This would also be useful if you had the goods on some Maffia bigwig or high government official and wanted to make sure you stay alive. Simply arrange for the data to be transmitted to 100 newspapers (CRON process?) every week at a pre-designated time, unless you explicity logged in and told the server you wre alive every week. If the wrong password is given, (hack) the data gets fired out immediately.
Alternatively, you could set up a CRON process to do a low level format on your hard drive if you failed to log in for xx days, to make sure nobody gets your sensitive data after you die.
Rumor has it J. Edgar Hoover maintained his position by keeping a file cabinet full of nasty stuff on powerful politicians in his office. He ordered his assistant to destroy all of his "personal" files in the cabinet upon his death, which she did. I wonder how much history could have been re-written if those files had been retained.
In the very early days of radio, it was common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker" to demodulate signals. Nobody was sure how it worked at the time, so it was more of an art than a science. You would simply fiddle with the cat's whisker contact until you got the best signal possible. It wasn't until well after WW2 with the invention of the transistor that semiconductor physics were understood from a theoretical basis.
*IF* cold fusion is real, it may be much like that. They may have stumbed onto something, but the results are not reproducible, becuase we don't really understand what we are doing from even a theoretical, let alone an engineering basis. It is as if somebody had reported high temperature superconductivity before we had any theory explaining how may work, but couldn't reproduce it, since they didn't really know how to manufacture a high temperature superconductor, they just got lucky in the process.
Penicillin was discovered totally by accident, (contamination of a bacteria culture by a very rare strain of mould) but at least we could grow more of it to reproduce the results. Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
There are already legal limits to aggressive advertising, that are not considered to impinge free speech. To name a few:
- Posting monster billboards in residential neighbourhoods, even with the landwner's permission. (Except during elections) - Phoning or ringing doorbells or standing in front of my house with a megaphone bellowing sales pitches at ungodly hours. - Junk faxes - Indecent, misleading or libellous ads, including those which appear to be regular traffic signs. (Road closed - detour through mall) - Posting on private property without the owner's explicit permission.
I think this sort of thing is covered by the last case. If I send a 10 page flyer to your house that gives me permission to make unlimited use of your personal property unless you read the fine print on page 7 and mail it back to me within 10 days with the "NO" box ticked, no court in the land will accept this as implied permission. And it ought to be the case for spam/spyware as well.
To deposititing material that is not absolutely sterile on other worlds. It really screws up their research into lunar soil composition and the search for organic compounds on the moon/mars if some bozo splatters his remains or the remains of his pet dog/cat all over the surface just for vanity's sake.
Standard IANAL disclaimer: (Especially in Australia) I would guess that it is possible for contractors to band together and get some sort of class action status if SCO starts harassing them?
Realistically, I don't think it would be worth their time for SCO to try and identify small fry overseas contractors using Linux and file claims against them. And larger gov't contractors would have enough legal muscle to defend themselves in court. And SCO is becoming notorious for talking much and doing little.
If you discovered a critical safety flaw in a particular model of automobile, do you:
i) Let everybody know, so those who drive that particular model can get it fixed, or
ii) Let only the manufacturer know, so they can fix it in next years model first.
What about the poor souls who are relying on the software for the security of their business? With your door analogy, it is equivalent to letting the lock manufacturer know that their locks are defective, without notifying the homeowner. (End user) It is their doors that are vulnerable. Of course by broadcasting this to the world, you let the bad guys know at the same time, but IMHO it is better than saying nothing.
God forbid I give them any ideas, but I wonder why closed HW manufacturers haven't taken up the idea of leasing, rather than selling the product to you for 99 years, the way software manufacturers do. You don't "buy" closed source SW, you licence it. If you bought it, you could do what you want with it, but a SW licence is much more restrictive.
Similarly, if the manufacturer retained ownership of the box the way cable companies use to do with set top boxes, or the old bell used to do with your phone, then it wouldn't be yours to tinker with. Opening the box would void your warrenty, just like SW licence agreeements forbid decompilation or disassembly. (Don't know how much legal weight this carries, but they certainly try)
As it sits, I can't see how they can prevent me from doing whatever the heck I please with the products I purchased.
As I recall, the government spent a few million dollars combing vast areas of wilderness in the high arctic looking for debris. And not all of it burned up - some highly radioactive bits did come down intact. From what I remember, the soviets paid for roughly half of the cleanup effort, as they were reluctant to admit the satellite was theirs. (It was a nuclear powered spy satellite after all)
Since the Xbox is essentially a PC with a lot of anti-hack DRM crap built in, I wonder when it becomes practical simply to canibalize it for parts, stick on an "open" BIOS and turn it into a real low end PC?
Not as a basement hacker project, but as a commercial scale re-engineering effort. If you are replacing the BIOS with a one that will turn it into a regular PC and not play any PS/2 games, they could hardly be raided for piracy.
From http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr_ back.p df 20,000 millirem will mutate DNA enough to produce noticeable health effects. Above 100,000 millirem, diseases manifest.
10,000 millirem is enough to increase your cancer risk. 5,000 millirem per year is the maximum allowable annual dosage.
25,000-100.000 mrem - Temporary blood changes 35,000 - Loss of appetite, nausea 50,000 - Temporary sterility in males 100,000 - 2x normal incidence of genetic defects 100,000 - 300,000 - Vomiting, diarrhea 300,000 - 500,000 - 50% chance of death if not treated 300,000+ - Permanent sterility for females 400,000-1,000,000 - Acute illnes, death within days if not treated.
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour, when she was standing a few hundred metres from the reactor.
I am facinated by these pictures, I would love to (briefly) visit these places, but I fear she will do herself serious harm over time. The area is an incredible time capsule.
It was a novelty I turned off fairly quickly - text on windows underneath makes things hard to read. The best analogy is to try and read a collection of transparencies on your desk. If they are stacked on top of each other, they quickly become unreadable. Your pencil and paper desk isn't really 3D either. The same thing with voice recognition. Speaking text to your computer wears pretty thin too after a while, and imagine trying to do this in a crowded office!
Anything that involves waving your arms about to manipulate things in 3D won't work either. You will get great exercise, but try doing this for 8-10 hours a day.
But let the research continue - maybe somebody will eventually hit upon a way of interacting with your computer in a way that improves upon what we have. My bets are with a set of glasses with a "heads up" eye movement tracking display, projected in front of you. We just have to figure how to do this without giving users splitting headaches from improper/inadequate motion compensation.
You are given a choice of a dozen text editors, several office suites, and about 8 or so window managers. Takes a full day to figure out which of the 5000 odd software packages to install, an hour or less to actually do it.
Yes, I have read similar publications from them. A typical propoganda piece, full of historical distortions.
Bin Laden is a Saudi, not a Palestinian. None of the Sept 11th hijackers were. Very few Al Queda memebers are. The Palestinian Authority has gone to great lengths to distance themselves from, and denounce Al Queda. They use the existance of the state of Israel is a straw dog. I was able to speak with somebody before in the Egyptian government about the Yom Kippur war. It was quite revealing - the allies never trusted each other, and he admitted that even had the state of Israel been utterly destroyed, there would be no peace or stability in the region. Quite the reverse in fact.
American has lent much material aid to Israel, no doubt about it. They have also lent considerable aid to Islamic countries as well. Turkey enjoys very good relations with the US. They conveniently forget how the NATO, particularly the US and GB went to war to save Muslims in Bosnia.
Al Queda loves to beat their chest about the evils of the 800 year old crusades, (true enough) yet forget about the enslavement and mandatory conscription of Christan children to serve the Ottoman empire.
But you do have one point. Some of the things I see coming from the religious far right in the USA bear an uncomfortable resemblance to statements that might have come from the Taliban.
Although it is not mentioned in your statement, they DO hate a free society. Look at the model society they built in Afghanistan. It wasn't enough even to be a practicing Muslim, look what they did to the Sheite minorities, they considered heretic. You were forced to exactly follow the edicts of their particular (warped) interpretation of Islam.
Not to pick on Muslims by the way, there seems to be an equal distribution of intolerance distributed among all faiths.
He falls into the same trap as Senator McCarthy, by destroying the very thing he seeks to protect in his zeal. I remember stories of the neighbourhood "stazi" agents in the former East Germany, and thought what a horrible sort of place to live. Of course I would fight to the death to avoid having to live in such a society. Then you read about initiatives such as TIA and the PATRIOT act initiatives, and wonder if we really won the cold war after all....
This danger exists on both the right and left of the political spectrum. Censorship and repression in the name of "political correctness" is the other side of the coin.
In one way at least, Al Queda has won the war on terror - they hate the idea of a free, tolerant, pluralistic society, and they have managed to make ours considerably less so.
Actually, I believe it may be possible with anaerobic bacteria.
IANAB - I am not a biologist, but I know they have found bacteria living in very inhospitable areas, including mid-ocean vents. Some even survived a few years on the moon! Venus is not too unlike Earth was at the time life first arose. All we would have to do to start the ball rolling is unleash some genetically engineered bacteria that would thrive in the Venusian atmosphere, use a form of photosynthesis to convert the mostly CO2 atmosphere to oxygen and sugar, the way plant life does on earth. This would cool the atmosphere, and allow at least some of the the water in the atmosphere reach the surface. (Venusian clouds are sufuric acid)
Perhaps introduced bacteria could convert the sulfur in the clouds to something harmless or perhaps even useful.
Pushing one or two of Saturn's icy moonlets out of orbit and into a collision course would provide all the remaining water terraformers would need.
Decrypting Enigma messages were made much easier, because of human weaknesses. The operator would first send a 3 letter position for the plugboard in plaintext, and the operator would chose the remaining 3 for the rotor. The Bletchley park decoders could easily guess that if BER was sent, they guy on the other end would set his rotors to LIN. LON would be followed by -DON. HIT by -LER. Another Enigma operator would always use the initials of his French girlfriend!
Decoding was also made easier by knowing part of the content of the message. Loyal Nazis were always fond of closing their encrypted messages with a hearty "Heil Hitler" which of course aided the British immensely.
Slashdot Mirror
This would also be useful if you had the goods on some Maffia bigwig or high government official and wanted to make sure you stay alive. Simply arrange for the data to be transmitted to 100 newspapers (CRON process?) every week at a pre-designated time, unless you explicity logged in and told the server you wre alive every week. If the wrong password is given, (hack) the data gets fired out immediately.
Alternatively, you could set up a CRON process to do a low level format on your hard drive if you failed to log in for xx days, to make sure nobody gets your sensitive data after you die.
Rumor has it J. Edgar Hoover maintained his position by keeping a file cabinet full of nasty stuff on powerful politicians in his office. He ordered his assistant to destroy all of his "personal" files in the cabinet upon his death, which she did. I wonder how much history could have been re-written if those files had been retained.
SCO now knows how big an invoice to send Google! :-D
Remember the animated toys causing a huge pileup while crossing a busy street disguised as traffic cones?
I can also see somebody hacking into the control frequencies for these things and pulling evil pranks, which may kill somebody.
Flash the switch hook for call waiting feature, hold it down to hang up.
In the very early days of radio, it was common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker" to demodulate signals. Nobody was sure how it worked at the time, so it was more of an art than a science. You would simply fiddle with the cat's whisker contact until you got the best signal possible. It wasn't until well after WW2 with the invention of the transistor that semiconductor physics were understood from a theoretical basis.
*IF* cold fusion is real, it may be much like that. They may have stumbed onto something, but the results are not reproducible, becuase we don't really understand what we are doing from even a theoretical, let alone an engineering basis. It is as if somebody had reported high temperature superconductivity before we had any theory explaining how may work, but couldn't reproduce it, since they didn't really know how to manufacture a high temperature superconductor, they just got lucky in the process.
Penicillin was discovered totally by accident, (contamination of a bacteria culture by a very rare strain of mould) but at least we could grow more of it to reproduce the results. Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
Now that would be awesome!
We have finally invented personal shields. Another science fiction invention brought to life.
I wonder if they also blow up if hit by a lasgun.
It would be interesting to compare the results to GCC.
There are already legal limits to aggressive advertising, that are not considered to impinge free speech. To name a few:
- Posting monster billboards in residential neighbourhoods, even with the landwner's permission. (Except during elections)
- Phoning or ringing doorbells or standing in front of my house with a megaphone bellowing sales pitches at ungodly hours.
- Junk faxes
- Indecent, misleading or libellous ads, including those which appear to be regular traffic signs. (Road closed - detour through mall)
- Posting on private property without the owner's explicit permission.
I think this sort of thing is covered by the last case. If I send a 10 page flyer to your house that gives me permission to make unlimited use of your personal property unless you read the fine print on page 7 and mail it back to me within 10 days with the "NO" box ticked, no court in the land will accept this as implied permission. And it ought to be the case for spam/spyware as well.
To deposititing material that is not absolutely sterile on other worlds. It really screws up their research into lunar soil composition and the search for organic compounds on the moon/mars if some bozo splatters his remains or the remains of his pet dog/cat all over the surface just for vanity's sake.
Standard IANAL disclaimer: (Especially in Australia)
I would guess that it is possible for contractors to band together and get some sort of class action status if SCO starts harassing them?
Realistically, I don't think it would be worth their time for SCO to try and identify small fry overseas contractors using Linux and file claims against them. And larger gov't contractors would have enough legal muscle to defend themselves in court. And SCO is becoming notorious for talking much and doing little.
If you discovered a critical safety flaw in a particular model of automobile, do you:
i) Let everybody know, so those who drive that particular model can get it fixed, or
ii) Let only the manufacturer know, so they can fix it in next years model first.
What about the poor souls who are relying on the software for the security of their business? With your door analogy, it is equivalent to letting the lock manufacturer know that their locks are defective, without notifying the homeowner. (End user) It is their doors that are vulnerable. Of course by broadcasting this to the world, you let the bad guys know at the same time, but IMHO it is better than saying nothing.
God forbid I give them any ideas, but I wonder why closed HW manufacturers haven't taken up the idea of leasing, rather than selling the product to you for 99 years, the way software manufacturers do. You don't "buy" closed source SW, you licence it. If you bought it, you could do what you want with it, but a SW licence is much more restrictive.
Similarly, if the manufacturer retained ownership of the box the way cable companies use to do with set top boxes, or the old bell used to do with your phone, then it wouldn't be yours to tinker with. Opening the box would void your warrenty, just like SW licence agreeements forbid decompilation or disassembly. (Don't know how much legal weight this carries, but they certainly try)
As it sits, I can't see how they can prevent me from doing whatever the heck I please with the products I purchased.
I am also canadian and remember that incident.
As I recall, the government spent a few million dollars combing vast areas of wilderness in the high arctic looking for debris. And not all of it burned up - some highly radioactive bits did come down intact. From what I remember, the soviets paid for roughly half of the cleanup effort, as they were reluctant to admit the satellite was theirs. (It was a nuclear powered spy satellite after all)
Since the Xbox is essentially a PC with a lot of anti-hack DRM crap built in, I wonder when it becomes practical simply to canibalize it for parts, stick on an "open" BIOS and turn it into a real low end PC?
Not as a basement hacker project, but as a commercial scale re-engineering effort. If you are replacing the BIOS with a one that will turn it into a regular PC and not play any PS/2 games, they could hardly be raided for piracy.
From_ back.p df
http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr
20,000 millirem will mutate DNA enough to produce noticeable health effects. Above 100,000 millirem, diseases manifest.
10,000 millirem is enough to increase your cancer risk.
5,000 millirem per year is the maximum allowable annual dosage.
25,000-100.000 mrem - Temporary blood changes
35,000 - Loss of appetite, nausea
50,000 - Temporary sterility in males
100,000 - 2x normal incidence of genetic defects
100,000 - 300,000 - Vomiting, diarrhea
300,000 - 500,000 - 50% chance of death if not treated
300,000+ - Permanent sterility for females
400,000-1,000,000 - Acute illnes, death within days if not treated.
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour, when she was standing a few hundred metres from the reactor.
I am facinated by these pictures, I would love to (briefly) visit these places, but I fear she will do herself serious harm over time. The area is an incredible time capsule.
It was a novelty I turned off fairly quickly - text on windows underneath makes things hard to read. The best analogy is to try and read a collection of transparencies on your desk. If they are stacked on top of each other, they quickly become unreadable. Your pencil and paper desk isn't really 3D either. The same thing with voice recognition. Speaking text to your computer wears pretty thin too after a while, and imagine trying to do this in a crowded office!
Anything that involves waving your arms about to manipulate things in 3D won't work either. You will get great exercise, but try doing this for 8-10 hours a day.
But let the research continue - maybe somebody will eventually hit upon a way of interacting with your computer in a way that improves upon what we have. My bets are with a set of glasses with a "heads up" eye movement tracking display, projected in front of you. We just have to figure how to do this without giving users splitting headaches from improper/inadequate motion compensation.
Maybe the facility needs an automated nuclear self-destruct as in the movie/book "Andromeda Strain", when all else fails....
Of course, this backup might inexplicibly fail to function as well.
The hardest part is figuring out what you want.
You are given a choice of a dozen text editors, several office suites, and about 8 or so window managers. Takes a full day to figure out which of the 5000 odd software packages to install, an hour or less to actually do it.
So instead of 5,234,169 search results returned, we will see 45,961,384 results?
Yippee!!!!!
Yes, I have read similar publications from them. A typical propoganda piece, full of historical distortions.
Bin Laden is a Saudi, not a Palestinian. None of the Sept 11th hijackers were. Very few Al Queda memebers are. The Palestinian Authority has gone to great lengths to distance themselves from, and denounce Al Queda. They use the existance of the state of Israel is a straw dog. I was able to speak with somebody before in the Egyptian government about the Yom Kippur war. It was quite revealing - the allies never trusted each other, and he admitted that even had the state of Israel been utterly destroyed, there would be no peace or stability in the region. Quite the reverse in fact.
American has lent much material aid to Israel, no doubt about it. They have also lent considerable aid to Islamic countries as well. Turkey enjoys very good relations with the US. They conveniently forget how the NATO, particularly the US and GB went to war to save Muslims in Bosnia.
Al Queda loves to beat their chest about the evils of the 800 year old crusades, (true enough) yet forget about the enslavement and mandatory conscription of Christan children to serve the Ottoman empire.
But you do have one point. Some of the things I see coming from the religious far right in the USA bear an uncomfortable resemblance to statements that might have come from the Taliban.
Although it is not mentioned in your statement, they DO hate a free society. Look at the model society they built in Afghanistan. It wasn't enough even to be a practicing Muslim, look what they did to the Sheite minorities, they considered heretic. You were forced to exactly follow the edicts of their particular (warped) interpretation of Islam.
Not to pick on Muslims by the way, there seems to be an equal distribution of intolerance distributed among all faiths.
He falls into the same trap as Senator McCarthy, by destroying the very thing he seeks to protect in his zeal. I remember stories of the neighbourhood "stazi" agents in the former East Germany, and thought what a horrible sort of place to live. Of course I would fight to the death to avoid having to live in such a society. Then you read about initiatives such as TIA and the PATRIOT act initiatives, and wonder if we really won the cold war after all....
This danger exists on both the right and left of the political spectrum. Censorship and repression in the name of "political correctness" is the other side of the coin.
In one way at least, Al Queda has won the war on terror - they hate the idea of a free, tolerant, pluralistic society, and they have managed to make ours considerably less so.
They could ask that farmer in Vietnam for help.
At least he would be interested in buying the prototype.
Actually, I believe it may be possible with anaerobic bacteria.
IANAB - I am not a biologist, but I know they have found bacteria living in very inhospitable areas, including mid-ocean vents. Some even survived a few years on the moon! Venus is not too unlike Earth was at the time life first arose. All we would have to do to start the ball rolling is unleash some genetically engineered bacteria that would thrive in the Venusian atmosphere, use a form of photosynthesis to convert the mostly CO2 atmosphere to oxygen and sugar, the way plant life does on earth. This would cool the atmosphere, and allow at least some of the the water in the atmosphere reach the surface. (Venusian clouds are sufuric acid)
Perhaps introduced bacteria could convert the sulfur in the clouds to something harmless or perhaps even useful.
Pushing one or two of Saturn's icy moonlets out of orbit and into a collision course would provide all the remaining water terraformers would need.
Decrypting Enigma messages were made much easier, because of human weaknesses. The operator would first send a 3 letter position for the plugboard in plaintext, and the operator would chose the remaining 3 for the rotor. The Bletchley park decoders could easily guess that if BER was sent, they guy on the other end would set his rotors to LIN. LON would be followed by -DON. HIT by -LER. Another Enigma operator would always use the initials of his French girlfriend!
Decoding was also made easier by knowing part of the content of the message. Loyal Nazis were always fond of closing their encrypted messages with a hearty "Heil Hitler" which of course aided the British immensely.