It's an interesting idea, and it would encourage security, but it would only stand up in court for about 4-5 nanoseconds.
Generally, vicitimizing the victim by making him pay would be looked down upon. How about this? I break into your house, paw through your laundry, eat your food, and then leave without damaging anything. Should you be required to pay me for your lack of security?
Granted computers are different since you can launch attacks on other people from compromised computers, and you can't do that from houses. But the point is that making victims pay because they were victimized is going to piss off a LOT of people.:)
While I'm not going to argue with you on the perl hacker point, there is a huge difference between crackers and script kiddies. Well, as much of a difference as there is between a kernel hacker and joe schmo who just RUNS the kernel. Because it's the same distinction.
There are crackers who invent things, and as much as I hate crackers, I have to say that I admire their ability and intelligence to do those things. But what they ALSO do is package root kits and write scripts to take all of the thought out of cracking. The "customers" of those scripts are of course script kiddies. They don't know anything about how to exploit a hole in bind, or probably even what bind does. they just know that if they run "./ph33r-m3-spl0it2.sh" at the prompt, they'll get root.
I've written a program called gtkeyboard which uses this keyboard layout as one of its "possibilities". The keyboard is meant for all kinds of different applications (including possible wearable applications and things like keyboardless kiosks and the physically disabled).
The keyboard layout was originally given to me as the "opti" keyboard by one of the people who contributed code to the project. It actually is quite good for using a keyboard with one finger, or in the case of gtkeyboard, with the mouse, which is functionally equivalent to one finger really.
It is quite a good design, putting the spaces pretty much everywhere so that you can get to them from any key. With an average word length of 5 in English, it pretty much means that rougly 18-20% of your keystrokes are going to be spaces. Makes sense to have them in a convenient place, eh?
Most people wouldn't believe how much research goes into making these things the way they are. With this keyboard, they did a lot of tests training people to use it. As was expected, at the beginning people were actually a bit slower with it than with a qwerty keyboard because they didn't know where the keys were. As time went on though, they were able to VASTLY improve their speed over even the best speeds with qwerty. (remember, we're talking one finger here, not 10)
No. As a member, you can use the facts to make informed decisions...
Oh thank you Bill, honestly, I wouldn't know that it's alright to think for myself unless you told me that it's OK. I can't BELIEVE this question needed to be asked.
So, out of wild speculation just because I'm interested, if a cracker really screwed something up and the astronaut died as a result, is it murder? Manslaughter?
Cracking is all fine and good for 14 year old packet monkeys when they're doing it with each other's systems, but this is freakin' nuts.
BTW, why the hell are these systems even accessible in any way through the internet? I thought most of the government's really important systems had gotten hip to the fact that the only way to really be secure on the internet is to not be connected. And I can't imagine that the astronauts need yahoo stock quotes....
I'll stick to the gimp thank you. 100 MB when it's COMPRESSED. What the hell is in that thing? It better have a complete dictionary for every known human language, as well as true AI and a copy of the human genome for that size.
Sometimes I just wish that the magma bubble under Yellowstone Park would pop, flood 1/2 of the continental USA, plunge the world into decades of cloud-shrouded, plant-killing darkness, and put a hold on this charade. But, we'll just have to wait and see. It's about 4,000 years overdue, or so say the geologists.
That's interesting - do you have any more references on this? That would seriously suck! But it sounds quite intriguing...
Umm.. and how many people suffered and died so that we could get to this point? Trial and error is easy to excuse when you don't have to deal with the errors..
Well, I'm not a very optimistic guy. I don't claim that trial and error is the best way to do things, because it is almost never the best way to do things. I just don't know if I have enough faith in humanity to believe that they would do otherwise.
Surely, a lot of people died because of nuclear foolishness.
This piece is mostly useless fear mongering IMSNHO.
The human genome project will be handled most likely like any other huge and potentially dangerous human advance. People will first misuse it, they will get burned very badly, and then they will learn how to control it and how to use it in such a way as to benefit them and not burn them.
Think about nuclear weapons, which are much more immediately destructive. At first, nobody really know the extent of their power, and we had to nuke somebody to find out. Nowadays, we're using those advances for nuclear power and nuclear science, and getting by with the advantages and refraining from destroying ourselves. We have for the most part reached a reasonably stable state with nuclear power, EXCLUDING the possibility of crackpot governments nuking everybody back to the stone age.
Same thing with genetic science that may or may not come out of this accomplishment. First we'll fuck up and curse ourselves, then we'll learn, and it will become beneficial. But during the process, Jon Katz will have plenty of material to worry about and tell us about how the world is going down the shitter. (Monsanto branching out into the area of genetically engineering evil corporation's perfect workers, etc.)
remember that when there is a tech advance, (just like computers and the internet) it's not just the "Dr. Evil"'s that get it. So do we. So stop worrying, be careful, and get out there and kick some ass.
So what you're saying is that BXXP is an abstract class, and doesn't really do anything by itself, it just exists to be "inherited" by other classes and used in that way.
Whatever happened to functional programming? Why is earth going into an OOP shithole ever since java showed up?
Or alternatively, can it make us more money by screwing our competitors out of marketshare?
Is it simpler to maintain? (XML is nasty!)
It can be if you want it to be. It doesn't have to be. It can be quite elegant, really.
What's the learning curve?
XML? If you know HTML, I can teach you XML in about 5 minutes really. For protocols, who really cares what the learning curve is? PHB says to developer, "You will support this", and once it's supported, it's completely transparent to the user. Only the developer has to bother to learn the protocol. And if they built it around XML, it probably just ain't that hard.
What's the cost to switch? (Time & Cash)
Potentially huge. Potentially nothing. Depends on who you are. For some people, it will require downloading a new version of a browser. For others, millions on new software licenses for their crappy proprietary web servers, and developing support for this in.
Can a 5 yr old explain it to an adult?
Can a 5 year old explain the latest FPS to an adult? That didn't stop their acceptance and humongous sales.:)
If I want to be paranoid, I have the ability to pretty much move about undetected.
Depends on how paranoid is paranoid. You're not really anonymous anymore. There are things like the anonymizer, remailers, and so on, but due to abuse, I bet they keep bitchin' logs.
Spoofing used to be an issue, but AFAIK, (and I haven't even thought about it in quite a while) it's not really possible anymore due to bind updates. Everywhere you turn, you're being logged. Doesn't matter if it's an HTTP server, the banner ads on that server, downloading a file through "anonymous" FTP (yeah right) or logging into your own box. I don't see much anonymity at all on the web, since your IP is scattered all over the universe whenever you so much as connect to another server. If anybody knows ways to get around that, please let me know.
You can be anonymous in the sense that the server only knows that some loser on an @Home cable modem is the one who's looking up this goat pr0n or reading about ralph nader, but when it really comes down to it, you're not.
I've always wondered if anybody will ever implement some type of reverse lookup system through ISPs. I know it wouldn't be easy, but imagine something like this - you dial up, and connect to goatpr0n.com. Since they want to market to you, they send a request to your ISP's server invader.myisp.com asking which customer is connected to ISP IP hostname foo.bar.baz.dialup.myisp.com. At that point, myisp.com sends back some "relevant" information to the "client".
Or even completely different servers. I bet pepsi.com would love to have the identities of coke.com visitors for counter-marketing. I bet microsoft would love to have information on non-IE users. I bet some company pitching DSL would love to have information on people who seem to be coming in on slower modems to pitch to.
In a world where companies are getting busted for backdooring their own software, people are rioting against doubleclick abuses, and you're logged every time you take a shit, does privacy really still exist? The answer is yes, but only as long as you're doing something that nobody thinks they can make money off of.
Mostly depends on whether this group is one of those groups that has an advisory committee because they know they need it, or if they have the committee because they've been told they have to have it.
If the former, they're likely to realize how clueless they are. If the latter, this will be all heat and no light.
If UCITA can enforce all those crappy agreements that big software makers force on us, why can we not use that same LAW to protect GPL'd software.
Maybe they could. IANAL but maybe it's possible. If it were me calling the shots though I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't use a horrible law to protect even my own interests. It would be too much like PETA's recent idiocy, where they sue somebody for putting up a peta site that mocks them, while at the same time mocking mcdonalds with a similar site. To use the law to help us, and then to turn around and attack it (as I hope people will continue to do) is kinda low.
Which PDA's are we talking about here?
on
Gnome On Your PDA?
·
· Score: 3
Frankly, even though I like GNOME a lot, I really wouldn't want to ever use it on my palm pilot.
I'm asking the subject of this post, because I can't imagine that they want to port it to a Palm. Maybe the new VII's that I haven't used have a huge speed increase over the 5's, but I think Taco is right to worry about whether or not the resources are enough to pull it off.
Think about it - a PDA is for taking small notes, remembering phone numbers, keeping your calendar, playing silly games, etc. IMHO PDA applications that don't respond pretty much instantaneously aren't going to be any good, since when I see that long lost friend on the street corner who is giving me his email address, I don't want to wait 2 minutes for the application to start up.
Who knows though? Maybe they can strip the hell out of some portions of gnome and make it fast and light. But at the same time, if they do that, will it still be GNOME?
I could see gnome on subcompact PC's, the really tiny laptops like VAIOs and so on, but not on a PDA.
I don't think the AIM protocol was a secret, considering how many clones there are out there. There may have been a few items in the protocol that people didn't know about, but nothing majorly functional AFAIK.
Still, it's a good thing that they did this, since even though it's possible to reverse engineer these protocols, doesn't mean it's fun, quick, or easy.
That has got to be one of the most harsh and caustic things I've read in the past month. She is absolutely brutal. It was great.
One of the most revealing quotes: Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service
No problem - I was just as glad to find these when I first did. BTW, when on the perl.com page, you should find MJD's name, and click on it to see a list of the other articles he's written for perl.com. It will make you a better perl hacker.
Also, see his personal web site at www.plover.com in the perl stuff section. He has some good articles on the way regex's really work (NFA's) and other things.
He's a good writer, and I haven't found anything he wrote on perl that I didn't like. (There were a few things though that didn't apply to me or were a bit too basic intended for beginners)
It's quite a good intro, and I'd recommend it to anybody who knows perl fairly well. You don't even have to know much about RDBMS.
That article, paired with the perldoc information on the DBI is fairly decent to at least get started. The perl DBI book reviewed here though is good too if you want to go a bit deeper.
If the user wants the non-free alternative, let them get it themselves.
This is an important point that a lot of people in this discussion seem to be missing. It's not like Debian is banning non-free software and tweaking glibc so that no non-free software will work with it. They're just going to stop actively hosting and distributing it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Why should a charity promote (in the money-making sense) other people's software?
It shouldn't. That's why the resolution is a good idea. I do think that there are a lot of people out there for whom the popularity of linux is a very important thing. When people like that hear about a resolution like this, they think that without providing non-free software, debian will not have as many users as it could.
Well, it's just my opinion, but I don't see debian as competing with Red Hat because they're so different. I also don't give much of a damn about how many users are running debian. But at the same time, I think that many of the fears about this resolution are unfounded - this wasn't just put out by a group of zealots who want to restrict everyone's access to non-free software, and this probably won't affect debian's popularity at all, since non-free software will surely still be available in abundance.
I look at this resoultion as strenghthening and purifying all of the good aspects of Debian. Noncommercial, with a strong focus on Free Software.
The "primary examiner" and the "assistant examiner" are listed on the patent form if you click through to the link.
Would it even be worth it to bring this to the attention of their bosses? Not that they're any better or worse than any other patent examiners, but this does show gross ignorance in their field that they would grant this patent.
By the way - I never heard anything about sales figures for Cryptonomicon or snow crash OR the diamond age. Were they pretty well accepted? Does anybody know if they were successful, or "mainstream" successful?
I've read them all except the diamond age, and they kick ass. His writing has matured quite a bit through the progression of books.
Where's "your line"? I.e. what will you store, and what won't you store? Since you have your own principality, it's not necessarily obvious that certain things that couldn't be stored in the US wouldn't be stored in your data haven.
Also, what are you doing to protect customers? Do you see your data haven as becoming the "Swiss Bank" equivalent for data?
And finally, what kind of hardware/software do you guys have supporting your operation?
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting idea, and it would encourage security, but it would only stand up in court for about 4-5 nanoseconds.
:)
Generally, vicitimizing the victim by making him pay would be looked down upon. How about this? I break into your house, paw through your laundry, eat your food, and then leave without damaging anything. Should you be required to pay me for your lack of security?
Granted computers are different since you can launch attacks on other people from compromised computers, and you can't do that from houses. But the point is that making victims pay because they were victimized is going to piss off a LOT of people.
While I'm not going to argue with you on the perl hacker point, there is a huge difference between crackers and script kiddies. Well, as much of a difference as there is between a kernel hacker and joe schmo who just RUNS the kernel. Because it's the same distinction.
There are crackers who invent things, and as much as I hate crackers, I have to say that I admire their ability and intelligence to do those things. But what they ALSO do is package root kits and write scripts to take all of the thought out of cracking. The "customers" of those scripts are of course script kiddies. They don't know anything about how to exploit a hole in bind, or probably even what bind does. they just know that if they run "./ph33r-m3-spl0it2.sh" at the prompt, they'll get root.
I've written a program called gtkeyboard which uses this keyboard layout as one of its "possibilities". The keyboard is meant for all kinds of different applications (including possible wearable applications and things like keyboardless kiosks and the physically disabled).
The keyboard layout was originally given to me as the "opti" keyboard by one of the people who contributed code to the project. It actually is quite good for using a keyboard with one finger, or in the case of gtkeyboard, with the mouse, which is functionally equivalent to one finger really.
It is quite a good design, putting the spaces pretty much everywhere so that you can get to them from any key. With an average word length of 5 in English, it pretty much means that rougly 18-20% of your keystrokes are going to be spaces. Makes sense to have them in a convenient place, eh?
Most people wouldn't believe how much research goes into making these things the way they are. With this keyboard, they did a lot of tests training people to use it. As was expected, at the beginning people were actually a bit slower with it than with a qwerty keyboard because they didn't know where the keys were. As time went on though, they were able to VASTLY improve their speed over even the best speeds with qwerty. (remember, we're talking one finger here, not 10)
Doesn't understanding Script Kiddies imply that they do what they do with some logical, understandable purpose?
Do I have to agree with every position FIN takes?
No. As a member, you can use the facts to make informed decisions...
Oh thank you Bill, honestly, I wouldn't know that it's alright to think for myself unless you told me that it's OK. I can't BELIEVE this question needed to be asked.
So, out of wild speculation just because I'm interested, if a cracker really screwed something up and the astronaut died as a result, is it murder? Manslaughter?
Cracking is all fine and good for 14 year old packet monkeys when they're doing it with each other's systems, but this is freakin' nuts.
BTW, why the hell are these systems even accessible in any way through the internet? I thought most of the government's really important systems had gotten hip to the fact that the only way to really be secure on the internet is to not be connected. And I can't imagine that the astronauts need yahoo stock quotes....
I'll stick to the gimp thank you. 100 MB when it's COMPRESSED. What the hell is in that thing? It better have a complete dictionary for every known human language, as well as true AI and a copy of the human genome for that size.
Sometimes I just wish that the magma bubble under Yellowstone Park would pop, flood 1/2 of the
continental USA, plunge the world into decades of cloud-shrouded, plant-killing darkness, and put a hold on this charade. But, we'll just have to wait and see. It's about 4,000 years overdue, or so say the geologists.
That's interesting - do you have any more references on this? That would seriously suck! But it sounds quite intriguing...
So now corporations are going to use genetic engineering to eridacate geeks? Lovely.
:)
And who do they think would be actually doing that work anyway, hmmm???? It's not the PHBs who have the know-how to pull that off. It's the geeks.
Geeks are vital to big evil corporations. Who else would know what to do when the CEO's PC freezes if they get rid of geeks?
Umm.. and how many people suffered and died so that we could get to this point? Trial and error is easy to excuse when you don't have to deal with the errors..
Well, I'm not a very optimistic guy. I don't claim that trial and error is the best way to do things, because it is almost never the best way to do things. I just don't know if I have enough faith in humanity to believe that they would do otherwise.
Surely, a lot of people died because of nuclear foolishness.
This piece is mostly useless fear mongering IMSNHO.
The human genome project will be handled most likely like any other huge and potentially dangerous human advance. People will first misuse it, they will get burned very badly, and then they will learn how to control it and how to use it in such a way as to benefit them and not burn them.
Think about nuclear weapons, which are much more immediately destructive. At first, nobody really know the extent of their power, and we had to nuke somebody to find out. Nowadays, we're using those advances for nuclear power and nuclear science, and getting by with the advantages and refraining from destroying ourselves. We have for the most part reached a reasonably stable state with nuclear power, EXCLUDING the possibility of crackpot governments nuking everybody back to the stone age.
Same thing with genetic science that may or may not come out of this accomplishment. First we'll fuck up and curse ourselves, then we'll learn, and it will become beneficial. But during the process, Jon Katz will have plenty of material to worry about and tell us about how the world is going down the shitter. (Monsanto branching out into the area of genetically engineering evil corporation's perfect workers, etc.)
remember that when there is a tech advance, (just like computers and the internet) it's not just the "Dr. Evil"'s that get it. So do we. So stop worrying, be careful, and get out there and kick some ass.
So what you're saying is that BXXP is an abstract class, and doesn't really do anything by itself, it just exists to be "inherited" by other classes and used in that way.
Whatever happened to functional programming? Why is earth going into an OOP shithole ever since java showed up?
Does it offer the user more than they have?
:)
Or alternatively, can it make us more money by screwing our competitors out of marketshare?
Is it simpler to maintain? (XML is nasty!)
It can be if you want it to be. It doesn't have to be. It can be quite elegant, really.
What's the learning curve?
XML? If you know HTML, I can teach you XML in about 5 minutes really. For protocols, who really cares what the learning curve is? PHB says to developer, "You will support this", and once it's supported, it's completely transparent to the user. Only the developer has to bother to learn the protocol. And if they built it around XML, it probably just ain't that hard.
What's the cost to switch? (Time & Cash)
Potentially huge. Potentially nothing. Depends on who you are. For some people, it will require downloading a new version of a browser. For others, millions on new software licenses for their crappy proprietary web servers, and developing support for this in.
Can a 5 yr old explain it to an adult?
Can a 5 year old explain the latest FPS to an adult? That didn't stop their acceptance and humongous sales.
If I want to be paranoid, I have the ability to pretty much move about undetected.
.com would love to have the identities of coke.com visitors for counter-marketing. I bet microsoft would love to have information on non-IE users. I bet some company pitching DSL would love to have information on people who seem to be coming in on slower modems to pitch to.
Depends on how paranoid is paranoid. You're not really anonymous anymore. There are things like the anonymizer, remailers, and so on, but due to abuse, I bet they keep bitchin' logs.
Spoofing used to be an issue, but AFAIK, (and I haven't even thought about it in quite a while) it's not really possible anymore due to bind updates. Everywhere you turn, you're being logged. Doesn't matter if it's an HTTP server, the banner ads on that server, downloading a file through "anonymous" FTP (yeah right) or logging into your own box. I don't see much anonymity at all on the web, since your IP is scattered all over the universe whenever you so much as connect to another server. If anybody knows ways to get around that, please let me know.
You can be anonymous in the sense that the server only knows that some loser on an @Home cable modem is the one who's looking up this goat pr0n or reading about ralph nader, but when it really comes down to it, you're not.
I've always wondered if anybody will ever implement some type of reverse lookup system through ISPs. I know it wouldn't be easy, but imagine something like this - you dial up, and connect to goatpr0n.com. Since they want to market to you, they send a request to your ISP's server invader.myisp.com asking which customer is connected to ISP IP hostname foo.bar.baz.dialup.myisp.com. At that point, myisp.com sends back some "relevant" information to the "client".
Or even completely different servers. I bet pepsi
In a world where companies are getting busted for backdooring their own software, people are rioting against doubleclick abuses, and you're logged every time you take a shit, does privacy really still exist? The answer is yes, but only as long as you're doing something that nobody thinks they can make money off of.
Mostly depends on whether this group is one of those groups that has an advisory committee because they know they need it, or if they have the committee because they've been told they have to have it.
If the former, they're likely to realize how clueless they are. If the latter, this will be all heat and no light.
If UCITA can enforce all those crappy agreements that big software makers force on us, why can we not use that same LAW to protect GPL'd software.
Maybe they could. IANAL but maybe it's possible. If it were me calling the shots though I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't use a horrible law to protect even my own interests. It would be too much like PETA's recent idiocy, where they sue somebody for putting up a peta site that mocks them, while at the same time mocking mcdonalds with a similar site. To use the law to help us, and then to turn around and attack it (as I hope people will continue to do) is kinda low.
Frankly, even though I like GNOME a lot, I really wouldn't want to ever use it on my palm pilot.
I'm asking the subject of this post, because I can't imagine that they want to port it to a Palm. Maybe the new VII's that I haven't used have a huge speed increase over the 5's, but I think Taco is right to worry about whether or not the resources are enough to pull it off.
Think about it - a PDA is for taking small notes, remembering phone numbers, keeping your calendar, playing silly games, etc. IMHO PDA applications that don't respond pretty much instantaneously aren't going to be any good, since when I see that long lost friend on the street corner who is giving me his email address, I don't want to wait 2 minutes for the application to start up.
Who knows though? Maybe they can strip the hell out of some portions of gnome and make it fast and light. But at the same time, if they do that, will it still be GNOME?
I could see gnome on subcompact PC's, the really tiny laptops like VAIOs and so on, but not on a PDA.
I don't think the AIM protocol was a secret, considering how many clones there are out there. There may have been a few items in the protocol that people didn't know about, but nothing majorly functional AFAIK.
Still, it's a good thing that they did this, since even though it's possible to reverse engineer these protocols, doesn't mean it's fun, quick, or easy.
That has got to be one of the most harsh and caustic things I've read in the past month. She is absolutely brutal. It was great.
One of the most revealing quotes: Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service
No problem - I was just as glad to find these when I first did. BTW, when on the perl.com page, you should find MJD's name, and click on it to see a list of the other articles he's written for perl.com. It will make you a better perl hacker.
Also, see his personal web site at www.plover.com in the perl stuff section. He has some good articles on the way regex's really work (NFA's) and other things.
He's a good writer, and I haven't found anything he wrote on perl that I didn't like. (There were a few things though that didn't apply to me or were a bit too basic intended for beginners)
I learned the perl DBI from Mark Jason-Dominus' Article on Perl.com.
It's quite a good intro, and I'd recommend it to anybody who knows perl fairly well. You don't even have to know much about RDBMS.
That article, paired with the perldoc information on the DBI is fairly decent to at least get started. The perl DBI book reviewed here though is good too if you want to go a bit deeper.
If the user wants the non-free alternative, let them get it themselves.
This is an important point that a lot of people in this discussion seem to be missing. It's not like Debian is banning non-free software and tweaking glibc so that no non-free software will work with it. They're just going to stop actively hosting and distributing it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Why should a charity promote (in the money-making sense) other people's software?
It shouldn't. That's why the resolution is a good idea. I do think that there are a lot of people out there for whom the popularity of linux is a very important thing. When people like that hear about a resolution like this, they think that without providing non-free software, debian will not have as many users as it could.
Well, it's just my opinion, but I don't see debian as competing with Red Hat because they're so different. I also don't give much of a damn about how many users are running debian. But at the same time, I think that many of the fears about this resolution are unfounded - this wasn't just put out by a group of zealots who want to restrict everyone's access to non-free software, and this probably won't affect debian's popularity at all, since non-free software will surely still be available in abundance.
I look at this resoultion as strenghthening and purifying all of the good aspects of Debian. Noncommercial, with a strong focus on Free Software.
The "primary examiner" and the "assistant examiner" are listed on the patent form if you click through to the link.
Would it even be worth it to bring this to the attention of their bosses? Not that they're any better or worse than any other patent examiners, but this does show gross ignorance in their field that they would grant this patent.
By the way - I never heard anything about sales figures for Cryptonomicon or snow crash OR the diamond age. Were they pretty well accepted? Does anybody know if they were successful, or "mainstream" successful?
I've read them all except the diamond age, and they kick ass. His writing has matured quite a bit through the progression of books.
Where's "your line"? I.e. what will you store, and what won't you store? Since you have your own principality, it's not necessarily obvious that certain things that couldn't be stored in the US wouldn't be stored in your data haven.
Also, what are you doing to protect customers? Do you see your data haven as becoming the "Swiss Bank" equivalent for data?
And finally, what kind of hardware/software do you guys have supporting your operation?