A first reading of the ToS suggests that it is just journal *owners* who are banned from using styles etc to hide the ads from everyone. There's nothing to say that people *reading* the journal can't be running ad-blocking.
Errm, not quite sure what you mean. I was assuming that the hardware would have some private key embedded and that would be used to sign the output. The public key would be freely available and could be used by anyone to check the output really came from the hardware.
Of course this is vulnerable to taking the hardware apart to find the key but there are tamper-proofing methods to make this difficult.
They only had one space for a language there, so they picked the most important, I guess; probably the language most involved in the actual ant machine code generation. The actual declaration mentioned both Haskell and C++.
I have no experience with Lisp/Scheme etc, so I don't know how easy it is to write combinator libraries in them. I do think it'd be hard without a static type system, however; combinators can have pretty complicated types, and I at least really want some machine assistance to check those types as early as possible. That said, the ones we used here weren't all that complicated.
We definitely didn't really need the safety of wrapping side effects in monads, since we just used it for fresh labels. Didn't hurt that much either, though; programming an ant is naturally an imperative thing, so we'd have had to sequence commands in some way anyway.
In general I agree that most of winning is about having the right strategy and being able to use your chosen programming language well.
Did you try our second ant? That one is just like the other except that it explicitly avoids the enemy anthill. Of course, if you set a trap just outside or something it's just as likely to fall in as the other one.
The main tactic that is really effective against our ants is encircling our anthill. Luckily we often manage to collect more than half the food before an enemy has managed to do this. If I had time to improve our ant one of the main things I'd do is task some ants to act as a "tunnel"; this would stymie most encircling tactics.
It wasn't the university storing passwords in plain text. Students were using unencrypted logins and sending their passwords in the clear across the network (and yes, SSL is available).
I work at the university, and the essential facts of this case have been reasonably well known here since it happened several weeks ago.
The structure of the university means that the many parts of the university (the 'colleges') have independently run networks, all connected to the same university backbone. Many college networks aren't switched, either because of lack of time or resources, or because there's not all that much point - if you know what you're doing you can MAC flood the switches anyway from any port that is set to learn new computers (pretty much essential in libraries).
What the 'reporters' did was simply to run a packet sniffer on various unswitched networks. I think they managed to watch some CCTV coverage, read someone random's MSN conversation, and possibly pick up a few passwords. They then went and told the people they'd sniffed what they'd done, and wrote a rather over-sensationalised article about the security flaws.
This kind of thing (someone noticing the network is insecure and making a really big deal of it) happens every few years in Oxford, and usually it doesn't generate quite this much publicity. The university has gradually been developing a tougher line on computer misuse, which may explain their desire to throw the book at the journalists.
They are threatened with a 500 pound fine and being suspended for a year. Personally I think the fine is justified (the university could use it to buy some more switches:-) but suspending them, essentially for having no common sense, is a bit harsh. It would have been straightforward for them to obtain most of the facts they needed for the story without breaking the law and violating people's privacy (restrict the packet sniffer to specific computers where the owners had agreed in advance), but they chose not to or failed to think about it or do some basic research first.
If you want an accessible version of the Odeon, whether from them or from Matthew Somerville, let info@odeonuk.com know this!
Also, if you are disabled, live within the UK, and can't use their site because of your disability, then I believe the Disability Discrimination Act does apply here, and threatening them with action under it might be rather effective...
The internal codename for what became.NET was NGWS, standing for Next Generation Windows Services. Apparently one reason this codename was picked was that it was such a horrible name that it would force people to think of something better! Anyway, nothing better was found until literally the Friday before the Monday release - so.NET was chosen in rather a hurry overnight. I don't think anyone inside Microsoft (I was an intern there at the time) was particularly happy with it, but it was the best they could come up with.
Not if they were 256K_bit_ chips, which was my immediate assumption on noticing the apparently dodgy arithmetic. The 30pin SIMMs I remember had 8 (or 9 if you wanted parity) separate chips on them to make up one single module.
I'm still running 2.0.x on a couple of machines. It works, they're low spec machines which don't provide many services, why mess with it?
I'll probably be forced to upgrade soon by the lack of security updates for RH 5.x, though:( It's too much hassle tracking it all by hand, even with a minimal package set.
It should be pointed out that the Oxford Union (which is where the debate was) isn't the same thing as the Oxford University Student Union. Probably only really of importance to people in Oxford, who know this anyway, though:-)
One point the article made is that the original controversy caused lots more people to link to xenu.net, pushing it up from 4th in the Google results for "Scientology" to 2nd. I'd like to encourage everyone who hasn't already done so to also do this - maybe it can be pushed up to 1st:-)
If I have a program that is gpl'd but not released to the public and it is somehow stolen from me is it legal for other people to distribute it. Gpl does grant me the right to distribute but as I understand it doesn't allow other people to claim as their birthright..
If you distribute it to someone under the GPL, you are granting them an irrevocable license to further distribute it. If you don't do this but someone steals it, then you are not distributing it so this doesn't apply. Of course, proving which of these actually happened might get tricky.
Something similar happens sometimes when someone adds a bit of GPL-incompatible code to a GPL project, but then it's quite easy to prove what actually happened.
If you use images for email addresses, what are people using text browsers supposed to do? Even worse is using them on the "warning" pages - someone with a text browser would have no idea what the image said and therefore nothing to stop them falling into the trap and getting firewalled.
And of course if he uses ALT text for the images, then he has the same problem he was trying to avoid, of creating something the spambots can read.
I think that's pretty standard. Big companies want to build a big patent portfolio (mostly to get leverage cross-licensing with other big companies) so they encourage their employees to work towards that. Certainly both IBM and Microsoft do it, couldn't say for certain about any others.
It means basically that you could even get extradited to be tried in the U.S. if they so request.
I believe extradition laws generally say that you can't be extradited for doing something that wouldn't be illegal in the country you're being extradited from. I'm not sure if this principle is universal, though.
"The BBC documentary way back in B&W TV days about spaghetti growing on trees is/was funny because it was original and completely unexpected."
Five or ten years ago on AFD the BBC's Tomorrow's World (a 30 minute programme with lots of short items looking at possible technologies of the future) announced at the start of the program that one of the items they'd run would be a spoof, and it'd be up to the viewers to guess which one.
They they then did a bunch of items, and at the end said that they were going to let us vote on which one we thought was the spoof. We just had to touch the appropriate button which was flashed up on our TV screens, and they would register the vote.
I was actually touching the TV screen before I figured it out, because they'd had me thinking so hard about all the previous items. Doh!
Slashdot Mirror
A first reading of the ToS suggests that it is just journal *owners* who are banned from using styles etc to hide the ads from everyone. There's nothing to say that people *reading* the journal can't be running ad-blocking.
Errm, not quite sure what you mean. I was assuming that the hardware would have some private key embedded and that would be used to sign the output. The public key would be freely available and could be used by anyone to check the output really came from the hardware.
Of course this is vulnerable to taking the hardware apart to find the key but there are tamper-proofing methods to make this difficult.
The right way to achieve that would be a digital signature, not encryption.
They only had one space for a language there, so they picked the most important, I guess; probably the language most involved in the actual ant machine code generation. The actual declaration mentioned both Haskell and C++.
I have no experience with Lisp/Scheme etc, so I don't know how easy it is to write combinator libraries in them. I do think it'd be hard without a static type system, however; combinators can have pretty complicated types, and I at least really want some machine assistance to check those types as early as possible. That said, the ones we used here weren't all that complicated.
We definitely didn't really need the safety of wrapping side effects in monads, since we just used it for fresh labels. Didn't hurt that much either, though; programming an ant is naturally an imperative thing, so we'd have had to sequence commands in some way anyway.
In general I agree that most of winning is about having the right strategy and being able to use your chosen programming language well.
-- The "lump" in Dunkosmiloolump
Did you try our second ant? That one is just like the other except that it explicitly avoids the enemy anthill. Of course, if you set a trap just outside or something it's just as likely to fall in as the other one.
The main tactic that is really effective against our ants is encircling our anthill. Luckily we often manage to collect more than half the food before an enemy has managed to do this. If I had time to improve our ant one of the main things I'd do is task some ants to act as a "tunnel"; this would stymie most encircling tactics.
-- The "lump" in Dunkosmiloolump
The 2nd place entry was actually a mixture of Haskell and C++. They used C++ for their simulator and visualiser, and Haskell for their ant assembler.
It wasn't the university storing passwords in plain text. Students were using unencrypted logins and sending their passwords in the clear across the network (and yes, SSL is available).
I work at the university, and the essential facts of this case have been reasonably well known here since it happened several weeks ago.
:-) but suspending them, essentially for having no common sense, is a bit harsh. It would have been straightforward for them to obtain most of the facts they needed for the story without breaking the law and violating people's privacy (restrict the packet sniffer to specific computers where the owners had agreed in advance), but they chose not to or failed to think about it or do some basic research first.
The structure of the university means that the many parts of the university (the 'colleges') have independently run networks, all connected to the same university backbone. Many college networks aren't switched, either because of lack of time or resources, or because there's not all that much point - if you know what you're doing you can MAC flood the switches anyway from any port that is set to learn new computers (pretty much essential in libraries).
What the 'reporters' did was simply to run a packet sniffer on various unswitched networks. I think they managed to watch some CCTV coverage, read someone random's MSN conversation, and possibly pick up a few passwords. They then went and told the people they'd sniffed what they'd done, and wrote a rather over-sensationalised article about the security flaws.
This kind of thing (someone noticing the network is insecure and making a really big deal of it) happens every few years in Oxford, and usually it doesn't generate quite this much publicity. The university has gradually been developing a tougher line on computer misuse, which may explain their desire to throw the book at the journalists.
They are threatened with a 500 pound fine and being suspended for a year. Personally I think the fine is justified (the university could use it to buy some more switches
Oh, and there's no harm in also complaining to LVetere@odeonuk.com ...
If you want an accessible version of the Odeon, whether from them or from Matthew Somerville, let info@odeonuk.com know this!
Also, if you are disabled, live within the UK, and can't use their site because of your disability, then I believe the Disability Discrimination Act does apply here, and threatening them with action under it might be rather effective...
The internal codename for what became .NET was NGWS, standing for Next Generation Windows Services. Apparently one reason this codename was picked was that it was such a horrible name that it would force people to think of something better! Anyway, nothing better was found until literally the Friday before the Monday release - so .NET was chosen in rather a hurry overnight. I don't think anyone inside Microsoft (I was an intern there at the time) was particularly happy with it, but it was the best they could come up with.
Not if they were 256K_bit_ chips, which was my immediate assumption on noticing the apparently dodgy arithmetic. The 30pin SIMMs I remember had 8 (or 9 if you wanted parity) separate chips on them to make up one single module.
I've been running exim almost since I installed the box, so I dodged that bullet, luckily. Learnt to build my own RPMs then too :-)
I'm still running 2.0.x on a couple of machines. It works, they're low spec machines which don't provide many services, why mess with it?
:( It's too much hassle tracking it all by hand, even with a minimal package set.
I'll probably be forced to upgrade soon by the lack of security updates for RH 5.x, though
It should be pointed out that the Oxford Union :-)
(which is where the debate was) isn't the same thing as the Oxford University Student Union. Probably only really of importance to people in Oxford, who know this anyway, though
One point the article made is that the original controversy caused lots more people to link to xenu.net, pushing it up from 4th in the Google results for "Scientology" to 2nd. I'd like to encourage everyone who hasn't already done so to also do this - maybe it can be pushed up to 1st :-)
If I have a program that is gpl'd but not released to the public and it is somehow stolen from me is it legal for other people to distribute it. Gpl does grant me the right to distribute but as I understand it doesn't allow other people to claim as their birthright..
If you distribute it to someone under the GPL, you are granting them an irrevocable license to further distribute it. If you don't do this but someone steals it, then you are not distributing it so this doesn't apply. Of course, proving which of these actually happened might get tricky.
Something similar happens sometimes when someone adds a bit of GPL-incompatible code to a GPL project, but then it's quite easy to prove what actually happened.
If you use images for email addresses, what are people using text browsers supposed to do? Even worse is using them on the "warning" pages - someone with a text browser would have no idea what the image said and therefore nothing to stop them falling into the trap and getting firewalled.
And of course if he uses ALT text for the images, then he has the same problem he was trying to avoid, of creating something the spambots can read.
Check out this NewScientist feedback item. Or just jump straight to the google link they refer to. Can I get anyone a juice of lawyers?
that company has a patent-incentive policy
I think that's pretty standard. Big companies want to build a big patent portfolio (mostly to get leverage cross-licensing with other big companies) so they encourage their employees to work towards that. Certainly both IBM and Microsoft do it, couldn't say for certain about any others.
But the software was developed in Russia and was and still is - NOT illegal there.
And as far as I know, noone's been extradited from Russia - Skylarov was arrested while in the US, wasn't he?
It means basically that you could even get extradited to be tried in the U.S. if they so request.
I believe extradition laws generally say that you can't be extradited for doing something that wouldn't be illegal in the country you're being extradited from. I'm not sure if this principle is universal, though.
"the real reason this would be awesome is to avoid that damn local blackout for sporting events ;)"
Which would presumably damage the revenues of the events and force them to charge more for the television rights?
"The BBC documentary way back in B&W TV days about spaghetti growing on trees is/was funny because it was original and completely unexpected."
Five or ten years ago on AFD the BBC's Tomorrow's World (a 30 minute programme with lots of short items looking at possible technologies of the future) announced at the start of the program that one of the items they'd run would be a spoof, and it'd be up to the viewers to guess which one.
They they then did a bunch of items, and at the end said that they were going to let us vote on which one we thought was the spoof. We just had to touch the appropriate button which was flashed up on our TV screens, and they would register the vote.
I was actually touching the TV screen before I figured it out, because they'd had me thinking so hard about all the previous items. Doh!