It's centered around Kevin Mitnick's story, but Jonathan Littman's "The Fugitive Game" does cover a pretty interesting swath of both eras. It's considerably less histrionic than certain other works by people whom I wouldn't necessarily regard to be disinterested parties. It's well written and the depth of some of Mr. Littman's research warmed my heart.
Suelette Dreyfus' "Underground" covers a fair amount of the 1990's as well. It's on Project Gutenberg, but worth owning a copy of if you want some perspective on the global scene.
If you want insight into the history of the Internet or operating systems, look for anything by Peter Salus.
Well knowing some of these folks personally (count the digits in my slashdot ID if you're wondering for how long)... perhaps because they have credible insights into the industry and technology, and secondarily because given some of their day jobs, it's exceedingly unlikely they'd choose to be affiliated overtly with a site that was malicious?
Your faith in the environmental efficacy of government over corporations may be a tad misplaced. If you look at the list of superfund sites you will find a fair number of military bases and contractors operating under the auspices of support contracts from the government.
I remember in the 1980's working on a military base and seeing that they still carried DDT on trucks to kill bugs. I didn't have a big problem with that, other than that it would have been felonious to use in any place in the country at the time.
(Of course, now we're finding that judicious use of DDT in Africa may save thousands of lives, but it took a while to apply science to the miasma of FUD.)
As for money savings, there's an availability question too. We in the mid-Atlantic region with a fair number of operating reactors haven't faced anywhere near the energy fiascoes that California with their arguably kneejerk "no new plants" policies have endured. As a result of availability, not only haven't we seen rolling brownouts like California has, our prices are lower as well.
My PDP 11/23 still runs, both RT-11 and Fuzzball and if I fire it up with the Fujitsu Eagle with 150 pounds worth of 474 MB hard disk glory, it heats the room in the winter.
I think a Fuzzball with a GPS time source would be anachronistic, in more ways than one.
I have 4 TRS-80 model I's (my first computer), but my heart is set on eventually interfacing modern storage to the DECSYSTEM-20 in my garage. Alas, it's only a KS, but they're hard to find.
I haven't lit up the TI 99/4A in quite a while, and I really should put the boards into the 4 microVAX chassis I have waiting to be assembled.
Now the police report does indicate that they were both probably drinking.. but one wonders if perhaps his meeting with this lady was not entirely happenstance.
She does bear a passing resemblance to Jenna Elfman.
FWIW, having worked for the man, I can say he is one of a few unquestionably brilliant people whom I've known. PLUS, he makes the trains run on time and has an appreciation for business realities. I'll leave it to the reader to consider how often that confluence occurs.
I realise that neither I nor many people on./ suffer fools gladly, but I can only imagine what life must be like for him.
It seemed to me that in any given conversation he was usually seeing about 6 moves ahead.
If the Inevitable Breakdown(tm) is to ever be caused by an asteroid hitting Earth, I sincerely hope he's on the speed dial list.
I think that may be a good perspective. There's no reason you couldn't have a sort of enterprise policy enforcement that took time into account. Even/usr/games on older Unix systems had a timed access restriction mechanism.
I think that bright students will always find ways to use systems not oontemplated originally. Sometimes this results in wonderful creations. Sometimes it means that the best-laid policies may be difficult or impossible to enforce.
If they're to be part of a mission-critical enterprise process (such as learning at school), it's also important to make sure that there is a way to audit and/or enforce basic integrity and security.
Disclaimer: I work for a manufacturer of security and policy/configuration management products.
There's something to that. The "Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act" was the closest thing to a pure incumbent-protection plan that has ever been devised.
My sense is that were the U.S. to see it in a foreign country, we'd complain about fairness of their system.
In any number of Acceptable Use Policies(AUPs) for Internet service providers and the associated contracts that incorporate them, the sending of unsolicited commercial email is a violation.
You'd have to, or have your counsel check the terms of your firm's contracts with your ISPs, but it's worth citing as a real risk.
Actually, there's a classic definition of ownership, used for quite some time in the United States, to the effect that the owner is the first to put constructive use to a piece of land. It wouldn't be all that difficult to apply the same economic principle to sections of spectrum, even those recently freed from executive fiat by means of executive fiat, as in this case.
It was a long time ago, but back when I was working in the Mac product world, I ran into someone who explained how it works. I believe that Apple will donate equipment for use in films, but IF AND ONLY IF the equipment is used by protagonists/good guys.
If you want your movie's evil creative villain to use a MacBook Pro, you'll probably have to buy your own.
I have had one hell of a lot of fun scanning the skies. I started out with a modest 76cm Winegard antenna and a Samsung receiver, just pointed at Intelsat Americas 5 (formerly Telstar 5). IA5 has a veritable international conclave up there, with a lot of international content uplinked by Globecast World TV. Some of it is encrypted pay content, but a lot of it is free, subsidized by foreign governments who want to reach their folks overseas. China runs 2 or 3 continuous news channels on another satellite. I even used to be able to Al Manar's (The news station of the Hezbollah in Lebanon) morning news over my oatmeal until the U.S. Government shut them down.
If you only have room for a Ku-band dish, there's a ton of stuff to see. If you have the room for a C-band antenna, there's even more up there. It's a hoot to see reporters picking their noses and talking trash about the competition. There are occasional uplinks of keynote speeches from conferences, government channels, and a constantly-changing array of things ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.
The big watershed was when I picked up a little motor and a Fortec Star PVR. I recorded all manner of amazing (if disturbing) feeds during the attack on Iraq, including Iraqi TV rallies. The motorized dish really opens things up. I have camera's-eye view footage from a robot camera belonging to Dubai TV being shot up by a U.S. tank's fire.
It's easier to get started now than ever before. There's a standard called DiSEqC for sending switch and motor control signals over the coax between the receiver and the LNBF. No extra wires are necessary for a motorized dish. Additionally, a newer technology called USALS or DiSEqC 1.3 or "Goto X" allows the easy installation of a motor. You orient it to your Southernmost satellite, enter the Lat/Long coordinates of your location in to the receiver, and the newer boxes find everything on the arc.
If you want something to hack on, there's a platform called the Dreambox, from Dream Multimedia in Germany. It's a receiver based on the PowerPC set-top box chipset, and there are dozens of user-contributed loads for it, with plugins ranging from web browsers to RSS readers to Shoutcast clients. There's also a web interface for controlling the box and nabbing screenshots.
There are also PCI card receivers like the Twinhan available that plug into your PC and can stream to things like a Roku box.
If you want to watch yourself, there's even a service called UONTV, which will take an FTP of your MPEG2 video content and uplink it to IA5 for as little as $30/half-hour IIRC.
I would encourage anyone curious about the world of MPEG/DVB to check it out. A good reference is Satforums. There's no discussion of cracking or unscrambling there, but there's a font of MPEG/DVB information to be had, and support for some of the best PCI receiver card software.
In the U.S., there were parallel NPA's (numbering plan areas - you probably know them as "area codes") for the telex network and the telephone network, but the number assignment policies were not all that dissimilar, and were harmonized. The "area codes" for the telex network were originally of the form N10. You Marylanders in the 410 NPA are re-using a code that was originally used to call a TWX machine.
There were NO area codes of the N10 nor N00 format in the 1940s/50s. The
N10 format codes first were used for Telco Dial-TWX for new 4-Row Keyboard
7/8-level ASCII 100-speed TWX, starting in the early 1960s. 3-Row Kybd
5-level Baudot 60-speed TWX which had existed since 1931 was automated at
the same time by adding modems and dials to the TTYs and integrating them
into the DDD telephone network by giving them POTS-like telephone numbers
using "POTS" area codes. 3-Row TWX began to disappear as 4-Row TWX
devloped. Western Union took over the marketing of TWX by US Federal
Government orders in the early 1970's but it wasn't until 1981 when TWX in
the US was completely removed from the US-portion of the DDD telephone
network and instead completely re-routed over Western Union's own Telex
network. The N10 format codes no longer had *ANY* meaning on the US-part
of the DDD telephone network (although WUTCO still had TWXes numbered with
N10 format codes on the WUTCO Telex-I/II network), but it wasn't until
the early 1990s when Bellcore first assigned real POTS telephone area
codes of the N10 format.
Does anyone else here remember the way the very uptight folks at Prodigy used to sign their "your message has been censored" posts with the name "Cato", the Roman guardian of morals?
Of course, these people were already bent out of shape because people started mailing lists and things despite the fact that Prodigy's entire architecture was optimized to deliver messages and content from the corporate producers to the people and not back upstream.
Actually, if you look at the etymology of "regulated" in the time of our Founding Fathers, you'll find that it doesn't mean legislatively controlled.
If you were to take a firearm to a gunsmith and ask him to "regulate" it, he would have sighted it in for you.
The concept of a well-regulated militia conveys the image of body of marksmen, not necessarily of a body of personnel constrained by some ruleset. (other than the laws of physics perhaps)
If you look at the definition of the "unorganized militia" that is still on the books today, you'll find that it similarly includes all able-bodied men over the age of eighteen, IIRC.
It also appears that on at least one copy in the National Archives, one of those commas isn't there at all. I have yet to independently validate that, but several have noted it in the past.
Not only was original Gauntlet built upon BSD/OS, but Secure Computing Corporation's Sidewinder ran a version of BSD/OS into which Domain Type Enforcement had been integrated.
It was the preferred choice for commercial secure UNIX on Intel platforms in the 90s.
The network performance (amongst other things) was exceptional.
One correction: The approaches are dicey for heavy jets, but they're very straightforward for lighter general aviation aircraft.
The right thing to do would be to (re)open Reagan National to Part 91 general aviation traffic,and eventually phase out the heavies.
The overall noise would decrease significantly, people wouldn't be slam-dunking 737s anymore on the river approach, and it would once again be reasonable to fly into DC on a day trip.
USB: Handled by the OS. Easy to deal with. Monitors: would require hardware tapping, much harder to do (Especially remotely). Keyboards: Again, MOSTLY handled by the OS. (Windows passes most every key combination through hooks, except ctrl+alt+del. They'll probably change this so that if a secure window is on top, no hooks grab the data.)
Actually, the keyboards and monitors are two of the easiest places to obtain information via RF emissions, which can be about as remote as you can get. This is not all that hard to do - the BBC did a great story on it some years ago.
PGP is one of the only vendors who actually tried to address this by providing a screen background and font intentionally designed to be difficult to read via RF receivers.
I used to believe that IP was the right thing for almost all networked applications, but I have since learned better. IP may be too heavyweight a protocol stack for sensor networks.
If you look at the challenges for untethered sensor network devices, you'll quickly realize that "every bit transmitted brings a sensor a little closer to death." That's not my quote - I heard it from Deborah Estrin of the new Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA.
I agree that crypto is important, but for anything other than a periodically-wired transmitter like a laptop, or a device with a power source of extreme energy density, power budget is a consideration that often directly affects network stack optimization.
If any of you receive the Research Channel on the DISH Network, try to catch Professor Estrin's sensor talk. It's a great summary of the issues involved in making this stuff scalable.
That's an excellent point. It's also highly likely that any grain stocks with a risk of oil rancidity would be damaged right off, given that rancidity is almost always caused by oxidation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's centered around Kevin Mitnick's story, but Jonathan Littman's "The Fugitive Game" does cover a pretty interesting swath of both eras. It's considerably less histrionic than certain other works by people whom I wouldn't necessarily regard to be disinterested parties. It's well written and the depth of some of Mr. Littman's research warmed my heart.
Suelette Dreyfus' "Underground" covers a fair amount of the 1990's as well. It's on Project Gutenberg, but worth owning a copy of if you want some perspective on the global scene.
If you want insight into the history of the Internet or operating systems, look for anything by Peter Salus.
Make it Michael Bay and I'd say we have a winnah!
Well knowing some of these folks personally (count the digits in my slashdot ID if you're wondering for how long)... perhaps because they have credible insights into the industry and technology, and secondarily because given some of their day jobs, it's exceedingly unlikely they'd choose to be affiliated overtly with a site that was malicious?
Just a thought.
Your faith in the environmental efficacy of government over corporations may be a tad misplaced. If you look at the list of superfund sites you will find a fair number of military bases and contractors operating under the auspices of support contracts from the government.
I remember in the 1980's working on a military base and seeing that they still carried DDT on trucks to kill bugs. I didn't have a big problem with that, other than that it would have been felonious to use in any place in the country at the time.
(Of course, now we're finding that judicious use of DDT in Africa may save thousands of lives, but it took a while to apply science to the miasma of FUD.)
As for money savings, there's an availability question too. We in the mid-Atlantic region with a fair number of operating reactors haven't faced anywhere near the energy fiascoes that California with their arguably kneejerk "no new plants" policies have endured. As a result of availability, not only haven't we seen rolling brownouts like California has, our prices are lower as well.
My PDP 11/23 still runs, both RT-11 and Fuzzball and if I fire it up with the Fujitsu Eagle with 150 pounds worth of 474 MB hard disk glory, it heats the room in the winter.
I think a Fuzzball with a GPS time source would be anachronistic, in more ways than one.
I have 4 TRS-80 model I's (my first computer), but my heart is set on eventually interfacing modern storage to the DECSYSTEM-20 in my garage. Alas, it's only a KS, but they're hard to find.
I haven't lit up the TI 99/4A in quite a while, and I really should put the boards into the 4 microVAX chassis I have waiting to be assembled.
Emulators just aren't the same.
Now the police report does indicate that they were both probably drinking.. but one wonders if perhaps his meeting with this lady was not entirely happenstance.
She does bear a passing resemblance to Jenna Elfman.
FWIW, having worked for the man, I can say he is one of a few unquestionably brilliant people whom I've known. PLUS, he makes the trains run on time and has an appreciation for business realities. I'll leave it to the reader to consider how often that confluence occurs.
I realise that neither I nor many people on ./ suffer fools gladly, but I can only imagine what life must be like for him.
It seemed to me that in any given conversation he was usually seeing about 6 moves ahead.
If the Inevitable Breakdown(tm) is to ever be caused by an asteroid hitting Earth, I sincerely hope he's on the speed dial list.
I think that may be a good perspective. There's no reason you couldn't have a sort of enterprise policy enforcement that took time into account. Even /usr/games on older Unix systems had a timed access restriction mechanism.
I think that bright students will always find ways to use systems not oontemplated originally. Sometimes this results in wonderful creations. Sometimes it means that the best-laid policies may be difficult or impossible to enforce.
If they're to be part of a mission-critical enterprise process (such as learning at school), it's also important to make sure that there is a way to audit and/or enforce basic integrity and security.
Disclaimer: I work for a manufacturer of security and policy/configuration management products.
There's something to that. The "Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act" was the closest thing to a pure incumbent-protection plan that has ever been devised.
My sense is that were the U.S. to see it in a foreign country, we'd complain about fairness of their system.
In any number of Acceptable Use Policies(AUPs) for Internet service providers and the associated contracts that incorporate them, the sending of unsolicited commercial email is a violation.
You'd have to, or have your counsel check the terms of your firm's contracts with your ISPs, but it's worth citing as a real risk.
Actually, there's a classic definition of ownership, used for quite some time in the United States, to the effect that the owner is the first to put constructive use to a piece of land. It wouldn't be all that difficult to apply the same economic principle to sections of spectrum, even those recently freed from executive fiat by means of executive fiat, as in this case.
It was a long time ago, but back when I was working in the Mac product world, I ran into someone who explained how it works. I believe that Apple will donate equipment for use in films, but IF AND ONLY IF the equipment is used by protagonists/good guys.
If you want your movie's evil creative villain to use a MacBook Pro, you'll probably have to buy your own.
If you only have room for a Ku-band dish, there's a ton of stuff to see. If you have the room for a C-band antenna, there's even more up there. It's a hoot to see reporters picking their noses and talking trash about the competition. There are occasional uplinks of keynote speeches from conferences, government channels, and a constantly-changing array of things ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.
The big watershed was when I picked up a little motor and a Fortec Star PVR. I recorded all manner of amazing (if disturbing) feeds during the attack on Iraq, including Iraqi TV rallies. The motorized dish really opens things up. I have camera's-eye view footage from a robot camera belonging to Dubai TV being shot up by a U.S. tank's fire.
It's easier to get started now than ever before. There's a standard called DiSEqC for sending switch and motor control signals over the coax between the receiver and the LNBF. No extra wires are necessary for a motorized dish. Additionally, a newer technology called USALS or DiSEqC 1.3 or "Goto X" allows the easy installation of a motor. You orient it to your Southernmost satellite, enter the Lat/Long coordinates of your location in to the receiver, and the newer boxes find everything on the arc.
If you want something to hack on, there's a platform called the Dreambox, from Dream Multimedia in Germany. It's a receiver based on the PowerPC set-top box chipset, and there are dozens of user-contributed loads for it, with plugins ranging from web browsers to RSS readers to Shoutcast clients. There's also a web interface for controlling the box and nabbing screenshots.
There are also PCI card receivers like the Twinhan available that plug into your PC and can stream to things like a Roku box.
If you want to watch yourself, there's even a service called UONTV, which will take an FTP of your MPEG2 video content and uplink it to IA5 for as little as $30/half-hour IIRC.
I would encourage anyone curious about the world of MPEG/DVB to check it out. A good reference is Satforums. There's no discussion of cracking or unscrambling there, but there's a font of MPEG/DVB information to be had, and support for some of the best PCI receiver card software.
Here's an excerpt from a particularly informative old post.
Does anyone else here remember the way the very uptight folks at Prodigy used to sign their "your message has been censored" posts with the name "Cato", the Roman guardian of morals?
Of course, these people were already bent out of shape because people started mailing lists and things despite the fact that Prodigy's entire architecture was optimized to deliver messages and content from the corporate producers to the people and not back upstream.
One small correction. I think you mean "GSM has lower voice quality than IS-136."
IIRC, They're both TDMA systems.
Great, tasty chocolate drink, if you have an old-style diner or deli around.
No egg, no cream.
Actually, if you look at the etymology of "regulated" in the time of our Founding Fathers, you'll find that it doesn't mean legislatively controlled.
If you were to take a firearm to a gunsmith and ask him to "regulate" it, he would have sighted it in for you.
The concept of a well-regulated militia conveys the image of body of marksmen, not necessarily of a body of personnel constrained by some ruleset. (other than the laws of physics perhaps)
If you look at the definition of the "unorganized militia" that is still on the books today, you'll find that it similarly includes all able-bodied men over the age of eighteen, IIRC.
It also appears that on at least one copy in the National Archives, one of those commas isn't there at all. I have yet to independently validate that, but several have noted it in the past.
...but they're arguably the original vendors of the system. I remember hearing about them over 15 years ago.
Not only was original Gauntlet built upon BSD/OS, but Secure Computing Corporation's Sidewinder ran a version of BSD/OS into which Domain Type Enforcement had been integrated.
It was the preferred choice for commercial secure UNIX on Intel platforms in the 90s.
The network performance (amongst other things) was exceptional.
One correction: The approaches are dicey for heavy jets, but they're very straightforward for lighter general aviation aircraft.
The right thing to do would be to (re)open Reagan National to Part 91 general aviation traffic,and eventually phase out the heavies.
The overall noise would decrease significantly, people wouldn't be slam-dunking 737s anymore on the river approach, and it would once again be reasonable to fly into DC on a day trip.
Just a thought.
I used to believe that IP was the right thing for almost all networked applications, but I have since learned better. IP may be too heavyweight a protocol stack for sensor networks.
If you look at the challenges for untethered sensor network devices, you'll quickly realize that "every bit transmitted brings a sensor a little closer to death." That's not my quote - I heard it from Deborah Estrin of the new Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA.
I agree that crypto is important, but for anything other than a periodically-wired transmitter like a laptop, or a device with a power source of extreme energy density, power budget is a consideration that often directly affects network stack optimization.
If any of you receive the Research Channel on the DISH Network, try to catch Professor Estrin's sensor talk. It's a great summary of the issues involved in making this stuff scalable.
That's an excellent point. It's also highly likely that any grain stocks with a risk of oil rancidity would be damaged right off, given that rancidity is almost always caused by oxidation.