I don't have anything much to say about the article, as I'm sure others will have more pertinent comments for the discussion at hand. I do, however, want to say that it's nice to see serious ventures into the investigation of so-called "cyberattacks" go at the source for information: the hacker community itself.
It's nice to see someone not taking an academic position in regards to the matter, but actually inquire with the people that may know a bit more about the practical realities of hacking or, by association sometimes, cracking.
Now; let's make sure we point out the difference between hacking and cracking, here.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Imagine if they lose the rocket because they got confused, and one gang wanted to paint a vegetarian pizza while the other wanted an all-dress one? I say we should all switch to all-dress!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Company officials had wanted to use lasers to shine a giant logo on to the surface of the moon, but they started looking for an alternative promotional idea when they learnt that the image would have to be as big as Texas to be seen by earthlings more than 380,000 kilometers (238,000 miles) away.
These ad execs are either on drugs, or they read too much of "The Tick". Of course it has to be as big as Texas. And I bet if it was dirt cheap, they'd do it too. I can't imagine the horror of gazing up at the Moon every full moon and seeing the bloody Pizza Hut logo. That would be a nightmare.
Let's hope no one thinks of something so stupid ever again. Leave it to Chairface to design large lasers to etch his name on the Moon. ("Cha?")
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
You know, they're not paying so much so the Martians can see the ad for Pizza Hut then ask them to deliver to Uranus in 30 seconds else it's free. They do it precisely because they get news coverage, and people start talking about it. It'd be like launching a Pizza Hut ad down to the bottom of the Ocean; no one will see it, but the publicity generated by the event comes in very cheap.
At this price, and with the amount of collateral publicity it generates, the price they're paying is a bargain.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Read the article. You're right, this whole process covers only the exchange of keys.
But once you have a one-time pad, you only need to XOR it with your plaintext. Why would you need a complex encryption scheme? No key, no plaintext. One-time pads are the safest encryption method, period.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Check out the Armed Linux Website It looks... Weird. Why haven't we heard about this distro before? Who are these people? Why are they running ASP files? Why are all these hip-looking models looking up at me in a plunging shot? Why? Why??
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, I meant particles of dust, not the air itself. That's what I meant by 'atoms in the air', and not the atoms of the air itself.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The CNN article was clearer on the subject. They were told to stay indoors because the water that had leaked from the plant had evaporated and it started to rain radioactive rain. My god, that sounds ugly.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Those living within a six-mile radius of the plant were told to stay indoors.
What?? If the air is contaminated, then staying indoors won't change a thing. If atoms in the air are radioactive, everyone's gonna get it anyway. As for direct radiation from the central, the only thing that can help is: 1) shielding, and 2) distance. Thinking whether you're indoors or outdoors will make a difference is like thinking a layer of normal clothes will protect you from a bullet.
They wouldn't get me to stay indoors following this. I guess the people from the surrounding village don't really know what's going on.
If the Japanese Government acts so irresponsibly, this could get a lot worse...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I am not saying that the fact that presentation sways the vote is any indication on the expertise of those presenting their opinions. I do believe the experts suggesting moves are just that, experts.
What I am saying, however, is that rather than properly network the minds of the entire world into one player, this process uses a somewhat flawed method to process the various expertise. Certainly presentation is a factor; I'm not saying it's the only one.
An ideal form of networking minds would mean that the greatest mind in the lot is the minimum standard; in small groups, that works if everyone is open-minded. The brain of the group provides proper advice on a level, and the others, while not understanding everything, still manage to recognise the intelligence of a particular idea, then network on it to put it forward.
But in large groups, on the scale of this contest or a nation, this process is more and more difficult, because it is difficult to recognise particular expertise amongst the members. As a result, presentation plays a role, and it is possible that a form of expertise is lost to the fact that the number of participants is simply overwhelming.
And so, I don't believe that this chess game properly represents the sum of all the players in the world; it is something less than that. Same for any democratic process: somehow, expertise is lost by representation, and it is a sad fact that most geeks know, that often genius is buried under statistics and lost to anonymity.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
As I said in my initial comment; Linux lost the specific contest put forth by PC Week, but whether said contest is representative of anything is highly debatable.
My main point was that we all know that off-the-shelf, Linux would run NT into the ground in such a contest. In this case, it wasn't. The only person to blame here is the sysadmin that set up the boxes.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Jesux was never a hoax... It was a joke. I find it sad that reporters would pick up these stories from the web, then run with them in full gear without corroborating their stories. Then, when the time comes and people find out that they screwed up, the joker is the one blamed for the whole mess.
When I first read the Jesux homepage, the word joke was written in big, shiny letters all over it. But as soon as a journalist jumps on it and gets screwed for not doing his or her homework, then it becomes a hoax and we're supposed to believe all the guillible parties were fooled, while in fact they fooled themselves.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Well, I half-expected a script kiddie behind this. It turns out this is not. As a matter of fact, the exploit is clever enough to merit the prize.
What it does show is that, although Linux is more secure than NT off the shelf, both still require a sysadmin that does his research throughly and keeps up with bug fixes. Still, if this was on Bugtraq a month ago, I consider that someone at PC Week didn't do their homework. I don't think it warrants the conspiracy theories laying around, because the security hole was obscure enough; by this I mean that there was still the matter of replacing a cgi script through a commercial script.
So, well; let's take it with head high. Linux lost. I still think the competition wasn't representative, but in this case, Linux did lose to NT in a cracking race. We'd need to run the test on a thousand different machines to get significance, but still. These things happen, and as so many people have said, a box is only as secure as its sysadmin.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That's exactly my point. By depending so much on discussion, it drowns the statement in the fashion in which it is carried, so that in the end, it is the ability to sway a certain category of people that matters, rather than the statement itself.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
If you look closely at how this works, this isn't truly Kasparov vs. the world. It's Kasparov vs. four chess masters, with a randomising factor thrown in to determine whose move is selected.
If you truly did a Kasparov vs. the world, you'd just invite everyone to vote for the move they want, without any advice. Then, indeed, you would have Kasparov vs. the world, and the world would be a very, very average player indeed.
Rather, this is more like democracy. Four masters "suggest" moves, which means the clearer (or cryptic and brilliant-sounding) their analysis is, the more likely they are to sway the majority in their favour. Oh, sure, you can vote for another move that isn't suggested, but when the average player has a chance of going with one master whose opinion he believes he shares, or thinking up his own move that none of the four masters thought up, what do you think he'll do? And even if he does, will there be enough votes from the other players? No.
So the little genius sitting at home and ready to beat Kasparov is not going to weight much in the balance. He doesn't have access to a visible, publicised advice posting like the other chess masters have. He could post on a BBoard, but what if he really sucks at English and cannot communicate his analysis properly?
So, what is left, is the ability to sway the crowd. Chess ability matters, but when the average player can't figure the game out one move ahead, he's gonna go for the more convincing, not necessarely the better one. And so, we're back to good old democracy: don't elect the one you know to be the best qualified, because you yourself are not qualified to make that call. Just elect the candidate that sounds the most convincing and seems to know where he's going. And he'll take care of the rest.
Interestingly enough, this is the only way the world can win (or draw, by looking at the game) against Kasparov. If there was no expert vote-swaying, it would be anarchy. Now it's democracy.
This game is a statement on human politics!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
So now you can turn your monitor into a 30" monitor without increasing pitch, and you end up having to sit six feet from the monitor if you want to make out what's going on...
Besides, seeing Windows boot up on such a large screen must be the stuff of nightmares.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The idea of Linux for Windows sounded too much like the last resort of a company that can't find any other way to get Linux applications to crash.
Anyway; as Signal 11 has pointed out, that sounds like FUD, although pointed at W2K. Not that I mind, though. It's a nice thing to see the pendulum swing both ways in the news. Of course, ideally, there would be no FUD either way, be it Microsoft or OSS.
The "Linux is hard to install" is truly an annoying myth and one dating back to the early 1990's, at that. I do remember trying to install Linux back in University; it was a long and tedious process, for which you felt more than rewarded when, after weeding through tons of HOWTO's, you actually managed to kick X into working. It was a hard but very satisfactory experience.
I installed Linux again when Mandrake came out, and expected more or less the same growing pains. I was quite surprised to see the whole affair go by smoothly, so smoothly in fact that it's a simple matter to simply reinstall the whole thing when you begin screwing with permissions and packages too much. (Or when you lose your root password, heh heh.)
Now, the other day, I had to run a friend through the phone (I had a busted ankle and couldn't go there) into installing Windows 95. The main problem was to prevent the bloody thing from assuming things about every other driver. It took a good hour and a half to babystep her through.
That brings old memories of Linux. Linux Mandrake does not. The article has one essential point: indeed, Microsoft relies on the fact that the computer will come pre-installed with the OS. They've dumbed down the installation process to clueless technician level, but only for a standard platform on which the technician will have installed the OS many times.
As for most Linux distros, the installation process becomes more efficient and automatic each time. Microsoft doesn't seem to want to ease the installation process any time soon. As soon as a few people pick up W2K from the shelves and end up crying to their hacker son/nephew/friend (I do level 1 support for my family and many friends, as I'm sure you all can relate), the myth that "Windows is easy to install" will die.
In the meantime, let's keep working on the "Linux is hard to install" one.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I obviously don't have time to read it all in one sitting, but it looks very promising from skimming through it. It seems like it's a very intelligent treatment of programming; at long last, perhaps, a sort of formalism for hacking, as opposed to structured, counterintuitive programming that seems to be the norm in programming classes. (Anyone else has the impression that programming courses are made up for those who don't grasp the concept of programming?)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I must say, this is awfully cool. What's more, it's cheap. For $2000, you can bet I'll get one. It's probably useless; but I'll feel like the Uber-Geek with this baby on!
I can already hear the arguments...
Woman: "And then I told her, listen, bitch, blah blah blah blah blah..."
Man: "Uh huh. Uh huh."
Woman: "Hey. You're not listening!"
Man: "Sure, hon. Whatever you say."
Woman: "You're playing bloody Solitaire again, are you??"
Man (shocked): "What? Of course not!" Aparte: "All I need is a black king..."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
If you read my post properly, I didn't say eBay's problems would go away if they used Linux. I said that these problems would go away if an Open Source model was applied to code on the Internet. I'm not talking performance, I'm talking philosophy.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Video phones are an old idea. Somehow, we all thought that by the Year 2000(tm), we'd all have video phones at home. And sure enough, the technology's here. You can get a nice webcam and off you go.
But it hasn't picked up with the majority of the population, which is why it's something of the past. The reason is, the phone provides instantaneous communication. That's its fuction and purpose. The purpose is not to see the other, most of the times. Who would want to run out of the shower to answer an important call, then have to hide behind a sofa to speak on the phone?
So, this gadget will only be bought by senior management who somehow manage to bull$hi7 the accounting department into saying this is useful. Sure, on the off-chance that you're stuck in the bathroom (heh, little AY2K joke) for an important video conference call, it's gonna be great. Other than that, I think very few people will actually bother with it.
Yeah, it's cool. So that leaves senior management and geeks to buy it.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to see someone not taking an academic position in regards to the matter, but actually inquire with the people that may know a bit more about the practical realities of hacking or, by association sometimes, cracking.
Now; let's make sure we point out the difference between hacking and cracking, here. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
These ad execs are either on drugs, or they read too much of "The Tick". Of course it has to be as big as Texas. And I bet if it was dirt cheap, they'd do it too. I can't imagine the horror of gazing up at the Moon every full moon and seeing the bloody Pizza Hut logo. That would be a nightmare.
Let's hope no one thinks of something so stupid ever again. Leave it to Chairface to design large lasers to etch his name on the Moon. ("Cha?")
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
At this price, and with the amount of collateral publicity it generates, the price they're paying is a bargain.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
But once you have a one-time pad, you only need to XOR it with your plaintext. Why would you need a complex encryption scheme? No key, no plaintext. One-time pads are the safest encryption method, period.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What?? If the air is contaminated, then staying indoors won't change a thing. If atoms in the air are radioactive, everyone's gonna get it anyway. As for direct radiation from the central, the only thing that can help is: 1) shielding, and 2) distance. Thinking whether you're indoors or outdoors will make a difference is like thinking a layer of normal clothes will protect you from a bullet.
They wouldn't get me to stay indoors following this. I guess the people from the surrounding village don't really know what's going on.
If the Japanese Government acts so irresponsibly, this could get a lot worse...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What I am saying, however, is that rather than properly network the minds of the entire world into one player, this process uses a somewhat flawed method to process the various expertise. Certainly presentation is a factor; I'm not saying it's the only one.
An ideal form of networking minds would mean that the greatest mind in the lot is the minimum standard; in small groups, that works if everyone is open-minded. The brain of the group provides proper advice on a level, and the others, while not understanding everything, still manage to recognise the intelligence of a particular idea, then network on it to put it forward.
But in large groups, on the scale of this contest or a nation, this process is more and more difficult, because it is difficult to recognise particular expertise amongst the members. As a result, presentation plays a role, and it is possible that a form of expertise is lost to the fact that the number of participants is simply overwhelming.
And so, I don't believe that this chess game properly represents the sum of all the players in the world; it is something less than that. Same for any democratic process: somehow, expertise is lost by representation, and it is a sad fact that most geeks know, that often genius is buried under statistics and lost to anonymity.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
My main point was that we all know that off-the-shelf, Linux would run NT into the ground in such a contest. In this case, it wasn't. The only person to blame here is the sysadmin that set up the boxes.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
When I first read the Jesux homepage, the word joke was written in big, shiny letters all over it. But as soon as a journalist jumps on it and gets screwed for not doing his or her homework, then it becomes a hoax and we're supposed to believe all the guillible parties were fooled, while in fact they fooled themselves.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What it does show is that, although Linux is more secure than NT off the shelf, both still require a sysadmin that does his research throughly and keeps up with bug fixes. Still, if this was on Bugtraq a month ago, I consider that someone at PC Week didn't do their homework. I don't think it warrants the conspiracy theories laying around, because the security hole was obscure enough; by this I mean that there was still the matter of replacing a cgi script through a commercial script.
So, well; let's take it with head high. Linux lost. I still think the competition wasn't representative, but in this case, Linux did lose to NT in a cracking race. We'd need to run the test on a thousand different machines to get significance, but still. These things happen, and as so many people have said, a box is only as secure as its sysadmin.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
If you truly did a Kasparov vs. the world, you'd just invite everyone to vote for the move they want, without any advice. Then, indeed, you would have Kasparov vs. the world, and the world would be a very, very average player indeed.
Rather, this is more like democracy. Four masters "suggest" moves, which means the clearer (or cryptic and brilliant-sounding) their analysis is, the more likely they are to sway the majority in their favour. Oh, sure, you can vote for another move that isn't suggested, but when the average player has a chance of going with one master whose opinion he believes he shares, or thinking up his own move that none of the four masters thought up, what do you think he'll do? And even if he does, will there be enough votes from the other players? No.
So the little genius sitting at home and ready to beat Kasparov is not going to weight much in the balance. He doesn't have access to a visible, publicised advice posting like the other chess masters have. He could post on a BBoard, but what if he really sucks at English and cannot communicate his analysis properly?
So, what is left, is the ability to sway the crowd. Chess ability matters, but when the average player can't figure the game out one move ahead, he's gonna go for the more convincing, not necessarely the better one. And so, we're back to good old democracy: don't elect the one you know to be the best qualified, because you yourself are not qualified to make that call. Just elect the candidate that sounds the most convincing and seems to know where he's going. And he'll take care of the rest.
Interestingly enough, this is the only way the world can win (or draw, by looking at the game) against Kasparov. If there was no expert vote-swaying, it would be anarchy. Now it's democracy.
This game is a statement on human politics!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Besides, seeing Windows boot up on such a large screen must be the stuff of nightmares. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Anyway; as Signal 11 has pointed out, that sounds like FUD, although pointed at W2K. Not that I mind, though. It's a nice thing to see the pendulum swing both ways in the news. Of course, ideally, there would be no FUD either way, be it Microsoft or OSS.
The "Linux is hard to install" is truly an annoying myth and one dating back to the early 1990's, at that. I do remember trying to install Linux back in University; it was a long and tedious process, for which you felt more than rewarded when, after weeding through tons of HOWTO's, you actually managed to kick X into working. It was a hard but very satisfactory experience.
I installed Linux again when Mandrake came out, and expected more or less the same growing pains. I was quite surprised to see the whole affair go by smoothly, so smoothly in fact that it's a simple matter to simply reinstall the whole thing when you begin screwing with permissions and packages too much. (Or when you lose your root password, heh heh.)
Now, the other day, I had to run a friend through the phone (I had a busted ankle and couldn't go there) into installing Windows 95. The main problem was to prevent the bloody thing from assuming things about every other driver. It took a good hour and a half to babystep her through.
That brings old memories of Linux. Linux Mandrake does not. The article has one essential point: indeed, Microsoft relies on the fact that the computer will come pre-installed with the OS. They've dumbed down the installation process to clueless technician level, but only for a standard platform on which the technician will have installed the OS many times.
As for most Linux distros, the installation process becomes more efficient and automatic each time. Microsoft doesn't seem to want to ease the installation process any time soon. As soon as a few people pick up W2K from the shelves and end up crying to their hacker son/nephew/friend (I do level 1 support for my family and many friends, as I'm sure you all can relate), the myth that "Windows is easy to install" will die.
In the meantime, let's keep working on the "Linux is hard to install" one.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I must say, this is awfully cool. What's more, it's cheap. For $2000, you can bet I'll get one. It's probably useless; but I'll feel like the Uber-Geek with this baby on!
I can already hear the arguments...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Let's see, what else; would postulating that the Universe is a giant atom of Plutonium solve this problem?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
But it hasn't picked up with the majority of the population, which is why it's something of the past. The reason is, the phone provides instantaneous communication. That's its fuction and purpose. The purpose is not to see the other, most of the times. Who would want to run out of the shower to answer an important call, then have to hide behind a sofa to speak on the phone?
So, this gadget will only be bought by senior management who somehow manage to bull$hi7 the accounting department into saying this is useful. Sure, on the off-chance that you're stuck in the bathroom (heh, little AY2K joke) for an important video conference call, it's gonna be great. Other than that, I think very few people will actually bother with it.
Yeah, it's cool. So that leaves senior management and geeks to buy it. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."