UN says more inspections are needed. US says no, Iraq is in breach of UN resolutions, there must be war. US then breaches UN resolution and bombs Iraq.
So we have one country which has ignored the UN bombing another country for ignoring the UN.
When are the B-52s planning to hit Washington then?
"you can't help but identify with the helplessness of a man who sees his family blown to bits for no particular reason by murderous fanatics who use high-blown rhetoric to justify their butchery. I suppose there are lots of people who wish they could get their hands on Osama Bin Laden's throat"
And for the same reason there are plenty of people in the world who want to get their hands around George W. Bush's throat.
...get the Compaq-designed Personal Jukebox. The price tag is high because the sound quality is the best on the market. And a new driver now allows you to copy files (any files) from the PJB back to your PC. With a choice of 6GB and 20GB drives, an intuitive interface, and OPEN SOURCE software, what more could a true geek want?;-)
This article, written by a former CIA agent, reveals why the US secret services can't deal with bin Laden on his home turf. Very interesting read, and written before the events of last Tuesday.
"We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
Since when has Slashdot become a mouthpiece for political rants? I may or may not agree with this opinion, but please, keep it to yourself.
Not that you'll listen to me. You still don't actually *edit* stories (i.e. check spelling, grammar) and you have ignored calls for editors to be appointed in other countries (you know, like *outside* the US of A). Next thing, you'll be charging people who turn the ads off, and selling out like VA Linux. Oh, hold on...
Sorry to upset the apple-cart, but might a combination of XML and XSL challenge the dominance of Perl? I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.
So, how did they come up with that name then? Oh, those clever marketroids! First we had the GeForce; then came the GeForce 2. Ooh, now we have a mobile version, let's call it...GeForce 2 Go!
By hey, smartypants, what's the next version gonna be called? GeForce 3 Go? GeForce 2 Go 2? Doh!
Why should the onus fall on the Moz guys? There are other browsers - Opera for one. PS your.sig is faulty. It should read, "Don't let the bottom fall out of your world. EAT A VINDALOO AND let the world fall out of your bottom!";)
-- Barry de la Rosa, public[at]bpdlr.orgASM, tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
"Although Nokia and Ericsson are members of the Symbian group, which has developed the open-source EPOC operating system, all of the WAP applications are developed in a Windows environment, ensuring as many developers as possible can create them."
Doh! EPOC is not open source. This paragraph implies that if a project is not on Windows, or is open source, then it is harder for developers to get their hands on. This ignorance makes me wonder if the rest of the story holds water.
-- Barry de la Rosa, public[at]bpdlr.orgASM, tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
Can you really imagine Walmart giving all their checkout staff a free PC? How about bank workers, postmen, gas station attendants, farmworkers? How about temporary staff, office temps, single working mothers, voluntary staff, and the semi-retired? This is indeed a rather blinkered vision of "universal".
Universal should be all-inclusive. In fact there is a valid argument for giving to poorer and less advantaged communities first, to generate a better standard of living from the ground up, and with it a general increase in economic activity that benefits everyone.
Some might argue, "Well at least it's a start." I disagree. Most of these socially beneficial ideas start with the privileged few and always seem to go out of political fashion before they ever seep down to those who need them most.
Instead of big, bold PR stunts as these, companies should be implementing ethical recycling policies - old PCs + free software = inner city school IT system. How about free PCs for the local community?
-- Barry de la Rosa, public[at]bpdlr.orgASM, tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
So what's the fscking point of him putting this Web page up in the first place, unless he wants people to look at it! If 500,000 people look at his site in the first day, he may get charged an extra $1k, the site may go down, but he's just had more interest in his site than most commercial sites get in a year. Mission accomplished, as far as I can see. He can now take down the site and get on with the project.
-- Barry de la Rosa, public[at]bpdlr.orgASM, tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
Sorry, I'd disagree; not with the basic three eras (which I think are correct), but I think that you're not thinking globally enough. Maybe in the US you are starting to enter the third era, but even here in the UK the broadband era is at least 18 months away. What about Africa? India? China? The third era will only reach its full potentoial when the whole world has access to broadband. THAT will be when things really start getting interesting!
These guys are thinking, "Damn, we shouldn't have posted that article, look at all these Linux zealots thrashing our server! We've been slashdotted! Aaaargh!"
I can't believe no-one's mentioned Heinlein's classic "Stranger in a Strange Land" - although maybe a bit heavy on the religion side.
Also, one of the best intros to William Gibson is surely "Burning Chrome" - short stories, so excellent for the kid.
Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is good, but for a better Sci-Fi vision read "The Diamond Age", which deals with nanotechnology and is pretty relevant today. Also, the main character is a little girl, so your neice will probably be able to relate more to it.
Today we are announcing a sole source contract award from the National Security Agency, to Secure Computing's Advanced Technology Division to apply Secure's patented Type Enforcement technology, to the Linux operating system
Question 2: Why is this announcement important? Who needs these solutions?
This announcement is important because it supports our position that Secure Computing's technology provides security functionality unequalled in industry. The National Security Agency has had a longstanding reputation as being one of the most stringent information security customers in the world. The fact that they came to Secure Computing to provide this capability demonstrates their recognition of our capabilities.
Secure Computing believes that a primary measure that corporations can take to enhance their security, is to move critical applications onto operating systems that are not susceptible to attack. With the recent emergence of Linux, and its phenomenal growth rate, developing a secure Linux operating system, for customer applications, as well as our own security products, is a logical step. In addition to the DoD, we envision that our target customers, the medium to high-end corporations, will see the benefit of this activity.
In short, we believe that the market has "voted" and Linux is rapidly becoming a standard platform for the enterprise and for e-commerce and e-business. We undertook this work because we are committed to Linux and are currently porting our applications to the Linux platform.
Question 3: Why are you announcing this now?
We have just recently been awarded the development contract for this effort, so we are releasing the information.
Question 4: How does this change your existing security products and services?
We believe that the market has "voted" and Linux is rapidly becoming a standard platform for the enterprise and for e-commerce and e-business. We undertook this work because we are committed to Linux and are currently porting our applications to the Linux platform.
Question 5: Why did you enter into this Contract?
Secure Computing Corporation has a longstanding relationship with the NSA and several other agencies within the DoD. Sidewinder is currently the #1 Firewall in the DoD, and our Advanced Technology Division achieves almost 100% of their revenue from government contracts. Entering into this contract continues a very strong relationship, with some of the most advanced, security conscious customers in the world. Additionally, we undertook this work because we recognized the need for our products to be available on a secure version Linux. This is a win for both our Customer, the NSA and for ourselves, allowing us to leverage the NSA work to provide a foundation for future product directions.
Question 6: Can you provide a brief description of Type Enforcement, and the benefits it provides to the underlying operating system?
Type Enforcement is a mandatory access control mechanism that is tailored to provide the strength and flexibility required in today's business to business e-commerce environments. The strength comes from locating the Type Enforcement mechanisms in the lowest level of the OS kernel, thus ensuring that a clever attacker cannot bypass them. This also enables the Type Enforcement mechanism to protect all the applications and higher level operating system components on the system. At Secure Computing Corporation, we use Type Enforcement to protect the integrity of our Application Layer Gateway firewalls. The flexibility comes from separating the policy definition engine from the enforcement mechanisms. Thus, organizations and system vendors can develop Type Enforcement policy engines that are tuned to provide the security that they need, rather than being forced to accept a "one size fits all" form of security.
A Type Enforced system resembles a honeycomb, with each critical system component placed in its own separate cell, in which it can access only the resources and utilize the privileges it needs to perform its function. A security breach that affects one component does not affect components in other cells. Type Enforcement controls the harmful effects of security flaws in applications, including configuration errors by administrators.
The CERT Coordination Center Security Advisories are packed with examples of attacks that take advantage of an application flaw to attack a system. The recent successful attack against PC Week's Apache/Linux challenge system would have failed if the underlying Linux system had been Type Enforced.
Question 7: Is there a revenue impact to this announcement?
Yes, however, we have not entered into this contract merely for the contract revenue. As we have stated before, federal contracting offers us the opportunity to conduct R&D on new technologies and product, without additional company investment. So although this contract will produce in excess of 7 figures for ATD contract revenue, this was not the driving force.
Question 8: What are you contributing to the market with this announcement?
We believe this contract and announcement furthers our claim that Secure Computing provides security technology that is unequaled in this space.
Question 9: What are your plan regarding the Open Source nature of Linux?
It is our intention to be an active, responsible member of the open source community. Within the constraints this imposes, we will work with partners to develop new product offerings that will benefit our customers, our partners, and us. However, we will also benefit simply by having a Linux based secure operating system on which to host our products.
Our modifications to Linux will consist of:
- strong policy enforcement code which is in the kernel itself, - a flexible policy engine which is structured as a separate module We will open source all the modifications to the kernel as well as a general-purpose policy engine. We have not determined the exact functionality of this engine, but it will support a broad set of basic applications and it will be complete enough too teach the community how to write other policy engines. We hope that others will choose to enhance this engine and/or develop their own policy engines that are optimized for their purposes. We will keep the policy engines for our products, such as the Sidewinder policy engine, proprietary.
Very interesting to read this, and I think this applies equally well to online games. The quality of a multiplayer gaming environment doesn't just hang on the quality of the game or even the gameplay - it's also a matter of how well the community is served and the mechanism of interaction, which influences this process. Games such as Quake and its offshoots have thrived because their extensibility, through mods and add-ons, has allowed seperatism to flourish while at the same time Web sites like Planetquake have managed to bring the whole lot together. Other games (such as Diablo, and one I am helping to beta test at the moment springs to mind) tend to follow the "Smug complacency and stagnation" route, where small groups get bored and use cheats to spice things up, because the developers haven't put enough effort into creating a mechanism for growth and diversity.
Hope this doesn't seem too offtopic - I think it's entirely relevant myself, if maybe a bit of a rant!
Has no-one noticed that Didier Benchimol, one of Leonardo Finance's Directors, is an ex-Netscape guy? I used to deal with him for press enquiries on an occaisional basis. Surely someone who used to work for Netscape should know better!
But the bigger picture is, people don't think negatively about mental health issues, they just don't think about them at all.
What people don't understand, they are scared of ("Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger, etc. ) People make fun of "crazies" because they aren't educated as to what makes someone depressed/manic/schizo - when you realise it could (and does) happen to anyone at any time, that leads to people repressing their own mental disorders.
One of the reasons it is so hard to get over depression is that the people around you ignore it, and make you think that it is not important - and when you're depressed, you repress its importance. If more people pointed it out ("You seem depressed recently, are you OK?"), it makes people face up to it, and then they might have a chance of getting on the road to recovery.
I'm not talking about a nanny state here, just a state whereby people look out for each other a bit more rahter than just find any excuse to have a laugh at soemone else's expense.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, lets study this logic:
UN says more inspections are needed.
US says no, Iraq is in breach of UN resolutions, there must be war.
US then breaches UN resolution and bombs Iraq.
So we have one country which has ignored the UN bombing another country for ignoring the UN.
When are the B-52s planning to hit Washington then?
"you can't help but identify with the helplessness of a man who sees his family blown to bits for no particular reason by murderous fanatics who use high-blown rhetoric to justify their butchery. I suppose there are lots of people who wish they could get their hands on Osama Bin Laden's throat"
And for the same reason there are plenty of people in the world who want to get their hands around George W. Bush's throat.
...get the Compaq-designed Personal Jukebox. The price tag is high because the sound quality is the best on the market. And a new driver now allows you to copy files (any files) from the PJB back to your PC. With a choice of 6GB and 20GB drives, an intuitive interface, and OPEN SOURCE software, what more could a true geek want? ;-)
NewsNow.
Offers all the news you could want, and has a choice of news sites as well so you don't have to swallow the party line.
Full disclosure: I work for NewsNow ;)
This article, written by a former CIA agent, reveals why the US secret services can't deal with bin Laden on his home turf. Very interesting read, and written before the events of last Tuesday.
"We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
Since when has Slashdot become a mouthpiece for political rants? I may or may not agree with this opinion, but please, keep it to yourself.
Not that you'll listen to me. You still don't actually *edit* stories (i.e. check spelling, grammar) and you have ignored calls for editors to be appointed in other countries (you know, like *outside* the US of A). Next thing, you'll be charging people who turn the ads off, and selling out like VA Linux. Oh, hold on...
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
"(And since I'm in Germany for LinuxTag I get to post something before I usually even get up!)"
So when are you going to realise that a lot of readers are in Europe, and that you could do with a full-time European correspondent?
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
By hey, smartypants, what's the next version gonna be called? GeForce 3 Go? GeForce 2 Go 2? Doh!
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
Doh! EPOC is not open source. This paragraph implies that if a project is not on Windows, or is open source, then it is harder for developers to get their hands on. This ignorance makes me wonder if the rest of the story holds water.
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
This is coroporate access, not universal access.
Can you really imagine Walmart giving all their checkout staff a free PC? How about bank workers, postmen, gas station attendants, farmworkers? How about temporary staff, office temps, single working mothers, voluntary staff, and the semi-retired? This is indeed a rather blinkered vision of "universal".
Universal should be all-inclusive. In fact there is a valid argument for giving to poorer and less advantaged communities first, to generate a better standard of living from the ground up, and with it a general increase in economic activity that benefits everyone.
Some might argue, "Well at least it's a start." I disagree. Most of these socially beneficial ideas start with the privileged few and always seem to go out of political fashion before they ever seep down to those who need them most.
Instead of big, bold PR stunts as these, companies should be implementing ethical recycling policies - old PCs + free software = inner city school IT system. How about free PCs for the local community?
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
--
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.orgASM,
tel. +44 (0)7092 005700
There's a much funnier story on Wired about the same research: Study: Humans Do Many Things
Sorry, I'd disagree; not with the basic three eras (which I think are correct), but I think that you're not thinking globally enough. Maybe in the US you are starting to enter the third era, but even here in the UK the broadband era is at least 18 months away. What about Africa? India? China? The third era will only reach its full potentoial when the whole world has access to broadband. THAT will be when things really start getting interesting!
From www.netcraft.com:
www.currents.net is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) mod_oas/4.64 PHP/3.0.12 on Linux
Are they likely to be anti-Linux? Pro-MS?
These guys are thinking, "Damn, we shouldn't have posted that article, look at all these Linux zealots thrashing our server! We've been slashdotted! Aaaargh!"
Slashdot - the original Linux DDoS attack.
Can the moderators please do their jobs? This is patently off-topic, and quite frankly boring.
I can't believe no-one's mentioned Heinlein's classic "Stranger in a Strange Land" - although maybe a bit heavy on the religion side.
Also, one of the best intros to William Gibson is surely "Burning Chrome" - short stories, so excellent for the kid.
Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is good, but for a better Sci-Fi vision read "The Diamond Age", which deals with nanotechnology and is pretty relevant today. Also, the main character is a little girl, so your neice will probably be able to relate more to it.
Secure Computing Corporation
Type Enforced Linux / NSA Press Release
Frequently Asked Questions
Question 1: What are you announcing today?
Today we are announcing a sole source contract award from the National Security Agency, to Secure Computing's Advanced Technology Division to apply Secure's patented Type Enforcement technology, to the Linux operating system
Question 2: Why is this announcement important? Who needs these solutions?
This announcement is important because it supports our position that Secure Computing's technology provides security functionality unequalled in industry. The National Security Agency has had a longstanding reputation as being one of the most stringent information security customers in the world. The fact that they came to Secure Computing to provide this capability demonstrates their recognition of our capabilities.
Secure Computing believes that a primary measure that corporations can take to enhance their security, is to move critical applications onto operating systems that are not susceptible to attack. With the recent emergence of Linux, and its phenomenal growth rate, developing a secure Linux operating system, for customer applications, as well as our own security products, is a logical step. In addition to the DoD, we envision that our target customers, the medium to high-end corporations, will see the benefit of this activity.
In short, we believe that the market has "voted" and Linux is rapidly becoming a standard platform for the enterprise and for e-commerce and e-business. We undertook this work because we are committed to Linux and are currently porting our applications to the Linux platform.
Question 3: Why are you announcing this now?
We have just recently been awarded the development contract for this effort, so we are releasing the information.
Question 4: How does this change your existing security products and services?
We believe that the market has "voted" and Linux is rapidly becoming a standard platform for the enterprise and for e-commerce and e-business. We undertook this work because we are committed to Linux and are currently porting our applications to the Linux platform.
Question 5: Why did you enter into this Contract?
Secure Computing Corporation has a longstanding relationship with the NSA and several other agencies within the DoD. Sidewinder is currently the #1 Firewall in the DoD, and our Advanced Technology Division achieves almost 100% of their revenue from government contracts. Entering into this contract continues a very strong relationship, with some of the most advanced, security conscious customers in the world. Additionally, we undertook this work because we recognized the need for our products to be available on a secure version Linux. This is a win for both our Customer, the NSA and for ourselves, allowing us to leverage the NSA work to provide a foundation for future product directions.
Question 6: Can you provide a brief description of Type Enforcement, and the benefits it provides to the underlying operating system?
Type Enforcement is a mandatory access control mechanism that is tailored to provide the strength and flexibility required in today's business to business e-commerce environments. The strength comes from locating the Type Enforcement mechanisms in the lowest level of the OS kernel, thus ensuring that a clever attacker cannot bypass them. This also enables the Type Enforcement mechanism to protect all the applications and higher level operating system components on the system. At Secure Computing Corporation, we use Type Enforcement to protect the integrity of our Application Layer Gateway firewalls. The flexibility comes from separating the policy definition engine from the enforcement mechanisms. Thus, organizations and system vendors can develop Type Enforcement policy engines that are tuned to provide the security that they need, rather than being forced to accept a "one size fits all" form of security.
A Type Enforced system resembles a honeycomb, with each critical system component placed in its own separate cell, in which it can access only the resources and utilize the privileges it needs to perform its function. A security breach that affects one component does not affect components in other cells. Type Enforcement controls the harmful effects of security flaws in applications, including configuration errors by administrators.
The CERT Coordination Center Security Advisories are packed with examples of attacks that take advantage of an application flaw to attack a system. The recent successful attack against PC Week's Apache/Linux challenge system would have failed if the underlying Linux system had been Type Enforced.
Question 7: Is there a revenue impact to this announcement?
Yes, however, we have not entered into this contract merely for the contract revenue. As we have stated before, federal contracting offers us the opportunity to conduct R&D on new technologies and product, without additional company investment. So although this contract will produce in excess of 7 figures for ATD contract revenue, this was not the driving force.
Question 8: What are you contributing to the market with this announcement?
We believe this contract and announcement furthers our claim that Secure Computing provides security technology that is unequaled in this space.
Question 9: What are your plan regarding the Open Source nature of Linux?
It is our intention to be an active, responsible member of the open source community. Within the constraints this imposes, we will work with partners to develop new product offerings that will benefit our customers, our partners, and us. However, we will also benefit simply by having a Linux based secure operating system on which to host our products.
Our modifications to Linux will consist of:
- strong policy enforcement code which is in the kernel itself, - a flexible policy engine which is structured as a separate module We will open source all the modifications to the kernel as well as a general-purpose policy engine. We have not determined the exact functionality of this engine, but it will support a broad set of basic applications and it will be complete enough too teach the community how to write other policy engines. We hope that others will choose to enhance this engine and/or develop their own policy engines that are optimized for their purposes. We will keep the policy engines for our products, such as the Sidewinder policy engine, proprietary.
----
Very interesting to read this, and I think this applies equally well to online games. The quality of a multiplayer gaming environment doesn't just hang on the quality of the game or even the gameplay - it's also a matter of how well the community is served and the mechanism of interaction, which influences this process. Games such as Quake and its offshoots have thrived because their extensibility, through mods and add-ons, has allowed seperatism to flourish while at the same time Web sites like Planetquake have managed to bring the whole lot together. Other games (such as Diablo, and one I am helping to beta test at the moment springs to mind) tend to follow the "Smug complacency and stagnation" route, where small groups get bored and use cheats to spice things up, because the developers haven't put enough effort into creating a mechanism for growth and diversity.
Hope this doesn't seem too offtopic - I think it's entirely relevant myself, if maybe a bit of a rant!
Has no-one noticed that Didier Benchimol, one of Leonardo Finance's Directors, is an ex-Netscape guy? I used to deal with him for press enquiries on an occaisional basis. Surely someone who used to work for Netscape should know better!
Very good point.
But the bigger picture is, people don't think negatively about mental health issues, they just don't think about them at all.
What people don't understand, they are scared of ("Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger, etc. ) People make fun of "crazies" because they aren't educated as to what makes someone depressed/manic/schizo - when you realise it could (and does) happen to anyone at any time, that leads to people repressing their own mental disorders.
One of the reasons it is so hard to get over depression is that the people around you ignore it, and make you think that it is not important - and when you're depressed, you repress its importance. If more people pointed it out ("You seem depressed recently, are you OK?"), it makes people face up to it, and then they might have a chance of getting on the road to recovery.
I'm not talking about a nanny state here, just a state whereby people look out for each other a bit more rahter than just find any excuse to have a laugh at soemone else's expense.
The full version of the report is available here.
Hee hee, I always knew you Yanks were crazy ;-)