Distributive laws for Boolean logic and arithmetic:
a OR (b AND c) = (a OR b) AND (a OR c)
a + (b * c) = a + (b * c)
a AND (b OR c) = (a AND b) OR (a AND c)
a * (b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c)
i.e. AND distributes over OR and vice versa. Multiplication always distributes over addition and not vice versa. Probably a few other fundamental differences too.
The UK already has fairly severe (IMO) penalties for computer crime. The Computer Misuse Act of 1990 makes unauthorized access of a computer system a crime with a maximum sentence of 6 months or a fine of 2000. If there is an intent to commit a crime, then maximum sentence increases to 5 years. The unauthorized alteration of computer data also carries a maximum sentence of 5 years.
The Act covers any crime with a significant link in the UK. Additionally, it also includes conspiracy and incitement. Personally, I believe that the Act was a knee jerk reaction to the thought of criminals running round a wired nation. However, it is rare for somebody to be prosecuted under the Act.
Reading this news item reminded me of a point that Lawerence Lessig makes 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'. He observes that governments are able to push hidden agendas by regulating software makers, instead of using the law.
Free software counters this ability by allowing the public to examine the software. If Joe Hacker doesn't like what the software does, then he can alter it. The important result of this is that it forces the government to openly legislate if it wants to prohibit, for example, some online activity.
I believe that (democratic) governments should be as open as possible. Free software helps to achieve this role. Howard Dean using and promoting free software is hardly a major step, but at least it's a start.
I've noticed that the net seems to have been particularly slow recently. Checking on Xaffire Inc.'s Internet Average it's obvious that there are a few problems. Could this be a combination of the various DDoS's occuring at the moment and the recent worms?
Personally, I will always buy the paper book. I enjoy finding a quiet corner and opening a good, ol' fashion wooden book. There's something special about the feel of the pages and the smell of a book. Futhermore, decent typography is a pleasure to view. There is also a satisfaction with finishing a book, and putting it upon the bookshelf - owning that copy for life.
Unauthorised electronic versions of books are apt to be of poor quality if they've been OCRed. It takes a true perfectionist with a lot of motivation to produce an exact electronic copy of a paper book (although unauthorised reproduction of publisher produced electonic versions is still possible).
Furthermore, computers break. Especially if you try taking them to the beach. Paper has a far greater chance of surviving sand and water. And if it doesn't? Cheap enough to buy a replacement.
However, there have been many times where I've wished that I could egrep a book for a certain quote. Digitisation is a real help for *research*. Image being able to go google your local library. Or even all of the books ever produced, all stored in a universal format that's publicly accessible and not locked up in crypto bottles. That's harnishing human knowledge and creativity.
In short, book 'piracy' isn't going to put publishers out of business any time soon, and it might even help increase the appeal of paper books.
tcpkill will use network sniffing and packet insertion to kill any connections that are visible to the host computer. This usually means that connections to/from a computer on the same LAN segment as the host running tcpkill can be taken down. This is irrespective of whether the connection is being routed through the host computer. Running tcpkill on a gateway simply ensures complete visibility of the routed packets. In contrast, cutter does no network sniffing, and hence *must* be run on the gateway computer.
The 'cutter' program introduced in the article sounds suspiciously similar to Dug Song's tcpkill program (a member of his dsniff network utilities). In fact, tcpkill appears to be superior because it matches packets via tcpdump expressions, and hence is more versatile.
It's true that Palm must "keep pushing it's capabilities". However, I'm from the old school and I prefer to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid;). I'm planning on buying myself an original Handspring Visor. It may be simple, but at least it's (hopefully) not going to crash. As companies increase their lines of code, the number of bugs roughly increases as the square of this number, IIRC. It's annoying enough when my relatively simple mobile phone's software crashes. I don't want this to happen on a handheld device. As Antoine De Saint-Exupery put it:
"Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."
A while back I downloaded the latest CVS version of gaim (20020402) and decided to have a play around to see which maximum number of jobs gave the best compile times. My box is a dual celeron 550 with a modest 128MB of RAM. Results are as follows:
time make -j1 real 4m6.294s user 3m27.700s sys 0m48.820s
time make -j2 real 2m50.786s user 3m36.000e sys 0m49.190s
time make -j3 real 2m46.357s user 3m30.230s sys 0m49.410s
time make -j4 real 2m45.729s user 3m31.810s sys 0m50.790s
Switching to two or more maximum jobs gave a huge difference in compile times. Above -j2, there wasn't too much difference, with -j3 giving the (marginally) fastest compile times. Overall, multiple jobs are your friend if you hate waiting around longer that you have to for make jobs to finish.
The data that PuTTY leaves around can be fairly easily cleaned up though. However, ideally this shouldn't been needed. From the PuTTY FAQ:
PuTTY will leave some Registry entries, and a random seed file, on the PC. If you are using PuTTY on a public PC, or somebody else's PC, you might want to clean these up when you leave. You can do that automatically, by running the command
Living in the UK, there was a slightly different take on this technology in the press. The problem is that these engineered microbes violate international weapons laws. However, this would probably be a moot issue should the US decide to use such bioweapons.
The military has extensive use of secure communications channels. Modern warfare *demands* such capabilites. How is else the submarine commander going to know if the orders to nuke some third world country come from a valid source? Ok, so I'm being facetious, but still, if good crypto is implemented *properly* then it can be very secure.
Browsing the download page at PCWorld.com, most of the software (including IE6 and Adobe Acrobat Reader) is listed as having a 'free' license. I must admit that it's a favourite personal gripe of mine, but I wish that sites would draw attention between "it doesn't cost anything for personal use" and "free as in speech and (usually) beer" licenses. Maybe then the true merits of Open Source would become more apparent to Joe Schmoe.
... but then perhaps I'm deluded and most people don't care what licenses they submit to, as long as they can use their software.
XMMS (X MultiMedia System) is the Winamp for Linux. It does pretty much everything that Winamp does (including support for skins, visulisation plugins etc) and it's Open Source. I always prefer running applications natively instead of emulating, providing that I'm given the choice. 'Nuff said.
But a lot of people (myself included) find flourscent lights too harsh. They tend to emmit a lot of longer wavelength (blue) light. There's nothing like the yellowish glow of an incandescent light bulb. Oh, and they're somewhat smaller - I often end up repositioning table lamps when I'm doing some fine work, but flourescent tubes are more clunky.
Cycling is a great way to stay fit. There are some pretty beefy hills near why I live in the UK. There's nothing better than spending a day blasting down slopes. Strangely enough, pulling yourself to the top of the hill is just as exilarating.
Much fun can be had trying to push yourself as hard as possible on a downhill. All you really need is a speedo. And you get the added benefit of being able to boast that you hit 37 mph on a rocky downhill:)
I've taught myself to use a map if/when the hillfog comes in, but a GPS is always added insurance. And it has the added benefit of allowing you to plot the route that you took.
I find that cycling is a great way to boost fitness levels, and get some proper sunlight exposure, instead of the crappy monitor tan;) I also find that I spend ages tuning my bike, which gets me away from my computer.
It's all about pushing the performance envelope, on the components that you have, to it's limits. Water cooling is not going to be reliable without spending a large amount of money, but it's still good for playing around with, and extracting those last few MHz from that CPU.
Overall, I guess it's all about being a geek, and wanting to play and prod systems till they're running at their absolute fastest. If you can't understand it, then it's very difficult / impossible to explain why people would want to do such things.
Funny thing is, "car geeks" do the same thing, "chipping" their cars and adjusting timings on-the-fly with in car laptops. There was some story about this recently, but I'm too lazy to look.
There is some uncertainty as to the future of PGP. Network Associates (pgp.com) appears to be trying to bale out of encryption, post 9/11... thus GnuPG is the way to go.
Incidentally, I use GPG to store a growing list of passwords. It is very useful to maintain a central list, for when I forget my passwords. However, this is not the way for large organisations to go (read: kludgey).
AIRC in the experiment that created Dolly, 8 embryos were implanted into separate ewes. Just one of the embryos (Dolly) made it all the way through to birth. Going by this, the chances that the child is born appear to be slim. However, the details also appear to be slightly vapourous...
Slashdot Mirror
a OR (b AND c) = (a OR b) AND (a OR c)
a + (b * c) = a + (b * c)
a AND (b OR c) = (a AND b) OR (a AND c)
a * (b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c)
i.e. AND distributes over OR and vice versa. Multiplication always distributes over addition and not vice versa. Probably a few other fundamental differences too.
Shell command: tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
The UK already has fairly severe (IMO) penalties for computer crime. The Computer Misuse Act of 1990 makes unauthorized access of a computer system a crime with a maximum sentence of 6 months or a fine of 2000. If there is an intent to commit a crime, then maximum sentence increases to 5 years. The unauthorized alteration of computer data also carries a maximum sentence of 5 years.
The Act covers any crime with a significant link in the UK. Additionally, it also includes conspiracy and incitement. Personally, I believe that the Act was a knee jerk reaction to the thought of criminals running round a wired nation. However, it is rare for somebody to be prosecuted under the Act.
Reading this news item reminded me of a point that Lawerence Lessig makes 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'. He observes that governments are able to push hidden agendas by regulating software makers, instead of using the law.
Free software counters this ability by allowing the public to examine the software. If Joe Hacker doesn't like what the software does, then he can alter it. The important result of this is that it forces the government to openly legislate if it wants to prohibit, for example, some online activity.
I believe that (democratic) governments should be as open as possible. Free software helps to achieve this role. Howard Dean using and promoting free software is hardly a major step, but at least it's a start.
I've noticed that the net seems to have been particularly slow recently. Checking on Xaffire Inc.'s Internet Average it's obvious that there are a few problems. Could this be a combination of the various DDoS's occuring at the moment and the recent worms?
Personally, I will always buy the paper book. I enjoy finding a quiet corner and opening a good, ol' fashion wooden book. There's something special about the feel of the pages and the smell of a book. Futhermore, decent typography is a pleasure to view. There is also a satisfaction with finishing a book, and putting it upon the bookshelf - owning that copy for life.
Unauthorised electronic versions of books are apt to be of poor quality if they've been OCRed. It takes a true perfectionist with a lot of motivation to produce an exact electronic copy of a paper book (although unauthorised reproduction of publisher produced electonic versions is still possible).
Furthermore, computers break. Especially if you try taking them to the beach. Paper has a far greater chance of surviving sand and water. And if it doesn't? Cheap enough to buy a replacement.
However, there have been many times where I've wished that I could egrep a book for a certain quote. Digitisation is a real help for *research*. Image being able to go google your local library. Or even all of the books ever produced, all stored in a universal format that's publicly accessible and not locked up in crypto bottles. That's harnishing human knowledge and creativity.
In short, book 'piracy' isn't going to put publishers out of business any time soon, and it might even help increase the appeal of paper books.
tcpkill will use network sniffing and packet insertion to kill any connections that are visible to the host computer. This usually means that connections to/from a computer on the same LAN segment as the host running tcpkill can be taken down. This is irrespective of whether the connection is being routed through the host computer. Running tcpkill on a gateway simply ensures complete visibility of the routed packets. In contrast, cutter does no network sniffing, and hence *must* be run on the gateway computer.
The 'cutter' program introduced in the article sounds suspiciously similar to Dug Song's tcpkill program (a member of his dsniff network utilities). In fact, tcpkill appears to be superior because it matches packets via tcpdump expressions, and hence is more versatile.
It's true that Palm must "keep pushing it's capabilities". However, I'm from the old school and I prefer to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid ;). I'm planning on buying myself an original Handspring Visor. It may be simple, but at least it's (hopefully) not going to crash. As companies increase their lines of code, the number of bugs roughly increases as the square of this number, IIRC. It's annoying enough when my relatively simple mobile phone's software crashes. I don't want this to happen on a handheld device. As Antoine De Saint-Exupery put it:
"Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."
There was an "I, Cringely" article about this last year. Nonetheless, it's still pretty damn cool.
Well, it's not like I don't receive everyone elses personal files through email, courtesy of the Sircam worm.
A while back I downloaded the latest CVS version of gaim (20020402) and decided to have a play around to see which maximum number of jobs gave the best compile times. My box is a dual celeron 550 with a modest 128MB of RAM. Results are as follows:
time make -j1
real 4m6.294s
user 3m27.700s
sys 0m48.820s
time make -j2
real 2m50.786s
user 3m36.000e
sys 0m49.190s
time make -j3
real 2m46.357s
user 3m30.230s
sys 0m49.410s
time make -j4
real 2m45.729s
user 3m31.810s
sys 0m50.790s
Switching to two or more maximum jobs gave a huge difference in compile times. Above -j2, there wasn't too much difference, with -j3 giving the (marginally) fastest compile times. Overall, multiple jobs are your friend if you hate waiting around longer that you have to for make jobs to finish.
PuTTY will leave some Registry entries, and a random seed file, on the PC. If you are using PuTTY on a public PC, or somebody else's PC, you might want to clean these up when you leave. You can do that automatically, by running the command
"putty -cleanup"
Living in the UK, there was a slightly different take on this technology in the press. The problem is that these engineered microbes violate international weapons laws. However, this would probably be a moot issue should the US decide to use such bioweapons.
The military has extensive use of secure communications channels. Modern warfare *demands* such capabilites. How is else the submarine commander going to know if the orders to nuke some third world country come from a valid source? Ok, so I'm being facetious, but still, if good crypto is implemented *properly* then it can be very secure.
... but then perhaps I'm deluded and most people don't care what licenses they submit to, as long as they can use their software.
Ok, I'm sorry.
XMMS (X MultiMedia System) is the Winamp for Linux. It does pretty much everything that Winamp does (including support for skins, visulisation plugins etc) and it's Open Source. I always prefer running applications natively instead of emulating, providing that I'm given the choice. 'Nuff said.
I just wish that they'd cut out Jaja Binks in the UK release of Episode 1...
But a lot of people (myself included) find flourscent lights too harsh. They tend to emmit a lot of longer wavelength (blue) light. There's nothing like the yellowish glow of an incandescent light bulb. Oh, and they're somewhat smaller - I often end up repositioning table lamps when I'm doing some fine work, but flourescent tubes are more clunky.
Cycling is a great way to stay fit. There are some pretty beefy hills near why I live in the UK. There's nothing better than spending a day blasting down slopes. Strangely enough, pulling yourself to the top of the hill is just as exilarating.
Much fun can be had trying to push yourself as hard as possible on a downhill. All you really need is a speedo. And you get the added benefit of being able to boast that you hit 37 mph on a rocky downhill :)
I've taught myself to use a map if/when the hillfog comes in, but a GPS is always added insurance. And it has the added benefit of allowing you to plot the route that you took.
I find that cycling is a great way to boost fitness levels, and get some proper sunlight exposure, instead of the crappy monitor tan ;) I also find that I spend ages tuning my bike, which gets me away from my computer.
It's all about pushing the performance envelope, on the components that you have, to it's limits. Water cooling is not going to be reliable without spending a large amount of money, but it's still good for playing around with, and extracting those last few MHz from that CPU.
Overall, I guess it's all about being a geek, and wanting to play and prod systems till they're running at their absolute fastest. If you can't understand it, then it's very difficult / impossible to explain why people would want to do such things.
Funny thing is, "car geeks" do the same thing, "chipping" their cars and adjusting timings on-the-fly with in car laptops. There was some story about this recently, but I'm too lazy to look.
i've put up a mirror of the article at www.dovehouse.fsworld.co.uk/linuxplanet/1.html.
There is some uncertainty as to the future of PGP. Network Associates (pgp.com) appears to be trying to bale out of encryption, post 9/11... thus GnuPG is the way to go.
Incidentally, I use GPG to store a growing list of passwords. It is very useful to maintain a central list, for when I forget my passwords. However, this is not the way for large organisations to go (read: kludgey).
AIRC in the experiment that created Dolly, 8 embryos were implanted into separate ewes. Just one of the embryos (Dolly) made it all the way through to birth. Going by this, the chances that the child is born appear to be slim. However, the details also appear to be slightly vapourous...