[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
[Cowboy Neal] Now that's an ant farm of a different color!
I agree with lots of folks here that this system works only if you don't have to trust the remote site to apply the obfuscating transformation. Here's a suggestion to make things somewhat more transparent.
Create a form with attached Javascript. You enter the real data and hit the "obfuscate" button. The script then locally adds noise to your answers. At this point, the "obfuscate" button turns into "submit", allowing you to send the visibly obfuscated responses to the remote site.
Of course, you'll probably want to read the source to make sure the real answers are not sent along with the obfuscated ones. Still, this scheme would go a ways toward creating the perception of honesty.
> My car gets 50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
That would be roughly 0.0025 miles/gallon. What do you drive, a Sherman tank?
Re:Why do you all hate this?
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 3, Funny
> All I read here are negative comments! What's so > bad about this? In the arcades in the UK, we > have a stupid game where you hold a metal bars > with your hand, you put the money in, and hold > onto them for as long as possible. What they do > is vibrate extremely quickly and ends up getting > your hands hot, and then it feels like your > whole arm has gone numb. Whoever holds longest > wins. Same thing.
Now we know why the British government held out as long as it did before paying worker's compensation for vibration white finger.
Oh, it's much worse than you're describing. Take a beaker full of sea water or dirt from your backyard. How many species of microbes are present in that beaker that can't easily be cultured in the lab and hence have never been described? Now repeat the same exercise using the flora in your lower GI tract.
I believe there have been some recent PCR-based surveys for DNA present in sea water that suggest that a whole bunch of microbes in perfectly accessible habitats have so far managed to slip under our taxonomic radar.
Ah, for the good old days circa 1991, when 4 megs of RAM was a bunch and DesqView was the method of choice for multitasking on your PC. I fondly recall running my BBS in one DV window while writing term papers in another with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
Quaint things I remember about DV:
* Well-behaved BBS programs (including all the FidoNet tools) were DV-aware and would kindly give up its timeslice if they weren't doing anything.
* QEMM, the memory manager that came with DesqView, had a complicated "optimization" script that tried to rearrange all your TSR programs to maximize the amount of available memory under 640k. The size of each Desqview DOS session was limited to the amount of sub-640k RAM that was free when you started DV, so optimization was really important.
* You started different programs from the DV menu by assigning them two-letter key codes. I remember rearranging the codes at length to minimize the finger travel time needed to open my most frequently used programs.
* DV was really bad at switching video modes. If you happened to be running Windows under DV, the screen would turn to some kind of bizarre CGA/EGA mode when you invoked the DV menu.
DV/X was going to be the "next big thing," but I don't recall hearing about it after the feature article in HAL-PC magazine. In any case, it was quite expensive. Even QEMM was something like $40; I recall getting a copy as a birthday present, which became the only properly licensed piece of commercial software on my machine at the time.
Oh well, better mod this one (-1, maudlin nostalgia).
> I keep imagining the end results of Dream Hackers reprogramming your dreams for their pleasure.
John Brunner, please call your office... ever read the short story "Speech is Silver"?
What about tides?
on
Mapping Gravity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There's quite a large bulge of ocean that trails the moon around the earth, and a similar bulge diametrically opposite to it. There's a smaller bulge due to sun tides.
The GRACE home page doesn't seem to mention the effects of tides. Doesn't all that moving mass of H2O change the planet's mass distribution enough to mess with gravimetric readings?
After looking at the linked article, it seems clear that the supervisor in this case did something exceedingly dishonest and deserved to get shot down over it. You don't steal your students' work, either by patent or by publication. Period.
However, as someone who advises students, I'm a little worried about the speculation that my students can now sue me and my institution for *any* action on my part that they perceive not to be in their best interest. What if a student feels that I talked him into working on problem X, but he would have finished faster and published more papers by working on problem Y? Can I get sued over that?
What are the limits of my legal responsibility? And more importantly, if I have a particularly risk-averse chancellor/dean/department chair, is this precedent going to chill the advising relationship between me and my students?
His work has made it 70+ years so far and spawned an ever-growing pile of pastiches, homages, and occasionally, a really novel and entertaining piece of work (Richard A. Lupoff, please call your office...). At least one publisher has a strong interest in keeping his work in print (Arkham House), and the literary critics don't seem to have finished with him yet.
I don't think Lovecraft is likely to get the same kind of name recognition as, say, Jules Verne, but I have a feeling his work will survive.
> modern processors are well-adapted to general computing tasks.
Rather, "modern processors are well-adapted to general *serial* computing tasks." If you have a computation with an embarrassing amount of low-level parallelism (e.g. applying a filter to an image), you can either hope that streaming SIMD will come to your rescue, or you can burn an FPGA with an embarrassing number of parallel computation paths that implements the desired function. The FPGA would already win in many real-world computations, were it not for the fact that it's limited by the cost of getting the data on and off the chip over a slow data bus.
10. Plan 9 From a Galaxy Far, Far Away
9. I Married a Dark Jedi
8. It Came from Tatooine
7. Die, Jedi, Die!
6. Will Success Spoil George Lucas?
5. Evil Sith 2: Army of Clones
4. Urotsukijedi
3. Pod Racer Summer
2. Midichlorians: the Awakening
And the number one rejected title for Star Wars Episode 2...
> Why can't these virus writers do something cool?
You don't want virus writers with imagination. You *really* don't. A truly imaginative virus writer would likely devote all sorts of creative energy toward thinking up nasty things to do to your computer.
I'm still waiting for the trojan that silently installs itself, then once every day looks for spreadsheets on your system and randomly changes three numbers in every fifth file. Or perhaps it finds your Word documents and randomly removes the words "do not" from a few places. Or maybe it flips a few bits in your swap file, or munges your C++ compiler so that your programs randomly destroy the user's partition table one time out of a thousand. Maybe it sends death threats in your name to president@whitehouse.gov, or anonymously tells Microsoft that your company is pirating Windows.
No, I'm quite happy with the current crop of dull, stolid, entirely *un*imaginative virus writers, thank you very much!
> But, this product appears to only make its
> source available if you buy the $475
> server version. The cheaper workstation
> version does not come with source.
Bollocks. SSH 3.0.1 still comes with source in a non-commercial (though not libre) version. Excerpted from the license:
"To qualify for a Non-Commercial Version License, You must: (1) use the Software solely on a system under the Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD operating system(whether for commercial or non-commercial use), or (2) use the Software for non-commercial purposes as defined herein and be a Non-Commercial Entity as defined herein, or (3) be an University User as defined herein, or (4) be an Excluded Contractor as defined herein."
You can download the SSH 3.0.1 sources from the usual place: ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh.
I prefer free software as a rule, but OpenSSH's connection tunneling didn't work properly last time I tried it (around 2.4), and it still appears to lack MIT Kerberos 5 support as of 2.9p2. That said, it appears that ssh.com's v3.0 client won't authenticate via Kerb5 with a v2.x server.
Oh, I almost forgot -- if the above is indeed how the copy protection works, guess what's going to happen to a zillion or so Windows users the first time they try to play such a CD with Windows Media Player? Last time I looked, WMP is configured by default to rip the CD on the fly rather than using the CD drive's analog output. If your CD listening is accompanied by funky psychadelic animations, your WMP is using this mode (or you've just taken some really good pharmaceuticals).
If the article's speculation is correct, the copy protection simply consists of inserting bogus samples in the digital recording. A regular CD player interprets the samples as errors and interpolates over them, while a ripper copies the errors and hence leaves nasty noise in the ripped audio file.
If memory serves me correctly, programs like CDParanoia already interpolate across unreadable samples when ripping a CD. It seems simple enough to check for "obviously" bogus samples and weed them out. Viola - end of copy protection.
OK, now someone who knows what the real deal is can explain to me why this argument is complete hogwash:-).
In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Bulwer-Lytton: "[D]espite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied."
If even Lovecraft thought the guy was too verbose and soppy, well, that's a lot of verbiage and sop.
As for "bizarre charm," read the winning contest entries.
setenv HOSTNAME `hostname | sed 's/\..*//' | tr \[a-z] \[A-Z]`
set prompt = "C:\\"{$HOSTNAME}"> "
(I switch between machines a lot, so it makes sense to use the hostname rather than the directory name.) However, it gets worse... I once knew a former mainframe guru whose UNIX prompt was configured to look like VM/CMS.
Slashdot Mirror
[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
[Cowboy Neal]
Now that's an ant farm of a different color!
Here's a report summary I found on the technology from the Foundation for Water Research. It's not all that and a bag of chips.
http://www.fwr.org/wrcsa/832100.htm
I agree with lots of folks here that this system works only if you don't have to trust the remote site to apply the obfuscating transformation. Here's a suggestion to make things somewhat more transparent.
Create a form with attached Javascript. You enter the real data and hit the "obfuscate" button. The script then locally adds noise to your answers. At this point, the "obfuscate" button turns into "submit", allowing you to send the visibly obfuscated responses to the remote site.
Of course, you'll probably want to read the source to make sure the real answers are not sent along with the obfuscated ones. Still, this scheme would go a ways toward creating the perception of honesty.
> My car gets 50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
That would be roughly 0.0025 miles/gallon. What do you drive, a Sherman tank?
> All I read here are negative comments! What's so
> bad about this? In the arcades in the UK, we
> have a stupid game where you hold a metal bars
> with your hand, you put the money in, and hold
> onto them for as long as possible. What they do
> is vibrate extremely quickly and ends up getting
> your hands hot, and then it feels like your
> whole arm has gone numb. Whoever holds longest
> wins. Same thing.
Now we know why the British government held out as long as it did before paying worker's compensation for vibration white finger.
Oh, it's much worse than you're describing. Take a beaker full of sea water or dirt from your backyard. How many species of microbes are present in that beaker that can't easily be cultured in the lab and hence have never been described? Now repeat the same exercise using the flora in your lower GI tract.
I believe there have been some recent PCR-based surveys for DNA present in sea water that suggest that a whole bunch of microbes in perfectly accessible habitats have so far managed to slip under our taxonomic radar.
Ah, for the good old days circa 1991, when 4 megs of RAM was a bunch and DesqView was the method of choice for multitasking on your PC. I fondly recall running my BBS in one DV window while writing term papers in another with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
Quaint things I remember about DV:
* Well-behaved BBS programs (including all the FidoNet tools) were DV-aware and would kindly give up its timeslice if they weren't doing anything.
* QEMM, the memory manager that came with DesqView, had a complicated "optimization" script that tried to rearrange all your TSR programs to maximize the amount of available memory under 640k. The size of each Desqview DOS session was limited to the amount of sub-640k RAM that was free when you started DV, so optimization was really important.
* You started different programs from the DV menu by assigning them two-letter key codes. I remember rearranging the codes at length to minimize the finger travel time needed to open my most frequently used programs.
* DV was really bad at switching video modes. If you happened to be running Windows under DV, the screen would turn to some kind of bizarre CGA/EGA mode when you invoked the DV menu.
DV/X was going to be the "next big thing," but I don't recall hearing about it after the feature article in HAL-PC magazine. In any case, it was quite expensive. Even QEMM was something like $40; I recall getting a copy as a birthday present, which became the only properly licensed piece of commercial software on my machine at the time.
Oh well, better mod this one (-1, maudlin nostalgia).
> I keep imagining the end results of Dream Hackers reprogramming your dreams for their pleasure.
John Brunner, please call your office... ever read the short story "Speech is Silver"?
There's quite a large bulge of ocean that trails the moon around the earth, and a similar bulge diametrically opposite to it. There's a smaller bulge due to sun tides.
The GRACE home page doesn't seem to mention the effects of tides. Doesn't all that moving mass of H2O change the planet's mass distribution enough to mess with gravimetric readings?
(Disclaimer: I am not an earth scientist.)
After looking at the linked article, it seems clear that the supervisor in this case did something exceedingly dishonest and deserved to get shot down over it. You don't steal your students' work, either by patent or by publication. Period.
However, as someone who advises students, I'm a little worried about the speculation that my students can now sue me and my institution for *any* action on my part that they perceive not to be in their best interest. What if a student feels that I talked him into working on problem X, but he would have finished faster and published more papers by working on problem Y? Can I get sued over that?
What are the limits of my legal responsibility? And more importantly, if I have a particularly risk-averse chancellor/dean/department chair, is this precedent going to chill the advising relationship between me and my students?
His work has made it 70+ years so far and spawned an ever-growing pile of pastiches, homages, and occasionally, a really novel and entertaining piece of work (Richard A. Lupoff, please call your office...). At least one publisher has a strong interest in keeping his work in print (Arkham House), and the literary critics don't seem to have finished with him yet.
I don't think Lovecraft is likely to get the same kind of name recognition as, say, Jules Verne, but I have a feeling his work will survive.
> modern processors are well-adapted to general computing tasks.
Rather, "modern processors are well-adapted to general *serial* computing tasks." If you have a computation with an embarrassing amount of low-level parallelism (e.g. applying a filter to an image), you can either hope that streaming SIMD will come to your rescue, or you can burn an FPGA with an embarrassing number of parallel computation paths that implements the desired function. The FPGA would already win in many real-world computations, were it not for the fact that it's limited by the cost of getting the data on and off the chip over a slow data bus.
10. Plan 9 From a Galaxy Far, Far Away
9. I Married a Dark Jedi
8. It Came from Tatooine
7. Die, Jedi, Die!
6. Will Success Spoil George Lucas?
5. Evil Sith 2: Army of Clones
4. Urotsukijedi
3. Pod Racer Summer
2. Midichlorians: the Awakening
And the number one rejected title for Star Wars Episode 2...
1. Surf Gungans Must Die
The other day, I noticed that Dell had started offering a 1.1GHz PIII option on their Precision 4100. Is this one of the Tualatins?
(BTW, my box at home is still a 550 MHz PIII Katmai, the last one produced on 0.25 micron. I have major process-shrink envy.)
> For everyone who thought that the article might
> be about AT&T's Plan 9 operating system, here's
> a link...
Sigh. I can see that some intensive re-education is in order:
Plan Nine from Outer Space
> My question is this: are there any standard free
> (as in GNU) C or C++ math libraries for handling
> massive bit-widths like you get in RSA keys?
You want gmp, the GNU Multiprecision Library. The latest release is 3.1.1, available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/ .
I tried out that new "up up down down left right left right A B A B" combo kick... and blew out a disk in my back. Does my insurance cover this?
BTW, we're having a Quake deathmatch this weekend. You'd better write me a scrip for some Oxycontin, just in case.
> Why can't these virus writers do something cool?
You don't want virus writers with imagination. You *really* don't. A truly imaginative virus writer would likely devote all sorts of creative energy toward thinking up nasty things to do to your computer.
I'm still waiting for the trojan that silently installs itself, then once every day looks for spreadsheets on your system and randomly changes three numbers in every fifth file. Or perhaps it finds your Word documents and randomly removes the words "do not" from a few places. Or maybe it flips a few bits in your swap file, or munges your C++ compiler so that your programs randomly destroy the user's partition table one time out of a thousand. Maybe it sends death threats in your name to president@whitehouse.gov, or anonymously tells Microsoft that your company is pirating Windows.
No, I'm quite happy with the current crop of dull, stolid, entirely *un*imaginative virus writers, thank you very much!
> But, this product appears to only make its
> source available if you buy the $475
> server version. The cheaper workstation
> version does not come with source.
Bollocks. SSH 3.0.1 still comes with source in a non-commercial (though not libre) version. Excerpted from the license:
"To qualify for a Non-Commercial Version License, You must: (1) use the Software solely on a system under the Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD operating system(whether for commercial or non-commercial use), or (2) use the Software for non-commercial purposes as defined herein and be a Non-Commercial Entity as defined herein, or (3) be an University User as defined herein, or (4) be an Excluded Contractor as defined herein."
You can download the SSH 3.0.1 sources from the usual place: ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh.
I prefer free software as a rule, but OpenSSH's connection tunneling didn't work properly last time I tried it (around 2.4), and it still appears to lack MIT Kerberos 5 support as of 2.9p2. That said, it appears that ssh.com's v3.0 client won't authenticate via Kerb5 with a v2.x server.
Ah, Las Vegas... home to every convention known to man -- except, apparently, for the Geneva Convention.
Oh, I almost forgot -- if the above is indeed how the copy protection works, guess what's going to happen to a zillion or so Windows users the first time they try to play such a CD with Windows Media Player? Last time I looked, WMP is configured by default to rip the CD on the fly rather than using the CD drive's analog output. If your CD listening is accompanied by funky psychadelic animations, your WMP is using this mode (or you've just taken some really good pharmaceuticals).
If the article's speculation is correct, the copy protection simply consists of inserting bogus samples in the digital recording. A regular CD player interprets the samples as errors and interpolates over them, while a ripper copies the errors and hence leaves nasty noise in the ripped audio file.
:-).
If memory serves me correctly, programs like CDParanoia already interpolate across unreadable samples when ripping a CD. It seems simple enough to check for "obviously" bogus samples and weed them out. Viola - end of copy protection.
OK, now someone who knows what the real deal is can explain to me why this argument is complete hogwash
Mr. Demara... Mr. Ferdinand Demara... please call your office.
http://www.anakin.com/Pages/pretend/who.html
In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Bulwer-Lytton: "[D]espite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied."
If even Lovecraft thought the guy was too verbose and soppy, well, that's a lot of verbiage and sop.
As for "bizarre charm," read the winning contest entries.
I get strange looks from my friends for this one:
setenv HOSTNAME `hostname | sed 's/\..*//' | tr \[a-z] \[A-Z]`
set prompt = "C:\\"{$HOSTNAME}"> "
(I switch between machines a lot, so it makes sense to use the hostname rather than the directory name.) However, it gets worse... I once knew a former mainframe guru whose UNIX prompt was configured to look like VM/CMS.