Compared to the information leaked by Windows' security holes and XP reporting everything about you to Microsoft, Echelon looks like an "a/s/l?" request.
No-- not in the "I actually managed to use it on a real girl" sense. Obviously, as a reader of Slashdot, my prospects for a heterosexual coupling are nil.
No, I used it to wank to, and it performed fabulously. I salute you with a wadded-up tissue.
Once Microsoft's next generation of Windows software locks out any media player except MS's. Then it'll require content providers to sell kidneys to pay for the licensing to encode in the MS format.
Then Microsoft will have a lot of money and a big pile of kidneys, and content providers will have no money and die of renal failure.
Full text of review, in case it gets slashdotted.
on
A New Kind of Science
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
First things first - have I read this book? Hell, no, and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year, they're lying thru their teeth. This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page, the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole. That's got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press.
I've been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out. I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released, got it on Thursday and I've been skimming it like mad since. To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is, I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6, curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson's graduation. I've got four college degrees, one in math and two from MIT, and bottom line - this sucker's gonna take a while to digest. However, it's theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety. In ANKOS, Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius? Who knows, but it's going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point.
ANKOS is 1250+ pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine-print notes. The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic- and name-dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram's tangents strike your fancy. Topping the whole thing off is a 60+ page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes.
Despite its length, ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape. And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us. It's all about cellular automations, which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations. Start with a black square in the center grid square (cell) on the top line of a sheet of graph paper. Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors. Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper. Repeat. Watch what happens. Sounds simple. It isn't.
The first short chapter outlines Wolfram's central thesis: That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature, and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed. The reason, claims Wolfram, is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity. He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory, fractals, AI, cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years, his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm.
The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment: the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons. He discovers this "universe" of rules is sufficient to produce his four so-called "classes" of complex systems: order, self-similar nested patterns, structures and most importantly, true randomness. The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard-type patterns and leaf-type fractals; the last two, unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences. Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non-fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications.
The third chapter expands his initial 256-rule-set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept. Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black-and-white, rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row, rule sets that embody full-blown Turing machines, rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells, that tag end point grid squares with new patterns, that implement "registers" and "symbols" - Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail. And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores, it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented. This ever-escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling - in fact, embodying - the inherent complexity of the natural world.
In chapter four, he begins this process, by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers. Automatons that multiply and divide, that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi, that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations - Wolfram details them all. Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus? Set up dominos in just the right way, flip the first one and stand back - nature can do such calculations automatically, efficiently and mindlessly.
Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one-dimensional numbers to multi-dimensional entities. Simple X-Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines "networks" and "constraints" as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish - always generating the ever-higher levels of complexity. More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth. So far we've seen some really neat sleight-of-hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written. But we're only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go, and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up.
Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries. Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described, he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four "classes" of systems. He finds that while previously explored checkerboard (Class 1) and fractal (Class 2) systems yield few surprises, his newly-discovered unique (Class 3) and random (Class 4) cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes - a telltale hint of universality. Furthermore, their behavior starts to be influenced by "attractors" that guide them to "structure" and self-organization.
With the scent of universality and self-organization in the air, Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real-world topics of interest. Billiards, taffy-making, Brownian motion, casino games, the three-body problem, pachinko machines - randomness is obviously a factor in all of these. Yet, Wolfram notes, while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes, none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself. The cellular automations he has catalogued, particularly his beloved Rule 30, do. The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight, leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors. How, you ask? Hey, Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I'm still trying to follow: no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two.
By chapter eight, Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you, me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us. Forget the Navier-Stokes equations - if you want to understand fluid flow, you have to think of it as a cellular automation process. Ditto for crystal growth. Ditto for fracture mechanics. Ditto for Wall Street. Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth, seashell growth and pigmentation patterns. This is very convincing stuff - tables of Mathematica-generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature. Yes, you've seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks. The difference between fractals and cellular automations: fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process. It's a somewhat subtle difference - and a key Wolfram point.
Having established some credibility for his ideas, Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine, where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics. It was practically inevitable he would do this - his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics, and that's the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman. Despite his solid background in physics, this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff. He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. From Wolfram's way of thinking, if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation, then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story, so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself. He continues extensive speculations on what this may be, and how space, time, gravity, relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation. The rule set for this ultimate automation, which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica, takes the place of a mathematically-defined unified field theory in Wolfram's world. This is mind-blowing stuff, but ultimately boils down to Wolfram's opinion. I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as "mere" manifestations of some cellular automation - if so, what is left to be the "system" on which the automation itself is running? I'm reduced to one of Clarke's Laws: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine...
Wolfram shifts from Kubrick-style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten, where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind. Visual image perception, the human perception of complexity and randomness, cryptography, data compression, statistical analysis, and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored. The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself. Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these, except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics.
Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead. He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier, about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations, emulate other computational systems, and act as universal Turing machines. He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110. His arguments lead up to a closing realization, what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram's Law.
The final chapter, chapter twelve, discusses what all of Wolfram's years of isolation and work have led him to conclude. He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence. What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram's thoughts on the PCE. If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us, then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure. Because of the nature of cellular automation computation, there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion. We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts. New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular-automations like wind-tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature. Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve, and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will. To conclude with Wolfram's own final paragraph in the book:
"And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold."
As noted above, 350+ pages of notes follow this exposition, and trust me, there's no way they can be summarized. To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS, he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built-up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious. So much for dreaming.
So what is the bottom line on ANKOS? It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve. It is very thought provoking. It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation. But is it the next Principia, the herald of a new scientific revolution?
Read and decide for yourself. Only time, and a lot of it, will tell.
The Certificate of Completion of Studies from Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Ill. It's your ticket to a crew member job (and the possibility of an eventual promotion to shift leader) in any McDonald's anywhere in the country.
Enjoy the recession, and thank you for participating in the overstaffed tech sector. It has been a pleasure taking your tuition money.
In case previous full-text posts get slashdotted.
on
Hacking Web Services
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· Score: -1, Redundant
Security In Web Services: An Evolving Threat Model 2002-05-20
Shannon Cochran
Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, apprised security researchers at the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy about attacks likely to become commonplace in the emerging era of large-scale, distributed web services. "The kind of attacks that we're seeing are not a traditional security attack," he warned. The threat to web services is not about something like root access; it's more about repeated violations and exploitations of the service -- small cheats and hacks that are individually insignificant, but a huge problem in the aggregate. Spam is an example of this kind of hack. A web-based e-mail service does not suffer if one of its accounts is used for mass-mailing. When tens of thousands of accounts are abused in this way, the service can be brought to its knees. Manber calls this the "penny jar" effect, likening it to a thief who comes to a cash register and empties the penny dish every five minutes. The pennies are meant to be given away, and each instance of the loss is trivial; but if the theft continues unchecked, the service will be destroyed.
And money is far from the only target of attack. Buyer and seller ratings in auction sites are often forged, and so are rankings on game sites. "If you have any kind of rating, people go to all kinds of trouble to get that rating in an illegitimate way," Manber reported.
The more services are offered, the more vulnerable the provider becomes. "Someone can steal some money over here, go to Shopping and buy something, then go to Auction and sell it," said Manber. "This really happened."
Internationalization is a further weakness, because patches must be distributed over multiple systems around the world. Even one overlooked server leaves the provider vulnerable; but in a world of web services, the integrity of the network isn't nearly as valuable as the time and effort that skilled employees spend combating abuse. "I'm not even worried sometimes about the machines I buy," Manber clarified. "I'm worried about the time...There are more of them [attackers] than there are of me. They have a lot more time."
Interactivity poses a new set of risks. "Whenever we get content from users, it's a problem," said Manber. Advertisers will attempt to sneak their content into forums like the Personals, or go to the trouble of creating an informative site, only to change the content to advertising after the site is accepted into Yahoo's directory. Or they may add Yahoo redirects to their own sites in order to gain an appearance of legitimacy.
Services can also be stolen and resold. Yahoo found that the finance sites were plagued by screen scrapers running every few seconds to grab real-time stock quotes. Manber says that traffic on the finance sites dropped by 80% after the screen-scrapers were blocked. "You provide a premium service, people will sign up for it maybe once, put a proxy server up, steal the information, and bang! Now they provide the service."
Some of the exploits are darkly ingenious. During hotly contested auctions, some users will mount password attacks on other bidder's accounts an hour before the end of the auction -- not to actually gain access, but merely to trigger a security lockout, thereby ensuring that the legitimate user cannot place last-minute bids. Once Yahoo had to deal with a virus spread through a file download, with the twist that the virus would only become destructive if the file was removed from Yahoo's servers. And on the social engineering front, there's the list of instructions for "hacking a Yahoo account" that direct would-be hax0rs to send the e-mail address of the account they'd like to access, along with a gobbledegook string of code and their own account name and password, to a plausible-sounding address like passbot_return@yahoo.com.
"I've seen Ph.D. level cleverness," Manber admitted. In response, Yahoo has developed some sneaky countermeasures of its own. But although Manber provided examples of his algorithms, he asked attendees of the conference not to publicize them. The conflict between secrecy and openness is one that, as a former academic researcher, Manber feels keenly. On the one hand, he is fully aware that real progress in security comes through full disclosure and open, shared research. On the other hand, he knows that his company will suffer real and immediate damage if hackers learn the details of his methods.
"The kind of countermeasures that we're doing are pretty weak. If you compare it to cryptography we're a hundred years behind," he said. "Feedback is always a major issue for us. I always think about 'Should I do this? Will I tell them what I'm doing?...I'd rather see what they're doing. The way you win an arms race is not by building bigger and bigger weapons. Sometimes the best move is not to play the game.'"
One amusing example Manber gave is in the field of rate limiting -- Yahoo's attempt to throttle the rate at which users can sign up for new accounts. Although successful techniques to weed out bots have been developed -- like asking users to retype a random word displayed in an image designed to be impossible for OCR to process -- Manber has found that people are still registering for massive numbers of accounts. "As far as I can tell, they're just doing it by hand. They're sitting there all day doing it by hand," he said. So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
Number one on the list of open problems in web services security is the difficulty of differentiating users from bots. Though he called it "imperfect," he acknowledged that one solution would be to require an ID number or a credit card number. If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said. But even more than authentication, Manber wants reverse authentication: "I want a protocol that proves that someone is not a particular person."
He also wants obfuscated HTML, which is particularly ironic since, in his days in academia, Manber wrote one of the first screen-scrapers. He wants the ability to detect passive vulnerabilities in a system. And he wants better ways to fight back. "I have huge pipes," he laughed. "It's very easy for me to go after them. Unfortunately, it's not legal."
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
MS wanted to have eBay run on its software, but there were so many security holes in it, people were winning auctions that had closed years ago.
I beta tested Microsoft's software for eBay and managed to hack in bids that won auctions for that guy' kidney, Elian's raft, and that girder from the World Trade Center. There are no "invalid auctions" when the thing's running Microsoft's swiss cheese software.
I wrote modules of an operating system in sixth grade as part of my Introduction to Computers class. Granted, I didn't know a thing, and my OS consisted of printing "Hello World" and asking the user what kind of ice cream they liked.
But I've just discovered that my code is at the heart of the Longhorn project. Apparently, the new version of Windows is going to be called "Windows Hello World, Ice Cream Edition."
That one plays DVDs. Assuming they're encoded with Microsoft's DRM, running under a certified copy of Windows XP, and accessed via a Microsoft keyboard and/or MS mouse.
Oh-- and you have to have MS-approved electicity powering it. Check your local utility.
Microsoft makes a program that does this. It echoes your checking account into Bill Gates' and then cancels yours for you.
And then it sues you (unless you paid for a license to use it on every computer you've ever owned or will own. I had to buy a license for my C64, and one for my Microsoft X-Box 3.0 PC/PVR/DVD/Toaster/Shower.)
Slashdot Mirror
n/m
Compared to the information leaked by Windows' security holes and XP reporting everything about you to Microsoft, Echelon looks like an "a/s/l?" request.
Don't fear the government. Fear MS.
w00t!
I knew that sooner or later, this troll would turn out to be true. This is really a sad day.
RIP Stephen. You will be missed.
I would wait until she went inside, then sniff her bicycle seat while jerking off onto her handlebars.
I kind of thought that answer was self-evident, though.
Especially after Hallie Berry showed her knockers in it.
No-- not in the "I actually managed to use it on a real girl" sense. Obviously, as a reader of Slashdot, my prospects for a heterosexual coupling are nil.
No, I used it to wank to, and it performed fabulously. I salute you with a wadded-up tissue.
Once Microsoft's next generation of Windows software locks out any media player except MS's. Then it'll require content providers to sell kidneys to pay for the licensing to encode in the MS format.
Then Microsoft will have a lot of money and a big pile of kidneys, and content providers will have no money and die of renal failure.
First things first - have I read this book? Hell, no, and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year, they're lying thru their teeth. This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page, the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole. That's got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press.
...
I've been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out. I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released, got it on Thursday and I've been skimming it like mad since. To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is, I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6, curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson's graduation. I've got four college degrees, one in math and two from MIT, and bottom line - this sucker's gonna take a while to digest. However, it's theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety. In ANKOS, Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius? Who knows, but it's going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point.
ANKOS is 1250+ pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine-print notes. The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic- and name-dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram's tangents strike your fancy. Topping the whole thing off is a 60+ page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes.
Despite its length, ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape. And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us. It's all about cellular automations, which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations. Start with a black square in the center grid square (cell) on the top line of a sheet of graph paper. Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors. Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper. Repeat. Watch what happens. Sounds simple. It isn't.
The first short chapter outlines Wolfram's central thesis: That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature, and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed. The reason, claims Wolfram, is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity. He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory, fractals, AI, cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years, his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm.
The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment: the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons. He discovers this "universe" of rules is sufficient to produce his four so-called "classes" of complex systems: order, self-similar nested patterns, structures and most importantly, true randomness. The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard-type patterns and leaf-type fractals; the last two, unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences. Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non-fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications.
The third chapter expands his initial 256-rule-set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept. Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black-and-white, rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row, rule sets that embody full-blown Turing machines, rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells, that tag end point grid squares with new patterns, that implement "registers" and "symbols" - Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail. And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores, it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented. This ever-escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling - in fact, embodying - the inherent complexity of the natural world.
In chapter four, he begins this process, by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers. Automatons that multiply and divide, that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi, that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations - Wolfram details them all. Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus? Set up dominos in just the right way, flip the first one and stand back - nature can do such calculations automatically, efficiently and mindlessly.
Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one-dimensional numbers to multi-dimensional entities. Simple X-Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines "networks" and "constraints" as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish - always generating the ever-higher levels of complexity. More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth. So far we've seen some really neat sleight-of-hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written. But we're only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go, and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up.
Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries. Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described, he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four "classes" of systems. He finds that while previously explored checkerboard (Class 1) and fractal (Class 2) systems yield few surprises, his newly-discovered unique (Class 3) and random (Class 4) cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes - a telltale hint of universality. Furthermore, their behavior starts to be influenced by "attractors" that guide them to "structure" and self-organization.
With the scent of universality and self-organization in the air, Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real-world topics of interest. Billiards, taffy-making, Brownian motion, casino games, the three-body problem, pachinko machines - randomness is obviously a factor in all of these. Yet, Wolfram notes, while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes, none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself. The cellular automations he has catalogued, particularly his beloved Rule 30, do. The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight, leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors. How, you ask? Hey, Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I'm still trying to follow: no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two.
By chapter eight, Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you, me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us. Forget the Navier-Stokes equations - if you want to understand fluid flow, you have to think of it as a cellular automation process. Ditto for crystal growth. Ditto for fracture mechanics. Ditto for Wall Street. Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth, seashell growth and pigmentation patterns. This is very convincing stuff - tables of Mathematica-generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature. Yes, you've seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks. The difference between fractals and cellular automations: fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process. It's a somewhat subtle difference - and a key Wolfram point.
Having established some credibility for his ideas, Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine, where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics. It was practically inevitable he would do this - his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics, and that's the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman. Despite his solid background in physics, this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff. He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. From Wolfram's way of thinking, if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation, then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story, so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself. He continues extensive speculations on what this may be, and how space, time, gravity, relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation. The rule set for this ultimate automation, which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica, takes the place of a mathematically-defined unified field theory in Wolfram's world. This is mind-blowing stuff, but ultimately boils down to Wolfram's opinion. I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as "mere" manifestations of some cellular automation - if so, what is left to be the "system" on which the automation itself is running? I'm reduced to one of Clarke's Laws: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine
Wolfram shifts from Kubrick-style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten, where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind. Visual image perception, the human perception of complexity and randomness, cryptography, data compression, statistical analysis, and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored. The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself. Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these, except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics.
Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead. He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier, about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations, emulate other computational systems, and act as universal Turing machines. He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110. His arguments lead up to a closing realization, what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram's Law.
The final chapter, chapter twelve, discusses what all of Wolfram's years of isolation and work have led him to conclude. He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence. What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram's thoughts on the PCE. If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us, then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure. Because of the nature of cellular automation computation, there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion. We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts. New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular-automations like wind-tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature. Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve, and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will. To conclude with Wolfram's own final paragraph in the book:
"And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold."
As noted above, 350+ pages of notes follow this exposition, and trust me, there's no way they can be summarized. To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS, he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built-up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious. So much for dreaming.
So what is the bottom line on ANKOS? It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve. It is very thought provoking. It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation. But is it the next Principia, the herald of a new scientific revolution?
Read and decide for yourself. Only time, and a lot of it, will tell.
The Certificate of Completion of Studies from Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Ill. It's your ticket to a crew member job (and the possibility of an eventual promotion to shift leader) in any McDonald's anywhere in the country.
Enjoy the recession, and thank you for participating in the overstaffed tech sector. It has been a pleasure taking your tuition money.
Security In Web Services: An Evolving Threat Model 2002-05-20
Shannon Cochran
Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, apprised security researchers at the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy about attacks likely to become commonplace in the emerging era of large-scale, distributed web services. "The kind of attacks that we're seeing are not a traditional security attack," he warned. The threat to web services is not about something like root access; it's more about repeated violations and exploitations of the service -- small cheats and hacks that are individually insignificant, but a huge problem in the aggregate. Spam is an example of this kind of hack. A web-based e-mail service does not suffer if one of its accounts is used for mass-mailing. When tens of thousands of accounts are abused in this way, the service can be brought to its knees. Manber calls this the "penny jar" effect, likening it to a thief who comes to a cash register and empties the penny dish every five minutes. The pennies are meant to be given away, and each instance of the loss is trivial; but if the theft continues unchecked, the service will be destroyed.
And money is far from the only target of attack. Buyer and seller ratings in auction sites are often forged, and so are rankings on game sites. "If you have any kind of rating, people go to all kinds of trouble to get that rating in an illegitimate way," Manber reported.
The more services are offered, the more vulnerable the provider becomes. "Someone can steal some money over here, go to Shopping and buy something, then go to Auction and sell it," said Manber. "This really happened."
Internationalization is a further weakness, because patches must be distributed over multiple systems around the world. Even one overlooked server leaves the provider vulnerable; but in a world of web services, the integrity of the network isn't nearly as valuable as the time and effort that skilled employees spend combating abuse. "I'm not even worried sometimes about the machines I buy," Manber clarified. "I'm worried about the time...There are more of them [attackers] than there are of me. They have a lot more time."
Interactivity poses a new set of risks. "Whenever we get content from users, it's a problem," said Manber. Advertisers will attempt to sneak their content into forums like the Personals, or go to the trouble of creating an informative site, only to change the content to advertising after the site is accepted into Yahoo's directory. Or they may add Yahoo redirects to their own sites in order to gain an appearance of legitimacy.
Services can also be stolen and resold. Yahoo found that the finance sites were plagued by screen scrapers running every few seconds to grab real-time stock quotes. Manber says that traffic on the finance sites dropped by 80% after the screen-scrapers were blocked. "You provide a premium service, people will sign up for it maybe once, put a proxy server up, steal the information, and bang! Now they provide the service."
Some of the exploits are darkly ingenious. During hotly contested auctions, some users will mount password attacks on other bidder's accounts an hour before the end of the auction -- not to actually gain access, but merely to trigger a security lockout, thereby ensuring that the legitimate user cannot place last-minute bids. Once Yahoo had to deal with a virus spread through a file download, with the twist that the virus would only become destructive if the file was removed from Yahoo's servers. And on the social engineering front, there's the list of instructions for "hacking a Yahoo account" that direct would-be hax0rs to send the e-mail address of the account they'd like to access, along with a gobbledegook string of code and their own account name and password, to a plausible-sounding address like passbot_return@yahoo.com.
"I've seen Ph.D. level cleverness," Manber admitted. In response, Yahoo has developed some sneaky countermeasures of its own. But although Manber provided examples of his algorithms, he asked attendees of the conference not to publicize them. The conflict between secrecy and openness is one that, as a former academic researcher, Manber feels keenly. On the one hand, he is fully aware that real progress in security comes through full disclosure and open, shared research. On the other hand, he knows that his company will suffer real and immediate damage if hackers learn the details of his methods.
"The kind of countermeasures that we're doing are pretty weak. If you compare it to cryptography we're a hundred years behind," he said. "Feedback is always a major issue for us. I always think about 'Should I do this? Will I tell them what I'm doing?...I'd rather see what they're doing. The way you win an arms race is not by building bigger and bigger weapons. Sometimes the best move is not to play the game.'"
One amusing example Manber gave is in the field of rate limiting -- Yahoo's attempt to throttle the rate at which users can sign up for new accounts. Although successful techniques to weed out bots have been developed -- like asking users to retype a random word displayed in an image designed to be impossible for OCR to process -- Manber has found that people are still registering for massive numbers of accounts. "As far as I can tell, they're just doing it by hand. They're sitting there all day doing it by hand," he said. So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
Number one on the list of open problems in web services security is the difficulty of differentiating users from bots. Though he called it "imperfect," he acknowledged that one solution would be to require an ID number or a credit card number. If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said. But even more than authentication, Manber wants reverse authentication: "I want a protocol that proves that someone is not a particular person."
He also wants obfuscated HTML, which is particularly ironic since, in his days in academia, Manber wrote one of the first screen-scrapers. He wants the ability to detect passive vulnerabilities in a system. And he wants better ways to fight back. "I have huge pipes," he laughed. "It's very easy for me to go after them. Unfortunately, it's not legal."
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
You can restrict ISPs and web sites, but Windows XP will let anyone access your personal information through it's bevy of security holes.
Servers unable to handle the load? Must be running Microsoft.
I claim this FP for Bill Gates and his $41 billion.
Oops. Not frast. Sorry Bill. Don't kill me.
A little static electircity changing an electron or two in your computer, and you'll have to re-authenticate it.
After all, they've been working behind the scenes to cripple my computer with bloated, insecure software.
You can tell what's being displayed on a Windows box from its reflection by looking to see if the reflection is a uniform, unchanging shade of blue.
It usually will be.
1. Reboot.
2. Re-authenticate Windows XP.
3. Install new memory to accommodate additional registry entries resulting from Step 2.
4. Re-authenticate Windows XP after program detects new memory and concludes it is now on a different computer.
5. Crash computer by pressing spacebar or by moving the mouse to the left.
6. Repeat.
You could feel free to lick Bill Gates' rectum.
Microsoft is using this as its new corporate anthem.
But beware the dark side, which seeks to bitchslap you for ruining their silly film obsession.
Trust your feelings, and also, trust those who say that this is indeed Natalie Portman's luscious behind.
MS wanted to have eBay run on its software, but there were so many security holes in it, people were winning auctions that had closed years ago.
I beta tested Microsoft's software for eBay and managed to hack in bids that won auctions for that guy' kidney, Elian's raft, and that girder from the World Trade Center. There are no "invalid auctions" when the thing's running Microsoft's swiss cheese software.
I wrote modules of an operating system in sixth grade as part of my Introduction to Computers class. Granted, I didn't know a thing, and my OS consisted of printing "Hello World" and asking the user what kind of ice cream they liked.
But I've just discovered that my code is at the heart of the Longhorn project. Apparently, the new version of Windows is going to be called "Windows Hello World, Ice Cream Edition."
Microsoft's Media Player?
That one plays DVDs. Assuming they're encoded with Microsoft's DRM, running under a certified copy of Windows XP, and accessed via a Microsoft keyboard and/or MS mouse.
Oh-- and you have to have MS-approved electicity powering it. Check your local utility.
Microsoft makes a program that does this. It echoes your checking account into Bill Gates' and then cancels yours for you.
And then it sues you (unless you paid for a license to use it on every computer you've ever owned or will own. I had to buy a license for my C64, and one for my Microsoft X-Box 3.0 PC/PVR/DVD/Toaster/Shower.)