Careful there. You'd better first do a thorough patent search to make sure that Microsoft doesn't already hold the patent on the idea.
Come to think of it, maybe this is why unix systems normally come with 3-button mice, to avoid infringing on MS's mouse design. And maybe it would be a good idea to patent the 3-button mouse quickly, before MS does, and release it under the GPL.
So are you telling me that aol.com isn't blocking our email?
If so, how do you explain the bounce messages in my wife's inbox that explicitly says this is so?
And the message says this is because of dynamic IP addresses. It doesn't say that smtp.rcn.com has a dynamic IP address; it just says that some rcn.com addresses are dynamic. That is apparently sufficient ground at AOL to block email from smtp.rcn.com.
Maybe I am a dummy, but how do you suggest we get our email accepted by aol.com?
Heh. But the threat of immortality might not make it all that crowded.
Some years back, I read of an interesting study. The question was phrased as: Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and actuarial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
The answer turned out to be about 15 years.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great. Making your body "immortal" wouldn't make you immune to death from the things that kill you now. It would just increase somewhat your chances of surviving. An auto accident, gunshot, or HIV virus would still end a life, but maybe just a bit later than now.
To get a real change and a population problem from immortality, we'd also need many social changes that blocked all the things that are now quite effective at killing young people.
Most people have a choice of exactly one ISP. Take it or leave it.
Actually, we do have two available here. Both have reported the same problem with mail to aol.com addresses. Maybe AOL is blocking all email from ISPs. That would definitely cut down the amount of spam that their customers receive.
It won't work. Around here, we get cable service through rcn.com, and my wife and I have email accounts with them. I don't use it much except for testing, but she uses it a lot. She uses her Mac Mail program, and it is configured to relay through smtp.rcn.com. Some weeks back, she found that email to aol.com addresses were bouncing. I found the raw source message, and it contained an explicit statement that all messages from rcn.com addresses were being rejected as spam.
AOL has done this in the past, of course, and they proudly announce how many spam messages they have rejected. Some have suggested that they should reject all email, and then they'd have a 100% successful rejection of spam. But I digress.;-)
Anyway, the dummies that reject email based on things like dynamic IP addresses often reject all messages from an ISP. So it doesn't matter whether the email comes from your machine or the ISP's relay.
... the real problem with passwords is nobody ever teaches anybody how to make a strong password that is easy to remember.
Yeah, but there's something that makes it worse: Every time you have to make up a password, your first try is rejected because it violates the rules of that software. So you keep trying until you stumble across something that is acceptable.
As a result, my file of passwords now has 68 entries, and that doesn't even include the half dozen logins that I use often enough to remember. I don't keep them on paper, of course. I keep them on my web site, so I can find them from anywhere.;-)
Of course, the file has a misleading name, is hidden behind a number of index.html files, and has a name that starts with a dot so that the server doesn't give it out even during server changes when the index.html files are sometimes ignored for a short time. I know I should still be worried about the URL being intercepted in transit. But so far, this is the best solution I've found to what is a rather intractable problem.
The real problem is security dummies that impose such complex password rules on users that we are forced to resort to schemes like this to "remember" our passwords.
My point, which you quoted, was that: "You can't do much with ***___JUST___*** XWindows."
Sure you can. You can build an "X terminal". I've worked several places where that's what most of the machines were. You get a few xterms with $DISPLAY set up appropriately, and a small library of the obvious comm apps. You telnet/rsh/ssh to other machines and start running apps, whose windows appear on your screen. Some just have a window that lets you pick the remote host you want, a connection protocol, and a preferred terminal emulator (if any). Works like a charm. Aside from the need to connect to remote hosts initially, it's not materially different from a full workstation.
Of course, there really is more than just X Windows. There's a minimal OS (such as Minix or Qnix) with device drivers. There are a few local apps that are mostly the comm tools that you need to get out of the terminal. But this is just the stuff you need so that the X server can run in a useful manner.
(Newer X terminals now include things like browsers, and some even include a mail reader, which is sorta getting far away from the purity of the earlier X terminals. With time, they'll be fullblown systems in their own right. It's called creeping featuritis.;-)
When people start using applications to talk over the Internet, that's when you will have your Internet connection taxed.
Do you live in an area where your Internet connection isn't taxed? I don't.
Around here, you can get an Internet connection in only two ways: a phone line (modem or DSL) or cable. Both have a per-connection tax.
If Vonage is taxed as a phone company, then a customer who has DSL-based Internet service is paying the tax twice on the same line.
With cable service, the double taxation isn't so obvious, but it's still there. You pay twice for the connection, once as cable service and once as phone service.
Ah, the old "If it looks like a duck..." canard.;-)
The answer to this, of course, is that it could be a member of the family Rallidae (rails, gallinules, coots), not the Anatidae (ducks, geese, swans).
The North American coot looks, acts, and sounds a lot loke a duck, and most people think it's a duck. But in fact it's a rail. It's adapted a lot like a duck, but it's not. If you look at one closely, you see a lot of significant differences. Thus, ducks all have a continuous web between their toes. Rails have "flanges" on the sides of their toes that overlap and act like webbing, but their toes aren't connected like ducks' toes are.
Coots function a lot like ducks, but the low-level technology is very different.
There is a lot of confusion in the business and political world about what the Internet is. It's a lot like the old story of the blind men and the elephant. The guy who feels a leg may think that an elephant is a kind of tree, but that doesn't make it a tree.
Similarly, the cable, movie and music industries think the Internet is a new broadcast medium, despite the fact that the Internet hardly does "broadcast" at all. (It's primarily a point-to-point system, not one-to-many.) They want the Internet regulated so that it doesn't compete with their traditional monopolies. The phone industry thinks the Internet is a new way of doing phone calls, and wants it regulated into a monopoly that doesn't compete with the traditional phone system monopoly.
But this is all a "blind men and elephant" situation. The Internet is fundamentally different from these older comm media. Though it is able to mimic many of their functions, it does so in a different way. And it's a system that is inherently without central control, so it's a threat to the central-monopoly structure of the old media. And, money aside, one of the intended goals of all the old industries is that they want to put a stop to the development that is turning the Internet into a replacement for their monopolies.
One irony is that the phone system has been rapidly converting its low-level wires into TCP (or RTP) connections, and putting all their traffic onto the Internet. This is a huge cost saving to them, but of course their regulation doesn't permit them to pass the savings along to customers (or eliminate the long-distance charges).
The real danger to their business model is from newcomers like Vonage who don't have a tradional system to protect. The whole point of all this is to stop these upstarts and stop the innovation that will kill the traditional business plans.
[I]t creates a horrific precedent. Basically any translation from the web to the "real world" can be considered under this,..
Yeah; what I'm wondering is: Suppose I use the builtin microphone and speakers in my Mac Powerbook, or the plugin mike and speakers in my linux box, and write software to connect these to a program on another machine on the Net?
Am I now a phone company? Do I have to file the appropiate papers, pay taxes, and so on?
It gets more interesting when you consider that both I and my wife have PDAs with WiFi access. There are a number of these on the market now, such as the Palm Tungsten and the Blackberry RIM handhelds, and they mostly have a builtin mike and speaker. Also, voice-recognition software is available for all of these machines. Combine these with the Internet, and using them to remotely access sound files looks a lot like "phone" service.
So if I write a browser plugin that lets me talk into my PDA, which connects to my home machine and retrieves some files, am I now running a phone company? How about if I connect to a friend's home machine and do the same?
And some of us are working on voice-based interfaces for the benefit of the visually impaired. Is this all now to be considered a "phone" service, to be regulated and taxed as such?
Maybe it's time to just declare the Internet to be a phone system?
The default assumption is that your password is safe and you have taken precautions to protect it.
Yes, and this is the basis of OSX's susceptibility to things like spyware. With most unixoid systems, my password is only used to get to things that require my permissions. This is usually only login and killing the screen saver. To escalate permissions to a system id, you give that system id's password.
On OSX, to get the system configured initially, you are repeatedly prompted for a password by a popup window, and you have to type your own password. Thus, users are trained early on to respond to a popup demand for a password by typing their own password.
An expert user might be suspicious of this. But Macs are marketed primarily to non-geeks, not to computer experts. Most Mac users have no intention to get into the arcane inner workings of their computer; they want something that "just works". So they will in fact be trained to type their password when it is requested, and they will do so without much if any suspicion.
If I can get them to install my spyware, all I have to do is pop up that little window asking for their password. Perhaps I use the "keychain" incantation as an extra persuader. They type their password. My program now has access to not just their permissions, but also all of the "system" ids, including root. My code can also send the password, login, and machine id info back home, if the machine is connected to the Net.
This sounds like an invitation to a disaster to me. And note that the current topic is spyware getting into OSX via any browser.
The primary problem here is the use of a user's password to access all of the "system" ids. It's as if all the ids on the machine have the same password. This is nearly as insecure as not having passwords at all. Especially when you train your users to type their password whenever asked.
Hmmm repeated. I tried it again today, and this time it asked me for my password. So whatever the rule is, something changed since yesterday, when I didn't get any password prompts from "sudo id" at all.
I'd suspected that it might be somehow related to the groups that I'm in, but I'm in fewer groups than you are. My "id" command only lists staff and admin; I'm not in the wheel group. In fact, on my PowerBook, wheel (group 0) actually has no members except root.
In any case, I get nervous when I don't understand the security rules. If I can't predict the security behavior, I can't trust it.
Also, the fact that sudo works when I give it my own password (not root's) also makes me nervous. If my account is compormised and someone learns my password (say because some software has sent it across a wire in the clear), then they also have sudo access. This just seems wrong to me.
Yup, and it's not exactly a new term. The only real change here is deciding to no longer call that period "pre-Cambrian". 50 years ago, not enough was known about things that old to justify declaring an official period name. But now we know a lot more, and there is a rough concensus on where the border belongs, so promoting "Ediacaran" to the top level now makes sense.
The major book on the early Cambrian is probably still Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life", though a few minor points in that book have been superseded in the 15 years since it was published. Is there a comparable tome on the Ediacaran fossils? There were some truly alien-looking creatures then, not very similar to anything living on Earth today.
Heh. Actually, this is sort of a repeat of a similar story several years ago, when they were training rats to sniff out mines.
In those stories, they usually explained that wild city rats (brown or black) didn't make very good mine sniffers, because, although they are smart enough for the job, they really are fairly nasty wild animals that don't train well. Lab rats have been domesticated in a sense, and cooperate with humans better. But there was a problem: People tend to think that this sort of rat is cute. The trainers did get attached to them. That was ok for this purpose, because they wanted the rats to be well cared for. They're trained workers, after all.
If you look at the photo in the nytimes article, you'll also see a really cute critter, sorta like a small bunny. I'd bet that people like them, too. Plump, fuzzy critters are cute, even if they are a species of rat.
At 3 pounds (around 1.4 kg), they're definitely heavier than lab rats, but apparently still light enough to not trigger the mines. I wonder if they're more intelligent or easier to train than lab rats? If they live longer, that could also be an advantage.
Actually, while Finnish and Hungarian are distant relatives, they aren't nearly close enough that native speakers of either can understand the other. They're farther apart than English and German, or French and Italian. An even more distant relative is Japanese. I know a couple of native Finnish speakers who have studied Japanese, and they say that, while it's incomprehensible at first, the logic is much like Finnish, and it doesn't seem as "alien" as English or Swedish.
But it is easy for a Finn to learn Hungarian, just as it's easy for an Italian to learn French. The young people all want to learn English and German these days, though, with French a distant third. (Third as an elective; it's really fourth, because the schools are required to teach Swedish.)
As for the multilingual phenomenon in Scandinavia, I've seen one thing in both Sweden and Finland that may be a major part of the explanation. The television is never dubbed; at most it has subtitles. This is especially true of children's shows. When you ask why this is, the answer is always the same: The shows give the kids a choice of reading the text (in their native language) or understanding the speech (in another language). Either way, if they want to follow the show, they have to learn something. And the kids quickly learn that it's better to understand the speech, because then you don't have to take your eyes off the action to read the text. Also, the kids reinforce this with each other, because they talk about the shows with friends, and if you didn't understand it, you're a dummy.
So in Scandinavia, children's TV is actually educational, as well as fun. I remember picking up a bit more Finnish and Swedish while visiting some people with a young child, with the Mummi show in the background a lot of the time. Vocal track in Finnish; subs in Swedish. It's a great show, if you put yourself in a 5-year-old frame of mind, with a cynical outlook on society that makes for strong approval from adults.
Yeah, and I also tried "sudo | id", which told me it was run by root.
And, contrary to the comments by others, I haven't given sudo a password within the past five minutes. I haven't given sudo a password any time today.
This implies that anything that can trick my machine into running code from the outside under my permission can use sudo without a password to get root permission.
So much for OSX security.
Funny thing is: I know that sudo on my PowerBook has asked me for a password some time in the past. In fact, it did so at least once yesterday. But I have no idea what the pattern is. I don't use sudo often enough to have seen any such pattern.
Since its behavior is unknown to me, I should assume the worst. But it's difficult to imagine anything much worse than seeing "sudo id" tell me "uid=0(root)" when I haven't typed any password at all.
Well, I thought I'd set up my "normal" account on my PowerBook as a conventional unprivileged user, to avoid any such problems. Imagine my horror when I ran the following in a Terminal window:
Note that the "sudo" command didn't even ask me for a password.
I've dug around in TFM to try to understand the OSX security model. My conclusion from this and other tests: OSX security is far too complex for my feeble brain.
If OSX were marketed as a system for experts, this might not bother me. But it is aggressively marketed as the system "for the rest of us", and pushed as a good system for a computer novice. OSX takes care of all those complex computer-nerd things for you, so you don't have to worry your pretty head about it.
Frankly, the above example tells me that I should be worried. That just shouldn't work, dammit. And the docs should explain to me what's wrong, and how to fix it.
[I]f you make a user just for possibly unsafe stuff you're pretty well protected.
Indeed. I've done just that. I have to do a bunch of web testing as part of my job. One of the useful things about my PowerBook is that I have... let's see... yup, 8 different browsers now. And I often have to test with javascript turned on. Nobody with a grain of sense does that in an account that contains valuable data. We've had several demos of why not here on/. Remember "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!"?
So I have a "test" account that OSX (like any unix clone) can keep fairly separate from my real work account. It's test that does most of the web testing.
And yes, test has lost all of his files on several occasions. Once was when I coded up a web page with my own javascript file-zapper, and told test to download it. All of test's files were gone.
But nothing else in the system disappeared (except a few files in/tmp and/usr/tmp, and who needs those?;-)
Supposedly you can do this on XT, too. I wonder how many XT users could actually do it successfully the first try? I know (from a test on another machine;-) that I can't. That doesn't mean it's impossible, of course; there are probably a few XT users that would find it easy. OTOH, most unix/linux/OSX novices could do it without much effort.
(I wonder when browsex will come out for OSX? Cool browser. But I do wonder how you have sex that involves your brows.)
(And I wonder what other browsers exist for OSX that I don't know about.)
Well, yeah, but outside of Ahvenanmaa - oops, I mean Aaland -- the Swedish minority does pretty much grow up bilingual. Quadrilingual, actually. The couple of times I've been in Finland, I could hardly find anyone in the coastal areas whi didn't speak both, and also at least two of (German, French, Russian, Spanish).
If you're born in Finland, no matter whether Finnish or Swedish is your home language, you learn at a very early age that if you want to talk to the other 99.9% of the people in the world, you'd better learn a couple of other languages. Otherwise you'll be stuck forever in that tiny, semi-frozen corner of the planet.
The young people in Finland all speak English. Or at least they claim it's English. But then, we Americans also claim to speak English, despite the fact that American dictionaries rarely if ever make such a claim these days. They all claim to be "a dictionary of the American language".;-)
In any case, if you want to see an "alien" language (from an English-speakers viewpoint), don't look at Klingon or Elvish; They aren't much more than encoded English. Instead, look at Finnish. Of course, to a native speaker of Finnish, English and Swedish are equally bizarre, twisted and "alien". And to the million or so Finns who grow up truly bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, there are mental compartments that work in truly different ways. It's an interesting example of how varied the human mind can be.
Funny thing is, to someone who has lived in the American Midwest, there's absolutely nothing alien about Finland except that language. It's just like Minnesota or Wisconsin or Ontario - except for the language. So much for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
We will now wander off into an abstruse linguistic thread...
This is sort of like saying one architect stole a building design from another because it has four sides and a roof.
Well, I claim that the entire article was stolen. Every word in it appears in several previously-published dictionaries. They should sue Mr Brown and the AdTI for copyright infringement.
(One problem might be discovering just which dictionaries they plagiarized. The dictionary publishers seem to have plagiarized from each other extensively, making it difficult to discover the real source of any particular word.)
Heh, no. But that could be used as a similar example. A search engine that is good at legal searches should be a lot pickier about how the language is used. I'd imagine that lawyers would really like something that is a lot more targetted and precise than google.
In general, I'd think that to solve this problem, you wouldn't want to look too closely at specific examples, other than to become convinced that each specialty really is going to need its own parser and syntax analyzer.
A good traditional example is the phrase "dead beef", which is of course an encoding of four bytes in hexadecimal. In the data that my search bot analyzes, this would in fact be a legal and meaningful phrase, but it wouldn't be hexadecimal, and it wouldn't have anything to do with cattle (dead or alive). The encoding that I'm indexing in fact uses the letters A-G, and case is significant. Grouping of letters into word-like strings is meaningful, but has nothing to do with "words" in any spoken language.
There's another well-known alphabetic encoding that is becoming very significant that uses only the letters ACGT (and sometimes U). There are people working on software that indexes such text. In this case, strings like CAT and TAG are very meaningful (though I couldn't tell you off the top of my head which amino acids they encode).
It would be interesting if a search-engine project could find a way to incorporate text in such "languages" so that they could be combined in meaningful ways with searches of text in human languages. Or in computer languages, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we should put two buttons on the mouse.
Careful there. You'd better first do a thorough patent search to make sure that Microsoft doesn't already hold the patent on the idea.
Come to think of it, maybe this is why unix systems normally come with 3-button mice, to avoid infringing on MS's mouse design. And maybe it would be a good idea to patent the 3-button mouse quickly, before MS does, and release it under the GPL.
So are you telling me that aol.com isn't blocking our email?
If so, how do you explain the bounce messages in my wife's inbox that explicitly says this is so?
And the message says this is because of dynamic IP addresses. It doesn't say that smtp.rcn.com has a dynamic IP address; it just says that some rcn.com addresses are dynamic. That is apparently sufficient ground at AOL to block email from smtp.rcn.com.
Maybe I am a dummy, but how do you suggest we get our email accepted by aol.com?
I hate crowded planets.
Heh. But the threat of immortality might not make it all that crowded.
Some years back, I read of an interesting study. The question was phrased as: Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and actuarial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
The answer turned out to be about 15 years.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great. Making your body "immortal" wouldn't make you immune to death from the things that kill you now. It would just increase somewhat your chances of surviving. An auto accident, gunshot, or HIV virus would still end a life, but maybe just a bit later than now.
To get a real change and a population problem from immortality, we'd also need many social changes that blocked all the things that are now quite effective at killing young people.
Next time, try a credible, competent ISP.
Most people have a choice of exactly one ISP. Take it or leave it.
Actually, we do have two available here. Both have reported the same problem with mail to aol.com addresses. Maybe AOL is blocking all email from ISPs. That would definitely cut down the amount of spam that their customers receive.
It won't work. Around here, we get cable service through rcn.com, and my wife and I have email accounts with them. I don't use it much except for testing, but she uses it a lot. She uses her Mac Mail program, and it is configured to relay through smtp.rcn.com. Some weeks back, she found that email to aol.com addresses were bouncing. I found the raw source message, and it contained an explicit statement that all messages from rcn.com addresses were being rejected as spam.
;-)
AOL has done this in the past, of course, and they proudly announce how many spam messages they have rejected. Some have suggested that they should reject all email, and then they'd have a 100% successful rejection of spam. But I digress.
Anyway, the dummies that reject email based on things like dynamic IP addresses often reject all messages from an ISP. So it doesn't matter whether the email comes from your machine or the ISP's relay.
... the real problem with passwords is nobody ever teaches anybody how to make a strong password that is easy to remember.
;-)
Yeah, but there's something that makes it worse: Every time you have to make up a password, your first try is rejected because it violates the rules of that software. So you keep trying until you stumble across something that is acceptable.
As a result, my file of passwords now has 68 entries, and that doesn't even include the half dozen logins that I use often enough to remember. I don't keep them on paper, of course. I keep them on my web site, so I can find them from anywhere.
Of course, the file has a misleading name, is hidden behind a number of index.html files, and has a name that starts with a dot so that the server doesn't give it out even during server changes when the index.html files are sometimes ignored for a short time. I know I should still be worried about the URL being intercepted in transit. But so far, this is the best solution I've found to what is a rather intractable problem.
The real problem is security dummies that impose such complex password rules on users that we are forced to resort to schemes like this to "remember" our passwords.
whose sole active ingredient is caffeine.
Doesn't work with any of the 8 browsers on my PowerBook, not even IE.
A quick check shows that it's a frameset, and the URL in the main frame gets a "refused" reply.
... should of been a Tricycle with wierless internet access. ...
... Without any wiers, you probably didn't catch many fish at that festival.
Hmmm
But you did have a net, so maybe your catch was ok?
Answer: One more than it takes to change a light bulb.
(Punchline: "That's a hardware problem.")
My point, which you quoted, was that:
;-)
"You can't do much with ***___JUST___*** XWindows."
Sure you can. You can build an "X terminal". I've worked several places where that's what most of the machines were. You get a few xterms with $DISPLAY set up appropriately, and a small library of the obvious comm apps. You telnet/rsh/ssh to other machines and start running apps, whose windows appear on your screen. Some just have a window that lets you pick the remote host you want, a connection protocol, and a preferred terminal emulator (if any). Works like a charm. Aside from the need to connect to remote hosts initially, it's not materially different from a full workstation.
Of course, there really is more than just X Windows. There's a minimal OS (such as Minix or Qnix) with device drivers. There are a few local apps that are mostly the comm tools that you need to get out of the terminal. But this is just the stuff you need so that the X server can run in a useful manner.
(Newer X terminals now include things like browsers, and some even include a mail reader, which is sorta getting far away from the purity of the earlier X terminals. With time, they'll be fullblown systems in their own right. It's called creeping featuritis.
When people start using applications to talk over the Internet, that's when you will have your Internet connection taxed.
Do you live in an area where your Internet connection isn't taxed? I don't.
Around here, you can get an Internet connection in only two ways: a phone line (modem or DSL) or cable. Both have a per-connection tax.
If Vonage is taxed as a phone company, then a customer who has DSL-based Internet service is paying the tax twice on the same line.
With cable service, the double taxation isn't so obvious, but it's still there. You pay twice for the connection, once as cable service and once as phone service.
Ah, the old "If it looks like a duck ..." canard. ;-)
The answer to this, of course, is that it could be a member of the family Rallidae (rails, gallinules, coots), not the Anatidae (ducks, geese, swans).
The North American coot looks, acts, and sounds a lot loke a duck, and most people think it's a duck. But in fact it's a rail. It's adapted a lot like a duck, but it's not. If you look at one closely, you see a lot of significant differences. Thus, ducks all have a continuous web between their toes. Rails have "flanges" on the sides of their toes that overlap and act like webbing, but their toes aren't connected like ducks' toes are.
Coots function a lot like ducks, but the low-level technology is very different.
There is a lot of confusion in the business and political world about what the Internet is. It's a lot like the old story of the blind men and the elephant. The guy who feels a leg may think that an elephant is a kind of tree, but that doesn't make it a tree.
Similarly, the cable, movie and music industries think the Internet is a new broadcast medium, despite the fact that the Internet hardly does "broadcast" at all. (It's primarily a point-to-point system, not one-to-many.) They want the Internet regulated so that it doesn't compete with their traditional monopolies. The phone industry thinks the Internet is a new way of doing phone calls, and wants it regulated into a monopoly that doesn't compete with the traditional phone system monopoly.
But this is all a "blind men and elephant" situation. The Internet is fundamentally different from these older comm media. Though it is able to mimic many of their functions, it does so in a different way. And it's a system that is inherently without central control, so it's a threat to the central-monopoly structure of the old media. And, money aside, one of the intended goals of all the old industries is that they want to put a stop to the development that is turning the Internet into a replacement for their monopolies.
One irony is that the phone system has been rapidly converting its low-level wires into TCP (or RTP) connections, and putting all their traffic onto the Internet. This is a huge cost saving to them, but of course their regulation doesn't permit them to pass the savings along to customers (or eliminate the long-distance charges).
The real danger to their business model is from newcomers like Vonage who don't have a tradional system to protect. The whole point of all this is to stop these upstarts and stop the innovation that will kill the traditional business plans.
[I]t creates a horrific precedent. Basically any translation from the web to the "real world" can be considered under this, ..
Yeah; what I'm wondering is: Suppose I use the builtin microphone and speakers in my Mac Powerbook, or the plugin mike and speakers in my linux box, and write software to connect these to a program on another machine on the Net?
Am I now a phone company? Do I have to file the appropiate papers, pay taxes, and so on?
It gets more interesting when you consider that both I and my wife have PDAs with WiFi access. There are a number of these on the market now, such as the Palm Tungsten and the Blackberry RIM handhelds, and they mostly have a builtin mike and speaker. Also, voice-recognition software is available for all of these machines. Combine these with the Internet, and using them to remotely access sound files looks a lot like "phone" service.
So if I write a browser plugin that lets me talk into my PDA, which connects to my home machine and retrieves some files, am I now running a phone company? How about if I connect to a friend's home machine and do the same?
And some of us are working on voice-based interfaces for the benefit of the visually impaired. Is this all now to be considered a "phone" service, to be regulated and taxed as such?
Maybe it's time to just declare the Internet to be a phone system?
The default assumption is that your password is safe and you have taken precautions to protect it.
Yes, and this is the basis of OSX's susceptibility to things like spyware. With most unixoid systems, my password is only used to get to things that require my permissions. This is usually only login and killing the screen saver. To escalate permissions to a system id, you give that system id's password.
On OSX, to get the system configured initially, you are repeatedly prompted for a password by a popup window, and you have to type your own password. Thus, users are trained early on to respond to a popup demand for a password by typing their own password.
An expert user might be suspicious of this. But Macs are marketed primarily to non-geeks, not to computer experts. Most Mac users have no intention to get into the arcane inner workings of their computer; they want something that "just works". So they will in fact be trained to type their password when it is requested, and they will do so without much if any suspicion.
If I can get them to install my spyware, all I have to do is pop up that little window asking for their password. Perhaps I use the "keychain" incantation as an extra persuader. They type their password. My program now has access to not just their permissions, but also all of the "system" ids, including root. My code can also send the password, login, and machine id info back home, if the machine is connected to the Net.
This sounds like an invitation to a disaster to me. And note that the current topic is spyware getting into OSX via any browser.
The primary problem here is the use of a user's password to access all of the "system" ids. It's as if all the ids on the machine have the same password. This is nearly as insecure as not having passwords at all. Especially when you train your users to type their password whenever asked.
Hmmm repeated. I tried it again today, and this time it asked me for my password. So whatever the rule is, something changed since yesterday, when I didn't get any password prompts from "sudo id" at all.
I'd suspected that it might be somehow related to the groups that I'm in, but I'm in fewer groups than you are. My "id" command only lists staff and admin; I'm not in the wheel group. In fact, on my PowerBook, wheel (group 0) actually has no members except root.
In any case, I get nervous when I don't understand the security rules. If I can't predict the security behavior, I can't trust it.
Also, the fact that sudo works when I give it my own password (not root's) also makes me nervous. If my account is compormised and someone learns my password (say because some software has sent it across a wire in the clear), then they also have sudo access. This just seems wrong to me.
Why would they have done it this way?
It's Ediacaran, ...
Yup, and it's not exactly a new term. The only real change here is deciding to no longer call that period "pre-Cambrian". 50 years ago, not enough was known about things that old to justify declaring an official period name. But now we know a lot more, and there is a rough concensus on where the border belongs, so promoting "Ediacaran" to the top level now makes sense.
The major book on the early Cambrian is probably still Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life", though a few minor points in that book have been superseded in the 15 years since it was published. Is there a comparable tome on the Ediacaran fossils? There were some truly alien-looking creatures then, not very similar to anything living on Earth today.
Heh. Actually, this is sort of a repeat of a similar story several years ago, when they were training rats to sniff out mines.
In those stories, they usually explained that wild city rats (brown or black) didn't make very good mine sniffers, because, although they are smart enough for the job, they really are fairly nasty wild animals that don't train well. Lab rats have been domesticated in a sense, and cooperate with humans better. But there was a problem: People tend to think that this sort of rat is cute. The trainers did get attached to them. That was ok for this purpose, because they wanted the rats to be well cared for. They're trained workers, after all.
If you look at the photo in the nytimes article, you'll also see a really cute critter, sorta like a small bunny. I'd bet that people like them, too. Plump, fuzzy critters are cute, even if they are a species of rat.
At 3 pounds (around 1.4 kg), they're definitely heavier than lab rats, but apparently still light enough to not trigger the mines. I wonder if they're more intelligent or easier to train than lab rats? If they live longer, that could also be an advantage.
Actually, while Finnish and Hungarian are distant relatives, they aren't nearly close enough that native speakers of either can understand the other. They're farther apart than English and German, or French and Italian. An even more distant relative is Japanese. I know a couple of native Finnish speakers who have studied Japanese, and they say that, while it's incomprehensible at first, the logic is much like Finnish, and it doesn't seem as "alien" as English or Swedish.
But it is easy for a Finn to learn Hungarian, just as it's easy for an Italian to learn French. The young people all want to learn English and German these days, though, with French a distant third. (Third as an elective; it's really fourth, because the schools are required to teach Swedish.)
As for the multilingual phenomenon in Scandinavia, I've seen one thing in both Sweden and Finland that may be a major part of the explanation. The television is never dubbed; at most it has subtitles. This is especially true of children's shows. When you ask why this is, the answer is always the same: The shows give the kids a choice of reading the text (in their native language) or understanding the speech (in another language). Either way, if they want to follow the show, they have to learn something. And the kids quickly learn that it's better to understand the speech, because then you don't have to take your eyes off the action to read the text. Also, the kids reinforce this with each other, because they talk about the shows with friends, and if you didn't understand it, you're a dummy.
So in Scandinavia, children's TV is actually educational, as well as fun. I remember picking up a bit more Finnish and Swedish while visiting some people with a young child, with the Mummi show in the background a lot of the time. Vocal track in Finnish; subs in Swedish. It's a great show, if you put yourself in a 5-year-old frame of mind, with a cynical outlook on society that makes for strong approval from adults.
echo |sudo -S ls
Yeah, and I also tried "sudo | id", which told me it was run by root.
And, contrary to the comments by others, I haven't given sudo a password within the past five minutes. I haven't given sudo a password any time today.
This implies that anything that can trick my machine into running code from the outside under my permission can use sudo without a password to get root permission.
So much for OSX security.
Funny thing is: I know that sudo on my PowerBook has asked me for a password some time in the past. In fact, it did so at least once yesterday. But I have no idea what the pattern is. I don't use sudo often enough to have seen any such pattern.
Since its behavior is unknown to me, I should assume the worst. But it's difficult to imagine anything much worse than seeing "sudo id" tell me "uid=0(root)" when I haven't typed any password at all.
Note that the "sudo" command didn't even ask me for a password.
I've dug around in TFM to try to understand the OSX security model. My conclusion from this and other tests: OSX security is far too complex for my feeble brain.
If OSX were marketed as a system for experts, this might not bother me. But it is aggressively marketed as the system "for the rest of us", and pushed as a good system for a computer novice. OSX takes care of all those complex computer-nerd things for you, so you don't have to worry your pretty head about it.
Frankly, the above example tells me that I should be worried. That just shouldn't work, dammit. And the docs should explain to me what's wrong, and how to fix it.
[I]f you make a user just for possibly unsafe stuff you're pretty well protected.
... let's see ... yup, 8 different browsers now. And I often have to test with javascript turned on. Nobody with a grain of sense does that in an account that contains valuable data. We've had several demos of why not here on /. Remember "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!"?
/tmp and /usr/tmp, and who needs those? ;-)
;-) that I can't. That doesn't mean it's impossible, of course; there are probably a few XT users that would find it easy. OTOH, most unix/linux/OSX novices could do it without much effort.
Indeed. I've done just that. I have to do a bunch of web testing as part of my job. One of the useful things about my PowerBook is that I have
So I have a "test" account that OSX (like any unix clone) can keep fairly separate from my real work account. It's test that does most of the web testing.
And yes, test has lost all of his files on several occasions. Once was when I coded up a web page with my own javascript file-zapper, and told test to download it. All of test's files were gone.
But nothing else in the system disappeared (except a few files in
Supposedly you can do this on XT, too. I wonder how many XT users could actually do it successfully the first try? I know (from a test on another machine
(I wonder when browsex will come out for OSX? Cool browser. But I do wonder how you have sex that involves your brows.)
(And I wonder what other browsers exist for OSX that I don't know about.)
Well, yeah, but outside of Ahvenanmaa - oops, I mean Aaland -- the Swedish minority does pretty much grow up bilingual. Quadrilingual, actually. The couple of times I've been in Finland, I could hardly find anyone in the coastal areas whi didn't speak both, and also at least two of (German, French, Russian, Spanish).
;-)
...
If you're born in Finland, no matter whether Finnish or Swedish is your home language, you learn at a very early age that if you want to talk to the other 99.9% of the people in the world, you'd better learn a couple of other languages. Otherwise you'll be stuck forever in that tiny, semi-frozen corner of the planet.
The young people in Finland all speak English. Or at least they claim it's English. But then, we Americans also claim to speak English, despite the fact that American dictionaries rarely if ever make such a claim these days. They all claim to be "a dictionary of the American language".
In any case, if you want to see an "alien" language (from an English-speakers viewpoint), don't look at Klingon or Elvish; They aren't much more than encoded English. Instead, look at Finnish. Of course, to a native speaker of Finnish, English and Swedish are equally bizarre, twisted and "alien". And to the million or so Finns who grow up truly bilingual in Finnish and Swedish, there are mental compartments that work in truly different ways. It's an interesting example of how varied the human mind can be.
Funny thing is, to someone who has lived in the American Midwest, there's absolutely nothing alien about Finland except that language. It's just like Minnesota or Wisconsin or Ontario - except for the language. So much for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
We will now wander off into an abstruse linguistic thread
Alien puppet Linus swiped Linux from SCO, says balanced study.
... ;-)
Linus is an alien. He is a Finnish citizen currently residing in the United States.
(And take a look at the Finnish language. Talk about alien
This is sort of like saying one architect stole a building design from another because it has four sides and a roof.
Well, I claim that the entire article was stolen. Every word in it appears in several previously-published dictionaries. They should sue Mr Brown and the AdTI for copyright infringement.
(One problem might be discovering just which dictionaries they plagiarized. The dictionary publishers seem to have plagiarized from each other extensively, making it difficult to discover the real source of any particular word.)
Heh, no. But that could be used as a similar example. A search engine that is good at legal searches should be a lot pickier about how the language is used. I'd imagine that lawyers would really like something that is a lot more targetted and precise than google.
In general, I'd think that to solve this problem, you wouldn't want to look too closely at specific examples, other than to become convinced that each specialty really is going to need its own parser and syntax analyzer.
A good traditional example is the phrase "dead beef", which is of course an encoding of four bytes in hexadecimal. In the data that my search bot analyzes, this would in fact be a legal and meaningful phrase, but it wouldn't be hexadecimal, and it wouldn't have anything to do with cattle (dead or alive). The encoding that I'm indexing in fact uses the letters A-G, and case is significant. Grouping of letters into word-like strings is meaningful, but has nothing to do with "words" in any spoken language.
There's another well-known alphabetic encoding that is becoming very significant that uses only the letters ACGT (and sometimes U). There are people working on software that indexes such text. In this case, strings like CAT and TAG are very meaningful (though I couldn't tell you off the top of my head which amino acids they encode).
It would be interesting if a search-engine project could find a way to incorporate text in such "languages" so that they could be combined in meaningful ways with searches of text in human languages. Or in computer languages, for that matter.