For no reason I understand, the original PDF kept instantly crashing my copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0/Linux. So, I text-ized that baby. It's not quite as pretty, and you'll need an xterm that's about 95 characters wide to really appreciate it, but it's here nonetheless.
There's a lot of people out there (like myself) who, perhaps having watched one too many episodes of "The X-Files," will never buy into Carnivore.
Open source? Great. How do I know that's the source code the FBI actually used in the live unit? Not possible.
Technical docs? Spiffy. Same question.
Only with a warrant? Yeah, like I trust them to stick to that limitation. (Not to mention the fact that warrants can be issued very quietly, at three in the morning, by a "rubber-stamp" judge, and with ridiculously broad criteria.)
And don't even get me started on the potential of the unit being cracked. Win2K? What were they smoking?
I've dropped the mirror, but only because Gambit has the good stuff back up.
BTW, if you are in fact a representative of the corp, you really should consider at least getting a non-AC account. Looks all nice and professional and stuff. Definitely worth the 45-second investment.
Gambit took down their copies, and when I tried to download this baby from the other listed "mirror" from this discussion (palmgear.com), I hit a few "connection refused" messages. Maybe it was just my poor luck, maybe freakish coincidence. Who knows?
At any rate, I snagged copies and posted 'em here. Get 'em while they're hot.
Dreamcast does have a Windows-ish API buried deep under the hood. Granted, many game developers ignore it entirely (and that's probably a good thing), but it's there. The bulk of the work for this would just be minor code changes and some optimizations to take Bleem! (a Windows product) and a quick recompile.
I know I'm just asking for all kinds of trouble here... but I've made a copy of Netscape 0.94 for Windows available for download. (My ISP won't be happy, I expect.) Relive the good old days, before JavaScript, before frames, before the TEXT BGCOLOR tag. (And if it runs under WINE, let me know.)
If you read the article, it refers to using digital morphing in a fairly specific manner, and one that is truly war-like.
The old saying, "All's fair in love and war," isn't quite true. The Geneva Convention makes certain types of war effectively illegal (at least insofar as nobody's really in a position to enforce it), and it's there for a good reason.
This refers to using digital morphing techniques in a clearly deceptive manner - say, to "announce" a cessation of hostilities, so $VILLAIN can launch a sneak attack on $GOODGUYS, catching them unprepared and making it an easy slaughter.
War, like software development, is an imprecise art. But there are rules, and most of them are there for good reasons.
The original Wolfenstein 3D ran on darn near every 386 ever made. Beyond that, the hardware requirements were non-existant.
And this one, for few appreciable gains, now requires a 3D graphics card.
While I respect the coder's work here, and am a fan of nostalgia gaming in general (wow! Didn't know the early '90s counted as nostalgia, did you?) I hope a non-3D version comes out someday.
"To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) s one's own; use (another's production) without crediting the source. Literary theft..."
Thank you, Merriam and Webster.
I'm sure some people are flattered that their ideas are being republished in "major" media, and that's enough to make their day.
Some people, though, might not be so happy... The problem is, of course, that proving plagiarism is well-nigh impossible to do in court. (And how many/.'ers have the money to sue CNN or MSNBC anyway?)
Maybe it's time to take that little copyright/disclaimer bar at the bottom of every page and make it just a little bigger...
408. The debut of Internet Explorer... gave Netscape an incentive to improve Navigator's quality... The inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows... reduced the cost to the public of gaining access to [the Internet], at least in part because it compelled Netscape to stop charging for Navigator.
Mind you, it's basically the ONLY place anywhere in the whole document where anything even vaguely nice is said about Microsoft. But they're pretty desperate here, and will take anything they can get.
In any high-profile case like this, as soon as findings of fact, or in fact darn near anything, comes off the judge's desk, both sides will rush to claim victory.
From the brief skimming I've given to that 200+ page monstrosity known as the findings of fact in this case, it looks as though the US has a bit more right to break out the champagne than Microsoft. But at this stage it doesn't mean much.
Everyone involved is eager to put their own spin on things. Here, though, Microsoft is at a real disadvantage; they can only influence one media outlet (MSNBC), whereas everyone else seems to be already siding with the government by default.
It's not a ruling (yet). It's a mildly entertaining read, but that's all. Similarly, the MS documents from this article are mildly amusing, but they're just spin. Ditto for anything cranked out by the people on the other side.
When rulings and penalties and all the fun parts show up, then I'll be ready to celebrate the downfall of everyone's favorite 700-pound gorilla. Until then, back to reading/.:-)
The staffers at Loki are, I'm guessing, making at least a subsistence living by porting all these neat games to Linux.
But, is anyone buying them?
More interesting, and maybe even more important: I'm assuming (please correct if I'm wrong) that the original developers of HMM3, CivCTP, and the other games ported by Loki, simply threw money at Loki and said, "make it run on Linux." Are the original developers recouping their investments in Linux sales?
Until September 2000, RSA is protected by a US patent, which is (it seems) strictly enforced by RSA Inc.
There's a whole lot of meta-discussion that could take place about the bizarre intricacies of American patent law; in fact, it's all been done here on/. Several times, I'll wager.
In most of the rest of the world, if you disclose your patent-able process/algorithm/whatever BEFORE you apply for the patent, you won't be granted a patent. Period. In the States, though, you generally have up to a year AFTER you publish, and you'll still get the patent.
The RSA algorithm was published before the patents were applied for. So, in most of the world, RSA can be used free of legal implications. Not in the US, though.
For tricky problem solving, I need something to help clear my mind. Soothing music. Sarah McLachlan, older Tori Amos, Eagles, Doors.
This, of course, differs from my "normal" music -- right now, the MP3 playlist has some Frank Zappa, some Korn, 2Pac, a little bit of everything.
Interesting side-discussion (maybe): I mean, a little bit of everything. My CD collection ranges from all of the above, through Johnny Cash, and back around to The Cure. How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of music)?
... is that designing a good user interface is hard.
A talented programmer can work wonders behind the proverbial scenes. A good algorithm can make a program a joy to use, in some senses (namely, in the "hey, this thing is fast" sense). And given a good set of widgets and a fun toy to hook them together (things like Delphi), a skin can be wrapped around that neat algorithm quickly and you have something that can be termed a useful product.
But is it a good product? Is it a usable product? Not necessarily.
I can, and have, thrown together quickie UI's in Delphi. For testing purposes, and prototyping, it works just fine. Heck, half the time the buttons are still labeled "Button 1" and similar, because I know what they do.
Would I take a program like that and give it to anyone else? Hell no.
Entirely too many programmers think that because something is intuitive to them, it will automatically be intuitive to the rest of the world. It's a sin most of us have fallen victim to, and it's something we need to do something about. The very existence of classes on UI means that there may be hope...
Just a few random thoughts as I read through this latest piece of MS dumpage (roughly in order from the start of the document down)...
Without doing a lot more looking into these numbers and their sources, the first major section of the document is darn near useless. We all know of Microsoft's history for buying the numbers they want...
Just because NT has a number of mission-critical installations out there, doesn't mean that Linux can't also have that. More MS dodging.
"Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges." Wrong, pure and simple. It's called sudo.
Linux security in general: Yeah, you have to keep on your toes. But it's a lot better than trusting Microsoft to do all the watching for you. While sites are being cracked, and the Linux fix is already being deployed, Microsoft is still writing the "it's not an issue" press release.
So, several months ago, the old beta came out. Excuse me, alpha. Whatever. It's slightly better than nothing, I guess.
At the time, I was still using a 486 as my main computer (save the jeers for someone who cares:) and I wasn't worried about it.
So a couple weeks ago, I finally moved up to the late 1990s with an AMD K6-2 with more MHz than I really know what to do with. I start digging through Real Networks' site, trying to find this package, it's nowhere to be found. Site searches prove futile with all the keywords I can think of, etc. I can get (and in fact have gotten) RealPlayer 5.0, but that's all.
Yay Slashdot! Here's a new version! Oh, wait, it's actually the same as the old version. Real Networks hasn't, according to other/. posters, actually changed or improved the code beyond removing an old timeout.
It's three a.m., I must be lonely. Let's go download this baby. Hm. Well, it's glibc-only. Maybe I need to do that glibc upgrade anyway...
So what do we have? Six-month-old software, which is pretty old these days. The Linux version only supports a limited range of platforms (x86/glibc) - no libc5, no Alpha, nothing.
From Real Networks, Linux don't get no respect.
Is this level of support actually worth the trouble? It just seems wrong for them to pretend to have Linux support when they're not going to actually put effort into it.
If a system is cracked into, it's (probably) insecure.
But just because a system hasn't been cracked, doesn't guarantee it is secure.
In fact, if I were a malicious cracker, and found a hole in the security of either of these systems, I wouldn't tell a soul how I did it. I'd keep the knowledge to myself, and wait for some juicy targets running (insert least favorite OS here). Say, the next potential amazon.com.
I'm not silly enough to post any URL under my control to slashdot itself. No server I have a hand in could handle it.
Yet today, in a small way, it's doing so anyway. I consider myself fortunate that it was only in the middle of a big fat pack of quickies, so my 100 hits a day site is only having to put up with, say, 6000 hits today instead of the real Slashdot Effect.
(For the idly curious: I host the "job opening: apprentice Sith Lord" bit. Wheee. I didn't write it, it just showed up.)
If this means that someone will get paid for writing some of this documentation, then it may be one of the best things for open-source in a while.
Many programmers, myself included, absolutely hate writing docs. It's not fun. Code is fun. Solving new problems is a lot of fun. Sometimes, talking about it is fun, but only with people who understand what's going on.
Documentation isn't nearly as much fun. I can do it, and do it well, but I won't promise to enjoy it. And if I can choose between spending free time on code or on docs, code will win almost every time.
Now if you'll throw some money at me, docs could win. There's a LOT of software out there that could use some decent documentation (ideally docs that are as free as the code).
For years, the FCC hasn't had any rules for stations broadcasting under 100 watts, and refused to create any rules.
This would, naturally, lead some to believe that if you want to broadcast there, it's okay to do so. Nothing preventing you from it, right?
Heh.
If you take the time to dig, you can find documented, verifiable reports of the FCC calling in local police, FBI, and other MIB-types, doing dawn raids, ninja-style gear, the whole bit. Just to shut down microtransmitters.
Having no rules would be best, in my ideal world. But that doesn't seem to have worked. As long as the rules are vageuly sane -- say, cheap licensing fees, few to no requirements for content control...
Oh, sorry. You meant in the real world?
This looks great, but between the FCC's control fetish and the overwhelming influence of people with money, odds are nothing will come of this.
Social(ist) (in)Security Numbers are, officially, not supposed to be used for much beyond tax identification, and provision of SS benefits.
Not that anyone cares, of course. The government already has these numbers anyway, so that's not an issue. The real danger comes from the private sector.
Try to open a bank account anywhere in the States without one. Try to go to any school, even a private school or a high school. Try to work, well, anywhere.
Good luck.
Granted, this is hideously bad law. Wretechedly so. Fingerprints, SSN, DNA, and so on don't belong on your ID (usually). But there are far worse spectres than Big Brother.
Slashdot Mirror
I read /. for, probably, an hour daily, for the past couple years... oh, heck, just give me $50,000 and stock options and we'll call it even.
For no reason I understand, the original PDF kept instantly crashing my copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0/Linux. So, I text-ized that baby. It's not quite as pretty, and you'll need an xterm that's about 95 characters wide to really appreciate it, but it's here nonetheless.
Open source? Great. How do I know that's the source code the FBI actually used in the live unit? Not possible.
Technical docs? Spiffy. Same question.
Only with a warrant? Yeah, like I trust them to stick to that limitation. (Not to mention the fact that warrants can be issued very quietly, at three in the morning, by a "rubber-stamp" judge, and with ridiculously broad criteria.)
And don't even get me started on the potential of the unit being cracked. Win2K? What were they smoking?
BTW, if you are in fact a representative of the corp, you really should consider at least getting a non-AC account. Looks all nice and professional and stuff. Definitely worth the 45-second investment.
At any rate, I snagged copies and posted 'em here. Get 'em while they're hot.
Dreamcast does have a Windows-ish API buried deep under the hood. Granted, many game developers ignore it entirely (and that's probably a good thing), but it's there. The bulk of the work for this would just be minor code changes and some optimizations to take Bleem! (a Windows product) and a quick recompile.
http://scribers.midwest.net/dsmith42 /ns094.zip is where it is now -- mirrors are welcome. :)
The old saying, "All's fair in love and war," isn't quite true. The Geneva Convention makes certain types of war effectively illegal (at least insofar as nobody's really in a position to enforce it), and it's there for a good reason.
This refers to using digital morphing techniques in a clearly deceptive manner - say, to "announce" a cessation of hostilities, so $VILLAIN can launch a sneak attack on $GOODGUYS, catching them unprepared and making it an easy slaughter.
War, like software development, is an imprecise art. But there are rules, and most of them are there for good reasons.
Anyway, I guess scanning refers to scanners, i.e. reading pictures.
And this one, for few appreciable gains, now requires a 3D graphics card.
While I respect the coder's work here, and am a fan of nostalgia gaming in general (wow! Didn't know the early '90s counted as nostalgia, did you?) I hope a non-3D version comes out someday.
Thank you, Merriam and Webster.
I'm sure some people are flattered that their ideas are being republished in "major" media, and that's enough to make their day.
Some people, though, might not be so happy... The problem is, of course, that proving plagiarism is well-nigh impossible to do in court. (And how many /.'ers have the money to sue CNN or MSNBC anyway?)
Maybe it's time to take that little copyright/disclaimer bar at the bottom of every page and make it just a little bigger...
Mind you, it's basically the ONLY place anywhere in the whole document where anything even vaguely nice is said about Microsoft. But they're pretty desperate here, and will take anything they can get.
From the brief skimming I've given to that 200+ page monstrosity known as the findings of fact in this case, it looks as though the US has a bit more right to break out the champagne than Microsoft. But at this stage it doesn't mean much.
Everyone involved is eager to put their own spin on things. Here, though, Microsoft is at a real disadvantage; they can only influence one media outlet (MSNBC), whereas everyone else seems to be already siding with the government by default.
It's not a ruling (yet). It's a mildly entertaining read, but that's all. Similarly, the MS documents from this article are mildly amusing, but they're just spin. Ditto for anything cranked out by the people on the other side.
When rulings and penalties and all the fun parts show up, then I'll be ready to celebrate the downfall of everyone's favorite 700-pound gorilla. Until then, back to reading /. :-)
But, is anyone buying them?
More interesting, and maybe even more important: I'm assuming (please correct if I'm wrong) that the original developers of HMM3, CivCTP, and the other games ported by Loki, simply threw money at Loki and said, "make it run on Linux." Are the original developers recouping their investments in Linux sales?
Until September 2000, RSA is protected by a US patent, which is (it seems) strictly enforced by RSA Inc.
There's a whole lot of meta-discussion that could take place about the bizarre intricacies of American patent law; in fact, it's all been done here on /. Several times, I'll wager.
In most of the rest of the world, if you disclose your patent-able process/algorithm/whatever BEFORE you apply for the patent, you won't be granted a patent. Period. In the States, though, you generally have up to a year AFTER you publish, and you'll still get the patent.
The RSA algorithm was published before the patents were applied for. So, in most of the world, RSA can be used free of legal implications. Not in the US, though.
This, of course, differs from my "normal" music -- right now, the MP3 playlist has some Frank Zappa, some Korn, 2Pac, a little bit of everything.
Interesting side-discussion (maybe): I mean, a little bit of everything. My CD collection ranges from all of the above, through Johnny Cash, and back around to The Cure. How many c0derZ have similarly wide-ranging tastes (i.e. not just listening to one style of music)?
A talented programmer can work wonders behind the proverbial scenes. A good algorithm can make a program a joy to use, in some senses (namely, in the "hey, this thing is fast" sense). And given a good set of widgets and a fun toy to hook them together (things like Delphi), a skin can be wrapped around that neat algorithm quickly and you have something that can be termed a useful product.
But is it a good product? Is it a usable product? Not necessarily.
I can, and have, thrown together quickie UI's in Delphi. For testing purposes, and prototyping, it works just fine. Heck, half the time the buttons are still labeled "Button 1" and similar, because I know what they do.
Would I take a program like that and give it to anyone else? Hell no.
Entirely too many programmers think that because something is intuitive to them, it will automatically be intuitive to the rest of the world. It's a sin most of us have fallen victim to, and it's something we need to do something about. The very existence of classes on UI means that there may be hope...
Without doing a lot more looking into these numbers and their sources, the first major section of the document is darn near useless. We all know of Microsoft's history for buying the numbers they want...
Just because NT has a number of mission-critical installations out there, doesn't mean that Linux can't also have that. More MS dodging.
"Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges." Wrong, pure and simple. It's called sudo.
Linux security in general: Yeah, you have to keep on your toes. But it's a lot better than trusting Microsoft to do all the watching for you. While sites are being cracked, and the Linux fix is already being deployed, Microsoft is still writing the "it's not an issue" press release.
In short: ugh.
At the time, I was still using a 486 as my main computer (save the jeers for someone who cares :) and I wasn't worried about it.
So a couple weeks ago, I finally moved up to the late 1990s with an AMD K6-2 with more MHz than I really know what to do with. I start digging through Real Networks' site, trying to find this package, it's nowhere to be found. Site searches prove futile with all the keywords I can think of, etc. I can get (and in fact have gotten) RealPlayer 5.0, but that's all.
Yay Slashdot! Here's a new version! Oh, wait, it's actually the same as the old version. Real Networks hasn't, according to other /. posters, actually changed or improved the code beyond removing an old timeout.
It's three a.m., I must be lonely. Let's go download this baby. Hm. Well, it's glibc-only. Maybe I need to do that glibc upgrade anyway...
So what do we have? Six-month-old software, which is pretty old these days. The Linux version only supports a limited range of platforms (x86/glibc) - no libc5, no Alpha, nothing.
From Real Networks, Linux don't get no respect.
Is this level of support actually worth the trouble? It just seems wrong for them to pretend to have Linux support when they're not going to actually put effort into it.
But just because a system hasn't been cracked, doesn't guarantee it is secure.
In fact, if I were a malicious cracker, and found a hole in the security of either of these systems, I wouldn't tell a soul how I did it. I'd keep the knowledge to myself, and wait for some juicy targets running (insert least favorite OS here). Say, the next potential amazon.com.
I'm not silly enough to post any URL under my control to slashdot itself. No server I have a hand in could handle it.
Yet today, in a small way, it's doing so anyway. I consider myself fortunate that it was only in the middle of a big fat pack of quickies, so my 100 hits a day site is only having to put up with, say, 6000 hits today instead of the real Slashdot Effect.
(For the idly curious: I host the "job opening: apprentice Sith Lord" bit. Wheee. I didn't write it, it just showed up.)
So, does having one small article listed in a "Quickies" bit mean your site's been slashdotted? (I host the "Sith Apprentice" job app.)
If this means that someone will get paid for writing some of this documentation, then it may be one of the best things for open-source in a while.
Many programmers, myself included, absolutely hate writing docs. It's not fun. Code is fun. Solving new problems is a lot of fun. Sometimes, talking about it is fun, but only with people who understand what's going on.
Documentation isn't nearly as much fun. I can do it, and do it well, but I won't promise to enjoy it. And if I can choose between spending free time on code or on docs, code will win almost every time.
Now if you'll throw some money at me, docs could win. There's a LOT of software out there that could use some decent documentation (ideally docs that are as free as the code).
So where do I send my resume?
This would, naturally, lead some to believe that if you want to broadcast there, it's okay to do so. Nothing preventing you from it, right?
Heh.
If you take the time to dig, you can find documented, verifiable reports of the FCC calling in local police, FBI, and other MIB-types, doing dawn raids, ninja-style gear, the whole bit. Just to shut down microtransmitters.
Having no rules would be best, in my ideal world. But that doesn't seem to have worked. As long as the rules are vageuly sane -- say, cheap licensing fees, few to no requirements for content control...
Oh, sorry. You meant in the real world?
This looks great, but between the FCC's control fetish and the overwhelming influence of people with money, odds are nothing will come of this.
Not that anyone cares, of course. The government already has these numbers anyway, so that's not an issue. The real danger comes from the private sector.
Try to open a bank account anywhere in the States without one. Try to go to any school, even a private school or a high school. Try to work, well, anywhere.
Good luck.
Granted, this is hideously bad law. Wretechedly so. Fingerprints, SSN, DNA, and so on don't belong on your ID (usually). But there are far worse spectres than Big Brother.