squeeze_into_tiny_space()/* awww */, and hide(boolean tail_sticking_out)/* it's not a bug if you document it */
If you get it to purr just right, it can serve as a marital aid.
What we really need is a critter with a loadable personality module. Depending on your mood when you get home from work, you can have it greet you with frantic good cheer, or ignore you. And you'd be *amazed* the tricks you could teach him if he has a scripting language and a serial port.
MS word is so ubiquitous, that we have to deal with files created with it.
You realize, of course, that the MS-backed UTICA initiative, if passed into law, will make it illegal to reverse engineering the MS Word file format so that you can read from it or write to it.
It must be truly amazing to be at the so huge that if your activities are widely regarded as criminal, you can just change the laws.
Brill's Content did an interesting article calling into question some of Consumer Report's famed impartiality and meticulous testing methodologies, particularly on the issue of SUVs. Essentially, the suit filed by Isuzu and Suzuki alleges that CU has an editorial bias against SUVs:
The Suzuki litigation includes a sworn statement from Ronald Denison, a former test-facility employee for the magazine, who alleges that on the day the Suzuki Samurai was being tested in 1988, he heard Irwin Landau, the magazine's editorial director at the time, tell an engineer, "If you can't find someone to roll this car, I will." Landau said in his deposition that he would never have said such a thing, except in jest.
CU has expressed the opinion that SUVs are frivolous, gas-hungry, clumsy and wasteful. As a motorcycle rider in SUV-saturated Atlanta, I am inclined to agree with their assessment (and add further opinion on the typical driving abilities of their owners), but if there is a hidden editorial agenda which is influencing their testing methods, this is clearly cause for concern.
Is this a SLAPP suit? Sales of the Isuzu Trooper, which several contemporary offroad and 4WD magazines praised, suffered horribly after the Consumer Reports article. But it's worth noting what the Isuzu/Suzuki lawsuit tries hard to ignore--while the Trooper and Sidekick failed the lane-swerve test by rolling, that the Chevrolet Tahoe, Nissan Pathfinder, and Toyota 4Runner in the same article all passed the test acceptibly.
UTICA will basically do to the rest of the American software industry what anti-crypto laws have done to the American cryptographic software industry--crush it, drive it underground, stifle innovation, put it under the control of a handful of corporations whose best interest is served by entering a collusive agreement with the U.S. government, whose recent track record on human rights over corporate rights is, to say the least, bad.
Then all the remaining viable innovation will go overseas.
As long as the flow of information continues, this can't go on forever.
This is precisely what they are attempting to do: choke the flow of information. If you can accuse anyone of "reverse engineering" if they decrypt a "trade secret", then all MS would have needed to do is rot13 the Halloween documents and noone but the government could legally investigate their activities.
Speaking of control--I find it absolutely fascinating that under the combination of the DVD specification and the DMCA, you can go to jail for five years for successfully fast-forwarding through the previews at the beginning of your movie.
Five years for ignoring a thirty second ad. And they say Congress isn't on our side.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already supported by Microsoft Windows, and to some extent, Linux.
To quote from the article, "Most important is the fact that Serial ATA is software/register compatible with Parallel ATA, which means there is no need to rewrite anything at the driver or OS level."
Which means that Linux and Windows already support it, and not merely "to some extent".
Firewire is by far the technologically superior standard. I like technologically superior tools; that's why I have two Beta VCRs rotting in my attic. But I think SATA is going to be very popular for internally-connected devices like disk and tape drives, if only so manufacturers can avoid the higher cost of adopting an entirely new standard instead of just building off the existing one. As a manufacturer, which would you rather do: hand the team a full specification and tell them to implement it, or give them your existing code base and say, "hack this so it does I/O one bit at a time instead of eight"?
It's gonna make me cringe, I know, seeing Linux relegated to being the OS underneath AOL 5.0, but that's the price I pay for being a techohead--it's always gonna make me cringe to see something beautiful put to such lowly use by unappreciative cretins.
It's the same way with cars: it disgusts me to see high-performance cars like 328iSs in the hands of silly little blondes who got their daddy's to buy them so they would have a pretty little car to look pretty in. Then they drive them at 3/10ths and forget to change the oil and if you've ever pointed one of these cars down a twisty back road and thrashed the hell out of it only to have it come back for more then you'll hate the pretty little blonde for letting these gorgeous machines go to waste.
And I'm gonna hate the Linux-AOLers for not knowing what they have. But you know what? They'll serve a purpose. They'll be the reason for pre-configured $200 midrange Linux boxes. And with the prices that low, I'll buy a whole stack of 'em and put one in every room of the house. There'll be a server and the one I'm using at the moment and the other four'll be cheerfully cracking for distributed.net and I can afford it because of the five million silly Linux AOLers who aren't putting $80 each in Microsoft's pockets.
Then, even if they're a big thundering herd of cluelessness you don't want to get anywhere near, it'll be nice to have them out there somewhere.
Unless they were feeling petulant; then they would just charge you with "driving an improperly maintained vehicle."
At any place, at any time, you can be busted for something. They prefer it that way--possession of burglary tools (like a long screwdriver), loitering with intent (meeting up with a friend to go to a movie), vagrancy (sitting on a bench with less than $20 on you), conspiracy to commit income tax evasion (sitting on a bench with more than $1000 on you), conspiracy to possess a controlled substance (asking an undercover police officer what time it is and if he knows if a nearby restaurant has fast service), conspiracy to transport a controlled substance (trying to get off the plane ahead of the other passengers, trying to get off the plane after the other passengers, or getting off the plane in the thick of the other passengers).
As for whether the UCSBees in question are liable, well, that depends on whether they can afford a better lawyer than whoever's suing them, doesn't it.
As has been pointed out by at least one person on this discussion, there are some good reasons to be mistrustful of an FBI-distributed binary as root on your Unix system, considering the FBI's track record in respecting the personal privacy of the citizens it was created to protect. It is a shame that its long and consistent track record has necessitated such caution on the part of practically everyone outside the agency, because this DDoS scanner really does need to be run as a binary. Here's why:
Unlike CERN, the FBI can kick down doors and stop a DDoS by arresting its perpetrators and confiscating their computers. The best way to do this is to catch the perps in the act. The best way to do this is to identify and monitor a DDos the moment it begins. To do this, there must be detection software in place, and that detection software must notify the FBI instantly.
Now, if the source code to the application is readily available, it will document not only the means of discovery but also the means of FBI notification. The perpetrators of the DDoS could use this knowledge to revise their DDoS. In all likelihood they could not get around the means of discovery. However, they could easily subvert the means of notification. All they have to do is launch a simultaneous attack against the FBI's machine--jamming it with bad packets, or overloading its mail server, or simply flooding it with false positives. If the fifty or so real DDoS-origin addresses are buried under a hundred thousand bogus addresses, the perps have created such an effective smoke screen that they will almost certainly get away yet again.
Will a binary-only tool prevent this? No. But by using good obfuscation techniques they could delay decompilation for so long that the tool actually has a chance to work.
Probably the best thing the FBI could do if they wanted to nail these jerks would be to find a couple of high-profile potential targets, give them the source code to a tool under an NDA, and give the site the opportunity to inspect, approve of, compile and install the tool themselves.
Except that a well-encrypted file is indistinguishable from white noise. I wonder how many people will be imprisoned for refusing to turn the white noise they e-mailed someone into plain text?
Somehow it's making more and more sense that Orwell's novels were set in England. Yes, I know he's English, went to Eton, all that, but he made a point of setting his novels there, rather than in some made-up country, first to make his message particularly poignant to his homeland's readers, but also because he saw the real possibility of it happening there. Shame people stopped listening about twenty years ago.
English police don't need a search warrant to enter a home. Private ownership of guns of any sort is strictly controlled. The government has granted itself the right to read any electronic message and imprison you for years if they can't read it. God help you if it's white noise or if the file got corrupted. And there is legislation in the works to require every subject (interesting word, that) to submit a DNA sample to a national database.
.uk Slashdot readers, I offer you my sympathies and moral support. I sincerely hope your government starts exercising some self-control. But once the checks and balances of constitutional democracy have been subverted, they are hardly ever restored.
"I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not." --& nbsp;Ian Frazier, "On the Rez."
Nice quote, Jon. Nice to see someone else reads The Atlantic.
Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit
Probably be a whole lot easier just to throw the thing out of an airplane. Of course, g, atmospheric density, and delta-atmospheric density, will all be different on Mars than in Antarctica, meaning rate of descent and impact energy will all be different, too.
Does the lander bouncy-ball have any sort of cameras or guidance mechanism? It seems like a drogue chute, a couple of fins and a range-finder could do an awful lot of inexpensive good towards getting the thing to land someplace flat.
I think you're spot-on, yuriwho. The usefulness of these devices is going to be dependent on what if any bandwidth is available at a given moment. If your home PC is attached to a wire it certainly can process more information than a gigantic cell network, and it's connected regardless of whether you're in a restaurant or a tunnel or whatever. I think the PC is going to be where all your agents run, sifting through the big random pile of data the Internet is doomed to become, monitoring your stocks, analysing the market, shopping for that rare Pokémon, paying your taxes, running pattern recognition on the WebCams monitoring your house and back yard for burglars, and so forth. It'll ping your portable from time to time, and based on what it determines is the available bandwidth and cost thereof between you and it, prioritize and summarize the information it sends you. If you only have 300bps between you because you're so far out in the sticks the only feed you have is a $30/k download, $250/k upload satellite relay, it will restrict messages to "your house is on fire"-priority text; if you have unlimited-use at 9mpbs, it'll feed you a gameshow where it's transparenty rerendering all the contestants as naked supermodels answering questions about sex.
In effect, in addition to its own modest offline processing power, your portable is a thin client to a real computer doing incredibly powerful middleware stuff.
Huge processing power and huge bandwidth require heavy equipment, lots of electricity, and wires to carry the data. If your PC sits at home doing all the fancy stuff for you, we solve two problems at once: how to manage unpredictable wireless bandwidth and how to handle the huge processing requirements of tomorrow's software.
Map makers have been doing this for years, adding a bogus street to their indices or exaggerating the curve of a road in a way that wouldn't affect driving but would pinpoint a data thief. Cliff notes do this, too--making a couple of key errors which will positively glare to an informed reader. (They also insert a few very concise passages intended to lure a hapless student into copying them verbatim.)
Of course, some information can't be seeded this way. A medical diagnostics database, for example, could kill someone by having a bogus disease or treatment in it, and you can imagine what could happen if a metallurgy reference misrepresented the tensile strength vs. temperature curve of a material which found its way into turbine blades.
I do admit we've entered a very sticky set of issues here. I firmly believe that Lexus/Nexus and other such databases have a right to prevent a customer from creating an account, typing
select * from people p where sex='F' and marital_status in ('S','D','W') and age between 55 and 70 and net_worth>10000000 and not exists (select * from felony_trials where SSN=p.SSN and crime in ('MURDER', 'CONVICTED MURDER', 'BOBBITIZATION') and victim='HUSBAND');
at the prompt, and creating BeARichOldLadysCabanaBoy.com out of essentially stolen data. OTOH there have been some frighteningly successful unjustified cases of Restaurant Guide A suing Restaurant Guide B.
Here's another question: If I use the Yellow Pages to make a list of local restaurants, and write reviews of everything Asian-sounding, and put an index in the back which includes addresses and phone numbers, is Ma Bell entitled to a cut for my derivative, value-added work? If she is, I see an enormous future in making long lists of things and then copyrighting them. This certainly seems to be working in the patent community.
On the whole, this was a very good article, if only for the questions that it left raised and left unanswered. And I'll be sure to follow eBay's lawsuit against AuctionWatch and Bidder'sEdge. To quote--uh oh--Ashleigh Brilliant, I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.
One final note--if the copyrighting of a collection of data becomes a valid future enterprise, can I go ahead and copyright my name, address, school transcripts, credit history, and the list of every web page I've viewed in the past year? I think this last would be pretty goddamned useful in smacking DoubleClick upside the head violating my privacy.
They're enough of a problem, though, especially if they're based on closed-source protocols.
The question of how long you want your data to live is important. Who do you want to be able to read it--yourself ten years from now, your grandchildren, or an archeologist? Compare these three time scales to the rates of evolution for various data storage technologies and protocols.
Choose ASCII. Absolutely anything can read it. It has been around for nearly forty years and serves as the foundation for Unicode and every other significant modern encoding scheme. If someone can recover the bits you wrote, they can read what you wrote with nothing more complex than cat. If you want to go beyond ASCII, choose HTML. If you want to go beyond HTML, choose TeX. HTML is wonderful for formatted or semi-formatted documents because it is utterly platform independent and almost intuitively obvious to the reader. If formatting is critical to you, TeX is slightly less readable, but clean enough and well-documented enough that your document can be recovered with only slightly more effort than the HTML.
As for storage media, gosh, I can't really help you there. I've seen various reports in here of what does and does not survive for how long. Congratulations if your CD-ROMs last 300 years; doubtless you'll be able to fire up your creaky old computer and read those files back in ten or twenty years from now. But in three hundred years, or even fifty, who's going to have (a) a CD-ROM drive that will read your 300-year-old disk, (b) a computer that will interface to the CD-ROM, or (c) enough documentation of how those technologies work to reproduce a working example?
If a writer wants her stuff to last, her best bet is to print it as text on acid-free paper. The disadvantage to paper is in its editability. With slow-decaying acid-free paper and reliable storage/handling protocols, her worst-case scenario is she has to scan it back in and hack it up. Scanners are wonderfully architecture-independent--they translate what is universal into the currently fashionable file formats of the day. If she wants better editability and format preservation, let her print out the HTML or TeX source; then she can scan it back in and continue messing with its layout, fonts, styles, whatever. So what's the best font to use if you want to scan text back in later and you want humans to be able to read it.
Can this cause a positive feedback mechanism? If the greenhouse effect causes ocean temperatures to rise, more CO2 will enter the atmosphere, contributing more to the effect. Also, the drop in ocean-bound CO2 levels would starve O2-producing algae, further raising atmospheric CO2 levels, and since there are fewer and fewer land-based CO2 absorbers every year to take up the slack, all of this aggravates the greenhouse effect even further.
Granted, higher temperatures would eventually increase water evaporation rates thereby increasing cloud cover to the point that cloud albedo cancels the greenhouse effect, but couldn't this enter a violent (if decades-long climate changes can be called violent) oscillation with ice ages on one end and hurricane city on the other?
Just my uninformed paranoia at work here. Maybe I should try to coax my decrepit copy of SimEarth into running under WINE...
Cloud cover provides far more insulation than any amount of C02, methane, or whatever.
Not particularly--H20-laden air actually conducts heat faster than perfectly dry air. Also, those big, fluffy clouds have very high albedo; sunlight that hits them bounces back into space, preventing it from hitting the surface and thereby preventing Mr. Sun from warming the planet at all.
Didn't you read your Asteroids Killed the Dinosaurs brochure? The asteroid didn't doi it directly. What it did was hit the ocean (a 70% probability anyway), turning a whole bunch of it into steam, which condensed into a cloud that eventually covered the whole Earth, lowering surface temperatures far enough for long enough that most plants and animals simply couldn't survive.
Disclaimer: Just because the above sounds like plausible science does not mean it's valid.
The plaintiffs in the case are Universal City Studios Inc.; Paramount Pictures Corp.; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.; Tristar Pictures Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co.; Disney Enterprises Inc.; and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., according to a statement issued last Friday by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Guess I'll have to quit following this on CNN.com, too, them being a Time-Warner company. Any idea what studio released American Beauty? I want to go see that before I start boycotting <g>.
Saturday I got impatient and bought myself a DVD player for my birthday, which is a week from tomorrow. I'm glad I hadn't opened the box yet, because I'm going to return it today after work. I just can't own one of these things with a clear conscience anymore.
When they ask me for my reason for returning it, I'll simply say, "They threw a Norwegian kid in jail for figuring out how one of these works. I'm not going to subsidize their lawsuits, so I'm boycotting DVDs and DVD players."
I really, really hate not having a cool toy like a DVD player, but screw it--I despise the behavior of these companies and I will not endorse their behavior by paying them for this technology.
I wonder what all else I'll have to stop using or buying, and I doubt I can make a difference, but so what? I'm not going to pay these companies to "protect" me from this kid.
I don't think pollution is going to be an issue here; we're talking about a tiny, tiny amount of plastic. Consider the environmental cost of throwing a DVD away---a few grams of plastic and less than a gram of aluminium, plus the cardboard and plastic sleeve they sold it to you in. Compare this to environmental impact of making a six-mile round trip to the video store through heavy traffic in a gigantic SUV. If you walk or cycle to the video store, more power to you, of course, but most people either can't or won't.
With self-destructive media, that second trip to the vidshop is totally unnecessary. Only ninety percent of rented movies are actually watched. About ten to fifteen percent are kept one or more days late because they haven't been watched yet. And less than twenty percent of the time people go to the video store to return a rented movie do they rent something while they're there. Imagine never having to pay a late fee again, or having to return an unwatched movie. Imagine not having to waste twenty minutes and a third of a gallon of gasoline returning what could be thrown away more cheaply and more efficiently. Oh, and if you've got a two-evening rental and couple of five-evening rentals from Blockbuster, you could be saving two trips to the store.
The day will come when you can just download the movie, thereby eliminating the video store and all its related pollution altogether. Doubtless when that happens, illegal-vid sites will exist in the numbers illegal-mp3 sites do today. Until that time, I'll remain fairly happy not to have to fight traffic just so I can give something back.
And here is the absolute, hail-Eris best part: The video store will never, ever be out of what you're going there to rent.
Cheers
--
Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted
on
@Home UDP Lifted
·
· Score: 1
From the article:
According to Dan O'Brien, an analyst at Forrester Research, Usenet remains a "deep techie location on the Web." But as the Internet becomes increasingly populated by less tech-savvy users, the population of newsgroup users has stagnated.
I'm actually old enough to remember when September was only a month long and Usenet was around 20% interesting posts instead of today's less than five percent. Spam, ECP and EMP are so common that regulars are leaving in droves, even ones in groups that have been around for fifteen years or more. Hell, I can remember actually seeing a legitimate job posting in comp.jobs.offered!
The whole of Usenet is becoming like one of those Australian towns that had to be abandoned because it became overrun with mice. Who wants to stand around having a conversation when you have to spend most of your time dealing with goddamned mice? It makes me very, very sad.
some newbies think that all flamers are potentially psychotic stalkers
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Fear of encountering a crazy person is fairly universal these days, and for the last eighty or a thousand years. I think that net.stalkers are simply an extension of an existing phenomenon. There are skills newbies must learn in order to protect themselves. There will always be predators and their most likely prey will always be the naïve. It makes me sad to see them coming to my neighborhood.
In the meantime, I think you and I are using kook to refer to two different things: you're talking about truly deranged, evil, hurtful people who also have net.access and can't leave their net.lives on the net; I on the other hand am talking about classic net.kooks, Serdar Argic types, that richly deserve all the ridicule and flames they can and do garner.
I'm sorry you managed to cross one of these dangerous people and I hope you got them imprisoned for their criminal activities. But you're talking about a psychotic, obsessive stalker, not a kook. A true kook is simply a superlatively clueless crackpot. They should be made fun of until they go away. Start an alt.fan.* group. If you get tired of them before they go away, killfile them. That's one of the few advantages Usenet has over this place.
Suspicion and hostility of denizens to newbies does not prevent newbies from becoming oldhats; it instructs them in what is required of them if they want to be respected. Good flames are an important mechanism. Telling a poster that they're being an idiot, and why what they're doing is idiotic, is far more instructive than silence, or the white noise of a thousand random screaming "fuck you" at the same time. All flames--and all flamers--are not created equal. Generally one can tell within a post's first sentence or two whether its author is giving a thoughtful but critical reply, a hilariously satirical reply, or if they're just another disagreeable jackass. As with any other post, readers can quickly figure out whose flames to pay attention to and whose to ignore. A single, well crafted flame is far more useful--and far more entertaining to bystanders--than a dogpile.
Maybe if we thought of it as hazing--treating someone like garbage until they prove that they're worthy. It's harsh, perhaps, but it's also expedient, and ostracism is a good way to keep the fools and the bozos out. I come here to learn new, interesting stuff from people who make an effort at being responsible contributors, not to listen to every shrill crackpot who can type in a URL. If you don't have an opinion, or you're not qualified to give one, instead of posting, read. You don't have to post in every forum to become a good Netizen.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get it to purr just right, it can serve as a marital aid.
What we really need is a critter with a loadable personality module. Depending on your mood when you get home from work, you can have it greet you with frantic good cheer, or ignore you. And you'd be *amazed* the tricks you could teach him if he has a scripting language and a serial port.
--
It must be truly amazing to be at the so huge that if your activities are widely regarded as criminal, you can just change the laws.
--
CU has expressed the opinion that SUVs are frivolous, gas-hungry, clumsy and wasteful. As a motorcycle rider in SUV-saturated Atlanta, I am inclined to agree with their assessment (and add further opinion on the typical driving abilities of their owners), but if there is a hidden editorial agenda which is influencing their testing methods, this is clearly cause for concern.
Is this a SLAPP suit? Sales of the Isuzu Trooper, which several contemporary offroad and 4WD magazines praised, suffered horribly after the Consumer Reports article. But it's worth noting what the Isuzu/Suzuki lawsuit tries hard to ignore--while the Trooper and Sidekick failed the lane-swerve test by rolling, that the Chevrolet Tahoe, Nissan Pathfinder, and Toyota 4Runner in the same article all passed the test acceptibly.
--
Then all the remaining viable innovation will go overseas.
This is precisely what they are attempting to do: choke the flow of information. If you can accuse anyone of "reverse engineering" if they decrypt a "trade secret", then all MS would have needed to do is rot13 the Halloween documents and noone but the government could legally investigate their activities.
--
Five years for ignoring a thirty second ad. And they say Congress isn't on our side.
--
To quote from the article, "Most important is the fact that Serial ATA is software/register compatible with Parallel ATA, which means there is no need to rewrite anything at the driver or OS level."
Which means that Linux and Windows already support it, and not merely "to some extent".
Firewire is by far the technologically superior standard. I like technologically superior tools; that's why I have two Beta VCRs rotting in my attic. But I think SATA is going to be very popular for internally-connected devices like disk and tape drives, if only so manufacturers can avoid the higher cost of adopting an entirely new standard instead of just building off the existing one. As a manufacturer, which would you rather do: hand the team a full specification and tell them to implement it, or give them your existing code base and say, "hack this so it does I/O one bit at a time instead of eight"?
--
It's the same way with cars: it disgusts me to see high-performance cars like 328iSs in the hands of silly little blondes who got their daddy's to buy them so they would have a pretty little car to look pretty in. Then they drive them at 3/10ths and forget to change the oil and if you've ever pointed one of these cars down a twisty back road and thrashed the hell out of it only to have it come back for more then you'll hate the pretty little blonde for letting these gorgeous machines go to waste.
And I'm gonna hate the Linux-AOLers for not knowing what they have. But you know what? They'll serve a purpose. They'll be the reason for pre-configured $200 midrange Linux boxes. And with the prices that low, I'll buy a whole stack of 'em and put one in every room of the house. There'll be a server and the one I'm using at the moment and the other four'll be cheerfully cracking for distributed.net and I can afford it because of the five million silly Linux AOLers who aren't putting $80 each in Microsoft's pockets.
Then, even if they're a big thundering herd of cluelessness you don't want to get anywhere near, it'll be nice to have them out there somewhere.
--
At any place, at any time, you can be busted for something. They prefer it that way--possession of burglary tools (like a long screwdriver), loitering with intent (meeting up with a friend to go to a movie), vagrancy (sitting on a bench with less than $20 on you), conspiracy to commit income tax evasion (sitting on a bench with more than $1000 on you), conspiracy to possess a controlled substance (asking an undercover police officer what time it is and if he knows if a nearby restaurant has fast service), conspiracy to transport a controlled substance (trying to get off the plane ahead of the other passengers, trying to get off the plane after the other passengers, or getting off the plane in the thick of the other passengers).
As for whether the UCSBees in question are liable, well, that depends on whether they can afford a better lawyer than whoever's suing them, doesn't it.
Cheers.
--
--
Unlike CERN, the FBI can kick down doors and stop a DDoS by arresting its perpetrators and confiscating their computers. The best way to do this is to catch the perps in the act. The best way to do this is to identify and monitor a DDos the moment it begins. To do this, there must be detection software in place, and that detection software must notify the FBI instantly.
Now, if the source code to the application is readily available, it will document not only the means of discovery but also the means of FBI notification. The perpetrators of the DDoS could use this knowledge to revise their DDoS. In all likelihood they could not get around the means of discovery. However, they could easily subvert the means of notification. All they have to do is launch a simultaneous attack against the FBI's machine--jamming it with bad packets, or overloading its mail server, or simply flooding it with false positives. If the fifty or so real DDoS-origin addresses are buried under a hundred thousand bogus addresses, the perps have created such an effective smoke screen that they will almost certainly get away yet again.
Will a binary-only tool prevent this? No. But by using good obfuscation techniques they could delay decompilation for so long that the tool actually has a chance to work.
Probably the best thing the FBI could do if they wanted to nail these jerks would be to find a couple of high-profile potential targets, give them the source code to a tool under an NDA, and give the site the opportunity to inspect, approve of, compile and install the tool themselves.
--
Somehow it's making more and more sense that Orwell's novels were set in England. Yes, I know he's English, went to Eton, all that, but he made a point of setting his novels there, rather than in some made-up country, first to make his message particularly poignant to his homeland's readers, but also because he saw the real possibility of it happening there. Shame people stopped listening about twenty years ago.
English police don't need a search warrant to enter a home. Private ownership of guns of any sort is strictly controlled. The government has granted itself the right to read any electronic message and imprison you for years if they can't read it. God help you if it's white noise or if the file got corrupted. And there is legislation in the works to require every subject (interesting word, that) to submit a DNA sample to a national database.
--
--
Probably be a whole lot easier just to throw the thing out of an airplane. Of course, g, atmospheric density, and delta-atmospheric density, will all be different on Mars than in Antarctica, meaning rate of descent and impact energy will all be different, too.
Does the lander bouncy-ball have any sort of cameras or guidance mechanism? It seems like a drogue chute, a couple of fins and a range-finder could do an awful lot of inexpensive good towards getting the thing to land someplace flat.
--
In effect, in addition to its own modest offline processing power, your portable is a thin client to a real computer doing incredibly powerful middleware stuff.
Huge processing power and huge bandwidth require heavy equipment, lots of electricity, and wires to carry the data. If your PC sits at home doing all the fancy stuff for you, we solve two problems at once: how to manage unpredictable wireless bandwidth and how to handle the huge processing requirements of tomorrow's software.
--
Of course, some information can't be seeded this way. A medical diagnostics database, for example, could kill someone by having a bogus disease or treatment in it, and you can imagine what could happen if a metallurgy reference misrepresented the tensile strength vs. temperature curve of a material which found its way into turbine blades.
I do admit we've entered a very sticky set of issues here. I firmly believe that Lexus/Nexus and other such databases have a right to prevent a customer from creating an account, typing
at the prompt, and creating BeARichOldLadysCabanaBoy.com out of essentially stolen data. OTOH there have been some frighteningly successful unjustified cases of Restaurant Guide A suing Restaurant Guide B.Here's another question: If I use the Yellow Pages to make a list of local restaurants, and write reviews of everything Asian-sounding, and put an index in the back which includes addresses and phone numbers, is Ma Bell entitled to a cut for my derivative, value-added work? If she is, I see an enormous future in making long lists of things and then copyrighting them. This certainly seems to be working in the patent community.
On the whole, this was a very good article, if only for the questions that it left raised and left unanswered. And I'll be sure to follow eBay's lawsuit against AuctionWatch and Bidder'sEdge. To quote--uh oh--Ashleigh Brilliant, I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.
One final note--if the copyrighting of a collection of data becomes a valid future enterprise, can I go ahead and copyright my name, address, school transcripts, credit history, and the list of every web page I've viewed in the past year? I think this last would be pretty goddamned useful in smacking DoubleClick upside the head violating my privacy.
--
The question of how long you want your data to live is important. Who do you want to be able to read it--yourself ten years from now, your grandchildren, or an archeologist? Compare these three time scales to the rates of evolution for various data storage technologies and protocols.
Choose ASCII. Absolutely anything can read it. It has been around for nearly forty years and serves as the foundation for Unicode and every other significant modern encoding scheme. If someone can recover the bits you wrote, they can read what you wrote with nothing more complex than cat. If you want to go beyond ASCII, choose HTML. If you want to go beyond HTML, choose TeX. HTML is wonderful for formatted or semi-formatted documents because it is utterly platform independent and almost intuitively obvious to the reader. If formatting is critical to you, TeX is slightly less readable, but clean enough and well-documented enough that your document can be recovered with only slightly more effort than the HTML.
As for storage media, gosh, I can't really help you there. I've seen various reports in here of what does and does not survive for how long. Congratulations if your CD-ROMs last 300 years; doubtless you'll be able to fire up your creaky old computer and read those files back in ten or twenty years from now. But in three hundred years, or even fifty, who's going to have (a) a CD-ROM drive that will read your 300-year-old disk, (b) a computer that will interface to the CD-ROM, or (c) enough documentation of how those technologies work to reproduce a working example?
If a writer wants her stuff to last, her best bet is to print it as text on acid-free paper. The disadvantage to paper is in its editability. With slow-decaying acid-free paper and reliable storage/handling protocols, her worst-case scenario is she has to scan it back in and hack it up. Scanners are wonderfully architecture-independent--they translate what is universal into the currently fashionable file formats of the day. If she wants better editability and format preservation, let her print out the HTML or TeX source; then she can scan it back in and continue messing with its layout, fonts, styles, whatever. So what's the best font to use if you want to scan text back in later and you want humans to be able to read it.
--
Granted, higher temperatures would eventually increase water evaporation rates thereby increasing cloud cover to the point that cloud albedo cancels the greenhouse effect, but couldn't this enter a violent (if decades-long climate changes can be called violent) oscillation with ice ages on one end and hurricane city on the other?
Just my uninformed paranoia at work here. Maybe I should try to coax my decrepit copy of SimEarth into running under WINE...
--
Didn't you read your Asteroids Killed the Dinosaurs brochure? The asteroid didn't doi it directly. What it did was hit the ocean (a 70% probability anyway), turning a whole bunch of it into steam, which condensed into a cloud that eventually covered the whole Earth, lowering surface temperatures far enough for long enough that most plants and animals simply couldn't survive.
Disclaimer: Just because the above sounds like plausible science does not mean it's valid.
--
Guess I'll have to quit following this on CNN.com, too, them being a Time-Warner company. Any idea what studio released American Beauty ? I want to go see that before I start boycotting <g>.
--
When they ask me for my reason for returning it, I'll simply say, "They threw a Norwegian kid in jail for figuring out how one of these works. I'm not going to subsidize their lawsuits, so I'm boycotting DVDs and DVD players."
I really, really hate not having a cool toy like a DVD player, but screw it--I despise the behavior of these companies and I will not endorse their behavior by paying them for this technology.
I wonder what all else I'll have to stop using or buying, and I doubt I can make a difference, but so what? I'm not going to pay these companies to "protect" me from this kid.
--
I wonder if this is how they tracked down Jeff K.
--
With self-destructive media, that second trip to the vidshop is totally unnecessary. Only ninety percent of rented movies are actually watched. About ten to fifteen percent are kept one or more days late because they haven't been watched yet. And less than twenty percent of the time people go to the video store to return a rented movie do they rent something while they're there. Imagine never having to pay a late fee again, or having to return an unwatched movie. Imagine not having to waste twenty minutes and a third of a gallon of gasoline returning what could be thrown away more cheaply and more efficiently. Oh, and if you've got a two-evening rental and couple of five-evening rentals from Blockbuster, you could be saving two trips to the store.
The day will come when you can just download the movie, thereby eliminating the video store and all its related pollution altogether. Doubtless when that happens, illegal-vid sites will exist in the numbers illegal-mp3 sites do today. Until that time, I'll remain fairly happy not to have to fight traffic just so I can give something back.
And here is the absolute, hail-Eris best part: The video store will never, ever be out of what you're going there to rent.
Cheers
--
I'm actually old enough to remember when September was only a month long and Usenet was around 20% interesting posts instead of today's less than five percent. Spam, ECP and EMP are so common that regulars are leaving in droves, even ones in groups that have been around for fifteen years or more. Hell, I can remember actually seeing a legitimate job posting in comp.jobs.offered!
The whole of Usenet is becoming like one of those Australian towns that had to be abandoned because it became overrun with mice. Who wants to stand around having a conversation when you have to spend most of your time dealing with goddamned mice? It makes me very, very sad.
--
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Fear of encountering a crazy person is fairly universal these days, and for the last eighty or a thousand years. I think that net.stalkers are simply an extension of an existing phenomenon. There are skills newbies must learn in order to protect themselves. There will always be predators and their most likely prey will always be the naïve. It makes me sad to see them coming to my neighborhood.
In the meantime, I think you and I are using kook to refer to two different things: you're talking about truly deranged, evil, hurtful people who also have net.access and can't leave their net.lives on the net; I on the other hand am talking about classic net.kooks, Serdar Argic types, that richly deserve all the ridicule and flames they can and do garner.
Cheers.
--
Suspicion and hostility of denizens to newbies does not prevent newbies from becoming oldhats; it instructs them in what is required of them if they want to be respected. Good flames are an important mechanism. Telling a poster that they're being an idiot, and why what they're doing is idiotic, is far more instructive than silence, or the white noise of a thousand random screaming "fuck you" at the same time. All flames--and all flamers--are not created equal. Generally one can tell within a post's first sentence or two whether its author is giving a thoughtful but critical reply, a hilariously satirical reply, or if they're just another disagreeable jackass. As with any other post, readers can quickly figure out whose flames to pay attention to and whose to ignore. A single, well crafted flame is far more useful--and far more entertaining to bystanders--than a dogpile.
Maybe if we thought of it as hazing--treating someone like garbage until they prove that they're worthy. It's harsh, perhaps, but it's also expedient, and ostracism is a good way to keep the fools and the bozos out. I come here to learn new, interesting stuff from people who make an effort at being responsible contributors, not to listen to every shrill crackpot who can type in a URL. If you don't have an opinion, or you're not qualified to give one, instead of posting, read. You don't have to post in every forum to become a good Netizen.
--