the future is like walking down some unlit corridor, and it gets darker and darker as you move into it. And after a while you're moving on instinct alone.
This last line seems rather poetic, especially compared to Valenti's uninformed and uninspired words preceding it. Does anyone know if he is quoting someone there?
on the Internet, where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously.
Instantaneous xfer of a whole movie!!! What the hell does that woman have running into her basement? Sounds like a nice setup.
Just a couple of weeks ago I got all excited when joker.com seemed to accept -.com as an availble domain name. I got all the way to the creditcard info page before the filtering software caught it. Major disappointment.
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge Oh god, this is such a great bizarre book. Nano, L7 society, Evil Knievel....
I'm a coder who is starting to show signs of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. So I have installed IBM ViaVoice on Windows at work (alas no Solaris version), and Linux at home.
The Linux viavoice is basically just an SDK right now, however the Windows implementation is very very good. It works incredibly well with MICROS~1 Internet Explorer. Are there any plans to design Konqueror and KDE to facilitate the use of a voice interace API (such as ViaVoice SDK)?
I did a search on DVD at freshmeat and got nothing that can actually play a DVD movie in Linux. Not even the DeCSS util was listed there. Anyone got some links to the code/binary?
Re:Saw Singh Speak in Berkeley Recently...
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
Go to Cody's on Telegraph. They have autographed copies for sale ~$20 or less I think it was. That's where I got mine.
Some help on the Cipher Challenge
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
First off, I'd like to say that I *loved* this book. I had just finished Cryptonomicon (where my favorite part of the book was the World War II cryptanalysts adventures) and was primed for some in depth exploration of cryptography. Singh has written a broad-ranging but highly accessible book. I have some issues with his views of finality on quantum cryptography, but as a whole the book was intelligent and well written.
Anyhow, so of course I jumped in on the cipher challenge at the end of the book. The first two were easy, Stage 1 solved in minutes with vi and a quick series of %s/D/a/g type commands, and Stage 2 with a small perl script.
I've coded up a quick and messy java app with a horrible interface to help out on Stage 3 (I think I need more help though, it might be in German. Luckily my girlfriend is Austrian). In the spirit of sharing with the/. community I've made the java app and the OCR-scanned-in cipher texts available on my web site. The applet link is not working yet, but you can download the source and compile yourself. It runs as an application too.
Finally, I also have set up a mailing list for anyone who wishes to discuss or collaborate on the cipher challenge. The subscribe info is on the web site.
It was a painless RH6.0 install (via PCMCIA ethernet and DSL to ftp.cdrom.com) and most everything works great. Except I have major problems with hibernation mode working consistently.
I love throwing up my ricochet antannae in a public place, which usualy attracts a latent (or blatant) geek or two and then watching their eyebrows raise up when they see it's a linux box.
My buddy has the same setup except on a TP600 which means he has the processor speed to really show off (like running "klaser.kss -inroot"). Only problems with the TP600 is that there isn't stable support for DVD or USB yet. Not sure about his hibernation mode status.
Linux also seems to give better bandwidth over the ricochet wireless than running W95 on the same machine (the 600 is a dual boot).
Just today I bought a PC Card adapter for my digital camera memory so now I can xfer images directly to Linux. Totally painless. Wrote a script to automatically mount the flashcard and copy the images into a jpeg directory. Other scripts automatically create thumbnails and html pages for them.
In the morning I can jack into the DSL, use wget to slurp wired news, slashdot and freshmeat and then read them on my train commute to work (ricochet doesn't work in the subway). It was so easy to set up in Linux and would have been a bitch in W95 or MacOS.
I'm looking forward to messing around with the Linux Infrared support when I get the chance....There's so much available for a developer in the Linux environment! It's like a never-ending playground, I wouldn't want a laptop with any other OS again.
I've always wondered about this. If you have an SSL connection through a proxy, is the SSL connection really between the proxy and the server, as opposed to the client and the server? If the former, that would mean your HTTP traffic could still get sniffed at or before the proxy.
Even besides yestreday's notorious security problem, Hot mail does not guarantee any privacy. Your webserver proxy can potentially monitor all traffic, including your HTTP POST data sent when you submit a form such as hotmail's (or yahoo's, etc) mail composition form.
I would insist on first sending out a company-wide email which repeats the Computer Use Policy for your company and then blatantly states that the system will undergo periodic scans. Then wait a few days and perform the scan as requested.
The results of this scan should only be seen by a few authorized managers (not even you/me, if possible).
That covers me ethically. The authorized managers, if ethical (and good managers), will make rational and intelligent management decisons on how to act on the results.
My suggestions here: If the offending material is not illegal (not child porn or whatever might be illegal in your municipality) then the offender should be reprimanded privately. If it is illegal, well...ethics is a tough subject matter..you're on your own. It is important that all offenders are treated equally though.
I read the Salon article and followed a link to his web site, where he pokes at Salon for running with "hacker" instead of "cracker". He described himself as a hacker when applying to MTV, but I guess he has learned the difference in the past year.
Other items picked up from the article: He did work as a systems analyst at an ISP, and he has been on the Internet well before most people heard about it, and was a BBS junkie before that.
In my opinion he has enough cred to call himself both hacker (in philosophy) and cracker (in deed, to an extent). I'm impressed that he has decided to return for school for a Computer Science degree. Too many immature children get riled up over the definition of 'hacker' and neglect to gain a deeper understanding of computer science.
Although I find his website to be a bit over-the-top in vanity (and that's saying much coming from me ), it's not surprising given his age and his recent publicity.
Note: I haven't watched MTV in years, so I've never seen his "performance" but I think it would be naive of someone to think that these "Real World/Road Rules" tv shows are anything but a warped and manipulated reflection of reality.
Personal attacks on the man, coming from people who make assumptions without reading the article, come off sounding like jealousy and reflect much more negatively on the attacker than the attacked.
In a recent Scientific American (I think, I get so many magazines) it was pointed out that his death could possibly have been accidental. He died of cyanide poisining, and he had cyanide in his home lab that was being used for research. It's not inconceivable that he simply had an unfortunate accident. Someone please correct me if I'm relating this incorrectly, but that was the gist of it.
On a side note, I was shocked when I read Cryptonomicon and learned Turing was gay. I'm wondering how that fact is so often left out when people talk about Turing. He seemed to be quite open about his sexuality, I think it's a shame that future historians put him in the closet.
Of course, when discussing his achievments, his sexuality has nothing to do with it. But I can't help but feel that with homosexuality being still so discriminated against (at least in the USA) it is a shame that the gay community had such a hero and scientific role model kept in shadows.
Or did everyone else already know? Maybe I should take my Gaydar in for a tuneup.
Doesn't anybody READ the articles before posting?
on
Beaming Money
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· Score: 2
They have credible encryption experts involved in the project, including one inventor of PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY (ever heard of that?) who is additionally an investor.
-Undoubtedly the infrared xmission is encrypted!
-The data sent to Confinty is probably encrypted and digitally signed to avoid tampering.
-You probably will not be able to fake a transaction. My understanding of the article is that the money will be held in escrow until both parties confirm the transaction via sync'ing. (Although this would open up another possible problem).
In any case, why not take a RTFM-approach before posting flippant theories.
Re:A new way to rob people
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 2
This is, while wittily crafted, a rather ignorant comment, I can't believe it was sorted to the top of the comment display.
If one reads the article one would see that the transactions are neither anonymous nor instantaneous. Two qualities which are highly desirable to those interested in performing a successful mugging.
Ok, so maybe I left Research Triangle Park for San Francisco a couple of years ago, but I have to say North Carolina is not that bad. And good lord the housing market is better there. Out of the Triangle, Raligh is the worst but Chapel Hill and Durham (where Red Hat is located) have much charm (although I admit Durham's is a bit more subtle).
And after living in the Bay Area for awhile I can tell you: I'd much rather be in Durham than in Silicon Valley. That place is BO RING. No wonder so much coding gets done, there's *nothing* else to do.
First, I'd just like to mention that Ars Electronica is a very groovy and well respected conference. It's been around since the early 70's or so, well before the computer-art movement gathered any reasonable momentum.
As for why Linus deserves this: the people involved with the judging and organizing are truly wired into the artistic side of modern electronica , but I suspect Linux was just too big of a blip on their coolness radar to ignore. Yet I would argue that Linux has made, or at least the potential to make, a big impact on Computer Art by being powerful and accessible to those who want to create computer based artwork. Artists need freedom, and Linux deilvers freedom (in the GNU sense) and then some. And this is even before you get into tools, etc.
Past winners of Prix Ars awards included movies such as Spawn and Titanic (for CGI), and we all know about Linux's role in Titanic FX.
The review agreed with most of my opinions. I'd rank it above Return of the Jedi and below Empire Strikes Back.
I certainly hope #5 will be dark and menacing like ESB. The word on the street is that it will be a love story between anakin and the queen, but it can still be a dark and menacing love story!
spoiler alert
My faves (besides the best light saber duels in the history of mankind, you can see some hong kong action influence here):
The queen's outfits, right on.
The rolling droids
The (Jar Jar's race)'s power shield technology used on their cities and the borrowed vehicle.
The failed jedi mind trick
And I swear I saw Zera from Planet of the Apes in the stadium scene!
This is not actually text-to-speech but it is close and the speech is really good. There may be some new pre-processors which make it text-to-speech now (it's been a year since I've messed with this).
I have taken a camcorder and tripod into a theatre before, had no problems. I only did this to get a copy for some friends back in Durham/Chapel Hill NC because it was an independent and limited release film that was out only in San Francicso, LA and New York.
Personally, I think that if the film makers would make their films distributable over the Internet, even at a fee, they would see huge increases in audience and revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
This last line seems rather poetic, especially compared to Valenti's uninformed and uninspired words preceding it. Does anyone know if he is quoting someone there?
Instantaneous xfer of a whole movie!!! What the hell does that woman have running into her basement? Sounds like a nice setup.
Just a couple of weeks ago I got all excited when joker.com seemed to accept -.com as an availble domain name. I got all the way to the creditcard info page before the filtering software caught it. Major disappointment.
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge Oh god, this is such a great bizarre book. Nano, L7 society, Evil Knievel....
The Linux viavoice is basically just an SDK right now, however the Windows implementation is very very good. It works incredibly well with MICROS~1 Internet Explorer. Are there any plans to design Konqueror and KDE to facilitate the use of a voice interace API (such as ViaVoice SDK)?
I did a search on DVD at freshmeat and got nothing that can actually play a DVD movie in Linux. Not even the DeCSS util was listed there. Anyone got some links to the code/binary?
Go to Cody's on Telegraph. They have autographed copies for sale ~$20 or less I think it was. That's where I got mine.
Anyhow, so of course I jumped in on the cipher challenge at the end of the book. The first two were easy, Stage 1 solved in minutes with vi and a quick series of %s/D/a/g type commands, and Stage 2 with a small perl script.
I've coded up a quick and messy java app with a horrible interface to help out on Stage 3 (I think I need more help though, it might be in German. Luckily my girlfriend is Austrian). In the spirit of sharing with the /. community I've made the java app and the OCR-scanned-in cipher texts available on my web site. The applet link is not working yet, but you can download the source and compile yourself. It runs as an application too.
Finally, I also have set up a mailing list for anyone who wishes to discuss or collaborate on the cipher challenge. The subscribe info is on the web site.
Can you imagine guard dogs with wireless video transmitters? Or dolphins? Or CNN journalists?
Make way for the Borg.
In sports, Helmet Cams will be soooo 20th century.
Soldiers and spy's would take on new dimensions. Hell, the military and intelligence communities probably did this years ago, heh.
i luvs my linux TP560
It was a painless RH6.0 install (via PCMCIA ethernet and DSL to ftp.cdrom.com) and most everything works great. Except I have major problems with hibernation mode working consistently.
I love throwing up my ricochet antannae in a public place, which usualy attracts a latent (or blatant) geek or two and then watching their eyebrows raise up when they see it's a linux box.
My buddy has the same setup except on a TP600 which means he has the processor speed to really show off (like running "klaser.kss -inroot"). Only problems with the TP600 is that there isn't stable support for DVD or USB yet. Not sure about his hibernation mode status.
Linux also seems to give better bandwidth over the ricochet wireless than running W95 on the same machine (the 600 is a dual boot).
Just today I bought a PC Card adapter for my digital camera memory so now I can xfer images directly to Linux. Totally painless. Wrote a script to automatically mount the flashcard and copy the images into a jpeg directory. Other scripts automatically create thumbnails and html pages for them.
In the morning I can jack into the DSL, use wget to slurp wired news, slashdot and freshmeat and then read them on my train commute to work (ricochet doesn't work in the subway). It was so easy to set up in Linux and would have been a bitch in W95 or MacOS.
I'm looking forward to messing around with the Linux Infrared support when I get the chance. ...There's so much available for a developer in the Linux environment! It's like a never-ending playground, I wouldn't want a laptop with any other OS again.
</BABBLING IDIOT MODE>
I've always wondered about this. If you have an SSL connection through a proxy, is the SSL connection really between the proxy and the server, as opposed to the client and the server? If the former, that would mean your HTTP traffic could still get sniffed at or before the proxy.
Even besides yestreday's notorious security problem, Hot mail does not guarantee any privacy. Your webserver proxy can potentially monitor all traffic, including your HTTP POST data sent when you submit a form such as hotmail's (or yahoo's, etc) mail composition form.
The results of this scan should only be seen by a few authorized managers (not even you/me, if possible).
That covers me ethically. The authorized managers, if ethical (and good managers), will make rational and intelligent management decisons on how to act on the results.
My suggestions here: If the offending material is not illegal (not child porn or whatever might be illegal in your municipality) then the offender should be reprimanded privately. If it is illegal, well ...ethics is a tough subject matter ..you're on your own. It is important that all offenders are treated equally though.
Other items picked up from the article: He did work as a systems analyst at an ISP, and he has been on the Internet well before most people heard about it, and was a BBS junkie before that.
In my opinion he has enough cred to call himself both hacker (in philosophy) and cracker (in deed, to an extent). I'm impressed that he has decided to return for school for a Computer Science degree. Too many immature children get riled up over the definition of 'hacker' and neglect to gain a deeper understanding of computer science.
Although I find his website to be a bit over-the-top in vanity (and that's saying much coming from me ), it's not surprising given his age and his recent publicity.
Note: I haven't watched MTV in years, so I've never seen his "performance" but I think it would be naive of someone to think that these "Real World/Road Rules" tv shows are anything but a warped and manipulated reflection of reality.
Personal attacks on the man, coming from people who make assumptions without reading the article, come off sounding like jealousy and reflect much more negatively on the attacker than the attacked.
On a side note, I was shocked when I read Cryptonomicon and learned Turing was gay. I'm wondering how that fact is so often left out when people talk about Turing. He seemed to be quite open about his sexuality, I think it's a shame that future historians put him in the closet.
Of course, when discussing his achievments, his sexuality has nothing to do with it. But I can't help but feel that with homosexuality being still so discriminated against (at least in the USA) it is a shame that the gay community had such a hero and scientific role model kept in shadows.
Or did everyone else already know? Maybe I should take my Gaydar in for a tuneup.
-Undoubtedly the infrared xmission is encrypted!
-The data sent to Confinty is probably encrypted and digitally signed to avoid tampering.
-You probably will not be able to fake a transaction. My understanding of the article is that the money will be held in escrow until both parties confirm the transaction via sync'ing. (Although this would open up another possible problem).
In any case, why not take a RTFM-approach before posting flippant theories.
If one reads the article one would see that the transactions are neither anonymous nor instantaneous. Two qualities which are highly desirable to those interested in performing a successful mugging.
And after living in the Bay Area for awhile I can tell you: I'd much rather be in Durham than in Silicon Valley. That place is BO RING. No wonder so much coding gets done, there's *nothing* else to do.
YMMV
The report I read on wired also mentioned that it deletes files matching *.c *.cpp *.h and *.asm.
There is no honor amongst virus authors.
Well at least my Java, Perl and Prolog source are safe (not that I have any on a MICROS~1 machine).
As for why Linus deserves this: the people involved with the judging and organizing are truly wired into the artistic side of modern electronica , but I suspect Linux was just too big of a blip on their coolness radar to ignore. Yet I would argue that Linux has made, or at least the potential to make, a big impact on Computer Art by being powerful and accessible to those who want to create computer based artwork. Artists need freedom, and Linux deilvers freedom (in the GNU sense) and then some. And this is even before you get into tools, etc.
Past winners of Prix Ars awards included movies such as Spawn and Titanic (for CGI), and we all know about Linux's role in Titanic FX.
I certainly hope #5 will be dark and menacing like ESB. The word on the street is that it will be a love story between anakin and the queen, but it can still be a dark and menacing love story!
spoiler alert
My faves (besides the best light saber duels in the history of mankind, you can see some hong kong action influence here):
And I swear I saw Zera from Planet of the Apes in the stadium scene!
Check the mbrola homepage.
Personally, I think that if the film makers would make their films distributable over the Internet, even at a fee, they would see huge increases in audience and revenue.
heh heh.
Their database is already hosing up.
I'm a cynic. When I first heard about this a few months ago, I realized that any company this evil is bound to make money. So I bought shares.