A reminder about security in general. No matter how many precautions you take, there's always a chance that somebody is going to get into a system. By taking advantage of human weaknesses or lapses in judgement, for instance.
So it's always prudent to diversify and isolate systems to minimize disaster upon intrusion into one system. And always invest in a good damage control plan:)
It seems to me that this is why a self adapting filter, such as spamprobe (free *nix filter that uses Bayesian analysis) is superior in the long run. It builds a database and associates words and multi word phrases with spam or non-spam. At the start, its guesses are rather crude but I found that after 'training' the filter with about 50 emails, the accuracy is incredible.
This is very good news! All it takes is a couple large companies like this to adopt Linux (e.g. for embedded systems, perfect use for Linux).
Everyone on slashdot loves desktop PCs and laptops, but the vast majority of computing power in the world exists in embedded systems like in your car, home appliances, portable gadgets, etc. These little systems really run the world.
So when embedded systems engineers get hooked on Linux, believe me, that's huge.
Crap, would you believe Mozilla crashed on me twice while writing this reply?
I bike to university every day in Winnipeg when it's warm, but right now I need the bus. Take a look at Winnipeg's real time forecast. See that warning box? It means that with windchill, it's -37 C or F, doesn't matter which units at this close to the bottom of the scale.
Big red warning = you'll freeze your ass off. And that's why I'm not biking right now.
I wonder if winnipeg is over-represented on slashdot, i am too from the peg and am also severely disappointed with late buses to/from univ. Like last Friday, for instance. Grrr...
Brief terminology refresher: "volatile memory" refers to computer storage that is erased when power is lost.
This could be the basis for a beautifully secure public workstation (hardware security aside). Imagine a machine with maybe 1 GB of RAM instead of a hard drive. Upon boot, a static image of everything could be transferred to RAM.
So everything the user does is in RAM, and most importantly: rebooting is a guaranteed fresh start. Not only would this workstation be tremendously fast, but also relatively secure.
By the way, I got this idea after using Knoppix on some machines at school that have no hard drive.
I like the reset to clean state approach. I use public workstations at university (sure, I know it's not that secure) but I always reboot their Windows machines instead of just logging out.
I always advise my friends to do the same. Another thing I wish they could do is have the machine log-off after a timeout (instead of the screen saver). This would prevent forgetful people from staying logged in after leaving, which is a huge source of mischief.
but I bet a fix will apear for the Linux kernel pretty quick.
From what I understand, there is no problem if you're using a 2.4 series kernel. The article itself states that the ID field is set to 0 by the Linux network stack. There is no data to analyze/extract host info from, and your hosts are safe.
There's more than one reason NASA is in trouble. It looks like the current government might not be interested in spending so much on science and research (big surprise?). A foolish mistake for the short-sighted, IMHO.
The following is quoted from IEEE Spectrum, January 2002. "New NASA Administrator is Bush Insider"
Appointment meets with cautious optimism
Sean O'Keefe, the deputy director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was named the next NASA administrator by the White House on 14 November. The nomination has met with cautious optimism in Washington and, despite his lack of technical experience, in the aerospace community as well.
. . . A spokesperson for Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Science, Technology, and Space committee, agreed, saying that the senator believed O'Keefe's background "will be very useful in solving some of NASA's long-term management problems." . ..
O'Keefe's management history indicates not only great financial experience but also close ties with members of George W. Bush's government. During the previous Bush administration, he worked with Dick Cheney in the Department of Defense as comptroller and chief financial officer before being appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1992 . ..
. . . while NASA employees "have an interest in having their credibility increased," surely they also feel some trepidation at the arrival of such a cost-conscious administrator. "They're frightened to death," agreed Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who was NASA's first flight directory an director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 1972 to 1982.
. . . Echoing a NASA task force report in his testimony, O'Keefe said that "technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach." . ..
O'Keefe said that NASA should be freed "from the burden of operating infrastructure," and recommended the "continued privatization of the space shuttle" and the creation of "a non-governmental organization to manage [space station] research."
Germans are good engineers ? At Gas chambers and overhyped, overpriced cars...
No, not at gas chambers.
Several countries are known to raise particularly good engineers, perhaps because of the quality of education and strong professional culture. The United Kingdom, Germany, and even Canada are known to have particularly good engineers.
This is a terrible disaster. Getting out of bed and switching on the CBC (radio) I couldn't believe my ears. Were the explorers themselves OK? Trail of debris? Oh no...
As a young engineer, I can't help but think of the Challenger disaster. During my engineering education, the disaster was used for illustrative purposes in a number of ways -- it demonstrated pure engineering failure (design failure) certainly, but also demonstrated compromises made in engineering because of political/business pressure, a compromise that can not be tolerated when human safety is at stake. And we learned a lot from it.
Today's event is truly a disaster. But we must make the most of it. We have to thoroughly investigate, to complete satisfaction, until we learn what caused the accident/failure. Then we fix the problem to the best of our abilities and make sure the same mistake isn't repeated.
And then, most importantly, we try again. We must continue with scientific exploration of space. The benefits to humanity are many: development of new technologies; new solutions to problems here on earth; and most importantly... exploration and discovery.
And that's why, in my eyes, the explorers on Columbia deserve our utmost respect and praise. They risked their lives exploring beyond earth for humanity's benefit. It would truly be an insult to these fine people to cut back on space exploration because of this accident.
Accidents like this one should not make us halt exploration. They should renew our motivation to improve our designs, and then continue upon the original goals with improved technology!
You might not need it, but many others do. Certainly, if you're the "audience" at the end of the development/production line, lossy compression is fine.
On the other hand, if you produce digital works and you want to store data that could later be used as source material for a new project, you want to store the work at its original full quality. Otherwise, every time it is re-used the quality degrades. Sure, it's not as bad as magnetic tape degredation but eventually it adds up.
And that's why you need lossless audio (and vide, etc.) storage.
I've used wikipedia on several occasions and have even contributed a few articles relating to my university, city, and province. What an excellent project!
The breadth is pretty good. I've looked up things from world history to technical (modern day). I'd have to say the technical entries are stronger than the historical ones.
I worry a bit about historical inaccuracies, political leanings, bias etc. but then again all that stuff exists in any other published work out there. Maybe this thing we create together, with peer review and editing is no worse (bias-wise) than a collection of documents from a publisher?
I'm usually quite rude to telemarketers, but this time I thought I'd grab my opportunity to skew the "scientific survey" results.
This lady phoning from Texas or something was really interested in my radio listening habits. She kept asking me about these annoying, obnoxious stations (the ones with the r&b music the 16 year old girls seem to love so much).
I kept talking about stations that weren't one of her options on her on-screen list and I think she was getting irritated. But the whole experience made me realize how shitty commercial FM radio is, and how grateful I am for Campus radio stations, Volunteer and Community run stations and especially for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
This is amazing. Think about how far technology has come, that allows you broadband internet access on an airplane 35,000 ft high, travelling between two continents over nothing but water.
Holy crap.
I know the very first thing I would do, without a doubt, is fire up XMMS and listen to Digitally Imported Radio, and smile:)
I heard an interview on Canada's CBC Radio 1 (Friday evening), and they were talking with the owner of the company. He said that in their test flights they had only gone 4 or 5 feet off the ground until further improvements could be made. He also said that the one they're selling on Ebay has had some vital components removed to help "keep the buyer honest".
What we geeks need is for those long coding sessions is: better chairs, better screens, workplace ergonomy in general, decent food, short breaks a couple times an hour and a short walk around the block or something now and then aswell as 8 hours of sleep.
You forgot the women. We need more women. Seriously! Women are on average smarter than men and are less likely to put up with the abusive work conditions/demands placed on technologists these days.
What we should do is equalize the gender balance, then we'll all be treated more fairly in the workplace (read: legally force employers to be more humane). After the work day ends at 6, we can all head over to the local disco for some dancin'
Yeah, there must have been some pretty crazy bandwidth demands on mac.com. Even though I was able to download a couple of the files at full speed. If you're not sure whether you have a whole file, here are the md5sums for the first two:
Frankly if I were to do it all over again I'd just go buy a bunch of components, a soldering iron and a few prototyping boards. They still make those prototyping boards, don't they?
I'm sitting right beside a 300 in 1 kit (or, from where I'm looking at it, "300 in 1 elektronische projektdoos"). Prototyping boards are great, definitely more flexible. They have spring-loaded ones with horizontal and vertical tracks so you just "plug in" your components. No soldering needed. I've been using these a lot!
I had a flashback to my first crystal set radio. I ran a big wire (antenna) to a tree to pick up strong signals. Then the radio works without any battery. How can anyone say that's not neat!
Yes, DCC looks very promising. My university uses it and I have never seen it mark a message as spam when it wasn't (this is very good).
It often misses spams, but as more people run DCC servers the detection will improve. Detection also improves as spammers target more recipients at once - in a way, they're announcing their presence to the system.
It's good to see more interest in space travel and exploration. Doesn't anyone else think it's a bit stupid that nations spend so much money on weapons/military, just to cause that extra human suffering that makes life so grand... while we pass up the opportunity to explore what is undoubtedly the most fascinating and wonderful thing out there: space.
Holy crap, aren't we a dumb bunch of talking apes. There's probably some pretty neat stuff out there beyond Earth...
Slashdot Mirror
A reminder about security in general. No matter how many precautions you take, there's always a chance that somebody is going to get into a system. By taking advantage of human weaknesses or lapses in judgement, for instance.
:)
So it's always prudent to diversify and isolate systems to minimize disaster upon intrusion into one system. And always invest in a good damage control plan
troll..
It seems to me that this is why a self adapting filter, such as spamprobe (free *nix filter that uses Bayesian analysis) is superior in the long run. It builds a database and associates words and multi word phrases with spam or non-spam. At the start, its guesses are rather crude but I found that after 'training' the filter with about 50 emails, the accuracy is incredible.
This is very good news! All it takes is a couple large companies like this to adopt Linux (e.g. for embedded systems, perfect use for Linux).
Everyone on slashdot loves desktop PCs and laptops, but the vast majority of computing power in the world exists in embedded systems like in your car, home appliances, portable gadgets, etc. These little systems really run the world.
So when embedded systems engineers get hooked on Linux, believe me, that's huge.
Crap, would you believe Mozilla crashed on me twice while writing this reply?
I bike to university every day in Winnipeg when it's warm, but right now I need the bus. Take a look at Winnipeg's real time forecast. See that warning box? It means that with windchill, it's -37 C or F, doesn't matter which units at this close to the bottom of the scale.
Big red warning = you'll freeze your ass off. And that's why I'm not biking right now.I wonder if winnipeg is over-represented on slashdot, i am too from the peg and am also severely disappointed with late buses to/from univ. Like last Friday, for instance. Grrr...
Brief terminology refresher: "volatile memory" refers to computer storage that is erased when power is lost.
This could be the basis for a beautifully secure public workstation (hardware security aside). Imagine a machine with maybe 1 GB of RAM instead of a hard drive. Upon boot, a static image of everything could be transferred to RAM.
So everything the user does is in RAM, and most importantly: rebooting is a guaranteed fresh start. Not only would this workstation be tremendously fast, but also relatively secure.
By the way, I got this idea after using Knoppix on some machines at school that have no hard drive.I like the reset to clean state approach. I use public workstations at university (sure, I know it's not that secure) but I always reboot their Windows machines instead of just logging out.
I always advise my friends to do the same. Another thing I wish they could do is have the machine log-off after a timeout (instead of the screen saver). This would prevent forgetful people from staying logged in after leaving, which is a huge source of mischief.
but I bet a fix will apear for the Linux kernel pretty quick.
From what I understand, there is no problem if you're using a 2.4 series kernel. The article itself states that the ID field is set to 0 by the Linux network stack. There is no data to analyze/extract host info from, and your hosts are safe.
Wow! 64.4.22.23 is a Microsoft hotmail.com server and it does appear to be running Apache on a BSD server.
There's more than one reason NASA is in trouble. It looks like the current government might not be interested in spending so much on science and research (big surprise?). A foolish mistake for the short-sighted, IMHO.
.
.
.
.
The following is quoted from IEEE Spectrum, January 2002. "New NASA Administrator is Bush Insider"
Appointment meets with cautious optimism
Sean O'Keefe, the deputy director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was named the next NASA administrator by the White House on 14 November. The nomination has met with cautious optimism in Washington and, despite his lack of technical experience, in the aerospace community as well.
. . . A spokesperson for Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Science, Technology, and Space committee, agreed, saying that the senator believed O'Keefe's background "will be very useful in solving some of NASA's long-term management problems." . .
O'Keefe's management history indicates not only great financial experience but also close ties with members of George W. Bush's government. During the previous Bush administration, he worked with Dick Cheney in the Department of Defense as comptroller and chief financial officer before being appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1992 . .
. . . while NASA employees "have an interest in having their credibility increased," surely they also feel some trepidation at the arrival of such a cost-conscious administrator. "They're frightened to death," agreed Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who was NASA's first flight directory an director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 1972 to 1982.
. . . Echoing a NASA task force report in his testimony, O'Keefe said that "technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach." . .
O'Keefe said that NASA should be freed "from the burden of operating infrastructure," and recommended the "continued privatization of the space shuttle" and the creation of "a non-governmental organization to manage [space station] research."
. .
No, not at gas chambers.
Several countries are known to raise particularly good engineers, perhaps because of the quality of education and strong professional culture. The United Kingdom, Germany, and even Canada are known to have particularly good engineers.This is a terrible disaster. Getting out of bed and switching on the CBC (radio) I couldn't believe my ears. Were the explorers themselves OK? Trail of debris? Oh no...
As a young engineer, I can't help but think of the Challenger disaster. During my engineering education, the disaster was used for illustrative purposes in a number of ways -- it demonstrated pure engineering failure (design failure) certainly, but also demonstrated compromises made in engineering because of political/business pressure, a compromise that can not be tolerated when human safety is at stake. And we learned a lot from it.
Today's event is truly a disaster. But we must make the most of it. We have to thoroughly investigate, to complete satisfaction, until we learn what caused the accident/failure. Then we fix the problem to the best of our abilities and make sure the same mistake isn't repeated.
And then, most importantly, we try again. We must continue with scientific exploration of space. The benefits to humanity are many: development of new technologies; new solutions to problems here on earth; and most importantly... exploration and discovery.
And that's why, in my eyes, the explorers on Columbia deserve our utmost respect and praise. They risked their lives exploring beyond earth for humanity's benefit. It would truly be an insult to these fine people to cut back on space exploration because of this accident.
Accidents like this one should not make us halt exploration. They should renew our motivation to improve our designs, and then continue upon the original goals with improved technology!
Unfortunately, these people "matter a lot" because they're the ones signing the check$
You might not need it, but many others do. Certainly, if you're the "audience" at the end of the development/production line, lossy compression is fine.
On the other hand, if you produce digital works and you want to store data that could later be used as source material for a new project, you want to store the work at its original full quality. Otherwise, every time it is re-used the quality degrades. Sure, it's not as bad as magnetic tape degredation but eventually it adds up.
And that's why you need lossless audio (and vide, etc.) storage.
oh my god... I understand what you just said. I've reached a new low :(
Quick, somebody bring me some women...
I've used wikipedia on several occasions and have even contributed a few articles relating to my university, city, and province. What an excellent project!
The breadth is pretty good. I've looked up things from world history to technical (modern day). I'd have to say the technical entries are stronger than the historical ones.
I worry a bit about historical inaccuracies, political leanings, bias etc. but then again all that stuff exists in any other published work out there. Maybe this thing we create together, with peer review and editing is no worse (bias-wise) than a collection of documents from a publisher?
I'm usually quite rude to telemarketers, but this time I thought I'd grab my opportunity to skew the "scientific survey" results.
This lady phoning from Texas or something was really interested in my radio listening habits. She kept asking me about these annoying, obnoxious stations (the ones with the r&b music the 16 year old girls seem to love so much).
I kept talking about stations that weren't one of her options on her on-screen list and I think she was getting irritated. But the whole experience made me realize how shitty commercial FM radio is, and how grateful I am for Campus radio stations, Volunteer and Community run stations and especially for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
All of which, luckily, I have access to here.
This is amazing. Think about how far technology has come, that allows you broadband internet access on an airplane 35,000 ft high, travelling between two continents over nothing but water.
:)
Holy crap.
I know the very first thing I would do, without a doubt, is fire up XMMS and listen to Digitally Imported Radio, and smile
I heard an interview on Canada's CBC Radio 1 (Friday evening), and they were talking with the owner of the company. He said that in their test flights they had only gone 4 or 5 feet off the ground until further improvements could be made. He also said that the one they're selling on Ebay has had some vital components removed to help "keep the buyer honest".
You forgot the women. We need more women. Seriously! Women are on average smarter than men and are less likely to put up with the abusive work conditions/demands placed on technologists these days.
What we should do is equalize the gender balance, then we'll all be treated more fairly in the workplace (read: legally force employers to be more humane). After the work day ends at 6, we can all head over to the local disco for some dancin'
Yeah, there must have been some pretty crazy bandwidth demands on mac.com. Even though I was able to download a couple of the files at full speed. If you're not sure whether you have a whole file, here are the md5sums for the first two:
teaser.mov 40492ade77f93a23ae228da07ff4abb9
actone.mov ad22bca48d596fb629bf8812a1d1dccb
Will be on gnutella by tomorrow I'm sure.
I'm sitting right beside a 300 in 1 kit (or, from where I'm looking at it, "300 in 1 elektronische projektdoos"). Prototyping boards are great, definitely more flexible. They have spring-loaded ones with horizontal and vertical tracks so you just "plug in" your components. No soldering needed. I've been using these a lot!
I had a flashback to my first crystal set radio. I ran a big wire (antenna) to a tree to pick up strong signals. Then the radio works without any battery. How can anyone say that's not neat!
If you have some time to kill, go build one!
Yes, DCC looks very promising. My university uses it and I have never seen it mark a message as spam when it wasn't (this is very good).
It often misses spams, but as more people run DCC servers the detection will improve. Detection also improves as spammers target more recipients at once - in a way, they're announcing their presence to the system.
Keep an eye on this one! See the dcc FAQ.It's good to see more interest in space travel and exploration. Doesn't anyone else think it's a bit stupid that nations spend so much money on weapons/military, just to cause that extra human suffering that makes life so grand... while we pass up the opportunity to explore what is undoubtedly the most fascinating and wonderful thing out there: space.
Holy crap, aren't we a dumb bunch of talking apes. There's probably some pretty neat stuff out there beyond Earth...