a) Hofstadter's or (Turing's?) response to "Lady Lovelace's objection" (computers will never surprise us because we tell them what to do), to wit, that past a certain level of complexity you only know in vague terms what you've told the machine to do. (And in the OSS model, "you" includes a giant network of coders you'll never meet, some of whom may have lived in a different century than you.)
b) Knuth's hoary challenge to list all the things your computer does in one second
I'd hardly maintain that strong AI will necessarily emerge from, say, the Gnome source tree, but I think we can definitely look forward to a lifetime supply of computers doing things that no one expected or intended them to do. I'm happy to "live in interesting times."
I wonder if all the excitement and drama of the computer age is destined to stay, or if the fun idea of computer "neuroses," and other things Slashdot readers lose sleep over, will be a quaint thing of the past someday...something every young coder learns from Knuth (5th edition, Vol. 10)
I want to call your attention to the fact that the Winsock32 stack in Windows 98 build 950B is sensitive to setting this high-order bit. I can appreciate the humor of the RFC, BUT DO NOT SET THIS BIT on packets inbound to legacy hosts running this operating system!
This is related to the infamous TCPNODELAY stack exploit in the same OS. Patched systems should be okay.
I would document this vulnerability in my own RFC, but unfortunately the textarea is too small to contain it without comment overflow.
:) (In case you took one word of the above seriously...Happy April Fools Day from Kentucky! )
Late night confession as to why I DON'T backdoor
on
Do You Write Backdoors?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm certainly a "WarGames" generation hacker. (OK, I started coding in 1979, but I was 10, so I'm more or less of that generation.) Sure, the Captain Crunch/Joe Engressia mystique powered my early interest, and I played around with Ma Bell. But finding interesting test numbers and seeing what was possible was about the extent of it. I just have never wanted to exploit a system, except as an idle fantasy. I plunked tons of change into the pay phones at my high school to record the chirps, but I never exploited this at all. (Who did I know to call long distance? No one!)
I've made it easy to disable security on development versions of systems I've written, just to spare myself the pain of logging in every time I bounce the web server to reload my.jsps, but I have zero interest in letting a real "back door" go into production. I'm not sure why. Fear of getting caught is somewhere on the list, but pride in putting out the best, most secure system I know how to make is a lot more important. In my current job I'm playing with real people's real money. Who cares if my company screws me over some day? I still don't want to make it easy to screw over some poor AOL-connected grandmother who pays her bill using my system.
I guess what trumps it all is that code with a back door is less elegant than code without, from a standpoint of efficiency. Lines coded versus purpose accomplished. So in my book, it's no back doors because of 1) Aesthetics, 2) Pride 3) Fear of getting caught.
Anyone who's seen Robert Mitchum in "Thunder Road" can attest to the popularity (especially in the American South) of modifying stock engines for greater performance (in this case, evading law enforcement while delivering bootleg liquor ("moonshine".)
Which may indicate why NASCAR was (pre-TV coverage and mainstream marketing) favored mostly in the South, while up North (Indiana, Ohio) you have CART and IRL (Sprint cars, Midgets, and the like.) A Sprint car (as the name implies) can do some amazing speed on a short track, but they run the (relatively small) engines way too hot to do well in a long, sustained race a la NASCAR.
At the late, lamented Louisville Motor Speedway, I once watched a combined evening of NASCAR-type stock car and Sprint-car type events. (This track hadn't had Sprints before.) Imagine the surprise of the (mostly) stock-car fans when the Sprint cars broke the all-time track speed record *32 times* during their qualifying laps!
I read the first novel (long out of print) by D. F. Jones. I heard there's two more: in the second one the Martians arrive, deactivate Colossus, and take over, and in the third, the humans reactivate part of Colossus to deal with the Martians.
Colossus is quite an intelligent computer flick for its day (imagine 2001's HAL9000 meets Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper.) I wish they'd made the sequels.
"Zarkorr! The Invader" (IMDB) has the most "over the top" hacker I've ever seen. "Incompletely socialized" is not even close to capturing this guy. Inappropriate comments, laughing at his own jokes, breaking into a zillion machines in seconds, I can't stop laughing whenever I see it. Wonderful Kaiju (think Godzilla) tribute.
While I would appreciate an "accurate" portrayal in a real life story or drama about a coder, when it comes to science fiction, I've just given up. If ya can't beat 'em, etc.
Plus, we're a diverse lot. What would count as "realistic"?
I hated everything to do with religion for years
because I assumed Christians were all of this
Creation Science nonsense variety.
Boy was I surprised (and relieved) to discover
that there are scads of intelligent, logically minded people within the broad framework of Christianity. Not as many as one would like,
but these "reformers" are really courageous
and their long-term impact on reducing the
uglier aspects of the Christian tradition is
not to be underestimated.
The Atari 400/800 joystick ports could be bitmasked as inputs or outputs. This + 2n2222 transistor + 5V reed relay = pulse dialer (also
ca. 1983) -- Alan
My late grandfather taught physics at Murray State
University in western Kentucky from 1938-1973.
Reading this article made me go dig out his trusty slide
rule (now MY trusty slide rule.) All I ever did
on it was learn to multiply...now I think I'll use
the web to learn to use it properly.
I tend to agree with the Anonymous Coward who
described this issue in terms of "buzzword
dotcommers."
Computers are changing life on Earth. But if
one follows Moore's law backwards, it is changing
it at the same *rate* as it did when ENIAC,
UNIVAC, the Bletchley Park computers were
new. Defeating Goering's U-boat code: now THAT
is a 1942 "killer app" that I fortunately need not
download from Alphaworks....thank you Dr. Turing!
The fact that the world is "more changed" by
computers now than in Babbage's time is a function
of the cumulative "time integral" of the rate of
change, not the rate of change. (No coincidence
that it's now that computers are "more
important than ever."
The dotcom thing is a business phenomenon, not
a computer phenomenon. Computers still work the
way that Lovelace and Babbage described. Better
and faster, but a Turing Machine is an Analytical
Engine is a Pascal Calculator. The sociological
effects of computing (or any human endeavour)
are cumulative, their observed results tend to belong to history, not the news.
I feel sorry for and care about people whose
personal lives go awry, be it through a bad
marriage or a business failure. Who knows, it
could be me that's next.
But I have to agree that a good deal of the
people around me don't really seem to be working
all that hard for a living. These are my very
cubicle-mates. I think they're all very nice
people: even to a person!
I'm 32. I've been making money on computers mostly
since 1994, when I started office temping to
learn PC applications. In 2001, I'm about to have
a servlet filter I wrote published in a Java
white paper on XSLT. So 6 years in "business computing." Not too impressive for the dotcommer
who wants a career (SUV) in 6 months....
But I've been enjoying computers since 1980, when
as a 12-year-old I was hooked at school one-on-one
to a Teletype DSR-33 with a Honeywell 66 behind it (110 Baud, Half Duplex). I have breathed and
lived the idea of "computers" since I was a little
kid. And I'm not hurting in my job: 62K with no
degree, in my beloved hometown, often included
on "most livable places" almanacs.
I don't know if I'm lucky for keeping a job
or just lucky that computers exist and they're
interesting. But I would challenge those who read
this far in this post, to look at the weaker
ones around you and imagine the potential for
the planet if they understood the machine
as you do. In Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, we call
it the "Flint Ridge Con." Describe a peculiar
approach to the newbie, hook her/im on the
possibility implied, and wait for them to just
badger the living shit out of you with questions.
To paraphrase Feynman, I think this is the only
way in which any sort of progress can be made.
Thanks in advance for the bandwidth.
Alan
p.s. This is my first Slashdot post. I tend to
respect the views of people I read here, even
if I don't agree with them (simple reason:
a lot of good thinking goes on here.) So if
you don't agree with my post, just tell me
why I'm wrong. Mainly I have seen people get angry
on these kinds of fora and I really would hate
that more than anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of
a) Hofstadter's or (Turing's?) response to "Lady Lovelace's objection" (computers will never surprise us because we tell them what to do), to wit, that past a certain level of complexity you only know in vague terms what you've told the machine to do. (And in the OSS model, "you" includes a giant network of coders you'll never meet, some of whom may have lived in a different century than you.)
b) Knuth's hoary challenge to list all the things your computer does in one second
I'd hardly maintain that strong AI will necessarily emerge from, say, the Gnome source tree, but I think we can definitely look forward to a lifetime supply of computers doing things that no one expected or intended them to do. I'm happy to "live in interesting times."
I wonder if all the excitement and drama of the computer age is destined to stay, or if the fun idea of computer "neuroses," and other things Slashdot readers lose sleep over, will be a quaint thing of the past someday...something every young coder learns from Knuth (5th edition, Vol. 10)
I want to call your attention to the fact that
:) (In case you took one word of the above seriously...Happy April Fools Day from Kentucky! )
the Winsock32 stack in Windows 98 build 950B
is sensitive to setting this high-order bit. I can
appreciate the humor of the RFC, BUT DO NOT SET THIS
BIT on packets inbound to legacy hosts running this
operating system!
This is related to the infamous TCPNODELAY stack
exploit in the same OS. Patched systems should be okay.
I would document this vulnerability in my own RFC,
but unfortunately the textarea is too small to contain it without comment overflow.
I've made it easy to disable security on development versions of systems I've written, just to spare myself the pain of logging in every time I bounce the web server to reload my .jsps, but I have zero interest in letting a real "back door" go into production. I'm not sure why. Fear of getting caught is somewhere on the list, but pride in putting out the best, most secure system I know how to make is a lot more important. In my current job I'm playing with real people's real money. Who cares if my company screws me over some day? I still don't want to make it easy to screw over some poor AOL-connected grandmother who pays her bill using my system.
I guess what trumps it all is that code with a back door is less elegant than code without, from a standpoint of efficiency. Lines coded versus purpose accomplished. So in my book, it's no back doors because of 1) Aesthetics, 2) Pride 3) Fear of getting caught.
Anyone who's seen Robert Mitchum in "Thunder Road" can attest to the popularity (especially in the American South) of modifying stock engines for greater performance (in this case, evading law enforcement while delivering bootleg liquor ("moonshine".)
Which may indicate why NASCAR was (pre-TV coverage and mainstream marketing) favored mostly in the South, while up North (Indiana, Ohio) you have CART and IRL (Sprint cars, Midgets, and the like.) A Sprint car (as the name implies) can do some amazing speed on a short track, but they run the (relatively small) engines way too hot to do well in a long, sustained race a la NASCAR.
At the late, lamented Louisville Motor Speedway, I once watched a combined evening of NASCAR-type stock car and Sprint-car type events. (This track hadn't had Sprints before.) Imagine the surprise of the (mostly) stock-car fans when the Sprint cars broke the all-time track speed record *32 times* during their qualifying laps!
I read the first novel (long out of print) by D. F. Jones. I heard there's two more: in the second one the Martians arrive, deactivate Colossus, and take over, and in the third, the humans reactivate part of Colossus to deal with the Martians.
Colossus is quite an intelligent computer flick for its day (imagine 2001's HAL9000 meets Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper.) I wish they'd made the sequels.
While I would appreciate an "accurate" portrayal in a real life story or drama about a coder, when it comes to science fiction, I've just given up. If ya can't beat 'em, etc.
Plus, we're a diverse lot. What would count as "realistic"?
public class Something
{
private static Something s = new Something();
private Something() {}
public static Something getInstance() { return s; }
}
Next they'll say "There's No More Room at the Bottom."
Boy was I surprised (and relieved) to discover that there are scads of intelligent, logically minded people within the broad framework of Christianity. Not as many as one would like, but these "reformers" are really courageous and their long-term impact on reducing the uglier aspects of the Christian tradition is not to be underestimated.
Way to go.
The Atari 400/800 joystick ports could be bitmasked as inputs or outputs. This + 2n2222 transistor + 5V reed relay = pulse dialer (also ca. 1983) -- Alan
Try that instead.
Reading this article made me go dig out his trusty slide rule (now MY trusty slide rule.) All I ever did on it was learn to multiply...now I think I'll use the web to learn to use it properly.
Thanks for an interesting post.
I swear I tried to put them in, but gave up.
I tried XHTML 4.01 BR tags, and when that didn't
work, gave up from the lateness of the hour.
I am aware that this is documented and won't
make the same mistake next time.
Thanks!
I tried, but Phonix is not a state *sob* *sob* :)
I tend to agree with the Anonymous Coward who described this issue in terms of "buzzword dotcommers." Computers are changing life on Earth. But if one follows Moore's law backwards, it is changing it at the same *rate* as it did when ENIAC, UNIVAC, the Bletchley Park computers were new. Defeating Goering's U-boat code: now THAT is a 1942 "killer app" that I fortunately need not download from Alphaworks....thank you Dr. Turing! The fact that the world is "more changed" by computers now than in Babbage's time is a function of the cumulative "time integral" of the rate of change, not the rate of change. (No coincidence that it's now that computers are "more important than ever." The dotcom thing is a business phenomenon, not a computer phenomenon. Computers still work the way that Lovelace and Babbage described. Better and faster, but a Turing Machine is an Analytical Engine is a Pascal Calculator. The sociological effects of computing (or any human endeavour) are cumulative, their observed results tend to belong to history, not the news. I feel sorry for and care about people whose personal lives go awry, be it through a bad marriage or a business failure. Who knows, it could be me that's next. But I have to agree that a good deal of the people around me don't really seem to be working all that hard for a living. These are my very cubicle-mates. I think they're all very nice people: even to a person! I'm 32. I've been making money on computers mostly since 1994, when I started office temping to learn PC applications. In 2001, I'm about to have a servlet filter I wrote published in a Java white paper on XSLT. So 6 years in "business computing." Not too impressive for the dotcommer who wants a career (SUV) in 6 months.... But I've been enjoying computers since 1980, when as a 12-year-old I was hooked at school one-on-one to a Teletype DSR-33 with a Honeywell 66 behind it (110 Baud, Half Duplex). I have breathed and lived the idea of "computers" since I was a little kid. And I'm not hurting in my job: 62K with no degree, in my beloved hometown, often included on "most livable places" almanacs. I don't know if I'm lucky for keeping a job or just lucky that computers exist and they're interesting. But I would challenge those who read this far in this post, to look at the weaker ones around you and imagine the potential for the planet if they understood the machine as you do. In Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, we call it the "Flint Ridge Con." Describe a peculiar approach to the newbie, hook her/im on the possibility implied, and wait for them to just badger the living shit out of you with questions. To paraphrase Feynman, I think this is the only way in which any sort of progress can be made. Thanks in advance for the bandwidth. Alan p.s. This is my first Slashdot post. I tend to respect the views of people I read here, even if I don't agree with them (simple reason: a lot of good thinking goes on here.) So if you don't agree with my post, just tell me why I'm wrong. Mainly I have seen people get angry on these kinds of fora and I really would hate that more than anything.