Remember, the goal is to - by default - kill the relay-rapers, who, sadly, outnumber the legitimate users of third-party relay by a huge margin. Here's the word from Tom TaTom, Mindspring's abuse admin, from a posting in July 1999:
Yeah, the way Mindspring rolled out the port-25-blocking was pretty lame, and Tom, by virtue of his position, sounds like he had to choose his words carefully in that post, but it sounds to me like he's willing to listen. Tom's got plenty of clue.
On a technical level - while the following idea won't solve the case where you're relaying through a server for which you have authorization to relay but don't have administrative access... if you do own the server through which you're relaying, I'd imagine you could have it listen for SMTP traffic on a port other than port 25. Your outbound mail goes to your "other relay" via this other port. Or you can just relay outbound mail through smtp.mindspring.com, and fetch your incoming mail via POP. (Disclaimer: I haven't given any of these schemes because I haven't had the need to relay outside of Mindspring's network. Anyone who has put thought into this issue, please post your thoughts and/or solution... sounds like it's in demand!)
> Using the everpopular "If we don't they will" mentality. > Basically I think the world would be better off > without any people like that, it's just a sick attitute.
In terms of game theory, I viewed the Cold War as a high-stakes game of Prisoner's Dilemma. The optimal strategy in PD is tit-for-tat. If your opponent doesn't defect, neither should you. If your opponent does defect, you should respond on the next turn with a defection. Reinforce good behavior with good behavior, and bad with bad. Eliminating your ability to defect - and telegraphing this elimination to your opponent in advance of a game of PD - is poor strategy indeed when you have reason to believe your opponent won't be as high-minded as you.
Let the truth be known, I agree with you - the world would be a better place without the "If we don't they will" people. (Of course, it'd also be a better place if cold beer ran from my faucets instead of water, spammers were nonexistent, the Feds had a clue on crypto and privacy issues, and if Bill Gates had spent less time studying and more time partying in high school.)
Unless you've developed a mechanism for detecting and eliminating "if we don't they will" people on both sides of an incipient technological arms race (if you do have such a mechanism, activate it now before they find out about it!:), I'm afraid both sides will continue to need them.
> How is it people can't abstract? I'm amazed. > We already knew what was possible before it was built.
So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM:-)
Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?
Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?
Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.
A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 and Page 2) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.
How crazy was Project Chariot? Consider the fact that Bikini Atoll is now one of the best sites for skin diving and sport fishing on the planet. (Read that as "lots of shipwrecks in pristine condition" and a nearly-undisturbed environment for the past 40 years.) The most serious radiological contaminant on Bikini is Cs-137, and the main reason it's a problem is because the local vegetation picks it up in place of potassium. It's a land problem, not a sea problem. Since a putative Alaskan harbor isn't a likely site for crop-growing, and since it would have been excavated with high-yielding thermonuclear devices designed to maximize explosive yield and minimize heavy radionuclide production, the residual radiation levels around the site would have dropped to habitable levels relatively quickly. (Of course, whether it would have cooled off in time to be economically viable compared to conventional construction, or even whether or not a harbor would have benefited the Alaskan economy is a question for economists, not physicists:)
IMHO the best use for nuclear explosions would have been Project Orion; a nuclear pulse engine. Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear.
Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.
Back to nukes. Anyone interested in the history of atomic weaponry should consider a visit to the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico. The timing is great - the first weekend of October also marks the date on which White Sands Missile Range opens up the Trinity Site to the general public, allowing tours of the site of the first fission explosion.
Finally - whatever your opinions on the horror of the bomb's use - the physics behind it was still beautiful. Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design is highly encouraged to read Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ - a 14-part document also available at the FAS High Energy Weapons archive.
I smell a rat here too. I mean, if I, as the prosecution, don't have to reveal to the court how I decrypted the "evidence", doesn't that give me just a wee bit too much power?
Testimony: "Your honor, as you can plainly see, the {kiddie porn, bombmaking instructions, drugmaking instructions, nuclear secrets} is on the client's hard drive. We just can't tell you how we decrypted it."
Reality: "Hey, Officer Crypto-Dude, can you XOR the suspect's scramdisk file of random noise with some {kiddie porn, bombmaking instructions, drugmaking instructions, nuclear secrets}? I really need a conviction, man!"
Hell, why bother creating a bogus one-time pad if you don't have to reveal the method? How about "Hey, Officer Crypto-Dude, gimme the files off the hard drive from the other guy we convicted last month."
If the prosecution doesn't have to disclose how it decrypted your files, the only defence you have against fabricated evidence is to give up your keys and divulge what was really on your hard drive. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
As I wrote yesterday, I'm far more worried about corrupt cops than corrupt spooks. NSA knows it has better things to do with its time than invade your privacy. I'm not so convinced the same is true of Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh.
> My understanding of the NSA's position re. DES was that they were > opposed to software implementations because they did not believe > that any software encryption solution was secure.
True. And correct - even today, if you can fab DES chips and place them into DES gadgets, ideally in tamper-resistant packaging, you can be more confident of the security of your implementation than a guy with a DES-in-bits-of-magnetic-flux computer. It's a lot harder to replace a chip than it is to install a trojan on a target machine:)
> Every intervention of the NSA of which I am aware has had the effect of > making a product more secure, not less.
Amen. The strengthening of DES against differential attacks is probably just the best--known example. Just because NSA's hat isn't lily-white doesn't mean it's black. At the time of the strengthening, a strong DES was a Very Good Thing for national security.
Truth be known - and I'm still not saying that I'd trust NSA as far as I could throw it - I'd trust them before I'd trust the FBI. NSA's actions are consistent with the use of SIGINT for national security. Compare the number of times NSA has played the "drug dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists" card with the number of times we've heard it coming from Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh.
IMHO part of this is likely cultural - NSA knows it's got better things to do with its time than invade your privacy. Any harm done to your privacy from NSA is simply collateral damage as it carries out its mission. Law enforcement, presumably since it comes from a culture in which "chasing down bad guys" is more important than "leaving the good guys alone", has yet to figure this out.
I first heard of this when I heard of the one at the University of British Columbia: the FAQ and a Trader's Manual are available.
There's also one being run at the University of Iowa College of Business), which has links for current political markets including the 2000 Congressional, 2000 DNC, 2000 RNC, and New York Senate races. Let the games begin!
A little poking around reveals there are also a few markets open in Austrian politics.
And finally, I think that the site referenced in the USA Today article is here: http://www.posdaq.co.kr, but since it's in Korean, I'm not totally sure about that:-)
> Thurow can't come up with a single example of successfully implemented > self-regulation without government coercion? How about the MPAA ratings > system? The Comics Code Authority? That's just right off the top of my > head.
Actually, I think that was Thurow's point - my understanding is that none of those ratings systems would have come into being without the threat of the "government club" being used on those who didn't comply, and that it's precisely this sort of "self-regulation" (i.e. the government using the ISP industry as its club to spare itself the embarassment of drafting yet another set of unconstitutional laws, only to see them shot down in court again) that he favors.
IMHO, the government realizes that it can't nullify the First Amendment, but if it can get others to do the dirty work on its behalf in the interest of "e-commerce", it won't have to. IMHO this is the whole point of the "self-regulation" push. (Non-Americans can replace "First Amendment" with whatever guarantees of "free speech" are appropriate to their countries.)
In the meantime, many others in the responses to this article have done good jobs of pointing folks to articles and sites that debunk Thurow. When even economists appear to agree that Thurow isn't a credible credible source, I think we can safely move on. It sounds to me like Thurow saw a big conference on self-regulation and wanted to put his two Deutschmarks in on behalf of Bertelsmann. Nice try, but no frankfurter.
> If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something > (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for > determining who gets what.
Precisely.
Marx: "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Marx lived in an age in which all economics were based on the economics of scarcity. The second half of the little equation implied the use of force.
In a Gift Culture economy, the second half ceases to be an issue; from each according to his whim might be more like it. Given a sufficiently useful thing - say, a SCSI driver - there's bound to be someone willing to get off his duff and code it up, and from that point on, the advantages of OSS which we all know and love, take over. It's in the developer's best interest to see that the code is distributed widely. At that point, anyone who happens to need a SCSI driver can simply download it.
But to call this "communism" - when it requires economic products (software) that were not only nonexistent, but inconceivable within the socioeconomic framework in which communism was invented - smacks of intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
We'll take it as axiomatic that communism is coercive and bad under the economics of scarcity - you have to coerce people who don't buy into the system to "give" up their material posessions, or you have to coerce them into buying into the system. Whether you deprive them of their stuff or try to reprogram their minds, it's coercive, and leads to the disasters we've seen in the 20th century whenever an attempt is made to implement it on a large scale.
So much for superseding capitalism in any economic activity involving atoms instead of bits. Been there, done that, it didn't work. So let's try it with software:
Under "cyber-communism" - who writes the code for the payroll systems? The point-of-sale terminals? The inventory software for McDonalds? All the other "boring" stuff that isn't "fun"? Or does "from each according to his ability" simply mean that instead of taking your grain or your barrels of oil, the Central Committee will simply take your time and force you to work on some mind-numbingly dull project becase, after all, you're able to code payroll?
So much for superseding capitalism for all the grunt work.
What's left is what we already know to be true - for certain types of software...
> giving away my software is the greedy thing to do. > Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
...which says it better than I could have. Amen to that.
Back to the cybercommunism article, however - exactly how this very limited subset of economic activity (i.e. the development of cool software of broad-based application) can "supersede capitalism" is utterly beyond me. Furthermore, what this has to do with communism - a philosophical system invented in an age where a Gift Culture was inconceivable - is equally beyond me. But saying that "Giving cool and useful software away is fun" doesn't quite sell as many books as using buzzword-compliant postmodernisms such as "cybercommunism" or the "California Ideology", does it?
I concur with Ami. The arguments offered by the author just don't compute.
For those who haven't seen the Glubco microwave weapon, it's even simpler and cheaper than the HERF. It's also a hell of a lot more dangerous.
All you do is find an old microwave oven, tear it open, and remove the magnetron and associated HV power supply circuitry. You then build a small waveguide behind it so as not to fry yourself too badly. Point and shoot.
Now that I've said this, and the script-kiddies are off Darwinating themselves out of the gene pool, here's what happens to them:
Stupidity I. The capacitors in a high voltage supply on a microwave oven might not drain themselves automatically. If that happens, and the script kiddie is using both hands to play with the supply, he could fibrillate and die on the spot.
Stupidity II: If he's using one hand to play with the supply, when he gets zapped, he scrapes his hand to hell when jumping away from the shock. A Dejanews search on why you have to discharge the anode of a TV set before working on the tube will provide much amusement.
Stupidity III: All the nasty 120VAC bits are exposed, and our script kiddie doesn't use an isolation transformer, or does something similarly stupid. Bzzt, game over, thanks for playing.
As you can see, it's easy to weed out a good chunk of the script kiddie population before they even finish building the damn thing. Now, suppose they survive this long...
Leakage. They get internal burns because the waveguide wasn't built well enough. Visions of fingers turned into fried chicken wings come to mind as someone makes a waveguide that's short and easily-concealable, but that accidentally gives very wide dispersion.
Reflection. More of the same. Y'know how your microwave oven works? Script kiddie points magnetron at a metal wall.
Fire. Ever throw a CD in a microwave and not turn the microwave off after the pretty light show? The CD starts to smoke and burn. I'd imagine it'd be very easy to get the same thing to happen with the house wiring. And downright trivial to get it to happen to the traces on any printed circuit board.
If I had to put money on it, I'd say the RF burns would be the most horrific side-effect of a kid playing with the Glubco magnetron weapon, but that the most probably side-effect would be that he burns down his own house while beta-testing it.
Moral of the story: It's a cool idea. And in a situation of civil disorder (East Timor, anyone?) might be a handy field-expedient terror weapon - plug it into a wall socket in the target building, turn it on, and get the hell out of dodge while everything burns. For anything else, it's merely a quick and easy ticket out of the gene pool. Just like the bogus recipies in the "Anarchist's Cookbook", think of it as evolution in action.
First off - yes, the G4 is cool, and the latest Apple ad is cool in the way that Intel's bunny-suit ads only wish they could be.
But I wonder about a company that, with version 1.0 of the G3 firmware, allowed a G3 to be upgraded to a G4, but then disabled this option in version 1.1 of the firmware.
If I understand the Wired article correctly - it appears that Apple intentionally crippled its G3 firmware to prevent users from upgrading a G3 to a G4 with a CPU swap, presumably in order to "encourage" folks to buy a whole G4 box rather than just the chip upgrade.
At least with Intel, I may need a new motherboard for CPU swaps... but at least I can keep the video card, sound card, and, umm... plain white case:)
Can any Mac folks out there explain what's up with the G3/G4 firmware issue?
> As someone with a "karma" rating that puts my > posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to > agree. There are many times when I've posted > something off-the-cuff that I've wished I > could specify that it should be with a score of 1.
As another "+2 karma" poster, let me just say "me too", for precisely the same reasons.
More specifically, I propose that - at the time of posting - the poster of an article ought to have: (a) his or her karma score displayed on the "post comment" form (b) a pull-down option to select whether the post should be posted with a score of -1, 0, 1, or 2.
As for the issue of whether or not ACs should be allowed to post, IMHO they should. While there are many trolls and abuses of this privilege, there are also benefits. I find myself reading crypto/NSA/spooky posts and science posts at level 0, largely because in the case of the former, people with clue may also have a reason to want to post anonymously, and in the case of the latter, those with clue may not post frequently enough to Slashdot to justify the trouble of registering with the site. When it comes to astronomy, I'd much rather read the AC post at 0 from the Ph.D. in Astrophysics debunking the 5-10 registered posters at +1 who have no idea what they're talking about.
> Can this "human brain" thing run linux? > Can it be networked into a Beowulf?
I dunno about it running linux, but I believe the "networking a bunch of human brains into a Beowulf" has already been done. I think they called it "open source" when the resulting cluster is used to develop software:)
I've refused to shop at Spamazon for quite some time due to their penchant for spamming. Cases in point go back at least as far as early 1998 and are widely documented on Dejanews.
A better write-up of their business practices can be found at the page of Peter Seebach, a long-time n.a.n-a.e (news.admin.net-abuse.email) regular.
Finally, there's Spamazon's practice of shilling for themselves on USENET - an "astroturf" campaign eerily reminiscient of Micros~1's "independently-written letters to the editor" stunt. (Available through Dejanews - Start here or search for Message-ID <3584e5cc.1368345@news.sirius.com>.
While I'm as disgusted at the "purchase circles" idea as anyone, I'm not at all surprised. Spamazon doesn't think in terms of customers; merely in terms of targets for additional marketing. Take your business elsewhere. (Many on n.a.n-a.e have recommended Powell's. I concur.)
While "data" is not the plural of "anecdote", I'm not sure the web is shrinking, but my web has shrunk drastically. I believe this to be a generalized phenomenon, which can be expressed as follows: the size-of-ones-view-of-the-web is inversely proportional to time spent surfing it.
My first experience of the WWW was in 1993/4. My first impression was "this is just like FTP or Gopher, but it decodes.GIFs and uses nice fonts!". There were only a few sites up, and I navigated everywhere from site to site, just seeing what was out there - content didn't matter as much as the novelty of going from one site to another with the click of a mouse.
Over the next year, people invented, and I discovered, search engines. "Cool! I can type in keywords and get something reasonably related to what I'm looking for!" Maybe my friend had put up a site with links to his friends' sites. Many "sites" were merely lists of links that the owner found interesting. Random surfing was still king. There was a wonderful War Games-esque feeling to be had from typing "let's play global thermonuclear war" into a window and getting results back that pointed to.mil sites:-)
Over time, I found myself visiting certain sites more often - they got bookmarked. I used a search engine as my default home page, but still spent most of my time feeding it interesting words to see what would come back, or words pertaining to technical questions to see if I could find answers.
Flash forward to today - I now find myself visiting only a handful of sites daily. Slashdot for tech news, a couple of major commercial media sites for local/national coverage, a financial site to get business news, and that's about it. I don't like watching the same news footage ten times during the evening TV news broadcast; why would I want to read the same news story ten times a day? There was an earthquake in Turkey. A buncha people died. What can FooNews tell me about that that BarNews won't?
I can count the number of sites I visit on a daily basis on one hand. I can count the total number of sites I visit on a typical day using both hands.
I suspect I'm not alone. Your stereotypical chatroom pornhound - does he really need to visit 2000 porn sites a day? Can he keep track of 50 "chat through the web" sites a day? No. He'll find one or two that he likes, and stick with them until he gets bored and moves on. A soccer mom - maybe a "moms with kids" bulletin board, and a few news sites. Her kid - a few entertainment sites, maybe the high school's forum page, and porn after he's disabled the censorware.
For most interactive sites, you find a community and then stay there until you find something more interesting. If the content is sufficiently compelling, (e.g./.), you stay forever. Most other sites are static; a corporation's press releases occur weekly/monthly, and any given "this is my dog" page (which might be interesting to you if it's your best friend's dog!) can only be expected to change every few months, as most people don't change their families/pets/lifestyles on a daily basis - in either case, why waste time visiting a static site daily, since 90% of the time, nothing will have changed?
I doubt that I'm a regular visitor to more than 2 or 3 of the top 50 sites. I doubt I'll ever visit more than 10-20 of 'em. But I do know that - compared to my old days, where I'd surf to dozens of sites in a random walk through the web in an afternoon - well over 90% of the traffic on port 80 associated with my top 50 sites.
Threemoons wrote: > This Order's true target will no doubt rear its disgusting head in the > next few weeks or so.
Amen. That's the part that frightens me.
(1)(a)(1) The first part is pretty good. There's nothing wrong with investigating the "...extent to which existing Federal laws provide a sufficient basis for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet". If something is illegal in the Real World, it's probably illegal on the 'net.
(1)(a)(2) The second bit is neutral - in and of itself. "The extent to which new tec hnology tools, capabilities, or legal authorities may be required for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet" simply means "hey, if someone's doing something naughty, how much new technology do we need to find them?"
So what's the agenda? It's structured like most good propaganda documents - start with something everyone will agree with, stick in something that may have "unintended consequences" (to give you room to manoeuver), and then bury the real agenda deep down in the document, covered with noise. I've often felt that reading Fedspeak is more like an exercise in steganography. (The irony of this is left as an exercise for the reader.)
The obvious answer to (1) is "For the most part, existing federal laws probably do. Let's figure out if we've left any loopholes that need to be plugged."
The obvious answer to (2) is "Not many could be developed and implemented without draconian legislation (e.g. banning crypto) or an enormous erosion of civil liberties (e.g. mandating key escrow and/or automatic wiretap technologies built into all communications gear). The crypto genie has been out of the bottle for decades; if you want to enforce the law, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Sucks to be you, but even policing in a democracy ain't supposed to be trivial, and even if we wanted to make it easy for you, it's too late; you'll have to rely on HUMINT, not SIGINT.
Any/.'er on this Working Group would be done with it at that point. "Mr. President, set up e-mail hotlines like the one at enforcement@sec.gov and staff 'em with people who can nail the abusers, and sponsor training for local police departments so they have a rudimentary degree of technical clue when it comes to people using the 'net for criminal activity."
Of course, we're not on the Working Group. Buried at the tail end of the document is a list of names. Hmm... an interesting list indeed.
And so, buried in the noise we find the real signal... Instead, we've got the Attorney-General and the directors of the FBI, ATF, and DEA here, none of whom have been terribly interested in the Internet as "an important medium both domestically and internationally for commerce and free speech", and all of whom likely consider things like auto-wiretapping technologies, key escrow, and the elimination of strong crypto as precisely the things that are "...required for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct..."
Perhaps there's hope in the EO's (3)(b) paragraph, which specifies "technology-neutral laws and regulations", but I wouldn't count on it.
Finally, note that the committee isn't limited to the people on the list; it includes under Sec. 3. (11), "Other Federal officials deemed appropriate by the Chair of the Working Group". Seeing as how the Chair of the Working Group is none other than Ms. Reno herself, I wouldn't place any bets on anything but token representation from technology companies and/or privacy advocates on the Working Group.
> Can you say False Consensus Building
And if you're still having trouble with saying "False Consensus Building", try saying "Stack The Deck" first.
I'm gonna indulge myself and get political here. I was a resident of Ontario for many years; the current provincial administration in Ontario is a libertarian's dream. (OK, maybe that's giving 'em too much credit - they've also done some pretty loony things too - but they're the closest thing to libertarians I've ever seen in power.)
They're politicians - and ideologues - which is a dangerous combination, even (especially!) if you happen to like their ideology, as I do. But at least you know what they stand for and what they're gonna do when elected. Here's a snapshot of their platform:
Lower taxes. They were first elected with a promise to cut the provincial portion of income taxes by 30%. Even I thought they were blowing smoke up the voters' arses on that one - and then they did it. I was both pleased and stunned.
Lower spending. The five years preceding the current administration saw a socialist administration which hiked welfare benefits by 20%, and taxes to match. Ontario was one of the highest-taxed, highest-spending, highest-deficit provinces when the socialists got the boot for the new crowd. All the spending cuts that were made in Ontario were also campaign promises.
Generally libertarian business/social practices. Relaxed labor laws, less red tape, less governmental interference in private and commercial affairs.
Within a month of their election 4-5 years ago, this administration:
Abolished photo radar (brought in by the previous administration - no, not visible cameras on the side of the road as deterrents, but unmarked vans, driving along with traffic, designed to maximize revenue.)
Abolished race quotas (the previous administration brought 'em in and said "they're not quotas, they're merely numerical goals for all businesses to meet or get fined")
Repealed a rabidly pro-union piece of workplace legislation (umm, also brought in by the previous administration...)
Cut welfare payments by 20%.
Instituted the first part of a 5-year tax cutting plan.
Again - all of these things were election promises. This is the first time I'd ever seen a party elected with a platform of repeal laws, not enacting new ones. It was also the first time I'd seen a party actually do the stuff it said it would do during the campaign.
Five years later, the previous administration's tax hikes had been completely undone, and the budget, which had been running $12B deficits annually, was within epsilon of being balanced. Well, you get the idea about what the current situation in Ontario is about. Ontario lived through five years under socialism, and then brought in the right-wing libertarians in a landslide of disgust with the socialists. That brought about 4-5 years of radical social change, after which Ontario ended up with the lowest provincial taxes in Canada, and a balanced budget to boot.
The best part? After five years of relative economic freedom (and incessant whining from bitter socialists about how the province was going to hell in a handbasket:), the voters finally got their chance to pass judgement on the new regime...
drum roll...
...and the right-wing libertarian crowd got re-elected with another majority. Based on the fact that they spent five years in power and made good on every tax cut promise they made in the first campaign, folks who live in Ontario can look forward to more income tax cuts, and a 20% cut in a large part of their property taxes.
So what the hell does this have to do with crypto?
IMNSHO, if you elect libertarians - regardless of the party banner they happen to be running under - the free crypto just comes with the rest of the goodies.
In addition to the article on Traffic Waves that someone posted up here a few moments ago, here's another one from the same author on another site, discussing practical applications: Curing lane-marge traffic jams.
To give you an idea of the scale of the modelling problem itself, there are commercial companies selling software in the $500-1500 range (and up, no doubt) for analyzing these problems. Here's an example: http://www.trafficware.com. In addition to demos (sadly, only for Windoze) it also contains many links and information on the mathematics behind traffic modelling.
All I can say is that I modified my driving habits after reading these sites, not out of any altruistic desire to improve traffic flow, but because it was fascinating to experiment with the theory that even a single car in a large traffic jam can act as an "antiparticle" and singlehandedly improve flow in two or three lanes. The improvement in traffic flow behind me (and my reduced blood pressure as a driver) was just a happy side effect.
Just send 5*10^50 atoms of hydrogen to each of the five star systems listed below. Then, add your own system to the top of the list, delete the system at the bottom, and send out copies of this message to 100 other solar systems.
If you follow these instructions, within 0.25 galactic rotations you are guaranteed to receive enough hydrogen in return to power your civilization until the heat death of the universe!
Yes, the CA antispam law is a good first step, as it allows ISPs to sue spammers.
Problem is, most ISPs won't sue. ISPs are in the business of providing IP connectivity, not suing spammers. Small ISPs don't generally have the money to bring about such suits in the first place, and large ISPs don't have the time to launch a dozen suits against every day's load of new dialup spammers.
What I want is something like the WA state law, which allows for a "private right of action" against the spammer. This allows the recipient of the spam, not the ISP, to sue. If the spammer doesn't show up in court to defend itself, a default judgement is entered against it, and the judgement can be sold off to a debt collection agency.
(Yes, if you live in Washington, that next spam could be worth up to $500! MAKE MONEY FAST!)
What's interesting about the WA state law is that most of the cases where people have collected $500 for being spammed haven't gone to court. Often, a demand letter in an amount less than $500 is all that's required, and the spammer, knowing it hasn't a hope in hell of winning in court, and wishing to avoid an encounter with the legal system, merely forks over the cash.
OK, that's the theory. Now the practice. Here's a guy in Washington, who sues spammers for fun. He's collected $3,900 to date.
If you live in Washington - go thou and do likewise.
Quoth the www.boston.com article: > > The address McWee said was left behind is registered with the > Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, a public registry service > for Internet addressees. According to the service, there are two > phone numbers in Beijing listed with that address. > > When The Associated Press called the numbers, a person who > answered the phone identified them as belonging to the Public > Security Ministry. A telephone operator at the ministry said they > belonged to its Internet Monitoring Bureau.
Silly question for y'all... as much as I'd like to believe that the Chinese Government is involved in DOSing "subversive" sites around the world, I remember reading something to the effect that all IP connectivity from China to the rest of the world goes through some sort of monitoring/firewall/gateway thingy.
If, for WWW access, this takes the form of some sort of proxy, perhaps it's only natural that the IP addresses of Chinese surfers appear to all be coming from a netblock controlled by the "Internet Monitoring Bureau"? Maybe it's the Chinese Government, maybe it's a Chinese script kiddie.
Maybe the Internet Monitoring Bureau, as they presumably have control over what domains get registered, happens to be the default telephone contact for domains in.cn, whether or not all traffic goes through a proxy server.
Does anyone have any hard information on how "Internet access" works in China?
My gut says it's still the Chinese government. But my brain's telling me not to jump to conclusions, especially when the most sensational "evidence" is based a phone call from an Associated Press reporter from a WHOIS lookup on APNIC.
(After all, when was the last time you saw an AP reporter who even knew what a WHOIS lookup was, let alone one who would consider that the concept of "contact information" for domains in a country like China might be completely different from that in the States.)
So - like I said - anyone know how IP connectivity in China really works and that this isn't just a red herring?
Re:MAPS sucks. (why was this flamebaited?)
on
NSI to be RBL'ed?
·
· Score: 4
>...poorly (crappily even) written documents... >...I am a bit dumber than the elite hackers that run mail-abuse.org.. >...unsolicited flames sent to lgrimani@hotmail.com will get reported to MAPS!
Opens with ad hominem arguments and ends with moot threats. I think I can see why it got flamebaited.
That said, the AC who wrote the article did have some good points, which probably bear repeating:
The RBL and similar blackholing technologies are distressing and confusing for newbies. While using the RBL is voluntary at the ISP level, the newbie typically has no idea that his ISP is using it. (He just wonders why his friends on ISPs that don't use it are getting 50 spams a day to his 5-10:)
If an ISP lands itself on the RBL, there is collateral damage, and consequently,
The RBL is a very heavy mallet to swing at a site. Whether or not this constitutes overkill, of course, is left as an exercise for/.
One problem, though - most of these concerns are valid only for situations in which an ISP is RBLed, and customers of the ISP wonder why their mail is blocked. For a blocking of NSI (or RealNetworks' mail servers), only those machines would be blackholed - and thus, only users on those spamming machines (in this case, presumably just a mailing 'bot) are likely to suffer collateral damage.
An RBL for an ISP is different - it passes the support load from the newbie customers of the ISP on to the support department of the ISP. On the other hand - when all else, including the efforts of the RBL team to resolve the situation peacefully, has failed, maybe that's the only option left. If an ISP chooses to harbor spammers, its customers will suffer, and leave.
Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not (and it's certainly a valid subject for debate), but that's not what we're talking about here.
An RBL for a spam-spewing mail server in a single domain inconveniences only the ability of that server to spew spam. If the server exists solely as a spam hydrant, then the collateral damage is essentially zero.
Finally, in MAPS' defence, it's hard to get a site on the RBL. Writing Nick (Nick Nicholas, former pacbell.net abuse god:) and saying "I mailed abuse@isp.com and they ignored me" isn't enough. A history of abuse must be established and documented, as well as attempts by phone as well as e-mail to resolve the situation. The MAPS team then goes out and attempts to resolve the situation themselves. Their decision to place a site on the RBL isn't an everyday occurrence; it's a last resort reserved for the most brazen of offenders.
FrameMaker. "If there's doc to be written, we wanna write it - but we won't port our most powerful documentation-creation platform to Linux."
Acrobat. "We want everyone to use PDF. We've got Acrobat reader for every platform under the sun, but the only platform for which we support the creation of PDF is Windoze and Mac. (For Acrobat Capture, it's Windoze only). Run any kind of UNIX - proprietary or open-source - and wanna create PDF? Forget it!"
So, let me get this straight. "We support open source, but our authoring tools are only available on a few proprietary UNIX platforms, definitely not on Linux, and our notion of a cross-platform output format can be viewed on anything, but only created on a PC or Mac."
If that's "supporting" open source, I think I prefer Bill Gates' way of supporting open source.
FrameMaker is great. I love it. I've used it daily on both a Sun box an an SGI. Why there, and not on a Windoze box? Because Frame has strong scripting and automation capabilities that make it the ideal doc-producing platform in a UNIX environment. (Ironically, these capabilites are largely lacking in the Windoze version of Frame.)
PDF is great. I'd love to be able to publish in it. I'd love to extend my Frame production scripts to produce stuff in PDF as well as PostScript. But hey, I've only got a lowly UNIX box, not one of those spiffy NT things that can create PDF.
Wake up, Adobe. If you really want your products used "wherever something needs to be documented", port your products to Linux. I'd have a had much easier time convincing my employers to spring for FrameMaker if I could have told him it ran on a white-box PC running Linux, rather than a Sun workstation. Telling them that in addition to the pricey workstation, they also need a white-box PC running Windoze in order for me to generate PDF doesn't help.
Now ask yourself, if you were a TV producer, wouldn't you be interested in which shows people tuned into if they only tuned into one show? Who cares about people who change to a program just because the previous one went to a commercial break.
You've just hit the nail squarely on the head. The Nielsen Group doesn't want a representative sample of all TV viewers - only the ones that advertisers can sell stuff to. People who watch TV for content aren't part of that group.
More to the point - the purpose of the Neilsen ratings isn't to tell TV producers what they need to get the eyeballs of the die-hard fans who watch one or two programs religiously - it's to tell advertisers where their dollars will be best-spent. Better to ignore the Babylon 5 fanatic who makes $80K/year and ignores the advertising in order to get the family of four making $30K and spending all their disposable income on the crap that Bratleigh and Snotley see during the commercials (er, the 30-second ones between the 30-minute ones!) every Saturday morning.
The TV viewer who changes channels when the commercials come on, or who only watches a few hours a week, is like the web surfer who turns off images and/or blocks banner ads. He or she who ignores the marketing is, perforce, not worth marketing to. By contrast, the people who sit, slack-jawed, through every commercial displayed, and who spend several hours a day doing it, regardless of whether the programming is worth watching or not, are a very sought-after market.
What this has done to the quality of programming is left as an exercise to the reader. Which, of course, is why many of us have abandoned television for the 'net.
Speaking of which - I loved being able to read a few articles about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing without having to sit through six hours of unending coverage about an inexperienced pilot who Darwinned himself out of the gene pool by being too stupid to trust his instruments instead of his vertigo-addled inner ears.
But back to your Nielsen experience - it's clear that TV advertisers are just as happy to not have to put up with people like us as we are not to have to put up with people like them. They go where the money is, we go where the content is. 10 years ago, I'd have been worried about this - after all, where do you go for content once all media have been dumbed-down for the slack-jaw set? Thankfully, the answer is right in front of us - we just make and distribute our own damn content, and to hell with anyone who tries to get in our way.
As I recall from my misspent youth, our code was something like this:
If it's military/government/medical - don't fsck with it. Don't even attempt entry. It had nothing to do with the cops - just the realization that some systems just might be mission-critical, and the consequences of a mistake ("Oops, my new command shell turned itself into a fork bomb") were too grave.
Once in, don't damage anything. Don't touch user data. Don't interfere with the operation of the system from the end-user's perspective.
On your way out, clean up your mess. Undo your backdoors as much as possible, and always attempt to tell the sysadmin what holes you used to get in so he can fix 'em before the next group of wanderers shows up.
I learned a lot about various operating systems during this phase. Where else would a protogeek in the early '80s be able to play with VMS and UNIX other than on someone else's machine through an X.25 network?
On software, yes, my friends and I cracked. We learned a lot of assembly language during this time. To this day, I still have, on a bookshelf, about half of Infocom's product line, and all of Sir-Tech's. I purchased every single box on that shelf. There were cracked Infocom games out there, but we ended up developing a crack that beat the "normal" crack by a country mile. We ended up admitting defeat on Sir-Tech's Wizardry; someone else published the crack that beat its nibble-counting scheme before we finished disassembling the code. (Then we just went back to playing it:)
But y'know what? We learned a hell of a lot about programming in the meantime. When we weren't cracking, we were writing our own code - versions of Life, adventure games, graphics hacks, whatever we felt like doing. We started off as crackers (of other people's software and the occasional system), and learned what we needed to know to end up as hackers (of our own software).
Someone posted an interesting comment on the intellectualcapital.com site - suggesting that today's crackers' efforts would be much better spent on using what's available to create something new, rather than idly DOSing web servers. I echo those sentiments. Nobody has to break into someone else's computer to have access to a modern operating system / compiler / better-than-a-1-MHz-8-bit-CPU. The power my friends and I once spent hours trying to get access to is now available to anyone, and it's available for free - as in beer and speech. Get out there and use it. If you must break into someone else's system, you've got the option of doing it as a friendly competition amongst your friends on your own network, a'la "Capture the Flag" at DEFCON. Besides being legal, it's a hell of a lot more challenging and fun when your opponent actually knows what he's doing!
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm preaching to the choir here... but hey, isn't that half the fun of/.?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"...We have not taken a position of refusing to make exceptions overall"
Yeah, the way Mindspring rolled out the port-25-blocking was pretty lame, and Tom, by virtue of his position, sounds like he had to choose his words carefully in that post, but it sounds to me like he's willing to listen. Tom's got plenty of clue.
On a technical level - while the following idea won't solve the case where you're relaying through a server for which you have authorization to relay but don't have administrative access... if you do own the server through which you're relaying, I'd imagine you could have it listen for SMTP traffic on a port other than port 25. Your outbound mail goes to your "other relay" via this other port. Or you can just relay outbound mail through smtp.mindspring.com, and fetch your incoming mail via POP. (Disclaimer: I haven't given any of these schemes because I haven't had the need to relay outside of Mindspring's network. Anyone who has put thought into this issue, please post your thoughts and/or solution... sounds like it's in demand!)
> Basically I think the world would be better off
> without any people like that, it's just a sick attitute.
In terms of game theory, I viewed the Cold War as a high-stakes game of Prisoner's Dilemma. The optimal strategy in PD is tit-for-tat. If your opponent doesn't defect, neither should you. If your opponent does defect, you should respond on the next turn with a defection. Reinforce good behavior with good behavior, and bad with bad. Eliminating your ability to defect - and telegraphing this elimination to your opponent in advance of a game of PD - is poor strategy indeed when you have reason to believe your opponent won't be as high-minded as you.
Let the truth be known, I agree with you - the world would be a better place without the "If we don't they will" people. (Of course, it'd also be a better place if cold beer ran from my faucets instead of water, spammers were nonexistent, the Feds had a clue on crypto and privacy issues, and if Bill Gates had spent less time studying and more time partying in high school.)
Unless you've developed a mechanism for detecting and eliminating "if we don't they will" people on both sides of an incipient technological arms race (if you do have such a mechanism, activate it now before they find out about it! :), I'm afraid both sides will continue to need them.
> We already knew what was possible before it was built.
So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM :-)
Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?
Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?
Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.
A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 and Page 2) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.
How crazy was Project Chariot? Consider the fact that Bikini Atoll is now one of the best sites for skin diving and sport fishing on the planet. (Read that as "lots of shipwrecks in pristine condition" and a nearly-undisturbed environment for the past 40 years.) The most serious radiological contaminant on Bikini is Cs-137, and the main reason it's a problem is because the local vegetation picks it up in place of potassium. It's a land problem, not a sea problem. Since a putative Alaskan harbor isn't a likely site for crop-growing, and since it would have been excavated with high-yielding thermonuclear devices designed to maximize explosive yield and minimize heavy radionuclide production, the residual radiation levels around the site would have dropped to habitable levels relatively quickly. (Of course, whether it would have cooled off in time to be economically viable compared to conventional construction, or even whether or not a harbor would have benefited the Alaskan economy is a question for economists, not physicists :)
IMHO the best use for nuclear explosions would have been Project Orion; a nuclear pulse engine. Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear.
Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.
Back to nukes. Anyone interested in the history of atomic weaponry should consider a visit to the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico. The timing is great - the first weekend of October also marks the date on which White Sands Missile Range opens up the Trinity Site to the general public, allowing tours of the site of the first fission explosion.
Finally - whatever your opinions on the horror of the bomb's use - the physics behind it was still beautiful. Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design is highly encouraged to read Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ - a 14-part document also available at the FAS High Energy Weapons archive.
Testimony: "Your honor, as you can plainly see, the {kiddie porn, bombmaking instructions, drugmaking instructions, nuclear secrets} is on the client's hard drive. We just can't tell you how we decrypted it."
Reality: "Hey, Officer Crypto-Dude, can you XOR the suspect's scramdisk file of random noise with some {kiddie porn, bombmaking instructions, drugmaking instructions, nuclear secrets}? I really need a conviction, man!"
Hell, why bother creating a bogus one-time pad if you don't have to reveal the method? How about "Hey, Officer Crypto-Dude, gimme the files off the hard drive from the other guy we convicted last month."
If the prosecution doesn't have to disclose how it decrypted your files, the only defence you have against fabricated evidence is to give up your keys and divulge what was really on your hard drive. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
As I wrote yesterday, I'm far more worried about corrupt cops than corrupt spooks. NSA knows it has better things to do with its time than invade your privacy. I'm not so convinced the same is true of Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh.
> opposed to software implementations because they did not believe
> that any software encryption solution was secure.
True. And correct - even today, if you can fab DES chips and place them into DES gadgets, ideally in tamper-resistant packaging, you can be more confident of the security of your implementation than a guy with a DES-in-bits-of-magnetic-flux computer. It's a lot harder to replace a chip than it is to install a trojan on a target machine :)
> Every intervention of the NSA of which I am aware has had the effect of
> making a product more secure, not less.
Amen. The strengthening of DES against differential attacks is probably just the best--known example. Just because NSA's hat isn't lily-white doesn't mean it's black. At the time of the strengthening, a strong DES was a Very Good Thing for national security.
Truth be known - and I'm still not saying that I'd trust NSA as far as I could throw it - I'd trust them before I'd trust the FBI. NSA's actions are consistent with the use of SIGINT for national security. Compare the number of times NSA has played the "drug dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists" card with the number of times we've heard it coming from Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh.
IMHO part of this is likely cultural - NSA knows it's got better things to do with its time than invade your privacy. Any harm done to your privacy from NSA is simply collateral damage as it carries out its mission. Law enforcement, presumably since it comes from a culture in which "chasing down bad guys" is more important than "leaving the good guys alone", has yet to figure this out.
There's also one being run at the University of Iowa College of Business), which has links for current political markets including the 2000 Congressional, 2000 DNC, 2000 RNC, and New York Senate races. Let the games begin!
A little poking around reveals there are also a few markets open in Austrian politics.
And finally, I think that the site referenced in the USA Today article is here: http://www.posdaq.co.kr, but since it's in Korean, I'm not totally sure about that :-)
> self-regulation without government coercion? How about the MPAA ratings
> system? The Comics Code Authority? That's just right off the top of my
> head.
Actually, I think that was Thurow's point - my understanding is that none of those ratings systems would have come into being without the threat of the "government club" being used on those who didn't comply, and that it's precisely this sort of "self-regulation" (i.e. the government using the ISP industry as its club to spare itself the embarassment of drafting yet another set of unconstitutional laws, only to see them shot down in court again) that he favors.
IMHO, the government realizes that it can't nullify the First Amendment, but if it can get others to do the dirty work on its behalf in the interest of "e-commerce", it won't have to. IMHO this is the whole point of the "self-regulation" push. (Non-Americans can replace "First Amendment" with whatever guarantees of "free speech" are appropriate to their countries.)
In the meantime, many others in the responses to this article have done good jobs of pointing folks to articles and sites that debunk Thurow. When even economists appear to agree that Thurow isn't a credible credible source, I think we can safely move on. It sounds to me like Thurow saw a big conference on self-regulation and wanted to put his two Deutschmarks in on behalf of Bertelsmann. Nice try, but no frankfurter.
> (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for
> determining who gets what.
Precisely.
Marx: "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Marx lived in an age in which all economics were based on the economics of scarcity. The second half of the little equation implied the use of force.
In a Gift Culture economy, the second half ceases to be an issue; from each according to his whim might be more like it. Given a sufficiently useful thing - say, a SCSI driver - there's bound to be someone willing to get off his duff and code it up, and from that point on, the advantages of OSS which we all know and love, take over. It's in the developer's best interest to see that the code is distributed widely. At that point, anyone who happens to need a SCSI driver can simply download it.
But to call this "communism" - when it requires economic products (software) that were not only nonexistent, but inconceivable within the socioeconomic framework in which communism was invented - smacks of intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
We'll take it as axiomatic that communism is coercive and bad under the economics of scarcity - you have to coerce people who don't buy into the system to "give" up their material posessions, or you have to coerce them into buying into the system. Whether you deprive them of their stuff or try to reprogram their minds, it's coercive, and leads to the disasters we've seen in the 20th century whenever an attempt is made to implement it on a large scale.
So much for superseding capitalism in any economic activity involving atoms instead of bits. Been there, done that, it didn't work. So let's try it with software:
Under "cyber-communism" - who writes the code for the payroll systems? The point-of-sale terminals? The inventory software for McDonalds? All the other "boring" stuff that isn't "fun"? Or does "from each according to his ability" simply mean that instead of taking your grain or your barrels of oil, the Central Committee will simply take your time and force you to work on some mind-numbingly dull project becase, after all, you're able to code payroll?
So much for superseding capitalism for all the grunt work.
What's left is what we already know to be true - for certain types of software...
> giving away my software is the greedy thing to do.
> Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
Back to the cybercommunism article, however - exactly how this very limited subset of economic activity (i.e. the development of cool software of broad-based application) can "supersede capitalism" is utterly beyond me. Furthermore, what this has to do with communism - a philosophical system invented in an age where a Gift Culture was inconceivable - is equally beyond me. But saying that "Giving cool and useful software away is fun" doesn't quite sell as many books as using buzzword-compliant postmodernisms such as "cybercommunism" or the "California Ideology", does it?
I concur with Ami. The arguments offered by the author just don't compute.
For those who haven't seen the Glubco microwave weapon, it's even simpler and cheaper than the HERF. It's also a hell of a lot more dangerous.
All you do is find an old microwave oven, tear it open, and remove the magnetron and associated HV power supply circuitry. You then build a small waveguide behind it so as not to fry yourself too badly. Point and shoot.
Now that I've said this, and the script-kiddies are off Darwinating themselves out of the gene pool, here's what happens to them:
- Stupidity I. The capacitors in a high voltage supply on a microwave oven might not drain themselves automatically. If that happens, and the script kiddie is using both hands to play with the supply, he could fibrillate and die on the spot.
- Stupidity II: If he's using one hand to play with the supply, when he gets zapped, he scrapes his hand to hell when jumping away from the shock. A Dejanews search on why you have to discharge the anode of a TV set before working on the tube will provide much amusement.
- Stupidity III: All the nasty 120VAC bits are exposed, and our script kiddie doesn't use an isolation transformer, or does something similarly stupid. Bzzt, game over, thanks for playing.
As you can see, it's easy to weed out a good chunk of the script kiddie population before they even finish building the damn thing. Now, suppose they survive this long...- Leakage. They get internal burns because the waveguide wasn't built well enough. Visions of fingers turned into fried chicken wings come to mind as someone makes a waveguide that's short and easily-concealable, but that accidentally gives very wide dispersion.
- Reflection. More of the same. Y'know how your microwave oven works? Script kiddie points magnetron at a metal wall.
- Fire. Ever throw a CD in a microwave and not turn the microwave off after the pretty light show? The CD starts to smoke and burn. I'd imagine it'd be very easy to get the same thing to happen with the house wiring. And downright trivial to get it to happen to the traces on any printed circuit board.
If I had to put money on it, I'd say the RF burns would be the most horrific side-effect of a kid playing with the Glubco magnetron weapon, but that the most probably side-effect would be that he burns down his own house while beta-testing it.Moral of the story: It's a cool idea. And in a situation of civil disorder (East Timor, anyone?) might be a handy field-expedient terror weapon - plug it into a wall socket in the target building, turn it on, and get the hell out of dodge while everything burns. For anything else, it's merely a quick and easy ticket out of the gene pool. Just like the bogus recipies in the "Anarchist's Cookbook", think of it as evolution in action.
But I wonder about a company that, with version 1.0 of the G3 firmware, allowed a G3 to be upgraded to a G4, but then disabled this option in version 1.1 of the firmware.
If I understand the Wired article correctly - it appears that Apple intentionally crippled its G3 firmware to prevent users from upgrading a G3 to a G4 with a CPU swap, presumably in order to "encourage" folks to buy a whole G4 box rather than just the chip upgrade.
At least with Intel, I may need a new motherboard for CPU swaps... but at least I can keep the video card, sound card, and, umm... plain white case :)
Can any Mac folks out there explain what's up with the G3/G4 firmware issue?
> posts at an automatic 2, I certainly have to
> agree. There are many times when I've posted
> something off-the-cuff that I've wished I
> could specify that it should be with a score of 1.
As another "+2 karma" poster, let me just say "me too", for precisely the same reasons.
More specifically, I propose that - at the time of posting - the poster of an article ought to have:
(a) his or her karma score displayed on the "post comment" form
(b) a pull-down option to select whether the post should be posted with a score of -1, 0, 1, or 2.
As for the issue of whether or not ACs should be allowed to post, IMHO they should. While there are many trolls and abuses of this privilege, there are also benefits. I find myself reading crypto/NSA/spooky posts and science posts at level 0, largely because in the case of the former, people with clue may also have a reason to want to post anonymously, and in the case of the latter, those with clue may not post frequently enough to Slashdot to justify the trouble of registering with the site. When it comes to astronomy, I'd much rather read the AC post at 0 from the Ph.D. in Astrophysics debunking the 5-10 registered posters at +1 who have no idea what they're talking about.
> Can it be networked into a Beowulf?
I dunno about it running linux, but I believe the "networking a bunch of human brains into a Beowulf" has already been done. I think they called it "open source" when the resulting cluster is used to develop software :)
I've refused to shop at Spamazon for quite some time due to their penchant for spamming. Cases in point go back at least as far as early 1998 and are widely documented on Dejanews.
A better write-up of their business practices can be found at the page of Peter Seebach, a long-time n.a.n-a.e (news.admin.net-abuse.email) regular.
Finally, there's Spamazon's practice of shilling for themselves on USENET - an "astroturf" campaign eerily reminiscient of Micros~1's "independently-written letters to the editor" stunt. (Available through Dejanews - Start here or search for Message-ID <3584e5cc.1368345@news.sirius.com>.
While I'm as disgusted at the "purchase circles" idea as anyone, I'm not at all surprised. Spamazon doesn't think in terms of customers; merely in terms of targets for additional marketing. Take your business elsewhere. (Many on n.a.n-a.e have recommended Powell's. I concur.)
My first experience of the WWW was in 1993/4. My first impression was "this is just like FTP or Gopher, but it decodes .GIFs and uses nice fonts!". There were only a few sites up, and I navigated everywhere from site to site, just seeing what was out there - content didn't matter as much as the novelty of going from one site to another with the click of a mouse.
Over the next year, people invented, and I discovered, search engines. "Cool! I can type in keywords and get something reasonably related to what I'm looking for!" Maybe my friend had put up a site with links to his friends' sites. Many "sites" were merely lists of links that the owner found interesting. Random surfing was still king. There was a wonderful War Games-esque feeling to be had from typing "let's play global thermonuclear war" into a window and getting results back that pointed to .mil sites :-)
Over time, I found myself visiting certain sites more often - they got bookmarked. I used a search engine as my default home page, but still spent most of my time feeding it interesting words to see what would come back, or words pertaining to technical questions to see if I could find answers.
Flash forward to today - I now find myself visiting only a handful of sites daily. Slashdot for tech news, a couple of major commercial media sites for local/national coverage, a financial site to get business news, and that's about it. I don't like watching the same news footage ten times during the evening TV news broadcast; why would I want to read the same news story ten times a day? There was an earthquake in Turkey. A buncha people died. What can FooNews tell me about that that BarNews won't?
I can count the number of sites I visit on a daily basis on one hand. I can count the total number of sites I visit on a typical day using both hands.
I suspect I'm not alone. Your stereotypical chatroom pornhound - does he really need to visit 2000 porn sites a day? Can he keep track of 50 "chat through the web" sites a day? No. He'll find one or two that he likes, and stick with them until he gets bored and moves on. A soccer mom - maybe a "moms with kids" bulletin board, and a few news sites. Her kid - a few entertainment sites, maybe the high school's forum page, and porn after he's disabled the censorware.
For most interactive sites, you find a community and then stay there until you find something more interesting. If the content is sufficiently compelling, (e.g. /.), you stay forever. Most other sites are static; a corporation's press releases occur weekly/monthly, and any given "this is my dog" page (which might be interesting to you if it's your best friend's dog!) can only be expected to change every few months, as most people don't change their families/pets/lifestyles on a daily basis - in either case, why waste time visiting a static site daily, since 90% of the time, nothing will have changed?
I doubt that I'm a regular visitor to more than 2 or 3 of the top 50 sites. I doubt I'll ever visit more than 10-20 of 'em. But I do know that - compared to my old days, where I'd surf to dozens of sites in a random walk through the web in an afternoon - well over 90% of the traffic on port 80 associated with my top 50 sites.
Am I alone?
> This Order's true target will no doubt rear its disgusting head in the
> next few weeks or so.
Amen. That's the part that frightens me.
(1)(a)(1)
The first part is pretty good. There's nothing wrong with investigating the "...extent to which existing Federal laws provide a sufficient basis for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet". If something is illegal in the Real World, it's probably illegal on the 'net.
(1)(a)(2)
The second bit is neutral - in and of itself. "The extent to which new tec hnology tools, capabilities, or legal authorities may be required for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet" simply means "hey, if someone's doing something naughty, how much new technology do we need to find them?"
So what's the agenda?
It's structured like most good propaganda documents - start with something everyone will agree with, stick in something that may have "unintended consequences" (to give you room to manoeuver), and then bury the real agenda deep down in the document, covered with noise. I've often felt that reading Fedspeak is more like an exercise in steganography. (The irony of this is left as an exercise for the reader.)
The obvious answer to (1) is "For the most part, existing federal laws probably do. Let's figure out if we've left any loopholes that need to be plugged."
The obvious answer to (2) is "Not many could be developed and implemented without draconian legislation (e.g. banning crypto) or an enormous erosion of civil liberties (e.g. mandating key escrow and/or automatic wiretap technologies built into all communications gear). The crypto genie has been out of the bottle for decades; if you want to enforce the law, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Sucks to be you, but even policing in a democracy ain't supposed to be trivial, and even if we wanted to make it easy for you, it's too late; you'll have to rely on HUMINT, not SIGINT.
Any /.'er on this Working Group would be done with it at that point. "Mr. President, set up e-mail hotlines like the one at enforcement@sec.gov and staff 'em with people who can nail the abusers, and sponsor training for local police departments so they have a rudimentary degree of technical clue when it comes to people using the 'net for criminal activity."
Of course, we're not on the Working Group. Buried at the tail end of the document is a list of names. Hmm... an interesting list indeed.
And so, buried in the noise we find the real signal...
Instead, we've got the Attorney-General and the directors of the FBI, ATF, and DEA here, none of whom have been terribly interested in the Internet as "an important medium both domestically and internationally for commerce and free speech", and all of whom likely consider things like auto-wiretapping technologies, key escrow, and the elimination of strong crypto as precisely the things that are "...required for effective investigation and prosecution of unlawful conduct..."
Perhaps there's hope in the EO's (3)(b) paragraph, which specifies "technology-neutral laws and regulations", but I wouldn't count on it.
Finally, note that the committee isn't limited to the people on the list; it includes under Sec. 3. (11), "Other Federal officials deemed appropriate by the Chair of the Working Group". Seeing as how the Chair of the Working Group is none other than Ms. Reno herself, I wouldn't place any bets on anything but token representation from technology companies and/or privacy advocates on the Working Group.
> Can you say False Consensus Building
And if you're still having trouble with saying "False Consensus Building", try saying "Stack The Deck" first.
They're politicians - and ideologues - which is a dangerous combination, even (especially!) if you happen to like their ideology, as I do. But at least you know what they stand for and what they're gonna do when elected. Here's a snapshot of their platform:
- Lower taxes. They were first elected with a promise to cut the provincial portion of income taxes by 30%. Even I thought they were blowing smoke up the voters' arses on that one - and then they did it. I was both pleased and stunned.
- Lower spending. The five years preceding the current administration saw a socialist administration which hiked welfare benefits by 20%, and taxes to match. Ontario was one of the highest-taxed, highest-spending, highest-deficit provinces when the socialists got the boot for the new crowd. All the spending cuts that were made in Ontario were also campaign promises.
- Generally libertarian business/social practices. Relaxed labor laws, less red tape, less governmental interference in private and commercial affairs.
Within a month of their election 4-5 years ago, this administration:- Abolished photo radar (brought in by the previous administration - no, not visible cameras on the side of the road as deterrents, but unmarked vans, driving along with traffic, designed to maximize revenue.)
- Abolished race quotas (the previous administration brought 'em in and said "they're not quotas, they're merely numerical goals for all businesses to meet or get fined")
- Repealed a rabidly pro-union piece of workplace legislation (umm, also brought in by the previous administration...)
- Cut welfare payments by 20%.
- Instituted the first part of a 5-year tax cutting plan.
Again - all of these things were election promises. This is the first time I'd ever seen a party elected with a platform of repeal laws, not enacting new ones. It was also the first time I'd seen a party actually do the stuff it said it would do during the campaign.Five years later, the previous administration's tax hikes had been completely undone, and the budget, which had been running $12B deficits annually, was within epsilon of being balanced. Well, you get the idea about what the current situation in Ontario is about. Ontario lived through five years under socialism, and then brought in the right-wing libertarians in a landslide of disgust with the socialists. That brought about 4-5 years of radical social change, after which Ontario ended up with the lowest provincial taxes in Canada, and a balanced budget to boot.
The best part? After five years of relative economic freedom (and incessant whining from bitter socialists about how the province was going to hell in a handbasket :), the voters finally got their chance to pass judgement on the new regime...
drum roll...
So what the hell does this have to do with crypto?
IMNSHO, if you elect libertarians - regardless of the party banner they happen to be running under - the free crypto just comes with the rest of the goodies.
To give you an idea of the scale of the modelling problem itself, there are commercial companies selling software in the $500-1500 range (and up, no doubt) for analyzing these problems. Here's an example: http://www.trafficware.com. In addition to demos (sadly, only for Windoze) it also contains many links and information on the mathematics behind traffic modelling.
All I can say is that I modified my driving habits after reading these sites, not out of any altruistic desire to improve traffic flow, but because it was fascinating to experiment with the theory that even a single car in a large traffic jam can act as an "antiparticle" and singlehandedly improve flow in two or three lanes. The improvement in traffic flow behind me (and my reduced blood pressure as a driver) was just a happy side effect.
This really works!
Just send 5*10^50 atoms of hydrogen to each of the five star systems listed below. Then, add your own system to the top of the list, delete the system at the bottom, and send out copies of this message to 100 other solar systems.
If you follow these instructions, within 0.25 galactic rotations you are guaranteed to receive enough hydrogen in return to power your civilization until the heat death of the universe!
Problem is, most ISPs won't sue. ISPs are in the business of providing IP connectivity, not suing spammers. Small ISPs don't generally have the money to bring about such suits in the first place, and large ISPs don't have the time to launch a dozen suits against every day's load of new dialup spammers.
What I want is something like the WA state law, which allows for a "private right of action" against the spammer. This allows the recipient of the spam, not the ISP, to sue. If the spammer doesn't show up in court to defend itself, a default judgement is entered against it, and the judgement can be sold off to a debt collection agency.
(Yes, if you live in Washington, that next spam could be worth up to $500! MAKE MONEY FAST!)
What's interesting about the WA state law is that most of the cases where people have collected $500 for being spammed haven't gone to court. Often, a demand letter in an amount less than $500 is all that's required, and the spammer, knowing it hasn't a hope in hell of winning in court, and wishing to avoid an encounter with the legal system, merely forks over the cash.
OK, that's the theory. Now the practice. Here's a guy in Washington, who sues spammers for fun. He's collected $3,900 to date.
If you live in Washington - go thou and do likewise.
>
> The address McWee said was left behind is registered with the
> Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, a public registry service
> for Internet addressees. According to the service, there are two
> phone numbers in Beijing listed with that address.
>
> When The Associated Press called the numbers, a person who
> answered the phone identified them as belonging to the Public
> Security Ministry. A telephone operator at the ministry said they
> belonged to its Internet Monitoring Bureau.
Silly question for y'all... as much as I'd like to believe that the Chinese Government is involved in DOSing "subversive" sites around the world, I remember reading something to the effect that all IP connectivity from China to the rest of the world goes through some sort of monitoring/firewall/gateway thingy.
If, for WWW access, this takes the form of some sort of proxy, perhaps it's only natural that the IP addresses of Chinese surfers appear to all be coming from a netblock controlled by the "Internet Monitoring Bureau"? Maybe it's the Chinese Government, maybe it's a Chinese script kiddie.
Maybe the Internet Monitoring Bureau, as they presumably have control over what domains get registered, happens to be the default telephone contact for domains in .cn, whether or not all traffic goes through a proxy server.
Does anyone have any hard information on how "Internet access" works in China?
My gut says it's still the Chinese government. But my brain's telling me not to jump to conclusions, especially when the most sensational "evidence" is based a phone call from an Associated Press reporter from a WHOIS lookup on APNIC.
(After all, when was the last time you saw an AP reporter who even knew what a WHOIS lookup was, let alone one who would consider that the concept of "contact information" for domains in a country like China might be completely different from that in the States.)
So - like I said - anyone know how IP connectivity in China really works and that this isn't just a red herring?
>
>
Opens with ad hominem arguments and ends with moot threats. I think I can see why it got flamebaited.
That said, the AC who wrote the article did have some good points, which probably bear repeating:
and consequently,
One problem, though - most of these concerns are valid only for situations in which an ISP is RBLed, and customers of the ISP wonder why their mail is blocked. For a blocking of NSI (or RealNetworks' mail servers), only those machines would be blackholed - and thus, only users on those spamming machines (in this case, presumably just a mailing 'bot) are likely to suffer collateral damage.
An RBL for an ISP is different - it passes the support load from the newbie customers of the ISP on to the support department of the ISP. On the other hand - when all else, including the efforts of the RBL team to resolve the situation peacefully, has failed, maybe that's the only option left. If an ISP chooses to harbor spammers, its customers will suffer, and leave.
Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not (and it's certainly a valid subject for debate), but that's not what we're talking about here.
An RBL for a spam-spewing mail server in a single domain inconveniences only the ability of that server to spew spam. If the server exists solely as a spam hydrant, then the collateral damage is essentially zero.
Finally, in MAPS' defence, it's hard to get a site on the RBL. Writing Nick (Nick Nicholas, former pacbell.net abuse god :) and saying "I mailed abuse@isp.com and they ignored me" isn't enough. A history of abuse must be established and documented, as well as attempts by phone as well as e-mail to resolve the situation. The MAPS team then goes out and attempts to resolve the situation themselves. Their decision to place a site on the RBL isn't an everyday occurrence; it's a last resort reserved for the most brazen of offenders.
- FrameMaker. "If there's doc to be written, we wanna write it - but we won't port our most powerful documentation-creation platform to Linux."
- Acrobat. "We want everyone to use PDF. We've got Acrobat reader for every platform under the sun, but the only platform for which we support the creation of PDF is Windoze and Mac. (For Acrobat Capture, it's Windoze only). Run any kind of UNIX - proprietary or open-source - and wanna create PDF? Forget it!"
So, let me get this straight. "We support open source, but our authoring tools are only available on a few proprietary UNIX platforms, definitely not on Linux, and our notion of a cross-platform output format can be viewed on anything, but only created on a PC or Mac."If that's "supporting" open source, I think I prefer Bill Gates' way of supporting open source.
FrameMaker is great. I love it. I've used it daily on both a Sun box an an SGI. Why there, and not on a Windoze box? Because Frame has strong scripting and automation capabilities that make it the ideal doc-producing platform in a UNIX environment. (Ironically, these capabilites are largely lacking in the Windoze version of Frame.)
PDF is great. I'd love to be able to publish in it. I'd love to extend my Frame production scripts to produce stuff in PDF as well as PostScript. But hey, I've only got a lowly UNIX box, not one of those spiffy NT things that can create PDF.
Wake up, Adobe. If you really want your products used "wherever something needs to be documented", port your products to Linux. I'd have a had much easier time convincing my employers to spring for FrameMaker if I could have told him it ran on a white-box PC running Linux, rather than a Sun workstation. Telling them that in addition to the pricey workstation, they also need a white-box PC running Windoze in order for me to generate PDF doesn't help.
You've just hit the nail squarely on the head. The Nielsen Group doesn't want a representative sample of all TV viewers - only the ones that advertisers can sell stuff to. People who watch TV for content aren't part of that group.
More to the point - the purpose of the Neilsen ratings isn't to tell TV producers what they need to get the eyeballs of the die-hard fans who watch one or two programs religiously - it's to tell advertisers where their dollars will be best-spent. Better to ignore the Babylon 5 fanatic who makes $80K/year and ignores the advertising in order to get the family of four making $30K and spending all their disposable income on the crap that Bratleigh and Snotley see during the commercials (er, the 30-second ones between the 30-minute ones!) every Saturday morning.
The TV viewer who changes channels when the commercials come on, or who only watches a few hours a week, is like the web surfer who turns off images and/or blocks banner ads. He or she who ignores the marketing is, perforce, not worth marketing to. By contrast, the people who sit, slack-jawed, through every commercial displayed, and who spend several hours a day doing it, regardless of whether the programming is worth watching or not, are a very sought-after market.
What this has done to the quality of programming is left as an exercise to the reader. Which, of course, is why many of us have abandoned television for the 'net.
Speaking of which - I loved being able to read a few articles about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing without having to sit through six hours of unending coverage about an inexperienced pilot who Darwinned himself out of the gene pool by being too stupid to trust his instruments instead of his vertigo-addled inner ears.
But back to your Nielsen experience - it's clear that TV advertisers are just as happy to not have to put up with people like us as we are not to have to put up with people like them. They go where the money is, we go where the content is. 10 years ago, I'd have been worried about this - after all, where do you go for content once all media have been dumbed-down for the slack-jaw set? Thankfully, the answer is right in front of us - we just make and distribute our own damn content, and to hell with anyone who tries to get in our way.
If it's military/government/medical - don't fsck with it. Don't even attempt entry. It had nothing to do with the cops - just the realization that some systems just might be mission-critical, and the consequences of a mistake ("Oops, my new command shell turned itself into a fork bomb") were too grave.
Once in, don't damage anything. Don't touch user data. Don't interfere with the operation of the system from the end-user's perspective.
On your way out, clean up your mess. Undo your backdoors as much as possible, and always attempt to tell the sysadmin what holes you used to get in so he can fix 'em before the next group of wanderers shows up.
I learned a lot about various operating systems during this phase. Where else would a protogeek in the early '80s be able to play with VMS and UNIX other than on someone else's machine through an X.25 network?
On software, yes, my friends and I cracked. We learned a lot of assembly language during this time. To this day, I still have, on a bookshelf, about half of Infocom's product line, and all of Sir-Tech's. I purchased every single box on that shelf. There were cracked Infocom games out there, but we ended up developing a crack that beat the "normal" crack by a country mile. We ended up admitting defeat on Sir-Tech's Wizardry; someone else published the crack that beat its nibble-counting scheme before we finished disassembling the code. (Then we just went back to playing it :)
But y'know what? We learned a hell of a lot about programming in the meantime. When we weren't cracking, we were writing our own code - versions of Life, adventure games, graphics hacks, whatever we felt like doing. We started off as crackers (of other people's software and the occasional system), and learned what we needed to know to end up as hackers (of our own software).
Someone posted an interesting comment on the intellectualcapital.com site - suggesting that today's crackers' efforts would be much better spent on using what's available to create something new, rather than idly DOSing web servers. I echo those sentiments. Nobody has to break into someone else's computer to have access to a modern operating system / compiler / better-than-a-1-MHz-8-bit-CPU. The power my friends and I once spent hours trying to get access to is now available to anyone, and it's available for free - as in beer and speech. Get out there and use it. If you must break into someone else's system, you've got the option of doing it as a friendly competition amongst your friends on your own network, a'la "Capture the Flag" at DEFCON. Besides being legal, it's a hell of a lot more challenging and fun when your opponent actually knows what he's doing!
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm preaching to the choir here... but hey, isn't that half the fun of /.? :-)