My problem with this is that physical security is not a sinecure for technological problems.
If this were *merely* to eliminate redundant management structures, it might be agreeable. But probably wouldn't be.
As a former IBM employee, I've had to deal with the management of firewalls by a seperate security organization; the result was a minimum of six weeks to get a TCP port other than 80 opened, if it's permitted at all.
XML was invented by IBM employees as a means of routing around these people by tunneling operations on port 80, which these people would permit by virtue of it being port 80, without concern for the content of the traffic over that port.
Given encryption on storage media, both active and backup, and multiple site replication, physical security is more and more meaningless for information technology.
IMO, eventually corporate networks will not exist at all, *except* as VPNs.
At that point, "physical security" means sending armed guards out on business trips with every schmuck with a laptop, and posting them outside the homes and telecommuting centers of every remote worker.
Frankly, a merger in this area feels more like the physical security people trying to defend against their increasing irrelevance, in the same way that RIAA and MPAA are attempting to defend their increasing irrelevance.
"I feel sorry that he's not going to get a chance to test it out himself."
Leonard was on the Alcor Advisory Board:
http://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/alcorStaff.htm
Since you are not permitted to be a board member unless you are signed up, it's likely he will be suspended, regardless of the situation, unless there is a requirement for an autopsy, and Alcor is unable to get a court order to have the body released.
In general, Alcor is very aggressive in ensuring that its patients get suspended as quickly as possible, and with as little concommitant damage as possible. Everyone doing the work is themselves signed up, and will treat the patient as they themselves expect to be treated.
Even in the case of serious damage, there will be a "best effort" attempt, unless the patient specifies otherwise; from the FAQ ( http://alcor.org/FAQs/ ):
-- Q: What if it is impossible to place me into suspension? A: The Alcor Cryonic Suspension Agreement has provisions for this possibility. Options are available, including naming secondary beneficiaries to whom funds set aside for suspension can be paid. Many members want their suspension funds going towards efforts focusing on recovering any biological remains whatsoever, regardless of the degree of damage or time elapsed. --
The person to contact for status should be the Alcor press contact; whether or not they will make information available in this depends wholly on the privacy agreements in place with the patient.
If this were really an issue, we would be seeing terrorists with small devices built into cell phone cases that were built using a switch, a battery, a capacitor, a coil, an electromechanical relay, and a large antenna loop: a spark gap generator, of the type one makes from Radio Shack project kits.
Or, they would just have cell phones, since they are also supposedly a source of interference with something other than AirFone revenues;^)).
In reality, this article is _mostly_ bogus.
The ILS (Instrument Landing System) is vulnerable to electronic interference, mostly because it is an incredibly ancient implementation, and has not yet been replaced with anything designed in the last two decades.
The antique ILS in even the most modern aircraft is why you can't use electronic equipment during takeoff and landing (landing is obvious; so's takeoff, if you realize that it might have to be aborted, in which case it turns into a landing).
Most airports, however, are in urban areas, with a high telephone cell density. If this were ever a real issue, we would see aircraft dropping out of the sky as they flew over any urban area. SFO, PHX, and SLC tend to have a higher than average instrument requirement (the first for fog, the second two for temperature inversion based wind shear; want to vomit? Fly Tucson to Phoneix. SLC also has snow visibility issues in winter). For most airports, the systems are largely ignored. SLC has an upgraded system that ~60% of modern planes can use, actually; it's a deployment issue.
The TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) is actually based on paired receivers. It's succeptable to powerful broad-band interferences; "powerful", in this case, means "orders of magnitude higher than the those currently permitted for use in UWB devices".
The failure you would see (and you would probably need a specially manufactured transmitter to see it) would be a 180 degree polar flip (i.e. if the transponder you cared about were 23 degrees down and 17 degrees right, it would read as 157 degrees up and 163 degrees left). This actually happens a lot, and the hardware is built to automatically compensate through multiple samples (i.e. sustained interference is required).
The fix for this is to go to trios instead of pairs of receivers.
As we saw just the other week, though, TCAS itself is generally ignored in favor of ground instructions, we lost two planes in a collision in Germany specifically because TCAS was ignored.
Given that TCAS is almost never used, anyway, because the controllers keep the planes far enough apart, the interference is isn't likely to be an issue.
In any case, I think the overall concern is a result of the fear of out-of-spec devices, which met emissions at the time of manufacture, and have since, for whatever reason, ended if with a much higher signal strength.
Personally, I think they are worried over nothing: it's just an uncommenly slow news day, what with most of the U.S. shut down for Labor Day...
The obvious next step is to vary the type of material being used linearly across the tattoo itself, turning it into a "glucose meter".
As an interesting aside, could this method be used to produce tattoos that were more easily removable as well?
I think I would want this to be removable, particularly when stem cell research finally cures diabetes once and for all, and you are left with a legacy tattoo.
The most likely scenario for a cyber attack on Wall Street is falsification of ticker data by exploiting vulnerabilities in the "Instant Messaging" systems through which the ticker information is distributed.
This, in turn, drives computer-driven buying and selling cycles, which draw the rest of the system into a spiral.
As one example, E*Trade recently announced an association with Yahoo for distribution via Instant Messaging of ticker data to autonomous agents running on user's computers, which would then use the data to may buy/sell decisions based on user specified thresholds.
Exploiting a system like this would be, if not trivial, at least relatively stright forward.
G.E. sells CFL's (Compact Flourescent Lights) with an average lifetime of 12,000 hours (8 years). There are also a number of places that sell incandescent bulbs with a 20,000 hour lifetime. The filament is about as thick as a pencil; there are several theatre supply stores which sell them online. Here is the G.E. reference:
The Berkeley Fire Station also has a 40 watt bulb (also a G.E. bulb) that has ben burning continuously for 100 years now. This has been verified boh by G.E. and by Ripleys and the Guiness book of records (direct linking not possible; sorry).
The only value Java has is as a consistent, cross-platform API.
The value of this should not be underestimated, and it is exactly this which Microsoft attacked when they modified the API as distributed by them, and still called it Java.
I was among the first to hack my Netscape to change the "Starting Java..." message to a "Slowing down...." message.
IMO, interpreted Java sucks, and if that were the value proposition for the language, there'd be no question that a rehash of the UCSD P-system was in fact valueless.
But the value proposition that arises from treating Java as a cross-patform API id musch, much harder to dismiss. And yes, any cross-platform API inevitably threatens OS monopolies, so it's understanding that Microsoft would be fearful. But it doesn't excuse illegality.
..."how would the data both be recorded by and kept secure FROM the ISP?"
Short answer: it wouldn't.
There have been several instances, not well publicized for obvious reasons, where soon-to-be-former (8-)) ISP empoyees have sold mail server logs to SPAM'mers to obtain sender and recipient email addresses.
If the data is available, it's available. Even a crypto FS can be defeated (copy raw data, write zeros to file, read file, thereby retrieving the ciphertext pad, XOR - or whatever operation - the pad vs. the data, boom: cleartext back again, write data back to raw file: evidence of hack erased).
"crimes get solved, missing people's last movements can be determined, terrorists located,"...
ISP employees get paid off, battered women get located by abusive husbands, children kidnapped by non-custodial parents, victims tracked by their stalkers,...
All sorts of "good things"... yeah, right.
"Don't assume that everyone in power is corrupt"...
Don't assume that everyone in power now will always remain in power (even if they do), or that there will never be a corrupt person in power, ever. The Clinton presidency "borrowed" a huge number of confidential FBI files. Adolph Hitler was democratically elected, and one of the first things he did was confiscate privately owned firearms using registration information that was not collected for the purposes of government confiscation.
"If you're clever enough to surf anonymously"...
It's not the stupid bad guys we need to worry about.
NASA engineers have thought outside the box in order to come up with a device "to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat"... and on to the Q/A:
Q: How does it work? A: We ask people to think inside this box.
Q: What if they think outside the box? A: Then we can't detect anything.
Q: How do you make sure there are no "back doors" in the system? A: We asked our engineers to think outside the box inside the box.
Here are some Russian porcine xenotransplantation references; this is not a complete set of references, so you will have to do some searching on your own:
Islets of langerhan (treatment of type I diabetes): http://www.islet.org/41.htm
Liver xenotransplants (company involved in study): http://www.novartis.com/
Bioartificial Liver in vivo (Dutch): http://www.cordis.lu/tmr/src/grants/fmbi /961547.ht m
Suggested search terms:
russia liver xenotransplant
dutch porcine hepatocytes
russia porcine hepatocytes
Tiny bibliography:
Reversal of acute liver failure by xenografts of microencapsulated porcine hepatocytes Z Du, T Li, GM Shu, JC Song, AM Sun (Canada) 122
Experimental studies on hepatic support device using heterogeneous alive animal to substitute failed liver N Cui, N Cui, J Wang, Q Fu, H Cui, J Feng (China) 128
Development of xenogeneic direct hemoperfusion method for bioartificial liver K Naruse, Y Sakai, D Endoh, J Shindoh,K Kojima, Y Karasawa, T Kohsaki, Y Iida, M Makuuchi (Japan) 130
Postoperative liver failure successfully treated by hepatic arterial infusion of prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) and aperesis therapy Y Asanuma, T Sato, O Yasui, T Kurokawa, K Koyama (Japan) 120
Precrinical Study of a Hybrid Artificial Liver Support System J Fukuda, K Okamura, R Sakiyama, K Nakazawa, H Ijima, Y Yamashita, M Shimada, K Shirabe, S Tanaka, E Tsujita, K Sugimachi, K Funatsu (Japan) 123
Development of a hybrid bioartificial liver using hepatocytes entrapped in a basement membrane matrix M Nagaki, K Miki, Yl Kim, T Naiki, A Sugiyama, H Moriwaki (Japan) 127
See also: Frontline: Organ Farm, part 2 Program #1913 Original Airdate: April 3, 2001
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/or ga nfarm/
"Although organ transplants cannot be performed in the U.S., two people have had their lives saved by organs from a humanized transgenic pig. Both were treated at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. The first was 20-year-old Rob Pennington. He was an emergency admission for liver failure in the autumn of 1997, just weeks before such experiments were halted by the FDA."
If this is *specifically* for liver cancer, see also:
http://www.mad-cow.org/UKGMO/GMO_news14.html
19 Jun 00 - GMO - Tests on GM 'missiles' to target cancer cells
Suggested search terms:
"David Kerr" liver cancer
Clinical trials only, at this point; so far 200 patients have been treated in the UK using a genetically modified retrovirus. This is probably a better bet at this point than a xenotransplant, for this *specific* problem.
Then I can sign up for a HotMail account, set an "overflow" address, and then send it crap until it turns into a pure forwarding address, after which I never, ever log into HitMail, ever again.
I'm sure they'll really go for that idea:
1) They get to pay to store as much useless crap as it takes to push the account over quota
2) They don't get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers.
You are talking about Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus (PERV).
The answer is that we have actually been using pigs for Xenotransplantation for a very long time: my Grandfather had a pig-valve in his heart, and Jim Finn has fetal pig brain cells in his brain, along with 12 other people, which has (effectively) halted his parkinsons disease, and reversed most of the symptoms (he can work on his car himself now, when before he was reduced from crawling from room to room on his elbows).
Both of these surgeries are vintage 1980's/1990's, and many heart-vavle operations predate that time period, since we did not have mechanical replacements designed until more recently.
The Russians have also been using pig liver cells to treat incurable, and otherwise fatal hepatitus and liver cancer cases, successfully.
In all cases, the protocols require that the person remain sexually inactive in order to avoid the risk of transmitting PERV human-to-human.
However, all testing for the past two decades has indicated that PERV is not transmissable to humans from transplanted tissue: out of the many hundreds of porcine xenotransplant recipients, not a single one tests positive for PERV anywhere but the transplanted porcine cells themselves.
If you are up for a lot of reading, Jim Finn's story (in short form) with a lot of links is available at:
http://tv.carlton.com/organfarm/jim.jhtml
See also Jim's own online journal:
http://www.geocities.com/jimcfinn/index.html
Here is the medical writeup of Jim and the 12 other patients in the journal "Neurology":
This is *NOT* a driver for a particular piece of hardware, it is a *protocol stack*, which could care less who you buy your hardware or satellite service from.
"Without the Gilat modem and whatever runs on the server side, this is useless. They stand to lose nothing by providing a driver for hardware and a service that they control."
This is wrong. Control is *precisely* what they give up, as soon as they document/publish their protocol, unless they have a patent on it (they don't, according to my search of the patent database).
As you pointed out: it works at the high data rate with Windows (where they have implemented their stack) but not with Linux (where they have not). Thus the issue is software,l not hardware dependent.
This is *exactly* what Real, Inc. does, by documenting their protcols well enough to permit implementation of a proxy server over a NAT or firewall, but *NOT* well enough for you to implement a Real Audio server (no QOS encapsulated protocol documentation, for the protocol between the client and the server, which is tunneled through the proxy connection without being interpreted by it). By *NOT* documenting their protocol, they keep control of the server side of the market.
Let me put it this way: if *I* had source code to a Real Audio player that implemented the client side of the QOS protocol, I *could easily* implement the server side. As it is, you have to spend a lot of money reverse engineering the QOS protocol (Network Appliance did exactly this, in order to implement their streaming media caching server -- cached content needs the same QOS moderation in the stream the server sends to the client).
"The only thing standing in the way of `video on demand' is lack of demand." -- WiReD, 1996
Sure, it works for blacked out sporting events and porn, but that's all it has ever worked on, and that a very small percentage of the television watching market that wants to see Mike Tyson chew someones ear off.
"How do you get from "downward price pressure" to "higher cost to consumers"?"
People with an incomplete understanding of market economies always ignore fixed initial costs, for some reason, when trying to promote the idea of "free" software.
Please read this part again:
| By doing that, they compress the amount of | time they have available to amortize their | R&D costs, before someone else enters the | market and puts a downward price pressure | on the service, as it becomes commoditized....I get there by noting that R&D costs to be recovered remain a fixed constant, and the time available for recovery of those costs is reduced.
Then I divide the R&D costs by the time available, and spread that cost across the total number of users.
For people who can't do "story problems", here is the math:
R:= Recovery time, in years N:= Number of users C:= R&D costs ?:= Cost per consumer per year
C / N / R = ?
Say our R&D costs were $10,000. Say the number of users was 1000. And say we had 5 years to recover our costs, because that's how long it would take someone to duplicate our work, without access to our source code. So:
$10,000 / 1000 / 5 = $2/year cost per user for R&D
Now, let's give away our source code. Now it takes our competitor a year to productize it and get their business processes in place so they can compete equally:
$10,000 / 1000 / 1 = $10/year cost per user for R&D
Now, say only 3/4 the users are willing to pay the inflated costs, and the rest say "screw you, you greedy capitalist bastards, we will do without":
$10,000 / 750 / 1 = $13.33/year cost per user for R&D
Do you "get it" now??? *Eventually*, the cost will go down... but *ONLY* after the R&D costs have been amortized out by *someone* - a customer - paying for them. The money "Joe The Programmer" was paid to write the code in the first place had to come from *somewhere*.
I've had my ".org" domain name for a decade now. That's well before Dupont and all of the other idiots jumped in and tried to turn the DNS into a second branch of the PTO, and registered 500 domains in a day, and we all had to start paying for something which used to be free.
When I got this domain, the rules on.com,.net,.edu, and.mil were such that.org was the only place where a private individual was *allowed* to get a domain name at all!
I, for one, would be extremely pissed if the rules on.org were changed at this late date, so that I could no longer keep my domain name. I'm pretty sure that "slashdot.org" would be pretty pissed, as well.
If you are going to do that to.org, then limit two character domain names based on country codes to *citizens* of those countries, and limit.net to network infractructure (ISPs, NSPs, etc.), and.com to incorporated entities. Nobody else gets domain names, thanks!
Ut-oh... I guess it's now obvious that limiting domains by lexicography is a stupid thing. If you want to be a lexicographer, and you think you know better than the rest of us, by all means, start a search engine company or a portal site, and let people who agree with you use it and validate your judgement... or ignore you, if that's what their tastes dictate.
What do they have to lose by publishing the protocol specifications?
A heck of a lot, actually. They open the market to competitors who would otherwise have an R&D barrier to entry.
By doing that, they compress the amount of time they have available to amortize their R&D costs, before someone else enters the market and puts a downward price pressure on the service, as it becomes commoditized.
As a result, the price to consumers between the time of disclosure and the time that the price pressure actually starts, must be higher, which reduced the market further, so the price must be even higher... until it finds an equalibria point for the reduced amortization period.
This is true, even if there ends up being a small additional Linux developer market on top of the consumer market (if you can see more than that in what "they would gain from linux support", then you need to make a business case to that effect).
The net result is a higher cost to consumers, and a lower overall availability of the service.
It's not always a black-and-white, positive thing to have all information disclosed, no matter what.
At one point, I was approached to write something similar for a FreeBSD based devices, but at the time I had too much on my plate to accept the contract.
The protocol stack modifications allow for more data in the pipeline without an acknowledgement on a long delay link (e.g. a satellite link).
The basic problem with satellite links is that the latency increases the amount of data that must remain in the sender's buffer without acknowledgement, so the unacknowledged data times the number of active clients becomes the limiting factor. There are several approaches to dealing with this, but all of them require adulterating the protocol stack to the point that what you are running is not really TCP over IP, it's something else.
The problem is that you simply *can't* crank the TCP window size large enough to cover the latency, without reducing the number of clients that the server can support. Maybe this will change when 64 bit systems with 128G of RAM become available, but I rather expect that the extra memory will be used for supporting a larger number of simultaneous subscribers, rather than better supporting existing subscribers without using their proprietary protocol.
The reason the data rate goes down is that there is not an implementation of this stack for Linux (there is one for FreeBSD, but it's not published, to my knowledge), and there's also an implementation for Windows (not published).
Just because the call something a "driver" in the Windows world doesn'yt actually mean that it's really a "driver", and not something else.
In any case, it works at all because, in the face of the lack of a driver, the connection falls back to simple TCP/IP. *That* works, because the assumption is that the data will be mostly unidirectional, out to the remote site.
There's actually a lot of information available on the concept (but nearly none on the implementation, and I couldn't disclose anything anyway) if you dig around the various web sites.
"If they broke into the base, photocopied some records, and bragged about it noone would have even thought twice about their arrest."
Putting a file on a computer directly on the Internet is a far cry from putting a file in a locked file cabinet in a locked office in a secured building on a military base whose gates are protected by armed military personnel.
It much more like putting a file in a locked file cabinet in a public park.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with this is that physical security is not a sinecure for technological problems.
If this were *merely* to eliminate redundant management structures, it might be agreeable. But probably wouldn't be.
As a former IBM employee, I've had to deal with the management of firewalls by a seperate security organization; the result was a minimum of six weeks to get a TCP port other than 80 opened, if it's permitted at all.
XML was invented by IBM employees as a means of routing around these people by tunneling operations on port 80, which these people would permit by virtue of it being port 80, without concern for the content of the traffic over that port.
Given encryption on storage media, both active and backup, and multiple site replication, physical security is more and more meaningless for information technology.
IMO, eventually corporate networks will not exist at all, *except* as VPNs.
At that point, "physical security" means sending armed guards out on business trips with every schmuck with a laptop, and posting them outside the homes and telecommuting centers of every remote worker.
Frankly, a merger in this area feels more like the physical security people trying to defend against their increasing irrelevance, in the same way that RIAA and MPAA are attempting to defend their increasing irrelevance.
-- Terry
How about Paul Vixie, for maintaining the comp.sources archives for forever, so that they didn't get lost in the mists of time?
How about Fred Fish, who pretty much single-handedly invented the compilation distribution disk?
How about CSRG for BSD UNIX?
How about Kernighan and Ritchie, for the C language?
How about DECUS, for the DECUS tapes?
How about Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, for inventing the modem, and giving the idea away?
How about Ward Christensen again, for inventing the Xmodem protocol, and giving the software away?
-- Terry
PSS := "Poor Server Software"?
-- Terry
"I feel sorry that he's not going to get a chance to test it out himself."
Leonard was on the Alcor Advisory Board:
http://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/alcorStaff.htm
Since you are not permitted to be a board member unless you are signed up, it's likely he will be suspended, regardless of the situation, unless there is a requirement for an autopsy, and Alcor is unable to get a court order to have the body released.
In general, Alcor is very aggressive in ensuring that its patients get suspended as quickly as possible, and with as little concommitant damage as possible. Everyone doing the work is themselves signed up, and will treat the patient as they themselves expect to be treated.
Even in the case of serious damage, there will be a "best effort" attempt, unless the patient specifies otherwise; from the FAQ ( http://alcor.org/FAQs/ ):
--
Q: What if it is impossible to place me into suspension?
A: The Alcor Cryonic Suspension Agreement has provisions for this possibility. Options are available, including naming secondary beneficiaries to whom funds set aside for suspension can be paid. Many members want their suspension funds going towards efforts focusing on recovering any biological remains whatsoever, regardless of the degree of damage or time elapsed.
--
The person to contact for status should be the Alcor press contact; whether or not they will make information available in this depends wholly on the privacy agreements in place with the patient.
-- Terry
If this were really an issue, we would be seeing terrorists with small devices built into cell phone cases that were built using a switch, a battery, a capacitor, a coil, an electromechanical relay, and a large antenna loop: a spark gap generator, of the type one makes from Radio Shack project kits.
;^)).
Or, they would just have cell phones, since they are also supposedly a source of interference with something other than AirFone revenues
In reality, this article is _mostly_ bogus.
The ILS (Instrument Landing System) is vulnerable to electronic interference, mostly because it is an incredibly ancient implementation, and has not yet been replaced with anything designed in the last two decades.
The antique ILS in even the most modern aircraft is why you can't use electronic equipment during takeoff and landing (landing is obvious; so's takeoff, if you realize that it might have to be aborted, in which case it turns into a landing).
Most airports, however, are in urban areas, with a high telephone cell density. If this were ever a real issue, we would see aircraft dropping out of the sky as they flew over any urban area. SFO, PHX, and SLC tend to have a higher than average instrument requirement (the first for fog, the second two for temperature inversion based wind shear; want to vomit? Fly Tucson to Phoneix. SLC also has snow visibility issues in winter). For most airports, the systems are largely ignored. SLC has an upgraded system that ~60% of modern planes can use, actually; it's a deployment issue.
The TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) is actually based on paired receivers. It's succeptable to powerful broad-band interferences; "powerful", in this case, means "orders of magnitude higher than the those currently permitted for use in UWB devices".
The failure you would see (and you would probably need a specially manufactured transmitter to see it) would be a 180 degree polar flip (i.e. if the transponder you cared about were 23 degrees down and 17 degrees right, it would read as 157 degrees up and 163 degrees left). This actually happens a lot, and the hardware is built to automatically compensate through multiple samples (i.e. sustained interference is required).
The fix for this is to go to trios instead of pairs of receivers.
As we saw just the other week, though, TCAS itself is generally ignored in favor of ground instructions, we lost two planes in a collision in Germany specifically because TCAS was ignored.
Given that TCAS is almost never used, anyway, because the controllers keep the planes far enough apart, the interference is isn't likely to be an issue.
In any case, I think the overall concern is a result of the fear of out-of-spec devices, which met emissions at the time of manufacture, and have since, for whatever reason, ended if with a much higher signal strength.
Personally, I think they are worried over nothing: it's just an uncommenly slow news day, what with most of the U.S. shut down for Labor Day...
-- Terry
The obvious next step is to vary the type of material being used linearly across the tattoo itself, turning it into a "glucose meter".
As an interesting aside, could this method be used to produce tattoos that were more easily removable as well?
I think I would want this to be removable, particularly when stem cell research finally cures diabetes once and for all, and you are left with a legacy tattoo.
-- Terry
Saving TWOTOW~1.DVD...
69,914,794 of 6,442,450,944 bytes
1% Complete
2,214,592 seconds remaining...
If it's 4 months before the release now, I'm going to be able to see it a full *3 months* before the rest of you suckers!
Laugh all you want, but I know whose door *you'll* be knocking on, come September 28th, once the download is complete!
-- Terry
The most likely scenario for a cyber attack on Wall Street is falsification of ticker data by exploiting vulnerabilities in the "Instant Messaging" systems through which the ticker information is distributed.
This, in turn, drives computer-driven buying and selling cycles, which draw the rest of the system into a spiral.
As one example, E*Trade recently announced an association with Yahoo for distribution via Instant Messaging of ticker data to autonomous agents running on user's computers, which would then use the data to may buy/sell decisions based on user specified thresholds.
Exploiting a system like this would be, if not trivial, at least relatively stright forward.
-- Terry
G.E. sells CFL's (Compact Flourescent Lights) with an average lifetime of 12,000 hours (8 years). There are also a number of places that sell incandescent bulbs with a 20,000 hour lifetime. The filament is about as thick as a pencil; there are several theatre supply stores which sell them online. Here is the G.E. reference:
f l_ release.html
http://www.gelighting.com/na/pressroom/pr_all_c
The Berkeley Fire Station also has a 40 watt bulb (also a G.E. bulb) that has ben burning continuously for 100 years now. This has been verified boh by G.E. and by Ripleys and the Guiness book of records (direct linking not possible; sorry).
-- Terry
The only value Java has is as a consistent, cross-platform API.
The value of this should not be underestimated, and it is exactly this which Microsoft attacked when they modified the API as distributed by them, and still called it Java.
I was among the first to hack my Netscape to change the "Starting Java..." message to a "Slowing down...." message.
IMO, interpreted Java sucks, and if that were the value proposition for the language, there'd be no question that a rehash of the UCSD P-system was in fact valueless.
But the value proposition that arises from treating Java as a cross-patform API id musch, much harder to dismiss. And yes, any cross-platform API inevitably threatens OS monopolies, so it's understanding that Microsoft would be fearful. But it doesn't excuse illegality.
-- Terry
"Breathe on your own time, dammit!"
Had to be said.
-- Terry
..."how would the data both be recorded by and kept secure FROM the ISP?"
Short answer: it wouldn't.
There have been several instances, not well publicized for obvious reasons, where soon-to-be-former (8-)) ISP empoyees have sold mail server logs to SPAM'mers to obtain sender and recipient email addresses.
If the data is available, it's available. Even a crypto FS can be defeated (copy raw data, write zeros to file, read file, thereby retrieving the ciphertext pad, XOR - or whatever operation - the pad vs. the data, boom: cleartext back again, write data back to raw file: evidence of hack erased).
-- Terry
"crimes get solved, missing people's last movements can be determined, terrorists located," ...
...
...
...
ISP employees get paid off, battered women get located by abusive husbands, children kidnapped by non-custodial parents, victims tracked by their stalkers,
All sorts of "good things"... yeah, right.
"Don't assume that everyone in power is corrupt"
Don't assume that everyone in power now will always remain in power (even if they do), or that there will never be a corrupt person in power, ever. The Clinton presidency "borrowed" a huge number of confidential FBI files. Adolph Hitler was democratically elected, and one of the first things he did was confiscate privately owned firearms using registration information that was not collected for the purposes of government confiscation.
"If you're clever enough to surf anonymously"
It's not the stupid bad guys we need to worry about.
-- Terry
NASA engineers have thought outside the box in order to come up with a device "to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat"... and on to the Q/A:
Q: How does it work?
A: We ask people to think inside this box.
Q: What if they think outside the box?
A: Then we can't detect anything.
Q: How do you make sure there are no "back doors" in the system?
A: We asked our engineers to think outside the box inside the box.
-- Terry
I would like to do gekko experiments at home; right now, I'm using industrial magnets.
Any chance someone could post a link to the most recent "setae at home" clients?
Thanks in advance,
-- Terry
Here are some Russian porcine xenotransplantation references; this is not a complete set of references, so you will have to do some searching on your own:
i /961547.ht m
,K Kojima, Y Karasawa, T Kohsaki, Y Iida, M Makuuchi (Japan) 130
r ga nfarm/
Islets of langerhan (treatment of type I diabetes):
http://www.islet.org/41.htm
Liver xenotransplants (company involved in study):
http://www.novartis.com/
Bioartificial Liver in vivo (Dutch):
http://www.cordis.lu/tmr/src/grants/fmb
Suggested search terms:
russia liver xenotransplant
dutch porcine hepatocytes
russia porcine hepatocytes
Tiny bibliography:
Reversal of acute liver failure by xenografts of microencapsulated porcine hepatocytes Z Du, T Li, GM Shu, JC Song, AM Sun (Canada) 122
Experimental studies on hepatic support device using heterogeneous alive animal to substitute failed liver N Cui, N Cui, J Wang, Q Fu, H Cui, J Feng (China) 128
Development of xenogeneic direct hemoperfusion method for bioartificial liver K Naruse, Y Sakai, D Endoh, J Shindoh
Postoperative liver failure successfully treated by hepatic arterial infusion of prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) and aperesis therapy Y Asanuma, T Sato, O Yasui, T Kurokawa, K Koyama (Japan) 120
Precrinical Study of a Hybrid Artificial Liver Support System J Fukuda, K Okamura, R Sakiyama, K Nakazawa, H Ijima, Y Yamashita, M Shimada, K Shirabe, S Tanaka, E Tsujita, K Sugimachi, K Funatsu (Japan) 123
Development of a hybrid bioartificial liver using hepatocytes entrapped in a basement membrane matrix M Nagaki, K Miki, Yl Kim, T Naiki, A Sugiyama, H Moriwaki (Japan) 127
See also:
Frontline: Organ Farm, part 2
Program #1913
Original Airdate: April 3, 2001
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/o
"Although organ transplants cannot be performed in the U.S., two people have had their lives saved by organs from a humanized transgenic pig. Both were treated at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. The first was 20-year-old Rob Pennington. He was an emergency admission for liver failure in the autumn of 1997, just weeks before such experiments were halted by the FDA."
If this is *specifically* for liver cancer, see also:
http://www.mad-cow.org/UKGMO/GMO_news14.html
19 Jun 00 - GMO - Tests on GM 'missiles' to target cancer cells
Suggested search terms:
"David Kerr" liver cancer
Clinical trials only, at this point; so far 200 patients have been treated in the UK using a genetically modified retrovirus. This is probably a better bet at this point than a xenotransplant, for this *specific* problem.
-- Terry
Yeah.
Then I can sign up for a HotMail account, set an "overflow" address, and then send it crap until it turns into a pure forwarding address, after which I never, ever log into HitMail, ever again.
I'm sure they'll really go for that idea:
1) They get to pay to store as much useless crap as it takes to push the account over quota
2) They don't get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers.
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
-- Terry
You are talking about Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus (PERV).
4 /5 /1042
The answer is that we have actually been using pigs for Xenotransplantation for a very long time: my Grandfather had a pig-valve in his heart, and Jim Finn has fetal pig brain cells in his brain, along with 12 other people, which has (effectively) halted his parkinsons disease, and reversed most of the symptoms (he can work on his car himself now, when before he was reduced from crawling from room to room on his elbows).
Both of these surgeries are vintage 1980's/1990's, and many heart-vavle operations predate that time period, since we did not have mechanical replacements designed until more recently.
The Russians have also been using pig liver cells to treat incurable, and otherwise fatal hepatitus and liver cancer cases, successfully.
In all cases, the protocols require that the person remain sexually inactive in order to avoid the risk of transmitting PERV human-to-human.
However, all testing for the past two decades has indicated that PERV is not transmissable to humans from transplanted tissue: out of the many hundreds of porcine xenotransplant recipients, not a single one tests positive for PERV anywhere but the transplanted porcine cells themselves.
If you are up for a lot of reading, Jim Finn's story (in short form) with a lot of links is available at:
http://tv.carlton.com/organfarm/jim.jhtml
See also Jim's own online journal:
http://www.geocities.com/jimcfinn/index.html
Here is the medical writeup of Jim and the 12 other patients in the journal "Neurology":
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/5
-- Terry
I will point out the obvious, yet again...
This is *NOT* a driver for a particular piece of hardware, it is a *protocol stack*, which could care less who you buy your hardware or satellite service from.
"Without the Gilat modem and whatever runs on the server side, this is useless. They stand to lose nothing by providing a driver for hardware and a service that they control."
This is wrong. Control is *precisely* what they give up, as soon as they document/publish their protocol, unless they have a patent on it (they don't, according to my search of the patent database).
As you pointed out: it works at the high data rate with Windows (where they have implemented their stack) but not with Linux (where they have not). Thus the issue is software,l not hardware dependent.
This is *exactly* what Real, Inc. does, by documenting their protcols well enough to permit implementation of a proxy server over a NAT or firewall, but *NOT* well enough for you to implement a Real Audio server (no QOS encapsulated protocol documentation, for the protocol between the client and the server, which is tunneled through the proxy connection without being interpreted by it). By *NOT* documenting their protocol, they keep control of the server side of the market.
Let me put it this way: if *I* had source code to a Real Audio player that implemented the client side of the QOS protocol, I *could easily* implement the server side. As it is, you have to spend a lot of money reverse engineering the QOS protocol (Network Appliance did exactly this, in order to implement their streaming media caching server -- cached content needs the same QOS moderation in the stream the server sends to the client).
-- Terry
"The only thing standing in the way of `video on demand' is lack of demand." -- WiReD, 1996
Sure, it works for blacked out sporting events and porn, but that's all it has ever worked on, and that a very small percentage of the television watching market that wants to see Mike Tyson chew someones ear off.
-- Terry
"How do you get from "downward price pressure" to "higher cost to consumers"?"
...I get there by noting that R&D costs to be recovered remain a fixed constant, and the time available for recovery of those costs is reduced.
:= Recovery time, in years := Number of users := R&D costs := Cost per consumer per year
People with an incomplete understanding of market economies always ignore fixed initial costs, for some reason, when trying to promote the idea of "free" software.
Please read this part again:
| By doing that, they compress the amount of
| time they have available to amortize their
| R&D costs, before someone else enters the
| market and puts a downward price pressure
| on the service, as it becomes commoditized.
Then I divide the R&D costs by the time available, and spread that cost across the total number of users.
For people who can't do "story problems", here is the math:
R
N
C
?
C / N / R = ?
Say our R&D costs were $10,000. Say the number of users was 1000. And say we had 5 years to recover our costs, because that's how long it would take someone to duplicate our work, without access to our source code. So:
$10,000 / 1000 / 5 = $2/year cost per user for R&D
Now, let's give away our source code. Now it takes our competitor a year to productize it and get their business processes in place so they can compete equally:
$10,000 / 1000 / 1 = $10/year cost per user for R&D
Now, say only 3/4 the users are willing to pay the inflated costs, and the rest say "screw you, you greedy capitalist bastards, we will do without":
$10,000 / 750 / 1 = $13.33/year cost per user for R&D
Do you "get it" now??? *Eventually*, the cost will go down... but *ONLY* after the R&D costs have been amortized out by *someone* - a customer - paying for them. The money "Joe The Programmer" was paid to write the code in the first place had to come from *somewhere*.
-- Terry
I've had my ".org" domain name for a decade now. That's well before Dupont and all of the other idiots jumped in and tried to turn the DNS into a second branch of the PTO, and registered 500 domains in a day, and we all had to start paying for something which used to be free.
.com, .net, .edu, and .mil were such that .org was the only place where a private individual was *allowed* to get a domain name at all!
.org were changed at this late date, so that I could no longer keep my domain name. I'm pretty sure that "slashdot.org" would be pretty pissed, as well.
.org, then limit two character domain names based on country codes to *citizens* of those countries, and limit .net to network infractructure (ISPs, NSPs, etc.), and .com to incorporated entities. Nobody else gets domain names, thanks!
When I got this domain, the rules on
I, for one, would be extremely pissed if the rules on
If you are going to do that to
Ut-oh... I guess it's now obvious that limiting domains by lexicography is a stupid thing. If you want to be a lexicographer, and you think you know better than the rest of us, by all means, start a search engine company or a portal site, and let people who agree with you use it and validate your judgement... or ignore you, if that's what their tastes dictate.
-- Terry
It's not "irrational"...
What do they have to lose by publishing the protocol specifications?
A heck of a lot, actually. They open the market to competitors who would otherwise have an R&D barrier to entry.
By doing that, they compress the amount of time they have available to amortize their R&D costs, before someone else enters the market and puts a downward price pressure on the service, as it becomes commoditized.
As a result, the price to consumers between the time of disclosure and the time that the price pressure actually starts, must be higher, which reduced the market further, so the price must be even higher... until it finds an equalibria point for the reduced amortization period.
This is true, even if there ends up being a small additional Linux developer market on top of the consumer market (if you can see more than that in what "they would gain from linux support", then you need to make a business case to that effect).
The net result is a higher cost to consumers, and a lower overall availability of the service.
It's not always a black-and-white, positive thing to have all information disclosed, no matter what.
-- Terry
At one point, I was approached to write something similar for a FreeBSD based devices, but at the time I had too much on my plate to accept the contract.
The protocol stack modifications allow for more data in the pipeline without an acknowledgement on a long delay link (e.g. a satellite link).
The basic problem with satellite links is that the latency increases the amount of data that must remain in the sender's buffer without acknowledgement, so the unacknowledged data times the number of active clients becomes the limiting factor. There are several approaches to dealing with this, but all of them require adulterating the protocol stack to the point that what you are running is not really TCP over IP, it's something else.
The problem is that you simply *can't* crank the TCP window size large enough to cover the latency, without reducing the number of clients that the server can support. Maybe this will change when 64 bit systems with 128G of RAM become available, but I rather expect that the extra memory will be used for supporting a larger number of simultaneous subscribers, rather than better supporting existing subscribers without using their proprietary protocol.
The reason the data rate goes down is that there is not an implementation of this stack for Linux (there is one for FreeBSD, but it's not published, to my knowledge), and there's also an implementation for Windows (not published).
Just because the call something a "driver" in the Windows world doesn'yt actually mean that it's really a "driver", and not something else.
In any case, it works at all because, in the face of the lack of a driver, the connection falls back to simple TCP/IP. *That* works, because the assumption is that the data will be mostly unidirectional, out to the remote site.
There's actually a lot of information available on the concept (but nearly none on the implementation, and I couldn't disclose anything anyway) if you dig around the various web sites.
-- Terry
"If they broke into the base, photocopied some records, and bragged about it noone would have even thought twice about their arrest."
Putting a file on a computer directly on the Internet is a far cry from putting a file in a locked file cabinet in a locked office in a secured building on a military base whose gates are protected by armed military personnel.
It much more like putting a file in a locked file cabinet in a public park.
-- Terry