the iPhone. I haven't decided if a once a week reboot to sync my phone is worthy of switching back, but it certainly something that is a downside.
Larry Lessig notes that you can't print the letter, thanks to the wonders of the rights management in Acrobat. When combined with the fact that the letter is scanned in, it makes it rather difficult to quote or distribute portions of the letter without sending the whole thing -- either that or we go back to the bad old days where everything needed to be retyped, bringing the possibility of typos and all that. Fortunately, for us Linux geeks (and I'd imagine the rest of the world that installs the software), pdftops will happily convert it to a postscript for easy printing. This is despite the fact that neither Acrobat nor Evince will print the pdf. I'd imagine that XPDF suffers from the same issue.
Rule number 1 about naming a project -- do a google search. If something else that might be pretty related comes up pretty easily, you've picked a crappy name. In this case Sabayon is already used as the name for GNOME profile editor. It seems like this has been around much longer too.
Rule number 2 about naming a project -- when naming a project, try to get a domain name that reflects the project. I'm confused about how I would know from a URL like http://www.lxnaydesign.net/ that it would be about Sabayon linux.
Remember to play nice boys and girls. And for the Sabayon Linux folks, don't worry, Mozilla made the same mistake a few years ago. Clear up the confusion and move on -- it looks like you've got a pretty slick little distro going.
You might be interested to follow the money trail behind there. There are two major money sources behind this legislation (well, probably more, but it takes time to mine OpenSecrets): The national association of broadcasters and the national cable and telecommunications association. Together these groups have given over $300,000 to the people who signed this letter over the past two election cycles. That's an average of more than $15,000 per congressman. It's scary that I can buy a congressman's support on a bill for less than the cost of my Mazda. Of particular note is how representative Upton, the man who the letter was directed to has already received over $35,000 in this and the previous election cycle from these interests.
More analysis and complete listings can be found at this entry in my weblog.
Anyway, so in response, I called my congressman, Mike Doyle (PA-14), and asked to speak to the tech person to understand his position on the broadcast flag. It's important to note that not all legislators who signed the letter support the flag on the same level. I was informed that Doyle supported it to keep copy protected content off the internet, but still wanted to allow time shifting and burning to DVD, copying to PSP etc. Good, but misguided. If your legislator takes this stance, I highly suggest referencing the Darkent Paper from Microsoft Research. Basically, it says that DRM will fail in these endeavors. Also, when you call, try not to sound like a loony. Being able to cite specific examples of how it will hurt you is good (e.g. I travel a lot and this will prevent me from watching shows on my PSP or are you willing to explain to grandma why she can't tape Monday night football to watch it the next morning because she can't stay up past 10pm).
next thing you know, you'll be able to use google to tell you Kirstie Alley's weight in electron volts or all of the taxidermists near Sheboygan, Wisconsin or, even worse, people will discover you can use it to search the web!
Seems to me that this technology has been available on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD for quite some time now in the form of Howl. It's an opensource library that supports Rendezvous/Zero Conf. I've used it for a while now to do all sorts of fun stuff. In fact, the responder portion of it even runs on the WRT54G boxes.
The only difference here is that this is the blessed client by Apple.
So just to reiterate, this isn't CMU proper that got hacked, it's the business school. They're off on their own little planet on the far corner of campus and run on their own schedule and everything else. It's like going to a completely different world overthere because you've got folks who dress nicely and what not.
CERT is not really related to Tepper (the business school) in any way. In fact, CERT and the SEI are barely even related to CMU, they're off in their own little building a few blocks away and have their own security and networking. To associate the b-school getting hack to a failure of CERT would be like saying the CIA was vulnerable because the department of argiculture got hacked. It's just bad journalism to make an insinuation along those lines. CMU is a fairly large organization and it has its share of folks who understand computers and share of folks who are dolts.
On to the other question, why were SSNs on there? Well, CMU is still stupidly using them as your student ID number. Up until this year they were encoded on your magnetic stript of your student ID card. You can change it, but they look at you funny when you ask to do that.
So why would CMU even need SSNs? Well, like most institutions you've got to do a lot with financial aid to students. If you're doing financial aid and credit you need to use SSNs, simple as that. Tepper has its own financial aid department and thus probably needed the SSNs for that.
This is just another point that the credit industry probably needs an overhaul more than anything else. Allowing someone to get credit by simply providing the SSN and a few other easy questions seems a bit reckles.
I was a little saddened after seeing the pictures and getting all stoked for ultra-high-res pictures like what Spirit and Opportunity are sending back, but I don't think it's in the cards.
The uplink from Huygens to Cassini was only 8kb (don't remember if it was bit or bytes, in any case, not a wide channel) and there was only about a 2 hour window to transfer to data before the batteries on Huygens went dead. I consider 2 hours pretty remarkable given the extreme conditions is going in to and the fact that the batteries have been waiting for seven years. The technology also dates to at least 1997, probably earlier (to provide time to check for reliability against radiation fun from space).
Supposedly there are some 350 or so pictures, so at 32Kb a piece (at least what the ESA is putting up), I don't think we're going to see anything much higher.
The delicious firefox plugin from http://delicious.mozdev.org/ is a little better than this because you can right click on a page and see who else has bookmarked without going to the page. It also gives tons of other nice feature, such as caching of you del.icio.us bookmarks for a sidebar. It's really nice.
Just a quick FYI, TOR is an onion routing system, meaning that the data is passed between TOR proxies until it reaches it's destination. This means that eventually you still need to fetch the data from a server, which means that the server can still be put under attack or taken down.
FreeNet is much more robust as you inject content and then it is stored in many nodes. Thus, it can't be taken down. Furthemore, in FreeNet different parts of the data are obtained from different sources, preventing more work that could be done with traffic analysis.
To say that TOR is like FreeNet is to seriously discount the features of FreeNet. TOR is a system for running Onion proxies. FreeNet is a completely anonymized hosting and content distribution system.
Ask and you shall receive...
Take a look at this article that I wrote up after I posted instructions on how to use lpd to spool mp3s. I was even lucky enough to get some of the logs from the mirrors for analysis. You can see the original slashdot article here.
Even if the file is generated on the fly, you still can avoid having to retransmit it by utilizing the etag and the if-none-match header. Basically this is a hash of the file contents that overrides the if-modified-since header. Simple solution: make wordpress generate an etag for the file and then compare it.
Anyway, you're right, it's not a bandwidth issue, for the most part its a software issue. I'm tracking some weblogs for research and crawl the RSS feeds once a day. Most sites only update their feed once every few days (individual weblogs we're talking about here), but don't handle either if-modified-since or if-none-match. This is largely because the software that generates the RSS feed does so on the fly.
I was running into similar problems on my site using Pyblosxom. The solution was just a little Cron magic combined with some mod_rewrite foo. Now the feed gets updated at most once an hour and all those remote sites can cache to their hearts content.
When I requested my credit reports before I got married they asked some questions that even I had problems answering. An example of a few I remember are: You currently have a student loan issued by which of the following banks? Bank A. Bank B. Bank C. None of the Above. Or another was What was the address you lived at when you received credit card XXXX?
These are good questions and I'm sure they've gove through a lot of work try and figure out how to ensure your credit report only goes to the appropriate person. While there are reasons to be leary of the credit reporting industry this is NOT one of them.