Are any of you network admins? What was your worst day on the job? Probably, it was a day when things really didn't go well after an upgrade or equipment change. You probably had people coming in to the equipment room every five minutes to ask two things: 1) do you need any help? and 2) when will it be fixed? You got sick of both questions, because you were stressed out enough already.
This is part of the Internet, though: we forget that real people do work for Microsoft. We forget that MS isn't just an evil force, but has people who have emotions working for it. It is an irony that people on Slashdot - technically literate people - who claim that email is an equalizer (no respector of race, disabilities, age, etc) - these same peple forget about the human faces behind a large website.
I wouldn't want to be in those network admin's shoes right now. I've had DNS outages, and I know what it is like to have corporate headquarters yelling, "Why aren't we up?"
So, before you criticize how "dumb" their admins are, and whatever else, remember two things: 1) This same problem (DNS outage) has happened to any real admin on Slashdot, and 2) the MS network admins are having a very bad day.
I can't resist... I know it has little bearing on the topic of what to do about the specific problems occurring with connectivity amoung Usenet nodes, but...
*Death of Usenet Predicted! Film at 11!*
I've been involved in Usenet and on-line communicications since about 1988. That doesn't make me an old-timer, but it does give me hopefully a little creadability.
In this time, I've seen people talk about how much trash has entered into Usenet, how spam is on the rise, how key backbone sites are dumping Usenet, etc. So far, Usenet has proven remarkably robust and resiliant to these kind of problems.
Yes, I browse Usenet with a very extensive SPAM filter. Just as in the old days, after about 500 messages in a thread, I tire of it and add it, also, to the SPAM filter. There are certain people who get the distinction of *plonk* as they are added to my kill files. But, life goes on.
In my opinion, Usenet is one of the last examples of community still left on the Internet (with some IRC channels and VERY FEW sites like Slashdot also there -- although I might argue that the community on slashdot isn't anything like the community on Usenet).
Oracle used to have a backdoor, too, although it wasn't the compiled-in, "hidden" backdoor, but rather a default account that many users didn't know was there (user name: scott). It doesn't exist in the newer versions of Oracle, though.
Let me just second this opinion! I've never used ClearCase, but I use both CVS and P4.
CVS doesn't understand that multiple files can be part of a signle atomic change. This is the biggest failing in CVS. If I change a function's interface, I'll probably also change the calls to the function to use the new interface. This change should be able to be backed out or applied completely atomically. P4 lets you do that. CVS keeps a history of each file, while P4 keeps a history of each change. A subtle, yet importantant, distinction.
It not only catches memory leaks, but also uninitialized pointers, using uninitialized RAM, stack overflows, etc. It is, in my opinion, the best tool on the market.
Yes, it does cost some $$$ (about $2500 per license). If you can't afford it for whatever reason (your a student, business doesn't have the money, etc), or you need a Linux solution (not purify - yet), you'll have to go open source. I would be thrilled if Rational released their tools on Linux, too, although I have to wonder how many Linux developers could afford to buy them (probably the reason they haven't released for Linux yet).
I worked with two other people in a "mega cube" (with 6' high permenant "walls"). We dubbed it the "Playpen". The company firmly believed in giving people the resources they needed to do our jobs, so we had:
1) A very large whiteboard on one wall - with no furnature in front of it.
2) A spare computer and desk for "guests" to use during technical discussions (also used as a second terminal for the residents if they needed to run something that took a lot of resources)
3) It was a corner office in a tall office building, so it had an awesome view
4) Each person had their own phone
5) Nice workstations with 21" monitors
6) A comfortable "poof chair" (it is sort of a "full body" bean bag)
7) A shared bookshelf, so that you could borrow each other's books.
8) A collection of office toys, including a rubber-band powered plane (OSHA wouldn't have liked us flying that in the cube; too bad) and a bat suspended from the ceiling (it claimed to have a "soothing motion" - it didn't).
It worked VERY well since the three of us that shared the office all worked on the same projects at the same time. This environment was easily the most productive environment I've worked in.
People have mentioned "noise", though. It was true that music could be an issue. I recommend that companies buy GOOD headphones for every employee - a pair of $200 headphones can sound better than a $1000 set of speakers; once everyone has a set of these, you won't be able to pay them to listen to music on crappy computer speakers. The headphones should allow outside sound in and have at least 25' of cord (use an extension if you must).
As for ringing phones, that WAS annoying! It wasn't too bad, though, because we also had a "mini room" (actually two spare offices) across the hall. These rooms were used when people needed to have a long phone conversation, as they could go in and shut the door. This also gave some privacy. It was considered rude to talk for hours in the megacube, unless you were talking to everyone else there.
The furnature consisted of whatever we could dig up. I would recommend nice desks (single piece, not a U or L shaped desk) with LOTS of small tables. The ones that we had were 3' by 3' tables that could be configured however we wanted. If you wanted a "L" desk, you just grabbed three of these and put them on the left of your desk. I actually had a wrap-around desk build out of these. The nice thing is that you can reconfigure your space as appropriate for your work. We could, for instance, build a conference table in the middle of the room in a matter of minutes. All those nice "executive" desks really fall short in the ability to adjust to the work environment - they are nice for people who crave status symbols, but not for many others.
As you can see, though, this didn't save the company any money. The three of us had about twice the space we would have had if we lived in cubes. Not many companies could justify buying a poof chair for a space like this. Most environments I've worked in refuse to buy the most modern workstations for programmers, and 21" monitors are, sadly, rare. But, we were much more productive and I believe that our space and equipment cost less than additional employees would have.
I would also say that some of the positives of this environment came accidently. For instance, the company didn't think that being cheap on a bookshelf would increase productivity, but it did!
I'm not sure if you are just running apps remotely or if you are running an entire windowing environment remotely.
I used to run an Xterminal that was on one side of a fairly overloaded 56K line. This terminal did not run a local window manger - it logged in remotely via XDM. It ran fine once I did some tweaking to the window manager. Specifically, "fancy" window managers are horrid over slow links. Don't even consider something like CDE/KDE, Gnome or FWVM over a slow line. TWM, while very sparse, is an excellent window manager for slow lines.
Of course, if you run your window manager on your local box, it will have little effect on your network speed.
On a related topic, though: use the "older" applications. Remember that these applications were used across slower networks by the developers! Most new applications were developped on a single machine, with no network involved for the developer's display. As a result, that section of the code was probably never tuned. An example would be to use "xterm" instead of "konsole" (although I haven't tested these against each other; this is only an example)
Some other relevant information:
All I ran was a mining dispatch system, which had some fairly simple graphics (it tracked the mine's heavy equipment) on top of a CAD overlay of the mine. I was also able to use xterms and such fine. Don't even think about running Star Office or Netscape remotely, though -- too many messages have to pass back and forth. Desktop apps should stay on the desktop!
The fringes of the SQL may be different but the core SQL language is controlled by the SQL Language Council so
any SQL which comes under the SQL '92 spec should move across without difficulty. It's the extras that cause
the problems where the different vendors have different approaches to various problems.
Oracle is not SQL '92 compliant, as it lacks the JOIN operator in the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement. Yes, you can still join many, many tables -- just use the older syntax. It probably is SQL 92 incompatabile in other regards, too.
For the author's question, this won't be a problem. For the conversion the other way, though, it might.
I don't mean to be too blunt, but, let me state the obvious: If you are using the DBMS to it's full potential, you are hopefully using many stored procedures. You'll have to recode them all, and you might have to change your glue code in the business logic layer (in Perl, you put all the DBI stuff into modules, right?). If you are using stored procedures, it is going to be a LOT OF WORK. If not, it'll probably be simple, although you won't gain anything noticiable by users. If you aren't using the stored procedures, hints, and other Oracle-specific functions, I'd just convert over to Postgress or MySql (if you aren't using foriegn keys, either) and save yourself lots of $$$.
He might need the native threads to take advantage of a multi-processor box... Green threads/process threads will be ~50% slower on a two processor box, and much slower than that on a medium sized server (8-16 processors). I can't imagine anyone even thinking of using Java on a truly large box, but you would get even more performance increase in a well-designed application.
Kimball's book, the Data Warehouse Toolkit, does exactly this. It gives you a pattern for a star schema, which is almost the only schema used in data warehousing. He then goes into detail about slowly changing dimensions, rapidly changing dimensions, partially summable facts, etc. If you do data warehousing, this is the book of patterns. Maybe I'll write a review for Slashdot sometime...
1) Take your DVD player. You'll save money and effort that way. Take your disks, too. Don't rezone anything, since you already own zone 2 disks and your player can also play zone 1 disks.
2) Buy a voltage converter to plug it into the wall.
3) Buy a decent US TV. Not an el-cheapo, but something that has the S-Video jack on the back. Cable that to your DVD player, since you mentioned "Super Video" AKA S-Video. Most 32" TV's have S-Video.
BTW: I used to do Internet security consulting and computer forensics work, as well as sysadmin. Hopefully that means I know what I'm talking about.
I've dealt with some of this before. I used to run a web hosting company's network. As a result of us hosting 100s of websites (we were small - I hate to see what the big guys deal with), we would daily get pings, traceroutes, port scans, attempted attacks, DOS attacks, VRFY/EXPNs, telnets, etc. Now, note that we only provided four services: WWW, FrontPage, FTP, and mail.
If I even looked at all the logs for these "attacks", I would not be doing my job! I can hear it now, "He wasn't doing his job; he wasn't being alert about his systems." No, I disagree. I would get litterally hundreds of these "attacks" daily, and only a couple DOS attacks a month would be "serious" enough to disrupt things (and very mildly, I'll add). Yes, I noticed things that affected our customers. But, I didn't care about the rest of the $#@^! After all, if they got in, the logs would no longer exist. If they didn't, it is kind of pointless to look at logs for attacks that failed.
I have to wonder what the people complaining about this do for a living. Obviously, they can't be complaining about a ping scan of a significant network, for they wouldn't have time to do that!
As for the "ping is dangerous" theory, yes it is used sometimes by crackers. But, I bet that I could send your system an IP fragment and determine if it existed or not. I could even traceroute with it. Chances are, even if your system is behind a packet filter (vs. a real firewall), I would *STILL* be able to map your topography! It wouldn't show up on your filters, either. Do we really believe that our network design is so unusual and important that we need to protect it using "closed source" methods?
Personally, I don't care if you look at my network. $#@^ with it, however, by causing DOS or breaking in, and you can bet that I'll call the FBI. Before then, though, because of the state of the Internet, I'm going to ignore you. I have no time to investigate every hacker coming through a chain of 10 trojaned Windoze boxes.
This might not BSOD, but it will crash the machine for sure. Just leave the cover off the machine. When it is time to crash it, just unplug the power from the hard disk. It will crash very shortly. (besides, I'd hope your product can handle a crashed hard disk in one of the machines!)
I read this column and shrieked in horror! Some of the suggestions will destroy your perfectly good computer. I spent some college summers working for a coal mine in Wyoming. Coal is made of carbon, and carbon is conductive. Needless to say, it is a bad thing to have in computer parts, electrical OR mechanical -- much worse than normal dust which doesn't really hurt electronics (unless you have enough of it to cause your machine to overheat; I doubt it). At this mine, I would spend 1-2 months at a time doing nothing but cleaning PCs. You see, we had to do it at least every 6 months, or the carbon would make connections where there shouldn't have been any. We had enough dust that I learned a little about cleaning PCs. What worked there will work ANYWHERE else!
First, though, some cautions: DON'T EVER DIP ANYTHING IN YOUR COMPUTER IN WATER. Most mechanical and electrical things in your computer have some metals that rust. You don't want a rusty computer. Mechanical parts take a long time to dry. Remember, chip sockets are primarily mechanical devices! Water is a poor conductor, but that lets it conduct where it shouldn't and hinders good connections enough to break them. If you ever get a computer wet, let it dry for two weeks, after removing all chips on the motherboard, cards in slots, and cables in plugs. Obviously this should be done professionally. Oh ya, you'll ruin your hard disk if you get it wet.
Second: Don't use an air compressor! You could end up sand-blasting delicate electronics and you probably will destroy your fans.
Here's how I do a PC cleaning...
SAFTY WARNING: Don't ever touch electronics when plugged in. Don't open the case of monitors or power supplies.
Tips: Static will be hard to kill your computer with. I don't do anything other than make sure I'm not working on carpet. I did this in Wyoming, with 0-5% humidity and never ruined a computer due to staic. I never wore static wristbands or such nonesense. Computers are really very durable. On the other hand, if static destroys your computer, it isn't my fault!
Always "blow" and never "suck". Sucking requires you to almost touch chips and electronics. Don't do that.
Monitor: Unplug it. Use windex on outside only. You can use a plastic cleaner if you need to. Don't get any liquid into the holes in back. Monitors contain extreamly high (and deadly) voltages, even when unplugged -- they store the current. Unless you really know what you are doing, don't touch it. A $200 monitor ain't worth your life. Period.
Keyboard: Unplug it. Take the keys off *IF THEY COME OFF WITHOUT DAMAGING THE KEYBOARD*. Hold keyboard upside down and shake vigorously. Tap it several times. You should have a pile of grime under it. Soak the keycaps in soapy water and scrub with a spunge. You can use canned compressed air or a vacume cleaner in exhast mode to blow dust out of the keyboard at this point. Leave the greas on the metal pieces like the spacebar, since it lets it work right.
Put on a dust mask at this point. Your lungs will thank you in 25 years. Dust can kill you, but it takes it some time to do so. A $2 mask will save you years potentially -- especially if you do a lot of this.
Main CPU case: Unplug it. Clean the outside with a general cleaner. Open it up, flip it upside down to get the "big stuff" out. Then blow out the power supply and system fans. When blowing out the power supply, first "block" the fan. You can do this by inserting a non-conductive tool or stick into the fan cover in back, so that the fan won't spin when you blow air through it. Don't ever spin the fan with canned or compressed air; they aren't designed for that and are made very cheap. They will break! Then, stick the nozel of the canned air into the slots and move it around, or use a vacume cleaner in exhast mode with the hoze pressed up against the vent holes around the power supply. A lot of dust will come out. Remember to never open the power supply up. It contains high voltage when unplugged, too. Do the same thing for fans. Then, blow dust off the main board and out from other parts of the case. Use care around hard disks, as you can ruin them with too much air pressure -- you can actually blow dust INTO them!
Then, reassemble the computer, power it on, and insert floppy and CD cleaning disks. Follow their instructions. You must do this, as you probably blew dust into them. Remember that floppys serve a dual function of also being air intakes in most computers! (you can stick a vacume outlet hose or compressed air can hose into the drive and blow it out before you reassemble the computer, if you want; it won't hurt it)
Hope this helps. Try to stay away from getting your stuff wet like this group keeps trying to tell you to do! Also, don't attempt this work if you are uncomfortable with doing it. It is unlikely, but even if you follow my instructions, I can't gaurantee you won't get hurt or hurt your computer.
This is *NOT* flamebait. Rather, it is the sad observations after working with kids and computers. I was fortunate enough to go to a school with a well-equiped lab, and also fortunate enough to be allowed to touch the networking stuff (hubs, servers, etc). I wouldn't be in the job I'm in now if it wasn't for that chance. But, not everyone in Jr. High or High School has a lot of maturity (don't believe me? Go sit in a HS lunchroom some day; plus, I know about some of the stuff I did) -- and it is best to protect investments of tens of thosands of dollars. As for porn, be wise.
I have worked with several High Schools and public computing facilities (mostly college level), and have learned a few tricks to making student labs work. If it is a public use lab, and Jr. High/High School students populate it, expect *AT LEAST* the following problems (it seems they are applying to college labs more and more now, too):
1) Missing mouse balls. Solution? Superglue. Sorry, can't clean the mice once you do this, but at least you don't have to buy 50,000 mouse balls.
2) Games/Porn/Surfing. Define your policy clearly. You should mention something about noise while you are at it (is it okay?). My recommendation on games/surfing is that it only be allowed during "off peak" hours; that is, no games or surfing when someone is waiting on a computer!
3) Viruses, trojans for Windoze. Have an Internet connection? Someone will install Back Oriface. Viruses will be common, too. Install good AV software.
4) Distruptive behavior. One common stage of youth learning computers involves trying to sabotage (sp?) each other's work. Read about a new Windoze denial of service? Someone is going to try it in your lab. If you run Unix, expect fork bombs. (If you run Unix, I recommend turning OFF remote logins except for Sysadmins on the workstations)
5) Piracy. Do you really think 15 high school students purchased that networked game they are playing? YOU COULD BE LIABLE, though! You have to monitor this, sadly, to reduce your liability. I would make an official policy of "no software installs" -- except possibly in each user's personal space. You can get around the requirement to audit your computers for unauthorized software by simply re-installing them every week or so (very easy to do with Ghost; simply make a special boot disk, put it in 5 computers at a time, load the image off the network and reboot them).
6) Printing! If you have free printing, you'll do a lot of printing.
7) Theft. This is the one I hate the most. Lock your hardware down. I recommend you also lock down your keyboard and mouse, all your power cables, etc. This is even more important if you can't monitor the lab 24 hrs/day.
8) Servers. Lock them up! Don't let them be used directly except under supervision. This is because you want to encourage students learning new environments to have someone "look over their shoulders." A second set of eyes avoids mistakes.
Oh yes, expect lots of grumbling. People won't like all your policies, and some people "know" they can do a better job at running a network. It's important that you somehow communicate that ego isn't the most important thing to have when working with computers. If you can turn out ego-less, qualified administrators, you will be doing us all a service!
If you have over 250,000 page views per month, check out http://www.affinia.com/ppn/ . I work for this company, so I am biased towards it (you are warned!).
This doesn't completely solve the question you asked as we don't do the same thing advertising companies do (we are different enough that you can keep existing advertising revenue streams, such as Flycast/Double Click/Burst -- we are a totally incremental revenue stream).
We do "product placements" instead of "banner ads". They look and work quite a bit differently, but I think you'll be pleased with them (not to mention that you can keep your existing ads).
We also have very good performance and reliability (we shouldn't slow your page loads significantly), not to mention our customer support is easy to work with.
Now that the Internet is so important for commercial activities, I wonder when the "logical next step" will come about...
The US still effectively controls the top level DNS servers. Let's say we went to war against, say, the UK. We obviously want to disrupt the UK's government and military communications as much as possible, so we remove.uk from the root DNS servers... Of course, there are work arounds, but none of them are easy. And, of course, no country uses the Internet for tactical communications -- but they do use it for "routine matters". It's hard to fight a war if you can't get shoes!
Yes, I did the same, using Quickbasic and VBBS instead of WWIV (C compilers used to cost more than QuickBasic's compiler). In addition, it seemed to have more neat features, such as a built-in scripting language. That's probably more responsible than anything I did for learning how to program.
I see there is a lot of talk about not using "toy" languages. I disagree. Part of programming is learning how to overcome limitations -- I program PL/SQL for a living, and working around PL/SQL problems is a critical skill!
Here's how I did it:
Age 5: Apple IIe, basic, hello world, that kind of thing. My dad said, "you can't program this until you learn to read." It made me want to learn to read *AND* learn to program!
Age 7 or so: My parents bought me a portable computer. It ran on a bunch of AA batteries (I never used that) or wall power, had a 4 line screen, with 40 characters wide. Yes, very, very limited. Oh, 16K of RAM. But, it had built in BASIC and booted up without any "programs" running. You had to type everything in at a "basic prompt." The system then remember what you put in between uses. So, I developed 5 or 6 games, and linked them together with a menu system. No graphics, but I still enjoyed it.
More Apple stuff, etc. Until age 15, when I became "cosysop" with a friend on a BBS. I did more than you would expect for a teenager -- we had formal "software upgrades", backup policies, etc. We used his computer to run the BBS, and my machine was the "development environment." Thus, it contained a duplicate of the "real" system and let us try things there first. When we switched to VBBS, I learned VBscript, and then we purchased the VBBS source code, so we could modify it. I learned a lot.
Age 16: Pascal, C, Fortran. Did this at the community college.
When you see "C", and are exposed to the raw power of it all, you only really appreciate it after dealing with the limitations of other languages. Sure, you learned a lot of esoteric tasks to work around toy machine problems, but, you still learned the basics of logic. Subroutines, objects, etc, can come earlier. When the kid wants to learn them, he will.
The key is to make the kid want to learn it, let them learn it (remove the obsticals), and encourage them. This is the same for teaching a kid anything.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the connection between open source and Napster! Here's things from where I sit:
Napster needs to win this lawsuit. The reason they need to win is because I don't want someone who writes an FTP client/server to be sued for distributing MP3s, warez, etc...
That said, I think that most napster users (I'm sure I'll get flamed by hundreds of guys who "use napster without stealing") steal artist's works. Sorry, they do. Why do you think this is so popular at colleges? Most students couldn't give a care about the technical side of this thing (most students DO NOT major in computers!). However, most students can care about "saving" money. Show me how Napster lets users improve music, like open source lets users improve software. At that point, I'll say it is related to open source.
Sorry for the off-topicness below, but I feel it must be said.
Main point: THE OPEN SOURCE CONCEPT DOES NOT REQUIRE EVERY PIECE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO BE GIVEN AWAY; IT ONLY REQUIRES THINGS PEOPLE WANT TO BE GIVEN AWAY TO BE GIVEN AWAY. If enough people do this, then open source will succeed. Want to support open source? Quit arguing about a commercial organization's copyright (unless it violates yours), and start giving stuff away.
Jon: What do you think of my job? Have I sold out to the enemy? Am I scum? You see, I've worked for several software companies, some of which sold their code. Most would NEVER give out their code, definately not for free. You see, we've paid millions of dollars to develop it. Why should I be forced to provide it freely? It sounds like you are trying to get slashdotters to want to steal my code, because "information wants to be free."
Information may want to be free. So be it. I prefer open source projects (the quality ones, such as Linux, Apache, and others -- not the majority of open source, though, because I don't have time to fix badly written programs; I use the same criteria for commercial software). There is a huge business of making and selling software. This industry is what pays my bills, and allows me to contribute to open source projects (off work hours). But, sadly, the only way this makes business sense is for us to keep our code. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to pay my bills.
Finually, when I try to encourage people to switch to open-source, I encounter resistance. Much of it is due to vocal open source "advocates". You know, the ones who call us scum for making money on our software (and not just on support of it). Most of us are not lucky enough to work for some major open-source Linux company.
In addition, I notice that we talk about "free beer". We talk about the importance of being able to modify code, as well, tweaking and improving it -- and then being able to distribute our changes. You can't do that with beer, though! Show me one incremental change made to a beer, and I'll recant. At the same time, though, I bet most slashdotters are willing to buy a beer.
Thank you for putting up with my rant. I had to vent a little bit.
First, one quick note: we have a lot of bright people reading this stuff. However, sometimes even us bright people fall for the "hindsight bias". I want to make sure that we aren't falling for it now!
Second, though, I believe that the article was poorly written. It doesn't accurately describe the threat, it focusses on Web servers, and it ignores the fact that our intellegance agencies and police forces have been doing this kind of thing for a long time (even in the US).
Some other things to note, though... 1) The information content of a key should be zero (thus random). We know this. However, we also know that even with SIMPLE encryption algorithms (think XOR), the result also has what appears to be zero information content. The information is random, provided you don't know the secret key or plain text. In fact, one of the first tests of an encryption routine is to see if the result in most cases fits the criteria for random information (there are math tests you can apply).
So, what this article REALLY says is this: By using the fact that encryption removes the information from a message (in a math sense), we can find keys, large random numbers, and encrypted messages when we examine a stream of bits. Think about this, though...Don't you think the NSA has always been able to intercept information and pass the encrypted pieces to one department and the unencrypted pieces to another? What about a police agency which takes someone's computer as evidence. Perhaps they deleted their PGP key, but not good enough. How do you find it? The same way mentioned in this article, using many well-written commercial software packages designed for forensics work.
This attack demonstrates yet another reason not to send private keys/shared keys over insecure channels. It is saying, "Someone might notice that thing is a key," even if there is a lot of traffic. Go figure.
As a side note, though, we can do our intellegence agencies a big favor by sending all messages out as encrypted messages. That way, they don't just have to try to crack the ones for which encryption makes sense on, but also the ones that encryption doesn't make sense on. How long do we have to wait until we can send Mom birthday wishes via encrypted mail? (Picture some guy 3 stories underground in Virginia trying to make sense of THAT secret code!)
I do not believe there is such a beast anymore as the good old-fashioned IBM keyboard. This is sad. I hope someone shows me I'm wrong, though!
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I hope that it helps you.
I can give you some good sources for finding "new" used IBM keyboards. The best one is to find someone who works in IT for a large company. Large companies often hold onto obsolete equipment for way too long, so they are still now giving away these keyboards.
BTW: the *BEST* IBM keyboard is the RS/6000 units. On the "newer" (Post 1990) RS/6000s, they used what looks really close to an AT keyboard, with the three differences being: 1) Right Ctrl key labled "ctrl/act" 2) Speaker in bottom (doesn't do anything on a PC) 3) Super-long cable
But, even if you can't find one of these goodies, an old AT keyboard will work. I have the sad feeling, though, that these are going to get hard to find. I'd buy the "happy-hacker" keyboard if only it made a real click...
Yes, provided they have the software, it is just an encrypted text/data file.
However, if they don't have the software, they have to get it. It took credit cards quite a long time to get universal adoption.
So, if I don't have this software, but you want to buy a widget from me, you send me the text/data file. I don't have the software, though, so you "beam" it to my palm-pilot or e-mail it to me or whatever. That is binary, executable code that you are sending to me.:( Even if it was signed, I would have no way to verify the signature without a public key (which you sent to me, with your payment, right?).
Slashdot Mirror
Are any of you network admins? What was your worst day on the job? Probably, it was a day when things really didn't go well after an upgrade or equipment change. You probably had people coming in to the equipment room every five minutes to ask two things: 1) do you need any help? and 2) when will it be fixed? You got sick of both questions, because you were stressed out enough already.
This is part of the Internet, though: we forget that real people do work for Microsoft. We forget that MS isn't just an evil force, but has people who have emotions working for it. It is an irony that people on Slashdot - technically literate people - who claim that email is an equalizer (no respector of race, disabilities, age, etc) - these same peple forget about the human faces behind a large website.
I wouldn't want to be in those network admin's shoes right now. I've had DNS outages, and I know what it is like to have corporate headquarters yelling, "Why aren't we up?"
So, before you criticize how "dumb" their admins are, and whatever else, remember two things: 1) This same problem (DNS outage) has happened to any real admin on Slashdot, and 2) the MS network admins are having a very bad day.
I can't resist... I know it has little bearing on the topic of what to do about the specific problems occurring with connectivity amoung Usenet nodes, but...
*Death of Usenet Predicted! Film at 11!*
I've been involved in Usenet and on-line communicications since about 1988. That doesn't make me an old-timer, but it does give me hopefully a little creadability.
In this time, I've seen people talk about how much trash has entered into Usenet, how spam is on the rise, how key backbone sites are dumping Usenet, etc. So far, Usenet has proven remarkably robust and resiliant to these kind of problems.
Yes, I browse Usenet with a very extensive SPAM filter. Just as in the old days, after about 500 messages in a thread, I tire of it and add it, also, to the SPAM filter. There are certain people who get the distinction of *plonk* as they are added to my kill files. But, life goes on.
In my opinion, Usenet is one of the last examples of community still left on the Internet (with some IRC channels and VERY FEW sites like Slashdot also there -- although I might argue that the community on slashdot isn't anything like the community on Usenet).
Oracle used to have a backdoor, too, although it wasn't the compiled-in, "hidden" backdoor, but rather a default account that many users didn't know was there (user name: scott). It doesn't exist in the newer versions of Oracle, though.
Let me just second this opinion! I've never used ClearCase, but I use both CVS and P4.
CVS doesn't understand that multiple files can be part of a signle atomic change. This is the biggest failing in CVS. If I change a function's interface, I'll probably also change the calls to the function to use the new interface. This change should be able to be backed out or applied completely atomically. P4 lets you do that. CVS keeps a history of each file, while P4 keeps a history of each change. A subtle, yet importantant, distinction.
You didn't mention a platform. I'm assuming some sort of Unix, such as Solaris or Windows.
Rational Software (I think) makes a product called Purify. If you ever work in a large shop, you'll use purify to help write your software.
Click here to go to their website
It not only catches memory leaks, but also uninitialized pointers, using uninitialized RAM, stack overflows, etc. It is, in my opinion, the best tool on the market. Yes, it does cost some $$$ (about $2500 per license). If you can't afford it for whatever reason (your a student, business doesn't have the money, etc), or you need a Linux solution (not purify - yet), you'll have to go open source. I would be thrilled if Rational released their tools on Linux, too, although I have to wonder how many Linux developers could afford to buy them (probably the reason they haven't released for Linux yet).
I worked with two other people in a "mega cube" (with 6' high permenant "walls"). We dubbed it the "Playpen". The company firmly believed in giving people the resources they needed to do our jobs, so we had:
1) A very large whiteboard on one wall - with no furnature in front of it.
2) A spare computer and desk for "guests" to use during technical discussions (also used as a second terminal for the residents if they needed to run something that took a lot of resources)
3) It was a corner office in a tall office building, so it had an awesome view
4) Each person had their own phone
5) Nice workstations with 21" monitors
6) A comfortable "poof chair" (it is sort of a "full body" bean bag)
7) A shared bookshelf, so that you could borrow each other's books.
8) A collection of office toys, including a rubber-band powered plane (OSHA wouldn't have liked us flying that in the cube; too bad) and a bat suspended from the ceiling (it claimed to have a "soothing motion" - it didn't).
It worked VERY well since the three of us that shared the office all worked on the same projects at the same time. This environment was easily the most productive environment I've worked in.
People have mentioned "noise", though. It was true that music could be an issue. I recommend that companies buy GOOD headphones for every employee - a pair of $200 headphones can sound better than a $1000 set of speakers; once everyone has a set of these, you won't be able to pay them to listen to music on crappy computer speakers. The headphones should allow outside sound in and have at least 25' of cord (use an extension if you must).
As for ringing phones, that WAS annoying! It wasn't too bad, though, because we also had a "mini room" (actually two spare offices) across the hall. These rooms were used when people needed to have a long phone conversation, as they could go in and shut the door. This also gave some privacy. It was considered rude to talk for hours in the megacube, unless you were talking to everyone else there.
The furnature consisted of whatever we could dig up. I would recommend nice desks (single piece, not a U or L shaped desk) with LOTS of small tables. The ones that we had were 3' by 3' tables that could be configured however we wanted. If you wanted a "L" desk, you just grabbed three of these and put them on the left of your desk. I actually had a wrap-around desk build out of these. The nice thing is that you can reconfigure your space as appropriate for your work. We could, for instance, build a conference table in the middle of the room in a matter of minutes. All those nice "executive" desks really fall short in the ability to adjust to the work environment - they are nice for people who crave status symbols, but not for many others.
As you can see, though, this didn't save the company any money. The three of us had about twice the space we would have had if we lived in cubes. Not many companies could justify buying a poof chair for a space like this. Most environments I've worked in refuse to buy the most modern workstations for programmers, and 21" monitors are, sadly, rare. But, we were much more productive and I believe that our space and equipment cost less than additional employees would have.
I would also say that some of the positives of this environment came accidently. For instance, the company didn't think that being cheap on a bookshelf would increase productivity, but it did!
I'm not sure if you are just running apps remotely or if you are running an entire windowing environment remotely.
I used to run an Xterminal that was on one side of a fairly overloaded 56K line. This terminal did not run a local window manger - it logged in remotely via XDM. It ran fine once I did some tweaking to the window manager. Specifically, "fancy" window managers are horrid over slow links. Don't even consider something like CDE/KDE, Gnome or FWVM over a slow line. TWM, while very sparse, is an excellent window manager for slow lines.
Of course, if you run your window manager on your local box, it will have little effect on your network speed.
On a related topic, though: use the "older" applications. Remember that these applications were used across slower networks by the developers! Most new applications were developped on a single machine, with no network involved for the developer's display. As a result, that section of the code was probably never tuned. An example would be to use "xterm" instead of "konsole" (although I haven't tested these against each other; this is only an example)
Some other relevant information:
All I ran was a mining dispatch system, which had some fairly simple graphics (it tracked the mine's heavy equipment) on top of a CAD overlay of the mine. I was also able to use xterms and such fine. Don't even think about running Star Office or Netscape remotely, though -- too many messages have to pass back and forth. Desktop apps should stay on the desktop!
Oracle is not SQL '92 compliant, as it lacks the JOIN operator in the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement. Yes, you can still join many, many tables -- just use the older syntax. It probably is SQL 92 incompatabile in other regards, too.
For the author's question, this won't be a problem. For the conversion the other way, though, it might.
I don't mean to be too blunt, but, let me state the obvious: If you are using the DBMS to it's full potential, you are hopefully using many stored procedures. You'll have to recode them all, and you might have to change your glue code in the business logic layer (in Perl, you put all the DBI stuff into modules, right?). If you are using stored procedures, it is going to be a LOT OF WORK. If not, it'll probably be simple, although you won't gain anything noticiable by users. If you aren't using the stored procedures, hints, and other Oracle-specific functions, I'd just convert over to Postgress or MySql (if you aren't using foriegn keys, either) and save yourself lots of $$$.
He might need the native threads to take advantage of a multi-processor box... Green threads/process threads will be ~50% slower on a two processor box, and much slower than that on a medium sized server (8-16 processors). I can't imagine anyone even thinking of using Java on a truly large box, but you would get even more performance increase in a well-designed application.
It's good to know that I'm not crazy -- I had the same problem! I kept thinking, "They've really squeezed that ocean together..."
Anyone near Laramie? I know you are willing to travel 60 miles or so for this if you live out here!
Kimball's book, the Data Warehouse Toolkit, does exactly this. It gives you a pattern for a star schema, which is almost the only schema used in data warehousing. He then goes into detail about slowly changing dimensions, rapidly changing dimensions, partially summable facts, etc. If you do data warehousing, this is the book of patterns. Maybe I'll write a review for Slashdot sometime...
1) Take your DVD player. You'll save money and effort that way. Take your disks, too. Don't rezone anything, since you already own zone 2 disks and your player can also play zone 1 disks.
2) Buy a voltage converter to plug it into the wall.
3) Buy a decent US TV. Not an el-cheapo, but something that has the S-Video jack on the back. Cable that to your DVD player, since you mentioned "Super Video" AKA S-Video. Most 32" TV's have S-Video.
BTW: I used to do Internet security consulting and computer forensics work, as well as sysadmin. Hopefully that means I know what I'm talking about.
I've dealt with some of this before. I used to run a web hosting company's network. As a result of us hosting 100s of websites (we were small - I hate to see what the big guys deal with), we would daily get pings, traceroutes, port scans, attempted attacks, DOS attacks, VRFY/EXPNs, telnets, etc. Now, note that we only provided four services: WWW, FrontPage, FTP, and mail.
If I even looked at all the logs for these "attacks", I would not be doing my job! I can hear it now, "He wasn't doing his job; he wasn't being alert about his systems." No, I disagree. I would get litterally hundreds of these "attacks" daily, and only a couple DOS attacks a month would be "serious" enough to disrupt things (and very mildly, I'll add). Yes, I noticed things that affected our customers. But, I didn't care about the rest of the $#@^! After all, if they got in, the logs would no longer exist. If they didn't, it is kind of pointless to look at logs for attacks that failed.
I have to wonder what the people complaining about this do for a living. Obviously, they can't be complaining about a ping scan of a significant network, for they wouldn't have time to do that!
As for the "ping is dangerous" theory, yes it is used sometimes by crackers. But, I bet that I could send your system an IP fragment and determine if it existed or not. I could even traceroute with it. Chances are, even if your system is behind a packet filter (vs. a real firewall), I would *STILL* be able to map your topography! It wouldn't show up on your filters, either. Do we really believe that our network design is so unusual and important that we need to protect it using "closed source" methods?
Personally, I don't care if you look at my network. $#@^ with it, however, by causing DOS or breaking in, and you can bet that I'll call the FBI. Before then, though, because of the state of the Internet, I'm going to ignore you. I have no time to investigate every hacker coming through a chain of 10 trojaned Windoze boxes.
Kill the hardware...
This might not BSOD, but it will crash the machine for sure. Just leave the cover off the machine. When it is time to crash it, just unplug the power from the hard disk. It will crash very shortly. (besides, I'd hope your product can handle a crashed hard disk in one of the machines!)
I read this column and shrieked in horror! Some of the suggestions will destroy your perfectly good computer. I spent some college summers working for a coal mine in Wyoming. Coal is made of carbon, and carbon is conductive. Needless to say, it is a bad thing to have in computer parts, electrical OR mechanical -- much worse than normal dust which doesn't really hurt electronics (unless you have enough of it to cause your machine to overheat; I doubt it). At this mine, I would spend 1-2 months at a time doing nothing but cleaning PCs. You see, we had to do it at least every 6 months, or the carbon would make connections where there shouldn't have been any. We had enough dust that I learned a little about cleaning PCs. What worked there will work ANYWHERE else!
First, though, some cautions:
DON'T EVER DIP ANYTHING IN YOUR COMPUTER IN WATER. Most mechanical and electrical things in your computer have some metals that rust. You don't want a rusty computer. Mechanical parts take a long time to dry. Remember, chip sockets are primarily mechanical devices! Water is a poor conductor, but that lets it conduct where it shouldn't and hinders good connections enough to break them. If you ever get a computer wet, let it dry for two weeks, after removing all chips on the motherboard, cards in slots, and cables in plugs. Obviously this should be done professionally. Oh ya, you'll ruin your hard disk if you get it wet.
Second: Don't use an air compressor! You could end up sand-blasting delicate electronics and you probably will destroy your fans.
Here's how I do a PC cleaning...
SAFTY WARNING: Don't ever touch electronics when plugged in. Don't open the case of monitors or power supplies.
Tips: Static will be hard to kill your computer with. I don't do anything other than make sure I'm not working on carpet. I did this in Wyoming, with 0-5% humidity and never ruined a computer due to staic. I never wore static wristbands or such nonesense. Computers are really very durable. On the other hand, if static destroys your computer, it isn't my fault!
Always "blow" and never "suck". Sucking requires you to almost touch chips and electronics. Don't do that.
Monitor: Unplug it. Use windex on outside only. You can use a plastic cleaner if you need to. Don't get any liquid into the holes in back. Monitors contain extreamly high (and deadly) voltages, even when unplugged -- they store the current. Unless you really know what you are doing, don't touch it. A $200 monitor ain't worth your life. Period.
Keyboard: Unplug it. Take the keys off *IF THEY COME OFF WITHOUT DAMAGING THE KEYBOARD*. Hold keyboard upside down and shake vigorously. Tap it several times. You should have a pile of grime under it. Soak the keycaps in soapy water and scrub with a spunge. You can use canned compressed air or a vacume cleaner in exhast mode to blow dust out of the keyboard at this point. Leave the greas on the metal pieces like the spacebar, since it lets it work right.
Put on a dust mask at this point. Your lungs will thank you in 25 years. Dust can kill you, but it takes it some time to do so. A $2 mask will save you years potentially -- especially if you do a lot of this.
Main CPU case: Unplug it. Clean the outside with a general cleaner. Open it up, flip it upside down to get the "big stuff" out. Then blow out the power supply and system fans. When blowing out the power supply, first "block" the fan. You can do this by inserting a non-conductive tool or stick into the fan cover in back, so that the fan won't spin when you blow air through it. Don't ever spin the fan with canned or compressed air; they aren't designed for that and are made very cheap. They will break! Then, stick the nozel of the canned air into the slots and move it around, or use a vacume cleaner in exhast mode with the hoze pressed up against the vent holes around the power supply. A lot of dust will come out. Remember to never open the power supply up. It contains high voltage when unplugged, too. Do the same thing for fans. Then, blow dust off the main board and out from other parts of the case. Use care around hard disks, as you can ruin them with too much air pressure -- you can actually blow dust INTO them!
Then, reassemble the computer, power it on, and insert floppy and CD cleaning disks. Follow their instructions. You must do this, as you probably blew dust into them. Remember that floppys serve a dual function of also being air intakes in most computers! (you can stick a vacume outlet hose or compressed air can hose into the drive and blow it out before you reassemble the computer, if you want; it won't hurt it)
Hope this helps. Try to stay away from getting your stuff wet like this group keeps trying to tell you to do! Also, don't attempt this work if you are uncomfortable with doing it. It is unlikely, but even if you follow my instructions, I can't gaurantee you won't get hurt or hurt your computer.
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Joel Maslak
Former Coal Miner!
This is *NOT* flamebait. Rather, it is the sad observations after working with kids and computers. I was fortunate enough to go to a school with a well-equiped lab, and also fortunate enough to be allowed to touch the networking stuff (hubs, servers, etc). I wouldn't be in the job I'm in now if it wasn't for that chance. But, not everyone in Jr. High or High School has a lot of maturity (don't believe me? Go sit in a HS lunchroom some day; plus, I know about some of the stuff I did) -- and it is best to protect investments of tens of thosands of dollars. As for porn, be wise.
I have worked with several High Schools and public computing facilities (mostly college level), and have learned a few tricks to making student labs work. If it is a public use lab, and Jr. High/High School students populate it, expect *AT LEAST* the following problems (it seems they are applying to college labs more and more now, too):
1) Missing mouse balls. Solution? Superglue. Sorry, can't clean the mice once you do this, but at least you don't have to buy 50,000 mouse balls.
2) Games/Porn/Surfing. Define your policy clearly. You should mention something about noise while you are at it (is it okay?). My recommendation on games/surfing is that it only be allowed during "off peak" hours; that is, no games or surfing when someone is waiting on a computer!
3) Viruses, trojans for Windoze. Have an Internet connection? Someone will install Back Oriface. Viruses will be common, too. Install good AV software.
4) Distruptive behavior. One common stage of youth learning computers involves trying to sabotage (sp?) each other's work. Read about a new Windoze denial of service? Someone is going to try it in your lab. If you run Unix, expect fork bombs. (If you run Unix, I recommend turning OFF remote logins except for Sysadmins on the workstations)
5) Piracy. Do you really think 15 high school students purchased that networked game they are playing? YOU COULD BE LIABLE, though! You have to monitor this, sadly, to reduce your liability. I would make an official policy of "no software installs" -- except possibly in each user's personal space. You can get around the requirement to audit your computers for unauthorized software by simply re-installing them every week or so (very easy to do with Ghost; simply make a special boot disk, put it in 5 computers at a time, load the image off the network and reboot them).
6) Printing! If you have free printing, you'll do a lot of printing.
7) Theft. This is the one I hate the most. Lock your hardware down. I recommend you also lock down your keyboard and mouse, all your power cables, etc. This is even more important if you can't monitor the lab 24 hrs/day.
8) Servers. Lock them up! Don't let them be used directly except under supervision. This is because you want to encourage students learning new environments to have someone "look over their shoulders." A second set of eyes avoids mistakes.
Oh yes, expect lots of grumbling. People won't like all your policies, and some people "know" they can do a better job at running a network. It's important that you somehow communicate that ego isn't the most important thing to have when working with computers. If you can turn out ego-less, qualified administrators, you will be doing us all a service!
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Joel Maslak
If you have over 250,000 page views per month, check out http://www.affinia.com/ppn/ . I work for this company, so I am biased towards it (you are warned!).
This doesn't completely solve the question you asked as we don't do the same thing advertising companies do (we are different enough that you can keep existing advertising revenue streams, such as Flycast/Double Click/Burst -- we are a totally incremental revenue stream).
We do "product placements" instead of "banner ads". They look and work quite a bit differently, but I think you'll be pleased with them (not to mention that you can keep your existing ads).
We also have very good performance and reliability (we shouldn't slow your page loads significantly), not to mention our customer support is easy to work with.
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Joel Maslak
Affinia Engineer
Now that the Internet is so important for commercial activities, I wonder when the "logical next step" will come about...
.uk from the root DNS servers... Of course, there are work arounds, but none of them are easy. And, of course, no country uses the Internet for tactical communications -- but they do use it for "routine matters". It's hard to fight a war if you can't get shoes!
The US still effectively controls the top level DNS servers. Let's say we went to war against, say, the UK. We obviously want to disrupt the UK's government and military communications as much as possible, so we remove
Yes, I did the same, using Quickbasic and VBBS instead of WWIV (C compilers used to cost more than QuickBasic's compiler). In addition, it seemed to have more neat features, such as a built-in scripting language. That's probably more responsible than anything I did for learning how to program.
I see there is a lot of talk about not using "toy" languages. I disagree. Part of programming is learning how to overcome limitations -- I program PL/SQL for a living, and working around PL/SQL problems is a critical skill!
Here's how I did it:
Age 5: Apple IIe, basic, hello world, that kind of thing. My dad said, "you can't program this until you learn to read." It made me want to learn to read *AND* learn to program!
Age 7 or so: My parents bought me a portable computer. It ran on a bunch of AA batteries (I never used that) or wall power, had a 4 line screen, with 40 characters wide. Yes, very, very limited. Oh, 16K of RAM. But, it had built in BASIC and booted up without any "programs" running. You had to type everything in at a "basic prompt." The system then remember what you put in between uses. So, I developed 5 or 6 games, and linked them together with a menu system. No graphics, but I still enjoyed it.
More Apple stuff, etc. Until age 15, when I became "cosysop" with a friend on a BBS. I did more than you would expect for a teenager -- we had formal "software upgrades", backup policies, etc. We used his computer to run the BBS, and my machine was the "development environment." Thus, it contained a duplicate of the "real" system and let us try things there first. When we switched to VBBS, I learned VBscript, and then we purchased the VBBS source code, so we could modify it. I learned a lot.
Age 16: Pascal, C, Fortran. Did this at the community college.
When you see "C", and are exposed to the raw power of it all, you only really appreciate it after dealing with the limitations of other languages. Sure, you learned a lot of esoteric tasks to work around toy machine problems, but, you still learned the basics of logic. Subroutines, objects, etc, can come earlier. When the kid wants to learn them, he will.
The key is to make the kid want to learn it, let them learn it (remove the obsticals), and encourage them. This is the same for teaching a kid anything.
"Old memory boards due to low power consumption".
Uh huh.
Can anyone say troll?
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Joel
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the connection between open source and Napster! Here's things from where I sit:
Napster needs to win this lawsuit. The reason they need to win is because I don't want someone who writes an FTP client/server to be sued for distributing MP3s, warez, etc...
That said, I think that most napster users (I'm sure I'll get flamed by hundreds of guys who "use napster without stealing") steal artist's works. Sorry, they do. Why do you think this is so popular at colleges? Most students couldn't give a care about the technical side of this thing (most students DO NOT major in computers!). However, most students can care about "saving" money. Show me how Napster lets users improve music, like open source lets users improve software. At that point, I'll say it is related to open source.
Sorry for the off-topicness below, but I feel it must be said.
Main point: THE OPEN SOURCE CONCEPT DOES NOT REQUIRE EVERY PIECE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO BE GIVEN AWAY; IT ONLY REQUIRES THINGS PEOPLE WANT TO BE GIVEN AWAY TO BE GIVEN AWAY. If enough people do this, then open source will succeed. Want to support open source? Quit arguing about a commercial organization's copyright (unless it violates yours), and start giving stuff away.
Jon: What do you think of my job? Have I sold out to the enemy? Am I scum? You see, I've worked for several software companies, some of which sold their code. Most would NEVER give out their code, definately not for free. You see, we've paid millions of dollars to develop it. Why should I be forced to provide it freely? It sounds like you are trying to get slashdotters to want to steal my code, because "information wants to be free."
Information may want to be free. So be it. I prefer open source projects (the quality ones, such as Linux, Apache, and others -- not the majority of open source, though, because I don't have time to fix badly written programs; I use the same criteria for commercial software). There is a huge business of making and selling software. This industry is what pays my bills, and allows me to contribute to open source projects (off work hours). But, sadly, the only way this makes business sense is for us to keep our code. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to pay my bills.
Finually, when I try to encourage people to switch to open-source, I encounter resistance. Much of it is due to vocal open source "advocates". You know, the ones who call us scum for making money on our software (and not just on support of it). Most of us are not lucky enough to work for some major open-source Linux company.
In addition, I notice that we talk about "free beer". We talk about the importance of being able to modify code, as well, tweaking and improving it -- and then being able to distribute our changes. You can't do that with beer, though! Show me one incremental change made to a beer, and I'll recant. At the same time, though, I bet most slashdotters are willing to buy a beer.
Thank you for putting up with my rant. I had to vent a little bit.
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Joel Maslak
First, one quick note: we have a lot of bright people reading this stuff. However, sometimes even us bright people fall for the "hindsight bias". I want to make sure that we aren't falling for it now!
Second, though, I believe that the article was poorly written. It doesn't accurately describe the threat, it focusses on Web servers, and it ignores the fact that our intellegance agencies and police forces have been doing this kind of thing for a long time (even in the US).
Some other things to note, though... 1) The information content of a key should be zero (thus random). We know this. However, we also know that even with SIMPLE encryption algorithms (think XOR), the result also has what appears to be zero information content. The information is random, provided you don't know the secret key or plain text. In fact, one of the first tests of an encryption routine is to see if the result in most cases fits the criteria for random information (there are math tests you can apply).
So, what this article REALLY says is this:
By using the fact that encryption removes the information from a message (in a math sense), we can find keys, large random numbers, and encrypted messages when we examine a stream of bits. Think about this, though...Don't you think the NSA has always been able to intercept information and pass the encrypted pieces to one department and the unencrypted pieces to another? What about a police agency which takes someone's computer as evidence. Perhaps they deleted their PGP key, but not good enough. How do you find it? The same way mentioned in this article, using many well-written commercial software packages designed for forensics work.
This attack demonstrates yet another reason not to send private keys/shared keys over insecure channels. It is saying, "Someone might notice that thing is a key," even if there is a lot of traffic. Go figure.
As a side note, though, we can do our intellegence agencies a big favor by sending all messages out as encrypted messages. That way, they don't just have to try to crack the ones for which encryption makes sense on, but also the ones that encryption doesn't make sense on. How long do we have to wait until we can send Mom birthday wishes via encrypted mail? (Picture some guy 3 stories underground in Virginia trying to make sense of THAT secret code!)
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Joel Maslak
I do not believe there is such a beast anymore as the good old-fashioned IBM keyboard. This is sad. I hope someone shows me I'm wrong, though!
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I hope that it helps you.
I can give you some good sources for finding "new" used IBM keyboards. The best one is to find someone who works in IT for a large company. Large companies often hold onto obsolete equipment for way too long, so they are still now giving away these keyboards.
BTW: the *BEST* IBM keyboard is the RS/6000 units. On the "newer" (Post 1990) RS/6000s, they used what looks really close to an AT keyboard, with the three differences being:
1) Right Ctrl key labled "ctrl/act"
2) Speaker in bottom (doesn't do anything on a PC)
3) Super-long cable
But, even if you can't find one of these goodies, an old AT keyboard will work. I have the sad feeling, though, that these are going to get hard to find. I'd buy the "happy-hacker" keyboard if only it made a real click...
Yes, provided they have the software, it is just an encrypted text/data file.
:( Even if it was signed, I would have no way to verify the signature without a public key (which you sent to me, with your payment, right?).
However, if they don't have the software, they have to get it. It took credit cards quite a long time to get universal adoption.
So, if I don't have this software, but you want to buy a widget from me, you send me the text/data file. I don't have the software, though, so you "beam" it to my palm-pilot or e-mail it to me or whatever. That is binary, executable code that you are sending to me.