At least here in the most populated parts of europe, the orbital tracks dont go directly over any major cities until, well, tomorrow. Plenty of time to get drunk enough to forget about this:-)
I don't find this news to be particularly newsworthy, except it is a slow news day. The timing sounds like a ploy to grab a little extra publicity, and possibly gain some more funding to keep the station going for another six months or more. Mir will stay up for at least another couple of years given its current orbital decay. The problem is what happens when the gyros stop. Once the gyros stop, the station will start a slow tumble, which will make it that much harder to predict when and where it might fall.
Fully expect this to become a non-event once they try all the alternative frequencies and command procedures and get some kind of response. Maybe this little incident will spur them onto bringing the station down in February as planned, while they still have some control, and not sell out to greedy television shows and ego-centric millionaires.
round up all the women and teenaged girls you know
Hey Katz, this is/., news for nerds who don't know any women:-)
It really is difficult to round up women when you tell them its a fantasy martial arts film. But slowly the women I know are seeing this film, they just aren't letting men take them. The film is still playing here in Europe after several months, and I'm amazed how many women have seen it, but none of them would dare go see it when it first opened.
And if you read Aint It Cool News you'd know that Ang Lee has already started casting for one of the prequels, and money is being thrown at him to make all four stories into movies.
So IBM is opensourcing AIX. Just because it is open source doesn't make it Linux. Its still AIX.
Sure, once some of the neat drivers, modules, and applications are open on AIX, there will be a cross pollinisation between Linux and AIX. But that isn't going to make AIX into Linux. They will remain separate systems, both will be better for IBM's moves.
The opensourcing of AIX should be hailed as a great triumph of the free software model. Now instead of Linux as the only project to point to, we can point to a completely separate system. Next, I'd love to see Digit^H^H^H^HCompaq open source VMS, just for nostalgia's sake.
IBM makes most of its money in the services arena. AIX sales were a tiny fraction of their revenue, so opening the source is not going to hurt their bottom line in any way. What would be really good is for their services group to start supporting Linux installations for large organisations, that would bring Linux into the corporate mainstream.
But the student didn't break any laws, as near as I can tell from reading a few articles about this. All the student did was bypass an internet filter installed by the school, and probably demonstrated this fact by calling up a subversive site like/.
But by bypassing a highly fallible system put in place by the school, he violated school policy, and he got the boot for a few days. Hmmm, 3 days off right before Christmas. I wonder if he was really just hacking school policy to get some time off at the right time:-)
I'm going to have to poke around on their site in greater depth to see what source materials this guy uses.
In Europe, in the older circles of ex intelligence agents cashing in as entrepreneurs doing security in the networking world, BMG is well known as a haven for ex-SS agents. Lots of them. Bertelsmann was known for picking up every SS agent as they were released from prison after the war crime trials in Nuremburg and offering them jobs. Much of the upper echelons of BMG were ex-SS officers and judges up through the 1970's and 80's, although most of the originals are retired or dead. The new crop are as right-wing as the old, but they are very careful to not tip their hand too often.
Bertelsmann survived the war almost completely intact. During the war, as a bonus for being such strong supporters of nazi-era ideas such as industry self-censorship (so the government didn't have to do it), they were awarded the spoils of all the other companies who tried to defy the third reich on its rise to power. During the war, all the publishers in occupied territories were forced into very lopsided business contracts, and many of those contracts were never reversed after the war. That left BMG as the most powerful publishing company in Europe.
This move, to ban controversial materials so the government doesn't have to step in, is exactly what Bertelsmann did from the late 20's until the end of the war. They are starting with banning something no reasonable person would object to, skinhead music. Once they get people settled with the idea that BMG is just doing this to protect society and youth and family values, they can easily move onto banning other kinds of music, such as hip-hop with violent lyrics, and my hopeful, Frank Sinatra karaoke.
As for the outflow of money, gold, and other capital starting in 1944, that is pretty well documented if you can go dig up the texts written by the various Marshall Plan economists who tried to track it down after the war. The reading is very dry, because economists are not novelists. Some capital was recovered, as hiding that much wealth was difficult, but some never was accurately identified, or else the searchers were blocked by corrupt South American governments.
And the seven days of the week would simply be named after numbers -- Oneday for Monday, Twoday for Tuesday,
In portuguese, the days are already numbers. Segunda-feira to Seixta-feira are monday through friday. Saturday and sunday are still related to the judaic and christian calendars, Sabado and Domingo.
It took me a while to get used to calling monday "second-day", but now that I what I think of it in english as well.
In countries where taxes are not taken out of your paycheck, payrolls often work on a 13 month system, so you get 2 months of pay the month the taxes are due. If you are smart, you put aside one fourth of your salary so you aren't scrambling on tax day, but not many people are smart. So many companies give you some help.
the AC
ObDisclaimer: My portuguese is from a very rusty and not recently used memory, impaired by going out drinking all night with some marketing bastards on expense:-)
Do you think that some supporters of Project Gutenberg could contact Adobe's legal department and change their attitude with some strong legal language?
What Adobe is doing certainly is wrong, stealing a publically available text, and then claiming additional "rights" which they clearly don't have. We need a copyright abuse police to crack down on those who don't have a clue as to the what copyright allows, and what it does not.
the AC
Re:A good step in the right direction
on
Deja.com Vu!
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· Score: 2
revenue of $922,000 in the first quarter
That kind of revenue stream could pay for colo space, bandwidth, and the salaries of a handful of techies and programmers.
The loss of $1.25 million comes from an idiot CEO who hired dozens of marketing and sales and business consultants, attempting to ride the dotcom vapour blowout. Now that the bubble has burst, they have realised they don't need 20 marketing people, they already have a brand name presence on the internet most dotcoms would kill for.
With any luck, they will realise there is a market for searching usenet archives going back 15 years, and set up a parallel pay-for-performance system for corporate groups. If you were the head of a large programming group, would you pay for a local copy of deja's DB, covering comp.* and alt.* from 1985 to a few months ago?
They could also sell their text archiving and indexing system to large companies, the same as google, ask jeeves, and others are doing. They might be doing that now, I just haven't heard about it.
the AC
A good step in the right direction
on
Deja.com Vu!
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· Score: 3
Now that dotcoms are starting to realise that banner revenue just doesn't cut it, they are going back to their original good ideas.
Now the power search is just one click away from the main screen. That is good. The archives still only go back to May 1999, that is not so good. And they still seem to place all kinds of special links into other people's posts. That's not good at all.
With any luck, the smart people at deja will continue to beat the shit out of the marketing droids and idiot managers, and finally restore one of the internet's great services to full functionality. With even more luck, they wont try to harvest sensitive user data in the hopes of wringing out a tiny fraction more revenue.
ADSL over ISDN is called IDSL, standard acronym compression applies, it runs at either 128k or 144kbps depending on the line card in the DSLAM. If you order IDSL, you probably get a second ISDN line, the DSL part doesn't sit on higher frequencies, it just replaces the LAPB stream and feeds directly into the DSLAM.
DSL can sit on top of ISDN, but I don't know of any manufacturers offering the special filters on a commercial basis. Since ISDN uses frequencies up to about 300KHz, those are lost to DSL, and the resulting DSL connection has less bandwidth.
BT has been offering IDSL to business for about a year now, whenever it seemed like a business was going to get some competitors internet connection. The tariffs were about half of a full time 2xB ISDN call, which is still pretty expensive, certainly more than what ADSL will cost. The good thing about IDSL is that it can go anywhere ISDN can reach, well outside the range of higher bandwidth DSL.
the AC
Posting a second time because things don't work right today.
The name of the game show is really YAGiS, to capitalise on the popularity of/.
When are the geeks of/. going to figure out some internet telephony, and start doing some interesting GiS episodes where everyone is in some remote location?
Yes, minitel is dying, but slowly. There is still a large captive audience, slowly being eaten away by the internet. Internet access requires a rather expensive computer, while minitel requires just a free terminal given away by FT.
The new iMinitel service requires you to enter a valid credit card number, so all of your activity can be billed. There is a minimum charge of 50F/month, so you are enticed to use it.
The business model was a good one, back when the services could all be billed by the telco monopoly. With the exception of a few government services available exclusively through minitel, the only other businesses which thrived were the pr0n services.
And to correct some technical info posted below, the minitel system originally used V.23bis, an asymetric modulation system 75 baud up, 1200 baud down. The character set was a bizarre set of 7 bit characters, with numerous overlay character and graphics sets, and a whole bunch of control codes and sequences. It made translating to/from ascii or any other terminal program almost impossible. Many minitel server companies offered special delay modes to slow down delivery of characters to the screen, to ensure that a customer would stay online longer and increase revenues. This current iMinitel emulator also runs slowly, no matter how much internet bandwidth you have. The servers are still set up to deliver content slowly, in the name of revenue enhancement. Very frustrating.
I prefer abuse@verizon.com, or whatever the name of the company is. But I hold an extra grudge against the new Verizon, they are attempting to be worse than UUNET at the peak of their open mail relay fiasco.
Just by putting these email addresses on slashdot will generate 3-15 spams a day from harvesters. It takes about 3 days from the time a non-obfuscated email address gets posted on/. until it makes it into some spammers mailing list. A single email address I posted on/. three years ago is still picking up 5-10 spams a week, the only email that goes to that honeypot.
Silly, the craft is 15 years old. They'd be running a nice, solid AT&T unix. But with a 16bps maximum bitrate, it only takes 2 people to slashdot the probe.
And if you know how, here's how its done:
pioneer_control$ ping -w 4000000 -c 2 -s 2 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=0 ttl=253 time=1437912.385 ms
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=253 time=1044077.385 ms
pioneer_control$ traceroute -w 4000000 -q 1 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol 16
traceroute to six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6), 30 hops max, 16 byte packets
16 204.6.124.194 (204.6.124.194) 139.096 ms
17 154.13.2.47 (154.13.2.47) 161.395 ms
18 38.1.25.230 (38.1.25.230) 124.904 ms
19 204.6.150.17 (204.6.150.17) 133.634 ms
20 jpl-gateway.nasa.gov (38.144.103.114) 235.643 ms
21 orbital-gw.jpl.nasa.gov (38.201.67.7) 127.282 ms
22 goldstone-gw.jpl.nasa.orb (98.10.1.31) 2033.643 ms
23 heliotrope-orbit-gw-16bps.jpl.nasa.orb (98.11.244.254) 2391.654 ms
24 antenna-70.jpl.nasa.orb.sol (98.144.2.1) 2169.122 ms
25 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6) 1822431.987 ms
You've just got to stop using those terrestrial based name servers run by the evil ICANN:-)
You've hit on the #1 problem with VoIP phones, the one most/.ers never seem to understand. Phone numbers!
There are two large scale communication systems in the world today, the phone system, and the internet. The phone system is still a magnitude larger than the internet.
Now the internet supports telephony, and there was even a recent discussion about IP dialtone. But where do you get your phone numbers? Just use IP addresses or URLs? How do you tie the two systems together, since the archaic telephone system can only address a string of numbers? IP addresses with the * key in place of a dot? No, you have to go to the lowest common denominator, phone numbers.
As people have noticed with all the recent press on telephone renumbering plans, the telephone world is growing by leaps and bounds as well. But unlike IPv4, which is hard coded to a 2^32 limit, the telephone system can expand forever by adding another digit to form new city codes and area codes. In every country, there is someone overseeing the assignment of blocks of telephone numbers, and in progressive countries, trying to ensure the established operator plays fairly with the new competition and everyone routes to everyone else's calls. Now, ISPs are being thrown into the mix.
What happens when your techo-peasant mother wants to call you on your spiffy new IP telephone? She'll dial your telephone number, and somewhere in between her analog POTS line and your IP phone, there must be a transition gateway. Either the phone company or an ISP will run it, and somehow they will bill for the privilege.
Nokia, Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, Ericson, and hundreds of dotcom startups, all have some kind of SS7/IMT to VoIP gateway products on offer. I've set some up, they all require a solid, but schizophrenic, understanding of both worlds. If you thought there was a philisophical gap between Linux and Micro~1.oft, just try bridging the voice and data worlds.
The hardest part is in obtaining a block of working phone numbers for each area, and getting a sympathetic telco to route calls. The next hardest part is in sorting out the billing. Who pays for terminating calls in each direction, and what happens when one system carries a toll call for the other. When/. ran an article last week about the Philippines charging for terminating VoIP calls, not one post seemed to show a clue as to why this rule came about. ObRant:I miss the old days when a large fraction of the/. posters were highly clued individuals:-)
The obvious economic advantage lies in using IP to transport voice calls. Either simply, such as IP to IP calls which bypass local tolls, or in companies using part of their internet bandwidth to pass call to remote offices or partners on the internet.
Career tip: Broadband companies are all desperately trying to create IP dialtone offerings, to help cut out the local telco monopoly. Learn VoIP, SS7, media gateway controllers, E.164 and SIP, and make a fortune selling your knowledge to cable and DSL companies.
I've known enough 'Merkins who have done this, and there are two ways of going about it, the hard way and the not-so-hard-way. There isn't an easy way:-)
Most of this advice deals with France, but some of it applies to Italy as well. It also applies to benelux, germany, ireland and the nordic countries, but all bets are off for the UK and Switzerland, who have truly twisted requirements.
Many of the posts lower down tell you about the impossibility of obtaining forms once you are in the country, and other "official" ways of legally working in france. This is the very hard way of doing things. If you read some of the sanctioned books like "How to live and work in France", they rattle on about doing things so as not to piss of the officials, and they repeat many of the bogus claims made by minor bureaucrats for all the forms they require. Read those books for all the interesting tidbits which might be helpful, then ignore most of their bloat-advice.
Let me recount some of my adventures in French bureaucracy. I've had minor functionaries give me large lists of documents to be produced before they will allow me to have a stamp of approval, or the required document. I figured out which ones were really relevant, and produced those a few days later. Voila! The petty funcs had forgotten their ridiculous list, and proceeded to give me what I needed. Knowing how to navigate the bureaucracy is an art form, and it will take you some time to learn it. It is a skill which will serve you well for the rest of your life, no matter where you end up living.
As for the "legal" advice of not searching for work before getting a work permit and visa, that is a catch-22 situation. France is full of shit like that, learn to ignore one side of it in order to proceed. There is nothing to really prevent you from taking a 3 month vacation to Paris and Rome just to see the sites. The sites you just happen to want to see are the insides of hiring managers offices, rather than museums and stupid old towers.
So count on at least one trip back home, possibly two. Consider them vacations. Schedule them for around Christmas or other holidays. Allow for some time to deal with notoriously slow consulates. These trips will allow you to bring home lots of souvenirs for your friends and family, and return with lots of stuff you need for your apartment and life in general.
The first things you want to do on your first trip is secure accommodation, a place where you can receive mail for at least 6 months. Renting a room from sympathetic roomies is your best bet (email me). You wont be able to rent an apartment on your own until you have a job and a bank account. Get your name on the mailbox, so the mail can come straight to you. This should also give you a phone number where you can be reached.
[I'll put in here you need a local bank account soon after you get an address. Ask other ex-pats where they bank, and find a friendly account manager. You will have to provide details of some other bank account in your name (to prevent money laundering), plus proof of your local address and phone number. This is where your salary will go. They shouldn't need a local social security number, not at this point]
Once you have a permanent address, you can start testing the job market (its getting better and better, go play on www.jobserve.com). Forget the advice to mail out CVs to hundreds of companies, start by targeting some interesting sounding, but ultimately throw-away, jobs for practice. Go to a few interviews just to see what kind of questions you get asked, make notes afterwards. Rework your CV until it looks very european.
When you do start interviewing for the jobs you want, be "honest" with the managers. Let them know you will be moving permanently in about 3 to 5 months, and can't start work before then. To americans, this sounds bad, but it is standard practice in Europe to have 3-12 months between a final interview and the start of work. I've been in one interview where they wanted someone to start in no less than 6 months, and no longer than 18 months out. Let the company know you will need their signature on some work permit documents, and you will provide them once you have a work contract. Most clued-in computer companies will understand, and be so desperate for someone with american experience they will help you out. Officially they can't give you a contract until you produce a visa and work permit, but you can't get those until you have a contract. Get the contract, even if they give you an addendum cancelling the contract right away. And get your salary figures in an addendum as well, otherwise the contract will be forwarded to the tax people. Dont show addendums, just the main contract.
Once you have a contract in hand, then go out and collect as many forms as you can to get yourself a social security number, a residency permit, health card, and anything else you can find. If your ex-pat friends can't show you everything they've filled out, spend some money to talk to an immigration lawyer (approx USD$200/hour) for advice on which forms to obtain and where and how to get them. In France and Italy, many forms can only be obtained after resolving an unbeatable catch-22 situation, but a lawyer acting on your behalf tends to cower insignificant bureaucrats.
Now is the time to go back to the states and approach the consulate once again. Just go in and ask for the forms, dont bother to explain too much in detail how you happened to get the contract, even if they ask. Since you are physically outside of France or Italy, they should take your word for doing things the legal way and hand you the forms. Have some fun with your friends and family, show around photos, and start to pack up what you really want to take to europe.
Once you get your work visa stamp in your passport, head back to europe and restart the paperwork process. Be tenaceous, in France it can take you weeks and weeks to get a few things done correctly. Allow for slow idiots taking longer than you though possible. Eventually it will all come together.
When you get through this process, you will have:
- a work visa in your passport
- a residency card with work permit option
- a taxpayer ID number
- a social security number for health care and retirement
- a health care card
- a permanent address
- a bank account for your salary to be deposited
- a checkbook and credit/debit card tied to the account
- eventually you will get an apartment in your own name, with phone/electricity/gas/water/taxes in your name as well.
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As for learning french, if you want to live in Paris it will be necessary to have fluent french, about 6 months of intensive lessons and some time in france forcing yourself to speak only french and listening to the Parisiennes before you can tackle the administration.
For Italy, about the same thing holds true, but the bureaucrats tend to be a little more forgiving to foreigners and might actually try out their limited inglesi on you.
I highly recommend pillow lessons. You tend to concentrate more:-)
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In Italy, many people work in the black, dodging taxes is the national pasttime. Especially contractors, especially english speaking contractors, and extra-especially computer contractors. The problem is so bad there is a special "tax police" to combat the problem. I know a lot of english speaking ex-pats with funny stories of working in the black, getting paid either in cash or into UK or Irish bank accounts. I've heard several similar stories of being raided by the tax police, who surround the buildings and then run around inside the building checking everyones tax numbers and status. The illegals all grab any identifying stuff from their desks, and jump out windows or form up into a rugby-style scrum for a charge out the back door. When there are hundreds of people running from a building in a large group, a few dozen carbinieri can only arrest a few of them, the rest get away to meet in local bars until the raid is over.
If your italian is up to the effort, and you don't mind being a clandestino, you could probably have a nice life in one of the big cities in Italy, never pay taxes, earn 30%-70% of your american income, and never bother with bureaucracy. Many employers tend to abuse "black" workers, and every contractor I know has at least one horror story of not getting paid, and being unable to fight back in court, so be wary. Its only if you want to get married or buy a house or do something major with your money that you will have to become legit. But for two or three years, it could be a blast.
At some point in your life you will be audited for taxes, either by the americans, or some government in europe. At that point, you will have to show you have paid taxes, or at least filed proper tax returns, for every year of your existence. If you just ignore taxes for a couple of years, it looks bad and someone will want you to pay based on your income levels on either side of the gap. It is better to declare you are "writing a book" or some other such nonsense, than to leave a gap in your taxes.
It doesn't matter if you only run GPLed systems, the BSA nazis will still kick down your door and force you into an audit. Even if you play nice with them and show them all your BSD/Linux machines and servers.
I know of one development company, entirely unix oriented, who was raided by the BSA nazis backed by local law enforcement. They had refused to allow the BSA to take over their entire network for 2-4 days because they couldn't afford the hit to their release schedule. After only a few letters to the BSA and one meeting, they were raided.
During the raid, everyone had to leave the building. All of the servers were powered down (so much for long uptimes) without even a shutdown command. Since the machines were BSD and Solaris based, the disks were removed and placed inside of special "audit machines" to be scanned. The auditors weren't completely clueless, but their first questions were "What version of Windoze are you using on this sparcstation?". When it was discovered by the raiding team everything was *nix, they had to call in a special *nix team the next day to perform the audit. The *nix team tried very hard to restore the systems, and eventually allowed the admins to help out. Even the cisco routers had their configs wiped, which is why I was called in.
The raid didn't produce one instance of a license violation, and now the BSA is fighting a lawsuit to recover costs for all the damage they did to the machines, servers, and network, plus lost productivity and market share. The BSA lost the first court case, and are now claiming to have no money, since they are just a non-profit pseudo-law-enforcement organisation. I'm not naming the company since they want to keep a very low profile until they get their money. The BSA has a history of trying to tarnish reputations when things get public, and this company is getting ready for an IPO.
So don't think the GPL will save you, the BSA will still want to audit you just to make sure you have paid your M$ tax.
Bertelsmann was the publishing company that supported the ideals of the third reich in the late 20's and early 30's, and who rode the nazi party's wave to domination. The company was a bavarian family run business, and espoused self-censorship of their materials as being good, responsible citizens. During the nazi period, Bertelsmann were given all of their competitors properties, all those that were seized for being "subversive" of the state. Most of those competitors made their fortunes during the relatively free era of the Weimar Republic, by publishing books and magazines which touched on many subjects the nazis didn't like.
After the fall of the Third Reich, Bertelsmann laid low and collected war reparations from the Marshall Plan, and generally tried to distance themselves from the horror of the war. They used the claim of being just a simple book seller, who by sheer coincidence ended up owning 100% of all publishing and distribution in Germany at the end of the war. They also took over most publishing in the occupied countries, using the power of the SS judges to "lawfully" transfer ownership. After the war, attempts were made in most countries to break the Bertelsmann connection, but with not any great effect, and those business connections continue to this day.
During the 50's and 60's, Bertelsmann became the largest employer of ex-SS officers. Whenever an SS officer was released from prison after serving time for war crimes, Bertelsmann would send a car to pick them up, and they would automatically have a job with the company.
Because of the large concentration of war criminals in the company, it has long been the focus of allied intelligence services. I've heard rumours that the company employs state of the art counter-surveillance at all their main buildings, and their internal communications are some of the most secure in the world.
I've never worked directly on Bertelsmann's networks, but I've a few colleagues who picked up all their encryption and security experience there. The funny thing is they used Crypto A/G gear for all their inter-office communication because they all believed GCHQ/Echelon was watching them.
More recently, another proposed BMG merger fell through, which generated surprisingly little press. It was the topic of discussion over beers a few weekends ago, and one of my drinking buddies from the Commission made the very cryptic comment "Those old nazis still have many enemies with long memories, and they are all in a position to keep Berty down". There was a young and naive crowd, the ones who don't believe in any conspiracy unless it is first seen on the documentary series "the X Files", who didn't catch on at all to that remark. But there were several older and more clued-in people who nodded imperceptibly and exchanged knowing glances.
How many marketing droids did it take to come up with a name like that? Are they planning on versions like "tripwire, BSD sourced, BSD edition", or "tripwire, ClosedProprietaryDMCAProtected Source, Windoze edition"?
Tripwire is a good product, it lets network and system admins sleep easier at night knowing they don't have to scan every box by hand every morning. I've found that sites running tripwire tend to have better system management policies, and know what security of internet boxes means.
Now we can make it better, and tie in some better automated functions for varying degrees of detection.
the AC
Imminent death of SomeBigCompany predicted
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 5
Dont sell Novell's NDS technology short. It is years ahead of M$'s active directory technology. Their sales might be weak, but enough to keep them alive long enough to win in the directory market.
I've been in the tech industry for more than a couple of decades now. I've heard at least 10 times of the immiment death of Apple. 4 or 5 times the imminent death of Novell. More times than I can count "imminent death of the internet". IBM, micro~1.oft, and many others have their death predicted on a regular basis. Ignore these death notices, instead go play on fuckedcompany.com and pick off a few feeble dotcoms. You have a good chance of being right.
Part of the charm of/. is the juvenile and irresponsible behaviour of Rob and friends. Although the trolls have tarnished/. to some degree, this has been going on since the early days of BBSes. Slash has the feel of a BBS, neatly repackaged into modern web technology, and run out of the back bedroom of some slacker college students. I think the success of/. is in part the laid back feel of the site.
Slashdot could use some full time editors, as opposed to the seemingly slaphazzard volunteerism going on now. A small group of people who coordinate between themselves which stories are going to be posted, to prevent numerous duplicate posts, and to check the authenticity of the stories. A little research to provide some additional links wouldn't take too much time. Some extra depth or thoughtful insight added to a submission before posting a story would help even more.
Slashback is a great feature, the first sign of becoming professional. Lets continue the trend with the addition of spell checkers and some proofreading before posting.
Its a quiet, boring Sunday, and I just can't let this go unchallenged. This is just an overimaginative press release, which has been popping up in the mainstream press for some time now, touting their 100% accurate mapping of "the dark side of the web". They have avoided the technical press, or else the editors of technical journals have bullshit filters in place and don't reprint this crap. The same phrases and anecdotes keep popping up in the same order, they probably have a PR person writing the articles for lazy journos, it happens.
on Thursday at the Loch Lomond Golf Club, Actis launched a muscular software program Yep, its a press release written as a story for the FT, who will reprint anything a PR agency hands them as long as it appears story-like.
You can find them at www.actis-technology.com, a company in existence since April of this year. They are a spin-off of buchananinternational.com which claim to have been around for quite a while. Their product is called 'Net Intelligence, apparently the apostrophe makes it trademarkable.
The actis software is essentially a proxy server, which funnels all email, web requests, and other selected traffic through their filters. They give you a list of sites, rated "bad" "not-so-bad" and "approved by Scottish wank^H^H^H^Hhackers", and then let you decide what to do for every alert the software spits at you. For a fee, if you want to track back a file picked up from usenet, they will search their dejanews clone database and tell you where it originally came from.
Check out some of their outrageous claims and mistakes in their press releases.
They spell phreaking as freaking. This disqualifies them from the start.
Consuming about 80 gigabytes of data an hour That means they have a 200 Mbps link at a minimum, and keep it 80% full 80% of the time. Thats a pretty big internet hog for europe, and I've never heard of them. Perhaps they spread that among several providers, but their website is colo at uk2net, running linux. But 80 Gig/hour is about 10 times what unfiltered usenet is producing.
"We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort, The last thing I want is disciplined minds." That should sell well to large corporations such as Boeing and the Home Office.
The team now has complete access to the world's newsgroups, where many viruses are initially posted and distributed, and to every image and every attachment. So they have a usenet server sucking up hundreds of publically accessible newsfeeds. I wonder how they compress all the spam messages that normally clog other servers? Maybe we can convince them to create a dejanews type service.
"Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack" 97% of all statistics quoted by Whitelaw are pulled from his ass (I made that up, its obvious 100% are)
Criminals - who have a peculiar habit of inputting all their deeds into PCs and handheld computers - often use software to erase such incriminating information I don't know very many criminals, but most IT professionals I know don't ever input all their deeds into PCs. But criminals have discovered the trashcan in windoze 98, better sell recovery services at an outrageous price.
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs So criminals the world over first break into companies computers in order to communicate. That's a pretty knowledgable crowd of criminals, better than the job market as a whole. And actis has defined what constitutes criminal communication, that must have been hard to take into account 178 nations, and thousands of individual jurisdictions in over 150 languages. And all that since April of this year. Wow!
Where serious crime emerges... so-called "snuff", or murder, videos, the corporate server can be programmed to take a copy of the file for use as evidence in future prosecutions and then switch off power to that particular PC. Hey, they played the paedophile and snuff video card. How does their software detect this on client PCs? And how do you switch off power to a particular PC? Do you re-wire the whole building so that every outlet has a computer controlled breaker? Do they somehow disable the power switch on the employees computer to keep them from switching it back on?
On his laptop, Whitelaw shows me how to find manuals on bomb-making and sophisticated lock-picking techniques, complete with DIY diagrams. Yahoo, infoseek, altavista, google. Wow, this company has discovered a vast criminal conspiracy, known by the code word "search engines". By installing their proxy filter, they will block all access to these criminal sites.
This press release is too much to bear. It is pure bullshit, 100% bullshit, and nothing but bullshit. They have Yet Another Internet Filter to sell to companies and they have to make waves to keep their investors happy. Ignore this and get on with first nathalie portman posts or philosophical discussions on "free" vs. "free" software.
Teflon, kevlar, and velcro are just some of the examples off the top of my head
All of those breakthroughs preceded NASA by years.
Teflon (PTFE) was invented and classified by American scientists at the Oak Ridge nuclear fuel processing plant during WWII. They were looking for a gasket material that could withstand enriched uranium, and they puzzled out what an ideal molecular structure should be and then went experimenting. A few years later it was re-discovered by a French materials scientist, who had the great idea of coating cooking pans with it, known as Tefal in Europe. For a number of years, it was illegal to import teflon coated pans into the US, but nobody really knew why.
Kevlar was a material created during WWII as well, but it remained classified, and no work was done with it until the 1960's when it was declassified. The military had no idea what the material could do, and they kept it away from commercial sight until about 1969.
Velcro is another French invention, dating back to the 1920's. The name comes from the two materials, Velvet and Crochet hooks.
There were some cool materials that came out of NASA. Kapton is one, its used as a fireproof electrical insulator.
If you ever can afford it, get a subscription to NASA Technical Briefs, a magazine that highlights all the inventions and patents NASA is making public. Since the US taxpayers are paying for all that research, all the patents are available for cheap, non-exclusive licensing. Because of the "Open Source" nature of NASA's R&D, they get tons of money just from licensing patents, and lots of companies can get cool tech without a huge R&D budget. But any company developing for NASA automatically signs over all rights to discoveries, so they can't jack up the prices later if something becomes key to space exploration.
Andy is pretty cool. CCC meetings with him are always more intense. He sees the world in a very artistic light, as a place for individuals, a breeding ground for freedom and new ideas.
ICANN meetings will be very interesting with the currently elected body. Andy, Karl Auerbach, and some of the other new reps make a good counterbalance to the suits and Esther Dyson. Any bets the newly elected reps will be excluded after the first few meetings?
Now we're onto the next great thing. 3D solid modeling printers. Spraying water droplets could be replaced with polymers that set when exposed to air, producing soft or hard objects in the privacy of your own home.
This could give the online sex industry that next boost in revenues the whole world's economies need.
For only $39.95, you too can download a perfect copy of Nathalie Portman's breasts, to fondle as much as your immature slashdot desires can handle. For the ladies, we have a lifesize reproduction of CmdrTaco's, errr, reproduction. Also comes in 2x and 4x sizes, so you'll never be disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
At least here in the most populated parts of europe, the orbital tracks dont go directly over any major cities until, well, tomorrow. Plenty of time to get drunk enough to forget about this :-)
I don't find this news to be particularly newsworthy, except it is a slow news day. The timing sounds like a ploy to grab a little extra publicity, and possibly gain some more funding to keep the station going for another six months or more. Mir will stay up for at least another couple of years given its current orbital decay. The problem is what happens when the gyros stop. Once the gyros stop, the station will start a slow tumble, which will make it that much harder to predict when and where it might fall.
Fully expect this to become a non-event once they try all the alternative frequencies and command procedures and get some kind of response. Maybe this little incident will spur them onto bringing the station down in February as planned, while they still have some control, and not sell out to greedy television shows and ego-centric millionaires.
the AC
round up all the women and teenaged girls you know
/., news for nerds who don't know any women :-)
Hey Katz, this is
It really is difficult to round up women when you tell them its a fantasy martial arts film. But slowly the women I know are seeing this film, they just aren't letting men take them. The film is still playing here in Europe after several months, and I'm amazed how many women have seen it, but none of them would dare go see it when it first opened.
And if you read Aint It Cool News you'd know that Ang Lee has already started casting for one of the prequels, and money is being thrown at him to make all four stories into movies.
the AC
So IBM is opensourcing AIX. Just because it is open source doesn't make it Linux. Its still AIX.
Sure, once some of the neat drivers, modules, and applications are open on AIX, there will be a cross pollinisation between Linux and AIX. But that isn't going to make AIX into Linux. They will remain separate systems, both will be better for IBM's moves.
The opensourcing of AIX should be hailed as a great triumph of the free software model. Now instead of Linux as the only project to point to, we can point to a completely separate system. Next, I'd love to see Digit^H^H^H^HCompaq open source VMS, just for nostalgia's sake.
IBM makes most of its money in the services arena. AIX sales were a tiny fraction of their revenue, so opening the source is not going to hurt their bottom line in any way. What would be really good is for their services group to start supporting Linux installations for large organisations, that would bring Linux into the corporate mainstream.
the AC
The teacher induced a minor to break a law
/.
:-)
But the student didn't break any laws, as near as I can tell from reading a few articles about this. All the student did was bypass an internet filter installed by the school, and probably demonstrated this fact by calling up a subversive site like
But by bypassing a highly fallible system put in place by the school, he violated school policy, and he got the boot for a few days. Hmmm, 3 days off right before Christmas. I wonder if he was really just hacking school policy to get some time off at the right time
the AC
I'm going to have to poke around on their site in greater depth to see what source materials this guy uses.
In Europe, in the older circles of ex intelligence agents cashing in as entrepreneurs doing security in the networking world, BMG is well known as a haven for ex-SS agents. Lots of them. Bertelsmann was known for picking up every SS agent as they were released from prison after the war crime trials in Nuremburg and offering them jobs. Much of the upper echelons of BMG were ex-SS officers and judges up through the 1970's and 80's, although most of the originals are retired or dead. The new crop are as right-wing as the old, but they are very careful to not tip their hand too often.
Bertelsmann survived the war almost completely intact. During the war, as a bonus for being such strong supporters of nazi-era ideas such as industry self-censorship (so the government didn't have to do it), they were awarded the spoils of all the other companies who tried to defy the third reich on its rise to power. During the war, all the publishers in occupied territories were forced into very lopsided business contracts, and many of those contracts were never reversed after the war. That left BMG as the most powerful publishing company in Europe.
This move, to ban controversial materials so the government doesn't have to step in, is exactly what Bertelsmann did from the late 20's until the end of the war. They are starting with banning something no reasonable person would object to, skinhead music. Once they get people settled with the idea that BMG is just doing this to protect society and youth and family values, they can easily move onto banning other kinds of music, such as hip-hop with violent lyrics, and my hopeful, Frank Sinatra karaoke.
As for the outflow of money, gold, and other capital starting in 1944, that is pretty well documented if you can go dig up the texts written by the various Marshall Plan economists who tried to track it down after the war. The reading is very dry, because economists are not novelists. Some capital was recovered, as hiding that much wealth was difficult, but some never was accurately identified, or else the searchers were blocked by corrupt South American governments.
the AC
And the seven days of the week would simply be named after numbers -- Oneday for Monday, Twoday for Tuesday,
:-)
In portuguese, the days are already numbers. Segunda-feira to Seixta-feira are monday through friday. Saturday and sunday are still related to the judaic and christian calendars, Sabado and Domingo.
It took me a while to get used to calling monday "second-day", but now that I what I think of it in english as well.
In countries where taxes are not taken out of your paycheck, payrolls often work on a 13 month system, so you get 2 months of pay the month the taxes are due. If you are smart, you put aside one fourth of your salary so you aren't scrambling on tax day, but not many people are smart. So many companies give you some help.
the AC
ObDisclaimer: My portuguese is from a very rusty and not recently used memory, impaired by going out drinking all night with some marketing bastards on expense
Do you think that some supporters of Project Gutenberg could contact Adobe's legal department and change their attitude with some strong legal language?
What Adobe is doing certainly is wrong, stealing a publically available text, and then claiming additional "rights" which they clearly don't have. We need a copyright abuse police to crack down on those who don't have a clue as to the what copyright allows, and what it does not.
the AC
revenue of $922,000 in the first quarter
That kind of revenue stream could pay for colo space, bandwidth, and the salaries of a handful of techies and programmers.
The loss of $1.25 million comes from an idiot CEO who hired dozens of marketing and sales and business consultants, attempting to ride the dotcom vapour blowout. Now that the bubble has burst, they have realised they don't need 20 marketing people, they already have a brand name presence on the internet most dotcoms would kill for.
With any luck, they will realise there is a market for searching usenet archives going back 15 years, and set up a parallel pay-for-performance system for corporate groups. If you were the head of a large programming group, would you pay for a local copy of deja's DB, covering comp.* and alt.* from 1985 to a few months ago?
They could also sell their text archiving and indexing system to large companies, the same as google, ask jeeves, and others are doing. They might be doing that now, I just haven't heard about it.
the AC
Now that dotcoms are starting to realise that banner revenue just doesn't cut it, they are going back to their original good ideas.
Now the power search is just one click away from the main screen. That is good. The archives still only go back to May 1999, that is not so good. And they still seem to place all kinds of special links into other people's posts. That's not good at all.
With any luck, the smart people at deja will continue to beat the shit out of the marketing droids and idiot managers, and finally restore one of the internet's great services to full functionality. With even more luck, they wont try to harvest sensitive user data in the hopes of wringing out a tiny fraction more revenue.
the AC
ADSL over ISDN is called IDSL, standard acronym compression applies, it runs at either 128k or 144kbps depending on the line card in the DSLAM. If you order IDSL, you probably get a second ISDN line, the DSL part doesn't sit on higher frequencies, it just replaces the LAPB stream and feeds directly into the DSLAM.
DSL can sit on top of ISDN, but I don't know of any manufacturers offering the special filters on a commercial basis. Since ISDN uses frequencies up to about 300KHz, those are lost to DSL, and the resulting DSL connection has less bandwidth.
BT has been offering IDSL to business for about a year now, whenever it seemed like a business was going to get some competitors internet connection. The tariffs were about half of a full time 2xB ISDN call, which is still pretty expensive, certainly more than what ADSL will cost. The good thing about IDSL is that it can go anywhere ISDN can reach, well outside the range of higher bandwidth DSL.
the AC
Posting a second time because things don't work right today.
The name of the game show is really YAGiS, to capitalise on the popularity of /.
/. going to figure out some internet telephony, and start doing some interesting GiS episodes where everyone is in some remote location?
When are the geeks of
the AC
Yes, minitel is dying, but slowly. There is still a large captive audience, slowly being eaten away by the internet. Internet access requires a rather expensive computer, while minitel requires just a free terminal given away by FT.
The new iMinitel service requires you to enter a valid credit card number, so all of your activity can be billed. There is a minimum charge of 50F/month, so you are enticed to use it.
The business model was a good one, back when the services could all be billed by the telco monopoly. With the exception of a few government services available exclusively through minitel, the only other businesses which thrived were the pr0n services.
And to correct some technical info posted below, the minitel system originally used V.23bis, an asymetric modulation system 75 baud up, 1200 baud down. The character set was a bizarre set of 7 bit characters, with numerous overlay character and graphics sets, and a whole bunch of control codes and sequences. It made translating to/from ascii or any other terminal program almost impossible. Many minitel server companies offered special delay modes to slow down delivery of characters to the screen, to ensure that a customer would stay online longer and increase revenues. This current iMinitel emulator also runs slowly, no matter how much internet bandwidth you have. The servers are still set up to deliver content slowly, in the name of revenue enhancement. Very frustrating.
the AC
I prefer abuse@verizon.com, or whatever the name of the company is. But I hold an extra grudge against the new Verizon, they are attempting to be worse than UUNET at the peak of their open mail relay fiasco.
/. until it makes it into some spammers mailing list. A single email address I posted on /. three years ago is still picking up 5-10 spams a week, the only email that goes to that honeypot.
Just by putting these email addresses on slashdot will generate 3-15 spams a day from harvesters. It takes about 3 days from the time a non-obfuscated email address gets posted on
the AC
Silly, the craft is 15 years old. They'd be running a nice, solid AT&T unix. But with a 16bps maximum bitrate, it only takes 2 people to slashdot the probe.
:-)
And if you know how, here's how its done:
pioneer_control$ ping -w 4000000 -c 2 -s 2 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=0 ttl=253 time=1437912.385 ms
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=253 time=1044077.385 ms
pioneer_control$ traceroute -w 4000000 -q 1 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol 16
traceroute to six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6), 30 hops max, 16 byte packets
16 204.6.124.194 (204.6.124.194) 139.096 ms
17 154.13.2.47 (154.13.2.47) 161.395 ms
18 38.1.25.230 (38.1.25.230) 124.904 ms
19 204.6.150.17 (204.6.150.17) 133.634 ms
20 jpl-gateway.nasa.gov (38.144.103.114) 235.643 ms
21 orbital-gw.jpl.nasa.gov (38.201.67.7) 127.282 ms
22 goldstone-gw.jpl.nasa.orb (98.10.1.31) 2033.643 ms
23 heliotrope-orbit-gw-16bps.jpl.nasa.orb (98.11.244.254) 2391.654 ms
24 antenna-70.jpl.nasa.orb.sol (98.144.2.1) 2169.122 ms
25 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6) 1822431.987 ms
You've just got to stop using those terrestrial based name servers run by the evil ICANN
the AC
You've hit on the #1 problem with VoIP phones, the one most /.ers never seem to understand. Phone numbers!
/. ran an article last week about the Philippines charging for terminating VoIP calls, not one post seemed to show a clue as to why this rule came about. ObRant:I miss the old days when a large fraction of the /. posters were highly clued individuals :-)
There are two large scale communication systems in the world today, the phone system, and the internet. The phone system is still a magnitude larger than the internet.
Now the internet supports telephony, and there was even a recent discussion about IP dialtone. But where do you get your phone numbers? Just use IP addresses or URLs? How do you tie the two systems together, since the archaic telephone system can only address a string of numbers? IP addresses with the * key in place of a dot? No, you have to go to the lowest common denominator, phone numbers.
As people have noticed with all the recent press on telephone renumbering plans, the telephone world is growing by leaps and bounds as well. But unlike IPv4, which is hard coded to a 2^32 limit, the telephone system can expand forever by adding another digit to form new city codes and area codes. In every country, there is someone overseeing the assignment of blocks of telephone numbers, and in progressive countries, trying to ensure the established operator plays fairly with the new competition and everyone routes to everyone else's calls. Now, ISPs are being thrown into the mix.
What happens when your techo-peasant mother wants to call you on your spiffy new IP telephone? She'll dial your telephone number, and somewhere in between her analog POTS line and your IP phone, there must be a transition gateway. Either the phone company or an ISP will run it, and somehow they will bill for the privilege.
Nokia, Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, Ericson, and hundreds of dotcom startups, all have some kind of SS7/IMT to VoIP gateway products on offer. I've set some up, they all require a solid, but schizophrenic, understanding of both worlds. If you thought there was a philisophical gap between Linux and Micro~1.oft, just try bridging the voice and data worlds.
The hardest part is in obtaining a block of working phone numbers for each area, and getting a sympathetic telco to route calls. The next hardest part is in sorting out the billing. Who pays for terminating calls in each direction, and what happens when one system carries a toll call for the other. When
The obvious economic advantage lies in using IP to transport voice calls. Either simply, such as IP to IP calls which bypass local tolls, or in companies using part of their internet bandwidth to pass call to remote offices or partners on the internet.
Career tip: Broadband companies are all desperately trying to create IP dialtone offerings, to help cut out the local telco monopoly. Learn VoIP, SS7, media gateway controllers, E.164 and SIP, and make a fortune selling your knowledge to cable and DSL companies.
the AC
I've known enough 'Merkins who have done this, and there are two ways of going about it, the hard way and the not-so-hard-way. There isn't an easy way :-)
:-)
Most of this advice deals with France, but some of it applies to Italy as well. It also applies to benelux, germany, ireland and the nordic countries, but all bets are off for the UK and Switzerland, who have truly twisted requirements.
Many of the posts lower down tell you about the impossibility of obtaining forms once you are in the country, and other "official" ways of legally working in france. This is the very hard way of doing things. If you read some of the sanctioned books like "How to live and work in France", they rattle on about doing things so as not to piss of the officials, and they repeat many of the bogus claims made by minor bureaucrats for all the forms they require. Read those books for all the interesting tidbits which might be helpful, then ignore most of their bloat-advice.
Let me recount some of my adventures in French bureaucracy. I've had minor functionaries give me large lists of documents to be produced before they will allow me to have a stamp of approval, or the required document. I figured out which ones were really relevant, and produced those a few days later. Voila! The petty funcs had forgotten their ridiculous list, and proceeded to give me what I needed. Knowing how to navigate the bureaucracy is an art form, and it will take you some time to learn it. It is a skill which will serve you well for the rest of your life, no matter where you end up living.
As for the "legal" advice of not searching for work before getting a work permit and visa, that is a catch-22 situation. France is full of shit like that, learn to ignore one side of it in order to proceed. There is nothing to really prevent you from taking a 3 month vacation to Paris and Rome just to see the sites. The sites you just happen to want to see are the insides of hiring managers offices, rather than museums and stupid old towers.
So count on at least one trip back home, possibly two. Consider them vacations. Schedule them for around Christmas or other holidays. Allow for some time to deal with notoriously slow consulates. These trips will allow you to bring home lots of souvenirs for your friends and family, and return with lots of stuff you need for your apartment and life in general.
The first things you want to do on your first trip is secure accommodation, a place where you can receive mail for at least 6 months. Renting a room from sympathetic roomies is your best bet (email me). You wont be able to rent an apartment on your own until you have a job and a bank account. Get your name on the mailbox, so the mail can come straight to you. This should also give you a phone number where you can be reached.
[I'll put in here you need a local bank account soon after you get an address. Ask other ex-pats where they bank, and find a friendly account manager. You will have to provide details of some other bank account in your name (to prevent money laundering), plus proof of your local address and phone number. This is where your salary will go. They shouldn't need a local social security number, not at this point]
Once you have a permanent address, you can start testing the job market (its getting better and better, go play on www.jobserve.com). Forget the advice to mail out CVs to hundreds of companies, start by targeting some interesting sounding, but ultimately throw-away, jobs for practice. Go to a few interviews just to see what kind of questions you get asked, make notes afterwards. Rework your CV until it looks very european.
When you do start interviewing for the jobs you want, be "honest" with the managers. Let them know you will be moving permanently in about 3 to 5 months, and can't start work before then. To americans, this sounds bad, but it is standard practice in Europe to have 3-12 months between a final interview and the start of work. I've been in one interview where they wanted someone to start in no less than 6 months, and no longer than 18 months out. Let the company know you will need their signature on some work permit documents, and you will provide them once you have a work contract. Most clued-in computer companies will understand, and be so desperate for someone with american experience they will help you out. Officially they can't give you a contract until you produce a visa and work permit, but you can't get those until you have a contract. Get the contract, even if they give you an addendum cancelling the contract right away. And get your salary figures in an addendum as well, otherwise the contract will be forwarded to the tax people. Dont show addendums, just the main contract.
Once you have a contract in hand, then go out and collect as many forms as you can to get yourself a social security number, a residency permit, health card, and anything else you can find. If your ex-pat friends can't show you everything they've filled out, spend some money to talk to an immigration lawyer (approx USD$200/hour) for advice on which forms to obtain and where and how to get them. In France and Italy, many forms can only be obtained after resolving an unbeatable catch-22 situation, but a lawyer acting on your behalf tends to cower insignificant bureaucrats.
Now is the time to go back to the states and approach the consulate once again. Just go in and ask for the forms, dont bother to explain too much in detail how you happened to get the contract, even if they ask. Since you are physically outside of France or Italy, they should take your word for doing things the legal way and hand you the forms. Have some fun with your friends and family, show around photos, and start to pack up what you really want to take to europe.
Once you get your work visa stamp in your passport, head back to europe and restart the paperwork process. Be tenaceous, in France it can take you weeks and weeks to get a few things done correctly. Allow for slow idiots taking longer than you though possible. Eventually it will all come together.
When you get through this process, you will have:
- a work visa in your passport
- a residency card with work permit option
- a taxpayer ID number
- a social security number for health care and retirement
- a health care card
- a permanent address
- a bank account for your salary to be deposited
- a checkbook and credit/debit card tied to the account
- eventually you will get an apartment in your own name, with phone/electricity/gas/water/taxes in your name as well.
----
As for learning french, if you want to live in Paris it will be necessary to have fluent french, about 6 months of intensive lessons and some time in france forcing yourself to speak only french and listening to the Parisiennes before you can tackle the administration.
For Italy, about the same thing holds true, but the bureaucrats tend to be a little more forgiving to foreigners and might actually try out their limited inglesi on you.
I highly recommend pillow lessons. You tend to concentrate more
----
In Italy, many people work in the black, dodging taxes is the national pasttime. Especially contractors, especially english speaking contractors, and extra-especially computer contractors. The problem is so bad there is a special "tax police" to combat the problem. I know a lot of english speaking ex-pats with funny stories of working in the black, getting paid either in cash or into UK or Irish bank accounts. I've heard several similar stories of being raided by the tax police, who surround the buildings and then run around inside the building checking everyones tax numbers and status. The illegals all grab any identifying stuff from their desks, and jump out windows or form up into a rugby-style scrum for a charge out the back door. When there are hundreds of people running from a building in a large group, a few dozen carbinieri can only arrest a few of them, the rest get away to meet in local bars until the raid is over.
If your italian is up to the effort, and you don't mind being a clandestino, you could probably have a nice life in one of the big cities in Italy, never pay taxes, earn 30%-70% of your american income, and never bother with bureaucracy. Many employers tend to abuse "black" workers, and every contractor I know has at least one horror story of not getting paid, and being unable to fight back in court, so be wary. Its only if you want to get married or buy a house or do something major with your money that you will have to become legit. But for two or three years, it could be a blast.
At some point in your life you will be audited for taxes, either by the americans, or some government in europe. At that point, you will have to show you have paid taxes, or at least filed proper tax returns, for every year of your existence. If you just ignore taxes for a couple of years, it looks bad and someone will want you to pay based on your income levels on either side of the gap. It is better to declare you are "writing a book" or some other such nonsense, than to leave a gap in your taxes.
the AC, independent in Europe and loving it
It doesn't matter if you only run GPLed systems, the BSA nazis will still kick down your door and force you into an audit. Even if you play nice with them and show them all your BSD/Linux machines and servers.
I know of one development company, entirely unix oriented, who was raided by the BSA nazis backed by local law enforcement. They had refused to allow the BSA to take over their entire network for 2-4 days because they couldn't afford the hit to their release schedule. After only a few letters to the BSA and one meeting, they were raided.
During the raid, everyone had to leave the building. All of the servers were powered down (so much for long uptimes) without even a shutdown command. Since the machines were BSD and Solaris based, the disks were removed and placed inside of special "audit machines" to be scanned. The auditors weren't completely clueless, but their first questions were "What version of Windoze are you using on this sparcstation?". When it was discovered by the raiding team everything was *nix, they had to call in a special *nix team the next day to perform the audit. The *nix team tried very hard to restore the systems, and eventually allowed the admins to help out. Even the cisco routers had their configs wiped, which is why I was called in.
The raid didn't produce one instance of a license violation, and now the BSA is fighting a lawsuit to recover costs for all the damage they did to the machines, servers, and network, plus lost productivity and market share. The BSA lost the first court case, and are now claiming to have no money, since they are just a non-profit pseudo-law-enforcement organisation. I'm not naming the company since they want to keep a very low profile until they get their money. The BSA has a history of trying to tarnish reputations when things get public, and this company is getting ready for an IPO.
So don't think the GPL will save you, the BSA will still want to audit you just to make sure you have paid your M$ tax.
the AC
Bertelsmann was the publishing company that supported the ideals of the third reich in the late 20's and early 30's, and who rode the nazi party's wave to domination. The company was a bavarian family run business, and espoused self-censorship of their materials as being good, responsible citizens. During the nazi period, Bertelsmann were given all of their competitors properties, all those that were seized for being "subversive" of the state. Most of those competitors made their fortunes during the relatively free era of the Weimar Republic, by publishing books and magazines which touched on many subjects the nazis didn't like.
After the fall of the Third Reich, Bertelsmann laid low and collected war reparations from the Marshall Plan, and generally tried to distance themselves from the horror of the war. They used the claim of being just a simple book seller, who by sheer coincidence ended up owning 100% of all publishing and distribution in Germany at the end of the war. They also took over most publishing in the occupied countries, using the power of the SS judges to "lawfully" transfer ownership. After the war, attempts were made in most countries to break the Bertelsmann connection, but with not any great effect, and those business connections continue to this day.
During the 50's and 60's, Bertelsmann became the largest employer of ex-SS officers. Whenever an SS officer was released from prison after serving time for war crimes, Bertelsmann would send a car to pick them up, and they would automatically have a job with the company.
Because of the large concentration of war criminals in the company, it has long been the focus of allied intelligence services. I've heard rumours that the company employs state of the art counter-surveillance at all their main buildings, and their internal communications are some of the most secure in the world.
I've never worked directly on Bertelsmann's networks, but I've a few colleagues who picked up all their encryption and security experience there. The funny thing is they used Crypto A/G gear for all their inter-office communication because they all believed GCHQ/Echelon was watching them.
More recently, another proposed BMG merger fell through, which generated surprisingly little press. It was the topic of discussion over beers a few weekends ago, and one of my drinking buddies from the Commission made the very cryptic comment "Those old nazis still have many enemies with long memories, and they are all in a position to keep Berty down". There was a young and naive crowd, the ones who don't believe in any conspiracy unless it is first seen on the documentary series "the X Files", who didn't catch on at all to that remark. But there were several older and more clued-in people who nodded imperceptibly and exchanged knowing glances.
the AC
How many marketing droids did it take to come up with a name like that? Are they planning on versions like "tripwire, BSD sourced, BSD edition", or "tripwire, ClosedProprietaryDMCAProtected Source, Windoze edition"?
Tripwire is a good product, it lets network and system admins sleep easier at night knowing they don't have to scan every box by hand every morning. I've found that sites running tripwire tend to have better system management policies, and know what security of internet boxes means.
Now we can make it better, and tie in some better automated functions for varying degrees of detection.
the AC
Dont sell Novell's NDS technology short. It is years ahead of M$'s active directory technology. Their sales might be weak, but enough to keep them alive long enough to win in the directory market.
I've been in the tech industry for more than a couple of decades now. I've heard at least 10 times of the immiment death of Apple. 4 or 5 times the imminent death of Novell. More times than I can count "imminent death of the internet". IBM, micro~1.oft, and many others have their death predicted on a regular basis. Ignore these death notices, instead go play on fuckedcompany.com and pick off a few feeble dotcoms. You have a good chance of being right.
the AC
Part of the charm of /. is the juvenile and irresponsible behaviour of Rob and friends. Although the trolls have tarnished /. to some degree, this has been going on since the early days of BBSes. Slash has the feel of a BBS, neatly repackaged into modern web technology, and run out of the back bedroom of some slacker college students. I think the success of /. is in part the laid back feel of the site.
Slashdot could use some full time editors, as opposed to the seemingly slaphazzard volunteerism going on now. A small group of people who coordinate between themselves which stories are going to be posted, to prevent numerous duplicate posts, and to check the authenticity of the stories. A little research to provide some additional links wouldn't take too much time. Some extra depth or thoughtful insight added to a submission before posting a story would help even more.
Slashback is a great feature, the first sign of becoming professional. Lets continue the trend with the addition of spell checkers and some proofreading before posting.
the AC
Its a quiet, boring Sunday, and I just can't let this go unchallenged. This is just an overimaginative press release, which has been popping up in the mainstream press for some time now, touting their 100% accurate mapping of "the dark side of the web". They have avoided the technical press, or else the editors of technical journals have bullshit filters in place and don't reprint this crap. The same phrases and anecdotes keep popping up in the same order, they probably have a PR person writing the articles for lazy journos, it happens.
... so-called "snuff", or murder, videos, the corporate server can be programmed to take a copy of the file for use as evidence in future prosecutions and then switch off power to that particular PC. Hey, they played the paedophile and snuff video card. How does their software detect this on client PCs? And how do you switch off power to a particular PC? Do you re-wire the whole building so that every outlet has a computer controlled breaker? Do they somehow disable the power switch on the employees computer to keep them from switching it back on?
on Thursday at the Loch Lomond Golf Club, Actis launched a muscular software program Yep, its a press release written as a story for the FT, who will reprint anything a PR agency hands them as long as it appears story-like.
You can find them at www.actis-technology.com, a company in existence since April of this year. They are a spin-off of buchananinternational.com which claim to have been around for quite a while. Their product is called 'Net Intelligence, apparently the apostrophe makes it trademarkable.
The actis software is essentially a proxy server, which funnels all email, web requests, and other selected traffic through their filters. They give you a list of sites, rated "bad" "not-so-bad" and "approved by Scottish wank^H^H^H^Hhackers", and then let you decide what to do for every alert the software spits at you. For a fee, if you want to track back a file picked up from usenet, they will search their dejanews clone database and tell you where it originally came from.
Check out some of their outrageous claims and mistakes in their press releases.
They spell phreaking as freaking. This disqualifies them from the start.
Consuming about 80 gigabytes of data an hour That means they have a 200 Mbps link at a minimum, and keep it 80% full 80% of the time. Thats a pretty big internet hog for europe, and I've never heard of them. Perhaps they spread that among several providers, but their website is colo at uk2net, running linux. But 80 Gig/hour is about 10 times what unfiltered usenet is producing.
"We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort, The last thing I want is disciplined minds." That should sell well to large corporations such as Boeing and the Home Office.
The team now has complete access to the world's newsgroups, where many viruses are initially posted and distributed, and to every image and every attachment. So they have a usenet server sucking up hundreds of publically accessible newsfeeds. I wonder how they compress all the spam messages that normally clog other servers? Maybe we can convince them to create a dejanews type service.
"Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack" 97% of all statistics quoted by Whitelaw are pulled from his ass (I made that up, its obvious 100% are)
Criminals - who have a peculiar habit of inputting all their deeds into PCs and handheld computers - often use software to erase such incriminating information I don't know very many criminals, but most IT professionals I know don't ever input all their deeds into PCs. But criminals have discovered the trashcan in windoze 98, better sell recovery services at an outrageous price.
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs So criminals the world over first break into companies computers in order to communicate. That's a pretty knowledgable crowd of criminals, better than the job market as a whole. And actis has defined what constitutes criminal communication, that must have been hard to take into account 178 nations, and thousands of individual jurisdictions in over 150 languages. And all that since April of this year. Wow!
Where serious crime emerges
On his laptop, Whitelaw shows me how to find manuals on bomb-making and sophisticated lock-picking techniques, complete with DIY diagrams. Yahoo, infoseek, altavista, google. Wow, this company has discovered a vast criminal conspiracy, known by the code word "search engines". By installing their proxy filter, they will block all access to these criminal sites.
This press release is too much to bear. It is pure bullshit, 100% bullshit, and nothing but bullshit. They have Yet Another Internet Filter to sell to companies and they have to make waves to keep their investors happy. Ignore this and get on with first nathalie portman posts or philosophical discussions on "free" vs. "free" software.
the AC
Teflon, kevlar, and velcro are just some of the examples off the top of my head
All of those breakthroughs preceded NASA by years.
Teflon (PTFE) was invented and classified by American scientists at the Oak Ridge nuclear fuel processing plant during WWII. They were looking for a gasket material that could withstand enriched uranium, and they puzzled out what an ideal molecular structure should be and then went experimenting. A few years later it was re-discovered by a French materials scientist, who had the great idea of coating cooking pans with it, known as Tefal in Europe. For a number of years, it was illegal to import teflon coated pans into the US, but nobody really knew why.
Kevlar was a material created during WWII as well, but it remained classified, and no work was done with it until the 1960's when it was declassified. The military had no idea what the material could do, and they kept it away from commercial sight until about 1969.
Velcro is another French invention, dating back to the 1920's. The name comes from the two materials, Velvet and Crochet hooks.
There were some cool materials that came out of NASA. Kapton is one, its used as a fireproof electrical insulator.
If you ever can afford it, get a subscription to NASA Technical Briefs, a magazine that highlights all the inventions and patents NASA is making public. Since the US taxpayers are paying for all that research, all the patents are available for cheap, non-exclusive licensing. Because of the "Open Source" nature of NASA's R&D, they get tons of money just from licensing patents, and lots of companies can get cool tech without a huge R&D budget. But any company developing for NASA automatically signs over all rights to discoveries, so they can't jack up the prices later if something becomes key to space exploration.
the AC
Andy is pretty cool. CCC meetings with him are always more intense. He sees the world in a very artistic light, as a place for individuals, a breeding ground for freedom and new ideas.
ICANN meetings will be very interesting with the currently elected body. Andy, Karl Auerbach, and some of the other new reps make a good counterbalance to the suits and Esther Dyson. Any bets the newly elected reps will be excluded after the first few meetings?
the AC
Now we're onto the next great thing. 3D solid modeling printers. Spraying water droplets could be replaced with polymers that set when exposed to air, producing soft or hard objects in the privacy of your own home.
This could give the online sex industry that next boost in revenues the whole world's economies need.
For only $39.95, you too can download a perfect copy of Nathalie Portman's breasts, to fondle as much as your immature slashdot desires can handle. For the ladies, we have a lifesize reproduction of CmdrTaco's, errr, reproduction. Also comes in 2x and 4x sizes, so you'll never be disappointed.
the AC