Sometimes the w3 comes out with something useful, clear and powerful. SVG and the original version of XML are examples of this. But they quickly forget their design goals and everything goes to hell. Example: XML is supposed to be a human readable, HTML like markup language for arbitrary data that is easy for a program to parse and understand. Then the committee does its thing and now with name spaces and the other additions, XML is about as readable as a binary file. W3's problem is that they are victims of feature creep. They take something simple and elegant and turn it into a monster. Features are good but they don't seem to know how to stop.
This is yet another example. Patents are good. They help inefficient startups with a new idea survive long enough to be competitive. Before patents, companies kept everything secret to protect themselves and science was stifled. Patents allow companies to protect their IP but for this protection they must open their invention to inspection. I would love to see all the proprietary, closed algorithms be patented and open sourced. That way they could still protect their work, but people could learn from their code. Innovation would be much faster. But patents should NEVER be applied to open standards. The patent should be in the implementation of a standard not the standard itself. Patenting an algorithm is OK, patenting the data structure it's processing shouldn't be.
W3 has forgotten its roots and its goals. They should be ashamed for even suggesting this.
IMHO NASA is having trouble because they are sticking with a 60s/70s mentality that just doesn't work anymore. Running the space shuttle and re-supplying the ISS isn't what NASA should be doing. NASA needs to hand some of that stuff over to the commercial sector. Then they could use the lowest bidder for launches. Ariane 5 cheaper than the shuttle? Then USE it. Stop making every thing home made, use off the shelf components. Making everything made sense when they were the only ones making space components but now there are competing products.
NASA should be focusing on things that the private sector can't do, like expensive R&D, non profitable science missions, going to mars, etc. They need to stop competing with private companies and start working with them. NASA has something like $13.6 billion a year to play with. The reason they only have a couple of hundred million left over for mars missions is that they are currently building a white elephant in low earth orbit.
NASA has screwed up priorities. Here is what I would like to see them doing:
Help fund private missions that look promising.
Do R&D on new propulsion, launch mthods, etc. Think long term. Asteroid mining is something that will probably be important in the future so do more NEAR style missions.
Lead operations to go to Mars and other interesting places. Design and fund them while relying on other companies to build everything and launch them.
NASA needs to approach space the way the NSF approaches science, grants etc.
Another thing, try to make some money out of space. Put advertising on the side of spacecraft, etc. Install HDTV cameras everywhere. Strap IMAX cameras to the side of the shuttle and get some fantastic footage that could help make space interesting again.
Right now if you do a word association test with someone on the street and say "NASA" and they will probably say something about the recent Mars probe losses. We need to get that back to being "Cool!!"
These maps are something I got interested in a couple of months ago. Check out the Internet Mapping Project. Although they're not much use currently, they're cool for seeing how well connected your ISP is. I'm with telstra, they're pretty good.
These maps could get much better in the future, especially if some new router protocols are developed that can report how much traffic is travelling through their individual lines. You could then colour code the links by traffic passing through them at a particular time. Red = very active, blue = idle. The backbones would be immediately obvious. This would also create a better map. The problem with the current maps is that they are generated using traceroute. This has the effect of making a few sites look very well connected when, in fact, they are simply the searching computers. By getting the routers themselves to divulge information about each link, you would get a complete map of the whole public internet. This may be possible now, I don't know much about BGP and its friends. Anywho, something to think about.
Still, the idea of some sort of trigger is clever. Whatever it may have been, if they used one, it would have meant that there were no phones to tap, no secret encrypted messages to crack, etc. Hell, the last time they talked to one another could have been two years ago while they were still in Afghanistan. Very low tech and very effective. Scary.
Linux doesn't run emulated on top of the MacOS when you install it on a mac. It is just like it is on the x86, a replacement OS. You can kiss the MacOS goodbye if you want to.
As for the Mac being emulated under MOL, well nothing is really emulated. It uses the native PPC processor. It provides the InterfaceLib library that PPC mac applications use to do their stuff. This is a gross simplification, it also has to do hardware mapping, screen in window stuff, etc but the speed is pretty much equivalent to running the apps on a mac. The MOL team call it a "virtual machine with custom device drivers" rather than emulation. They've done an excellent job.
See the FAQ for a bit more detail, not much though.
Most of our space craft ARE in orbit around the earth. This would be great for satellites, especially microsatellites. These are usually under 100kg and could be used for anything from satellite observation and diagnostics to cheap comm sats to HDTV mobile cameras. This experiment could help drive their cost down as it would mean that they could use a cheap GPS receiver for guidance instead of some clumsy, custom method. The US Air Force has some interesting ideas. As does this New Scientist article.
There are some reports, that I can't conform, that say that the trigger for the attacks was the Assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance (Taliban opposition). This would make sense as he was killed two days before the attacks by Taliban suicide bombers posing as journalists. The camera exploded! The whole operation could have been planned months in advance with absolutely NO contact between the terrorists, encrypted or otherwise. Once again I can't remember where I read this but I'm pretty sure it was CNN. Anyone else heard anything?
It's 309 digits long! As you can see the numbers are big and get exponentially bigger as the key size increases. The idea with public key encryption is that, while it is quite quick to multiply two numbers this size together, it is very hard to factor the result into the two parts again. It is possible but, for keys > about 56-bit, it is beyond what modern computers are capable of.
Distributed.net is a SETI@home-like project to crack ever larger keys, among other things. Check them out.
Thank God we have a mainstream news service that is telling the truth about this and not what the public want to hear. Your average, non-techie Joe wants something to blame. "Oh those terrorists used some encrypto thingee but that's illegal now so we're safe. Who was the idiot that made it legal in the first place?"
What I want to know is do any of these Congressmen realize that maybe, just maybe encryption is used for some legitimate purpose. I don't know, like... e-commerce? Online banking, shopping, etc all rely on good encryption to keep those Congressmen's credit card details safe from crackers. Even a small back door would be cracked wide open is a very short amount of time.
Plus the current encryption technology is scalable. The terrorists could just modify the old software if needed and use it. Outlaw something and only the outlaws will use it! The only thing that will be achieved is the crippling of legitimate stuff, like e-commerce.
But I'm preaching to the choir here. I just hope other News sites follow News.com's lead and not the Washington Post's.
Damn right. I'm typing this on OmniWeb right now. It is the prettiest browser around and its anti-aliased text is very easy on the eyes. It has slightly broken CSS support but you know what, the look of the browser is more important to me. I haven't hit a page that it has rendered incorrectly. It supports every nook and cranny of MacOSX and the MacOSX developer documentation even has a link to their developer site on every page! Large sections of the lower parts of OmniWeb are open source (not GPL though). I looked at Mozilla but quickly came back to OmniWeb.
Here are some screen shots of OmniWeb. Even if you are a Linux user go anyway and admire it! This one is good for showing off MacOSX's interface as well.
I don't mind people using their own widgets. It makes cross platform development easier. What pisses me off is when they do a piss poor job of it. I know this is a volunteer effort and I'm not criticizing them really, but if you do go the custom widgets way, please try to make your widgets look and feel like the native ones. The MacOSX version of Mozilla's custom widgets look like MacOS Classic. The scroll bars are especially bad.
Also, platforms have interface guidelines - read them. Too often programs get the look right but the FEEL is very wrong. An example would be buttons. On a mac, buttons that are clicked but while the mouse is still down the mouse is moved away, should not act as if they were clicked. This is so a user can change their mind. Too many programs act on a mouse down when they should be acting on this mouse down, if still over button on mouse up then act combination.
Linux users, and to some extent Windows users, are fairly used to programs that don't comply to the guidelines. Because of this, they often don't understand mac users griping about a program not being consistent. If you've never had consistency, you don't miss it. Mac users, on the other hand, are used to well written, compliant programs.
Consistency is one of the things that the mac sold on in a time of custom MS-DOS applications. The mac introduced the idea of a universal interface toolbox that all applications should use. Developers embraced it because it made writing their apps easier by not re-inventing the wheel. Because of this, and a strict set of User Interface Guidelines, the mac is the most consistent computing environment. Consistency is important! Because of the macs consistency, a user can typically use a new program without so much as picking up its manual. Inconsistency is why Linux is having so much trouble being user friendly to new users.
Nimda floods your log files because it makes more attempts on your computer BUT unlike CodeRed, it doesn't try to send the worm itself unless you're found to be vulnerable. If it detects that you ARE vulnerable, it uses TFTP to copy itself to the victim. CodeRed sent itself as a buffer overflow. So the request itself contained to worm. I'm guessing that the 16 or so small requests that Nimda makes don't add up, size wise, to the single big request that CodeRed makes.
1) An computer match doesn't necessarily mean you jump the person. A picture of the suspect and an archival photo of who the computer thinks they are would be displayed on a security monitor. A human can make the final choice. False positives would be drastically reduced this way. The authorities may decide to simply label the suspect as suspicious and keep a close eye on them. Treat the software as a tool to help human security guards narrow their search, not as the whole security system. Hell, for this purpose 80%-90% accuracy would be enough.
2) He writes:
"You might have a grainy picture of a terrorist, taken five years ago from 1000 yards away when he had a beard. Not nearly as useful"
This is still useful. There is facial recognition software that does its work by measuring the distances between the facial features. As long as you can make out the eyes, mouth and nose it should work. It will even work if you are wearing glasses or have a new beard! The only way to be sure of throwing it off is to wear large, very dark glasses and a big hat. These would make you look suspicious anyway. Like I said in point one, it doesn't have to be 99.99% accurate.
Basically, don't make this more complicated than it needs to be and keep human guards in the loop!
Am I the only one that had a feeling something like this would happen. All those hundreds of thousands of simultaneous probes have to have some effect. People on badly hit networks have reported massive bandwidth loss. This is the
"most of the links at the Internet edge had serious performance problems during the worms' probing and propagation phases"
part of the article.
Mind you, Nimda is probably gentler to non Windows systems, because it checks if the victim is vulnerable first, whereas CodeRed sent itself anyway. So although Nimda fills your logs quicker because it checks 16 or so backdoors for each attack, it probably, IMO, sends less data.
There's a UN charta that both the US and Russia signed that states that no county can claim sovereignty of celestial bodies. Property rights are a different matter, however, and no one can really stop you from claiming ownership of a celestial body, but I think you actually have to go there! "But it passed overhead!" probably wouldn't cut it. Now if it was permanently overhead, you may have some claim but I doubt it. For an example of a company planning to claim an asteroid see Space Dev.
Apple lost that case because they did something really stupid. They let microsoft copy their design (licensed it) but they were careless with the wording of the license. Basically the microsoft case doesn't set a precedent, microsoft got off on a technicality.
You can bet they aren't about to make the same mistake twice. They know that the look of their UI is what gets them free publicity. A disproportionate about of web site screen shots, and the like, are mac because of creative artists using macs. Their interface has brand recognition. It isn't the most important part of USING a mac but it's what non-mac users (read: potential converts) see. It has to be different from the rest or apple looses again.
Also factor in that they spend MILLIONS of dollars of THEIR money to design these interfaces. They are apple's property. Not meaning to be a troll but what right do theme makers have to steal other peoples designs: NeXT, Microsoft, Apple. Here's a thought: Design your own!
This argument is getting very old. Apple ships single button mice because they are easier for first timers. Have taught people to use computers, and watched as they try to press both mouse buttons on a PC at once, I see the truth in this.
For experienced users like myself I agree: two button mice are great. That's why I went to a computer fair and bought a cheap, optical, two button mouse with scroll wheel. I took off the PS/2 adapter and plugged it into a USB port. And you know what? MacOSX, from the moment I plugged it in, supported both mouse buttons and the scroll wheel. No driver installation. The idea that Macs don't support more than one mouse button is just plain wrong. So drop it already.
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This is yet another example. Patents are good. They help inefficient startups with a new idea survive long enough to be competitive. Before patents, companies kept everything secret to protect themselves and science was stifled. Patents allow companies to protect their IP but for this protection they must open their invention to inspection. I would love to see all the proprietary, closed algorithms be patented and open sourced. That way they could still protect their work, but people could learn from their code. Innovation would be much faster. But patents should NEVER be applied to open standards. The patent should be in the implementation of a standard not the standard itself. Patenting an algorithm is OK, patenting the data structure it's processing shouldn't be.
W3 has forgotten its roots and its goals. They should be ashamed for even suggesting this.
NASA should be focusing on things that the private sector can't do, like expensive R&D, non profitable science missions, going to mars, etc. They need to stop competing with private companies and start working with them. NASA has something like $13.6 billion a year to play with. The reason they only have a couple of hundred million left over for mars missions is that they are currently building a white elephant in low earth orbit.
NASA has screwed up priorities. Here is what I would like to see them doing:
- Help fund private missions that look promising.
- Do R&D on new propulsion, launch mthods, etc. Think long term. Asteroid mining is something that will probably be important in the future so do more NEAR style missions.
- Lead operations to go to Mars and other interesting places. Design and fund them while relying on other companies to build everything and launch them.
NASA needs to approach space the way the NSF approaches science, grants etc.Another thing, try to make some money out of space. Put advertising on the side of spacecraft, etc. Install HDTV cameras everywhere. Strap IMAX cameras to the side of the shuttle and get some fantastic footage that could help make space interesting again.
Right now if you do a word association test with someone on the street and say "NASA" and they will probably say something about the recent Mars probe losses. We need to get that back to being "Cool!!"
These maps could get much better in the future, especially if some new router protocols are developed that can report how much traffic is travelling through their individual lines. You could then colour code the links by traffic passing through them at a particular time. Red = very active, blue = idle. The backbones would be immediately obvious. This would also create a better map. The problem with the current maps is that they are generated using traceroute. This has the effect of making a few sites look very well connected when, in fact, they are simply the searching computers. By getting the routers themselves to divulge information about each link, you would get a complete map of the whole public internet. This may be possible now, I don't know much about BGP and its friends. Anywho, something to think about.
Still, the idea of some sort of trigger is clever. Whatever it may have been, if they used one, it would have meant that there were no phones to tap, no secret encrypted messages to crack, etc. Hell, the last time they talked to one another could have been two years ago while they were still in Afghanistan. Very low tech and very effective. Scary.
As for the Mac being emulated under MOL, well nothing is really emulated. It uses the native PPC processor. It provides the InterfaceLib library that PPC mac applications use to do their stuff. This is a gross simplification, it also has to do hardware mapping, screen in window stuff, etc but the speed is pretty much equivalent to running the apps on a mac. The MOL team call it a "virtual machine with custom device drivers" rather than emulation. They've done an excellent job.
See the FAQ for a bit more detail, not much though.
Most of our space craft ARE in orbit around the earth. This would be great for satellites, especially microsatellites. These are usually under 100kg and could be used for anything from satellite observation and diagnostics to cheap comm sats to HDTV mobile cameras. This experiment could help drive their cost down as it would mean that they could use a cheap GPS receiver for guidance instead of some clumsy, custom method. The US Air Force has some interesting ideas. As does this New Scientist article.
There are some reports, that I can't conform, that say that the trigger for the attacks was the Assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance (Taliban opposition). This would make sense as he was killed two days before the attacks by Taliban suicide bombers posing as journalists. The camera exploded! The whole operation could have been planned months in advance with absolutely NO contact between the terrorists, encrypted or otherwise. Once again I can't remember where I read this but I'm pretty sure it was CNN. Anyone else heard anything?
224137216
It's 309 digits long! As you can see the numbers are big and get exponentially bigger as the key size increases. The idea with public key encryption is that, while it is quite quick to multiply two numbers this size together, it is very hard to factor the result into the two parts again. It is possible but, for keys > about 56-bit, it is beyond what modern computers are capable of.
Distributed.net is a SETI@home-like project to crack ever larger keys, among other things. Check them out.
What I want to know is do any of these Congressmen realize that maybe, just maybe encryption is used for some legitimate purpose. I don't know, like... e-commerce? Online banking, shopping, etc all rely on good encryption to keep those Congressmen's credit card details safe from crackers. Even a small back door would be cracked wide open is a very short amount of time.
Plus the current encryption technology is scalable. The terrorists could just modify the old software if needed and use it. Outlaw something and only the outlaws will use it! The only thing that will be achieved is the crippling of legitimate stuff, like e-commerce.
But I'm preaching to the choir here. I just hope other News sites follow News.com's lead and not the Washington Post's.
Here are some screen shots of OmniWeb. Even if you are a Linux user go anyway and admire it! This one is good for showing off MacOSX's interface as well.
Also, platforms have interface guidelines - read them. Too often programs get the look right but the FEEL is very wrong. An example would be buttons. On a mac, buttons that are clicked but while the mouse is still down the mouse is moved away, should not act as if they were clicked. This is so a user can change their mind. Too many programs act on a mouse down when they should be acting on this mouse down, if still over button on mouse up then act combination.
Linux users, and to some extent Windows users, are fairly used to programs that don't comply to the guidelines. Because of this, they often don't understand mac users griping about a program not being consistent. If you've never had consistency, you don't miss it. Mac users, on the other hand, are used to well written, compliant programs.
Consistency is one of the things that the mac sold on in a time of custom MS-DOS applications. The mac introduced the idea of a universal interface toolbox that all applications should use. Developers embraced it because it made writing their apps easier by not re-inventing the wheel. Because of this, and a strict set of User Interface Guidelines, the mac is the most consistent computing environment. Consistency is important! Because of the macs consistency, a user can typically use a new program without so much as picking up its manual. Inconsistency is why Linux is having so much trouble being user friendly to new users.
Nimda floods your log files because it makes more attempts on your computer BUT unlike CodeRed, it doesn't try to send the worm itself unless you're found to be vulnerable. If it detects that you ARE vulnerable, it uses TFTP to copy itself to the victim. CodeRed sent itself as a buffer overflow. So the request itself contained to worm. I'm guessing that the 16 or so small requests that Nimda makes don't add up, size wise, to the single big request that CodeRed makes.
1) An computer match doesn't necessarily mean you jump the person. A picture of the suspect and an archival photo of who the computer thinks they are would be displayed on a security monitor. A human can make the final choice. False positives would be drastically reduced this way. The authorities may decide to simply label the suspect as suspicious and keep a close eye on them. Treat the software as a tool to help human security guards narrow their search, not as the whole security system. Hell, for this purpose 80%-90% accuracy would be enough.
2) He writes:
- "You might have a grainy picture of a terrorist, taken five years ago from 1000 yards away when he had a beard. Not nearly as useful"
This is still useful. There is facial recognition software that does its work by measuring the distances between the facial features. As long as you can make out the eyes, mouth and nose it should work. It will even work if you are wearing glasses or have a new beard! The only way to be sure of throwing it off is to wear large, very dark glasses and a big hat. These would make you look suspicious anyway. Like I said in point one, it doesn't have to be 99.99% accurate.Basically, don't make this more complicated than it needs to be and keep human guards in the loop!
- "most of the links at the Internet edge had serious performance problems during the worms' probing and propagation phases"
part of the article.Mind you, Nimda is probably gentler to non Windows systems, because it checks if the victim is vulnerable first, whereas CodeRed sent itself anyway. So although Nimda fills your logs quicker because it checks 16 or so backdoors for each attack, it probably, IMO, sends less data.
There's a UN charta that both the US and Russia signed that states that no county can claim sovereignty of celestial bodies. Property rights are a different matter, however, and no one can really stop you from claiming ownership of a celestial body, but I think you actually have to go there! "But it passed overhead!" probably wouldn't cut it. Now if it was permanently overhead, you may have some claim but I doubt it. For an example of a company planning to claim an asteroid see Space Dev.
You can bet they aren't about to make the same mistake twice. They know that the look of their UI is what gets them free publicity. A disproportionate about of web site screen shots, and the like, are mac because of creative artists using macs. Their interface has brand recognition. It isn't the most important part of USING a mac but it's what non-mac users (read: potential converts) see. It has to be different from the rest or apple looses again.
Also factor in that they spend MILLIONS of dollars of THEIR money to design these interfaces. They are apple's property. Not meaning to be a troll but what right do theme makers have to steal other peoples designs: NeXT, Microsoft, Apple. Here's a thought: Design your own!
For experienced users like myself I agree: two button mice are great. That's why I went to a computer fair and bought a cheap, optical, two button mouse with scroll wheel. I took off the PS/2 adapter and plugged it into a USB port. And you know what? MacOSX, from the moment I plugged it in, supported both mouse buttons and the scroll wheel. No driver installation. The idea that Macs don't support more than one mouse button is just plain wrong. So drop it already.