I remember when AltaVista first came out.. it was a revelation. The result you wanted was normally on the first few pages. Don't laugh - that was a big frigging deal at the time. These days, if the result you want isn't number one then you assume something is borked.
But it was quite easy to game the system. To begin with, if you wanted to be #1 for "SEX" you would just repeat the word "SEX" a lot of times. It was all done on in-page factors. Of course, AltaVista engineers eventually tried to counteract the spam (use a word too many times and it counts against you, for example), but the whole PageRank idea did lead to better results.
I seem to remember that AltaVista was originally a project to show how powerful DEC's Alpha processors were. Instead, it opened up the idea that the whole web (or at least millions of pages) could be searchable on a full-text basis. That was pretty revolutionary at the time.
The "perjury" aspect is always overlooked. If they claim contains the "perjury" line (which it should) then the person making it should face jail time. Simple.
I read that the government is going to set up it's own porn portal for "approved" smut while banning everything else. I read it on the internet so it must be true.
Two things.. one, almost all of these porn sites are not in the UK so basically won't give a shit.
Secondly, isn't it the case the those people who are most on a crusade against porn are the ones with the really sick and disturbing fetishes. Perhaps I could have 30 minutes with David Cameron's personal laptop just to check?
Agreed, GCOS is horrific and it is the OS That Will Not Die.
Multics (RIP) had some cool and interesting features. Everything was a file. Security Rings. A very consistent set of commands. But at a couple of million bucks at least per installation in 1980s money, it was a fairly niche product. I do remember having arguments with Unix folks about the strengths and weaknesses of both OSes. Of course Unix and its derivatives are absolutely everywhere now.
Actually, there are some clearly invalid or mis-typed email addresses in the list (e.g hotmial.com). So I am guessing that the addresses were not confirmed by the AFF system.
The data is a apparently a subset of 60 million records that the hackers are threatening to release.
I've had a look at the data, there are very many easily identifiable people, for some of those there is date-of-birth data, ZIP code, "preferences", details of any money spent etc. There are a few people using their.gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address, some other email addresses belonging to other corporations. I would suspect that those are the people who are most at risk of blackmail. Remember too that an email addresses can be used to look people up on Facebook, which would make it easier for blackmailers to find potential victims.
Not revealed in the breach (so far) are credit card data, real names (although many are obvious from the email addresses) or passwords. Although I notice that some people were smart enough to sign up with a throwaway email address, if they have actually paid for anything then they would have had to supply real contact details somewhere.
The background story appears to be that a pissed-off affiliate who claims they were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars had a contact hack the database. It seems the hackers are demanding money else they will release the rest of the data.
I've driven a car with a manual speed limiter for 10+ years now. I don't understand why all cars don't have one. Entering a 30mph/50kmh zone? Set that as the maximum speed on the limiter and you can drive around normally without having to keep checking your speed. Less time checking your speed equals more time looking where you are going. This is only a good thing.
In Europe, speed limiters seem to be common in Mercedes and Smart cars, Renault, Citroen and Peugeot cars, plus some of the newer Vauxhall/Opel models and Fords. It is built into the cruise control system.
The bad points? Well, reading signs is a so-so thing when it comes to accuracy, and satellite navigation systems sometimes get the speed very badly wrong if they have incorrect data. And just because the speed limit *says* that you can drive at up to whatever-is-on-the-sign, it doesn't mean it is *safe* to do so in the road conditions you actually have.
It's the case of the "Outside Context Problem" as described by the late, great Iain M Banks [via]
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The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
Banks goes on to note that most civilisations tend to encounter an Outside Context Problem only once, at the point where that particular civilisation ends or is subsumed into the more powerful one. (Incidentally this is also the title of a series of eBooks by Christopher Nuttall which are satisfyingly geeky.)
Of course, there are plenty of fictional examples of invasion, I guess ranging from the barely-competent aliens in Niven & Pournelle's "Footfall" (who were easily detected) and the almost-Gods of Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End" who basically just turned up without warning. It's too varied a field to come up with an idea of how we could detect them.
Application compatibility in Windows 8.1 is pretty good (except for really ancient 16-bit apps).. but a server environment is different with products that are often much more complicated and with very difficult migration paths to a newer version. If one exists. Take for example database clusters with custom code written by people who no longer work for the organisation - migrating from those is extremely difficult.
But.. although it is a pain, but Microsoft's EOL was well-known many years in advance. People are moaning about the dropping of support, but it has been around for 12 years. For a migration path Windows 2012 R2 will be supported until 2023, Windows 2008 R2 until 2020
The problem isn't that Windows 2003 will stop working.. the problem is that it won't get patched. Now, servers are generally lower-risk than client PCs because they just tend to do a couple of things without users surfing for porn, reading email or downloading crap. And also the products *running* on those servers may well continue to get updates anyway.
But about once a year or so, there is a vulnerability in Windows that is exploitable over the network remotely without authentication, the sort of thing that Conficker used to spread on (i.e. MS08-067). Wormable vulnerabilities are the highest risk, and the time between the flaw being announced and an exploit being created can just be a matter of days.
So, eventually those Windows 2003 boxes are going to get pwned. It might be weeks or years after 2003 goes EOL, but eventually it will happen.
It doesn't matter how secure the password is, if a site or service gets compromised then it is highly likely that the password will get revealed. What makes a difference in those cases is how well encrytped or hidden the password is, and how determined the attacker is. Attackers can use precomputed tables made up of all sorts of phrases, letters, numbers etc which will get a handle on even very secure passwords.
It's far more important to have a different password on each site.. or at least a different password on each site you care about. For some sites is really doesn't matter if it gets hacked or not. The Gawker breach a few years back for example.. who would really give a stuff about having their Gawker password compromised.
So, it doesn't really matter on a lot of these sites if your password is 123456 because everything of value is protected by something better. Isn't it?
Tizen = LiMo + MeeGo + Bada
Although also Tizen = liMo + MeeGo because Bada was rolled into Tizen later
And MeeGo = Maemo + Mobilin (Nokia and Intel respectively).
So, ultimately Tizen = LiMo + Maemo + Moblin + Bada.
Permadeath? Well, one of the first things you have to learn to do is cheat by backing up those file. Of course, on a Unix box you'll need to be root, but easier on other platforms.
Type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes are really not the same condition at all, although often the symptoms and treatment are similar. Much of the recent research has been into Type 1.
Incidentally, I have type 2 diabetes and my body/mass index is exactly where it should be, I'm not overweight and never have been. It doesn't just affect big people.
On the EU membership.. I would expect the concept of Scotland being a successor state would apply despite the posturing of certain EU members. Countries that break away from each other in this way (think Czech and Slovak Republics, the CIS) tend to retain the obligations and memberships of their predecessor states, which would mean that both the UK and the UK-sans-Scotland would both be EU members. It might end up as a legal fight in the courts to establish EU membership for Scotland though.
However, if they are not EU members and find themselves even temporarily outside the EEA (the European Economic Area that consists of the EU and EFTA countries) then that could effectively stop the free movement of people, goods and capital. It's possible that people from Scotland would need a visa to enter the UK unless a bilateral agreement could be make (such as the UK/Ireland agreement that exists outside the EU). This has the potential for being absolutely catastrophic.
The currency is also difficult, it has been argued that the Scots could have a once-side currency union with the pound sterling even if the UK did not agree. This sort of system already exists in the Isle of Man and Channel Islands, but those are not independent states as such (but nore are they part of the UK). However, there are only a quarter of a million people on those islands and Scotland has more than 20 times the population and 25 times the GDP, so it's a different league altogether.
But the clincher for me would be the sheer amount of paperwork involved if I were Scots. Am I Scottish or English or what? What about my family members? Where will my bank account be? My pension? My job? How do I get across the border? Even if everything goes smoothly, there is an immense amount of effort needed from citizens of the UK to straighten out all these details.
I used to run an 11/750 back in the early 90s. Rock solid, but ancient even then. Our students used it for Pascal programming using a bunch of VT131s which were also relics from another era. When we ditched those and got some (VT320-like) Televideo 9320s instead, everybody thought that the system had speeded up too..
One hundred *billion* dollars? Enough to buy about 5000 Apache attack helicopters (I would not like to be on the wrong end of those). Why do I think this program will end up with a tiny, tiny fraction of that?
A whole bunch of OS patches = One change
Replacing a server = One change
Reconfiguring some shared folders = One change
Replacing a whole bunch of printers = One change
There are a couple of advantages with a change process like this.. the first one is collective responsibility, so the poor sysadmin can pass at least some of the blame back to the CAB if it goes wrong. And then also there's the point that other people might have a legitimate input into the process, especially if there are things happening in the business on the same day as the proposed change that IT doesn't know about.
Similarly, if you dig out an old copy of BYTE or something similar, it is the *ads* which can be more interesting than the articles. You want *how* *much* for *that*??
I hate to call B5 "Space Opera" because it was fragging awesome and one of the best shows ever.. but there seems to be no Space Opera at all on TV anymore since Stargate and Galactica ended. Except perhaps for the odd episode of Dr Who I guess, but otherwise.. nothing. Unless I've missed something.
I was brought up on Star Trek. Surely someone out there in TV land must have the means of brining a decently plotted and good looking Space Opera back to our screens?
Slashdot Mirror
But it was quite easy to game the system. To begin with, if you wanted to be #1 for "SEX" you would just repeat the word "SEX" a lot of times. It was all done on in-page factors. Of course, AltaVista engineers eventually tried to counteract the spam (use a word too many times and it counts against you, for example), but the whole PageRank idea did lead to better results.
I seem to remember that AltaVista was originally a project to show how powerful DEC's Alpha processors were. Instead, it opened up the idea that the whole web (or at least millions of pages) could be searchable on a full-text basis. That was pretty revolutionary at the time.
The "perjury" aspect is always overlooked. If they claim contains the "perjury" line (which it should) then the person making it should face jail time. Simple.
Two things.. one, almost all of these porn sites are not in the UK so basically won't give a shit.
Secondly, isn't it the case the those people who are most on a crusade against porn are the ones with the really sick and disturbing fetishes. Perhaps I could have 30 minutes with David Cameron's personal laptop just to check?
(How come I can remember an article from 1988, but not remember to buy lemons when I'm at the supermarket?)
Multics (RIP) had some cool and interesting features. Everything was a file. Security Rings. A very consistent set of commands. But at a couple of million bucks at least per installation in 1980s money, it was a fairly niche product. I do remember having arguments with Unix folks about the strengths and weaknesses of both OSes. Of course Unix and its derivatives are absolutely everywhere now.
It goes something like this:
Male, male, male, male, male, male, male pretending to be female, male, male, OMG what's that.
Actually, there are some clearly invalid or mis-typed email addresses in the list (e.g hotmial.com). So I am guessing that the addresses were not confirmed by the AFF system.
I've had a look at the data, there are very many easily identifiable people, for some of those there is date-of-birth data, ZIP code, "preferences", details of any money spent etc. There are a few people using their .gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address, some other email addresses belonging to other corporations. I would suspect that those are the people who are most at risk of blackmail. Remember too that an email addresses can be used to look people up on Facebook, which would make it easier for blackmailers to find potential victims.
Not revealed in the breach (so far) are credit card data, real names (although many are obvious from the email addresses) or passwords. Although I notice that some people were smart enough to sign up with a throwaway email address, if they have actually paid for anything then they would have had to supply real contact details somewhere.
The background story appears to be that a pissed-off affiliate who claims they were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars had a contact hack the database. It seems the hackers are demanding money else they will release the rest of the data.
In Europe, speed limiters seem to be common in Mercedes and Smart cars, Renault, Citroen and Peugeot cars, plus some of the newer Vauxhall/Opel models and Fords. It is built into the cruise control system.
The bad points? Well, reading signs is a so-so thing when it comes to accuracy, and satellite navigation systems sometimes get the speed very badly wrong if they have incorrect data. And just because the speed limit *says* that you can drive at up to whatever-is-on-the-sign, it doesn't mean it is *safe* to do so in the road conditions you actually have.
One interesting footnote is that one of the legal team on Kremen's side was Charles Carreon who later gained notoriety through the The Oatmeal and FunnyJunk legal dispute.
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The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
Banks goes on to note that most civilisations tend to encounter an Outside Context Problem only once, at the point where that particular civilisation ends or is subsumed into the more powerful one. (Incidentally this is also the title of a series of eBooks by Christopher Nuttall which are satisfyingly geeky.)
Of course, there are plenty of fictional examples of invasion, I guess ranging from the barely-competent aliens in Niven & Pournelle's "Footfall" (who were easily detected) and the almost-Gods of Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End" who basically just turned up without warning. It's too varied a field to come up with an idea of how we could detect them.
But.. although it is a pain, but Microsoft's EOL was well-known many years in advance. People are moaning about the dropping of support, but it has been around for 12 years. For a migration path Windows 2012 R2 will be supported until 2023, Windows 2008 R2 until 2020
But about once a year or so, there is a vulnerability in Windows that is exploitable over the network remotely without authentication, the sort of thing that Conficker used to spread on (i.e. MS08-067). Wormable vulnerabilities are the highest risk, and the time between the flaw being announced and an exploit being created can just be a matter of days.
So, eventually those Windows 2003 boxes are going to get pwned. It might be weeks or years after 2003 goes EOL, but eventually it will happen.
It's far more important to have a different password on each site.. or at least a different password on each site you care about. For some sites is really doesn't matter if it gets hacked or not. The Gawker breach a few years back for example.. who would really give a stuff about having their Gawker password compromised.
So, it doesn't really matter on a lot of these sites if your password is 123456 because everything of value is protected by something better. Isn't it?
Tizen = LiMo + MeeGo + Bada
Although also Tizen = liMo + MeeGo because Bada was rolled into Tizen later
And MeeGo = Maemo + Mobilin (Nokia and Intel respectively).
So, ultimately Tizen = LiMo + Maemo + Moblin + Bada.
Permadeath? Well, one of the first things you have to learn to do is cheat by backing up those file. Of course, on a Unix box you'll need to be root, but easier on other platforms.
Incidentally, I have type 2 diabetes and my body/mass index is exactly where it should be, I'm not overweight and never have been. It doesn't just affect big people.
..Peter Norton Computing?
However, if they are not EU members and find themselves even temporarily outside the EEA (the European Economic Area that consists of the EU and EFTA countries) then that could effectively stop the free movement of people, goods and capital. It's possible that people from Scotland would need a visa to enter the UK unless a bilateral agreement could be make (such as the UK/Ireland agreement that exists outside the EU). This has the potential for being absolutely catastrophic.
The currency is also difficult, it has been argued that the Scots could have a once-side currency union with the pound sterling even if the UK did not agree. This sort of system already exists in the Isle of Man and Channel Islands, but those are not independent states as such (but nore are they part of the UK). However, there are only a quarter of a million people on those islands and Scotland has more than 20 times the population and 25 times the GDP, so it's a different league altogether.
But the clincher for me would be the sheer amount of paperwork involved if I were Scots. Am I Scottish or English or what? What about my family members? Where will my bank account be? My pension? My job? How do I get across the border? Even if everything goes smoothly, there is an immense amount of effort needed from citizens of the UK to straighten out all these details.
Other than that, the only use I can see for Java on the desktop is to enable machines to get infected with malware.
I used to run an 11/750 back in the early 90s. Rock solid, but ancient even then. Our students used it for Pascal programming using a bunch of VT131s which were also relics from another era. When we ditched those and got some (VT320-like) Televideo 9320s instead, everybody thought that the system had speeded up too..
One hundred *billion* dollars? Enough to buy about 5000 Apache attack helicopters (I would not like to be on the wrong end of those). Why do I think this program will end up with a tiny, tiny fraction of that?
Replacing a server = One change
Reconfiguring some shared folders = One change
Replacing a whole bunch of printers = One change
There are a couple of advantages with a change process like this.. the first one is collective responsibility, so the poor sysadmin can pass at least some of the blame back to the CAB if it goes wrong. And then also there's the point that other people might have a legitimate input into the process, especially if there are things happening in the business on the same day as the proposed change that IT doesn't know about.
Similarly, if you dig out an old copy of BYTE or something similar, it is the *ads* which can be more interesting than the articles. You want *how* *much* for *that*??
I was brought up on Star Trek. Surely someone out there in TV land must have the means of brining a decently plotted and good looking Space Opera back to our screens?