I'd expect that China would hold off on actual use of its intrusionware until it could use it as part of a coordinated effort.
Shooting at someone makes them tend to put on body armor. Making a series of attacks with intrusionware puts a lot of experts to work rendering that particular style of intrusionware unworkable - and making future intrusionware more difficult to write.
**you** are responsble for what your computer does
Can't handle that? Then get your machine off of the net. This is no different than your kid or one of his friends finding your gun, unsecured laying loose in a drawer, and using it to blow someone away.
It might be argued that having a bulldozer with a lock that can be picked with a hairpin makes you partly to blame when somebody steals it and uses it to knock down a department store. But if you accept that argument...
Who is at fault for the loose security on the bulldozer when all the bulldozers come from each of the handfull of bulldozer factories with such locks, all identical? Must every customer install his own lock? Must every customer become a better locksmith than the experts working at the factories? Shouldn't there at least be something in the manual telling the customers that they need to change the lock?
And who is at fault for the loose security on the bulldozer when the government bans locks that can't be picked with a hairpin?
Let's stick to putting the blame where it belongs: on the criminal.
And let's stick to solving the problem at its sources, which include the government's ban on strong cryptography.
Granted what they pulled off was quite impressive, is it really "hacking" in the true sense of the word?
Loath as I am to give psychopaths any reenforcement...
The trinoo/TFN/stacheldraht tools do show there's some talent under a couple of the black hats.
Some coboys ARE cattle rustlers. Some sailors ARE pirates. And some hackers ARE crackers and/or vandals.
Talent and psychopathy aren't well correlated, so there are a small number of people who have both. About one in a hundred is a psychopath, and that applies to hackers as well as every other group. Some fraction of psychopaths don't learn enlightened self-interest, and so remain amoral and prone to doing great damage to others to obtain minor, short-term benefits to themselves.
Of course, once the tools {and their install tools} are written, it doesn't take brains to install and use them. Just access to the tools and a lack of morals.
Strong authentication all along the data path is what we really need. That won't stop the attacks but it will help point the finger of blame and that can be an excellent incentive to strengthen an organizations security practices.
But strong authentication comes from strong crypto. And strong crypto in the US has been crippled by the US Government's export controls, which remove most of the financial reward for work on it by US programmers. (They can't export their products, so such products can't become a world standard, so they can't become a US standard, so they can't be sold. So the programmers find something else to do, where they CAN make some money.)
And who are the biggest lobbiests against removing those export controls?
The FBI and the NSA.
And why did they want the controls to remain?
So they can read everybody's wiretapped communications (NSA, FBI) and confiscated or copied disks (FBI, NSA).
And maybe so they can install their OWN intrusionware, so they can read it when the traffic hasn't been in the US (NSA, FBI drug warriors) or without having to sieze the computers and tip off those observed (FBI, NSA).
And maybe so they can plant things, disrupt targeted organizations' operations, or play damaging and often fatal "dirty tricks" on those they don't like (as both the FBI and the spook agencies are known to have done in every decade since their inception).
So now their interference with crypto has come home to roost - by leaving the US information infrastructure open to attack, until a large scale attack is under weigh.
Don't they both have charters that say they're supposed to work toward preventing that sort of thing?
Moderator points come in sets of five, not magic moderation rings with an infinite number of wishes. (Unlike the ability of trolls to post.)
Some moderators try to use them mainly for moderating interesting stuff UP, rather than moderating trolls down. If they burn them all on the latter, they don't get to call your attention to important stuff.
Later comments are seen by fewer moderators, and thus less likely to be dinged.
Moderation is done by readers of the already-posted items - not by a hypothetical staff approving or disapproving of postings before they're made. So items following-up an item already moderated down are less likely to be looked at and disapproved, even if the moderator is willing to waste his points on the Nth followup on an off-topic thread.
And moderators can't moderate responses to articles where they've already posted a response. (I, for instance, currently have three moderator points left, and am blowing my ability to use them anywhere in this article by posting this reply.)
So don't look for consistency in moderation. Be greatful you get any benefit from it at all.
Why should I as the average net citizen and as a citizen of the United States care that sites are being taken down[?]
Because it cost the targets a lot of money. And they'll have to make that up. So their prices will go up to make it back. Which means their competitors don't have to cut prices as hard. And Joe Random Consumer ends up footing the bill.
And that's YOU, friend.
And meanwhile, the law enforcement people will spend a lot more money hunting down and prosecuting the perpetrators. Paid for by YOUR tax money. And so your taxes go up, or your other services go down. Bucks out of your pocket again, or inconvenience because your road wasn't fixed or whatever.
And sysadmins at ISPs and thousands of sites all over then internet will spend a bunch of time thrashing around over the issue. They don't work for free. Cost of internet service goes up - or doesn't go down as fast. That gets folded into the price of everything the ISP's customers sell, and into your internet bill. Meanwhile you don't get other fixes as fast.
I could go on.
But there's a silver lining:
The digital anarchy will start patching this set of holes. This kind of DoS attack will get harder, and an unmodified version may become impossible. The net will be more robust.
There is no WAY I'm going to install an FBI-supplied object-only daemon that runs as root.
Given that they claim to have just written this thing, there is absolutely no excuse for not releasing it as source.
Such a program could view any file and report anything it finds to an external source of its own chosing. It could install trapdoors. It could expose private crypto keys. It could monitor traffic on internal nets - or even attack external sites. It could monitor email. I could go on.
But stop a distributed DoS attack? Does this thing sink its hooks into the kernel? (Would you install it if it did?) Or does it just scan all the disks and tables for "bad" source or object code or file/program names, in the hope the perpetrator (or his sysadmin) installs it on his own machine.
This might be worth reverse-engineering. But there's no WAY anybody concerned about his system's security will execute this puppy.
It will be interesting to see if this results in a practical quantum waveguide to replace wiring. Just insert (or remove) an electron at the one end of the pipe and it will produce (or delete) a marage at the other end.
I wonder if the "mirage" could be interpreted as the electrons of the cobalt atom tunneling to the image location and spending a fraction of their time there? That less-than-half strength might be because the nucleus is still at the other location and makes the electron density "prefer" that region because it is lower energy, due to the attraction of the positive charge.
I also wonder what is the speed of propagation of the effect? Switch a gate's output by dropping an electon into an electron trap at one end of the waveguide, and it appears (at, say, 50% density) at the other end, and affects the logic there. How long does it take to happen? Does it exceed the speed of signals in a wire? (That's a very small fraction of lightspeed on a chip, where the wire resistance and stray capacatance form a delay line.) Does it approach that of light in vacuum? Does it EXCEED that of light in vacuum? (Even if the total system can't send signals faster than light in emptyness, which is a very slight improvement on light in quantum vacuum.)
Whatever it is, my bet is that it will happen at tunneling speed.
Doing that would reduce the load on the Russian section of the net.
This would reward them for their misbehavior by reducing their ISP operation costs (helping to pay for the bugging equipment), reducing the amount of traffic they have to filter, and reducing the dilution of the signal they are after (Russian Dissident communication) by extraneous material (such as American animated advertisements).
One definiton of a police state is a country where everybody is on probation.
The problem with a plethora of bad laws that are largely ignored and selectively forced is that it results in a stiuation where everybody is breaking a law.
Once this happens, the exectuive branch has complete freedom to arrest anyone they don't like. The internal rules they make on whom to go after become the effective laws of the land, rendering the legislature moot and making the judiciary a rubber stamp. And any civilian that any policeman, bureaucrat, or executive branch politician doesn't like can be sucked into the system on a charge unrelated to the grudge.
This may be a little off-topic, since it relates to the injunction, not to the police action against Jon.
I noticed that the prosecution entered selected inflamatory Slashdot postings into evidence, to show the intent of the members of the software community was to flout the law, and the judge took notice of this.
ANYONE can post to Slashdot. The PROSECUTION can post to Slashdot, and create as many such inflamatory postings as they wish.
Seems to me that in the absense of any showing that the authors of the postings were bonifide members of the software community, rather than agents of the prosecution, and that their opinions were representative of the community as a whole, the judge should take no notice of them.
_And Then There Were None_ - one third of the collection _The Great Explosion_ - is the origin of MYOB and TANSTAAFL, and dear to the hearts of Pacifists and Anarchists everywhere.
Actually, it was MYOB, F-IW, and the basic use of "initial slang", i.e. acronyms, as shorthand for homilies. TANSTAAFL showed up in Heinlin's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, another Anarchist utopia story (though a bit more diverse, rather than Russel's more homogeneous Ghands - Ghandi-influenced pacifist anarchists).
There's a story behind TANSTAAFL, too, beyond the one in which it appeared...
Seems that Milton Freedman was attending an economics conference, and went out to lunch with another economist. On their way and during the lunch they continued an old economics debate: "Are there any universal rules of economics?", with Uncle Miltie taking the pro-rules side.
Upon leaving the restaurant Milton said ~You know, that was a marvelous lunch. And the restaurant had excelent service. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was free?~
Of course his dinner partner said "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And Milton pointed out that he'd just stated a universal rule of economics, destroying his own argument and winning the debate for Milton. B-)
And just incidentally creating a beloved homily for Libertarians and other capitalist-anarchists the world over.
Which reminds me... Don't forget to turn them on to L. Neil Smith's "North American Confederacy" series, starting with _The Probability Broach_ and continuing with _The Venus Belt_
Eric Frank Russel's _Wasp_ - the one book I never lend anymore - and of which I have three copies after the one I DID lend was "lost" and I couldn't find it again for ten years. Also by Russel: _The Space Willies_, _And Then There Were None_
Russel and Ian Flemming worked together in the British Department of Dirty Tricks during WW II. This is the think tank that designed the spy techniques and equipment, along with the same for escape from prison camps. (I think they were also responsible for the British Home Guard manual - the difinitive text on guerilla warfare in a modern occupied city.) After the war they both became fiction authors and used their experience in their stories. Flemming went straight to spy fiction, modeling "M" in the James Bond series after himself. Russel did Science Fiction, with a heavy socio-political bent. But some a few of his works draw directly on his war experience, _Wasp_ the most of all. It's his unimplemented plan to drop a saboteur into WW II Japan, recast into an interplanetary war (with the Japanese secret police only lightly disguised...)
_And Then There Were None_ - one third of the collection _The Great Explosion_ - is the origin of MYOB and TANSTAAFL, and dear to the hearts of Pacifists and Anarchists everywhere. The three stories in the collection show how three different hypothetical cultures successfully resist an expansionist empire.
_The Space Willies_ is a hilarious romp where a lone man wins an interstellar war between two multi-species empires. From a prison camp. By making a joke, and then refusing to admit it was a joke. (_Hogan's Heroes_ is a pale shadow.)
Try to get the originally published versions of _The Space Willies_ and _Wasp_. Russel had (or was?) an excelent editor, and the modern reprints of the unedited manuscripts show it. The unedited _Wasp_ is only slightly awkward and still excelent, but _The Space Willies_ was edited down to a half-Ace-Double from a novel, and improved significantly by the tightening, pacing, chaff removal, and even the title change - from _Next of Kin_.
Leinster does fine yarns with with moral and social as well as technical concepts playing key roles, and does them with a vocabulary that makes them accessable to a child (if occasionally annoying an adult). His "Med Ship" series in particular is an excelent introduction to "Golden Age" Science Fiction.
Also from the Golden Age: George O. Smith. Read his _Venus Equilateral_ collection and you'll want to resurrect vacuum tube technology and hunt down the discoveries that got lost when it was abandoned for silicon. (Then go do a web search on "Farnsworth AND Fusion"... B-) ) Or try _Highways in Hiding_ / _The Space Plague_ for a marvelous superman/chase/conspiracy story set in a future where two Psi powers are commonplace and an accepted part of the background! (How do you do secrecy when about half the population are telepaths, and most of the other half clarivoyant? Poker is interesting... B-) )
But the biggest source of chaos is two or more governments claiming the same hunk of land, population, or resources. So:
Polyarchy == Chaos.
And the more governments, the more chaos.
(What gripes me the most is people - generally in the government or the establishment media - who point to a polyarchy and its associated violence and tell us that this shows us how bad "Anarchy" is.)
However, I contend that humans have six senses, but for some reason, one gets no respect. The sixth, of course, is balance. You could also call it a sense of gravity.
It's actually two senses:
Rotational accelleration.
Linear accelleration/gravity.
Look at the inner ear and you'll see three loops at mutual right angles, embedded in the skull. At the point where they connect to the rest of the inner ear, there are nerve ending hairs protruding into the channel, similar to those that connect to the membrane down the center of the coclear spiral to sense sound. When you increase/decrease the component of the rotation of your head around the axis of one of the loops, the fluid in the loop lags behind the structure, pushing the hairs.
I think gravity/linear accelleration is measured by similar hairs with a mass on the end embedded in fluid (for damping) in the same structure - but I'm not sure.
You also have position sensors in your muscles and tension sensors in the tendons, which allow you to figure out the position of your body and the force you're exerting/having exerted on your limbs. This is in addition to the pressure sensors in your skin.
There is some question whether people have a weak magnetic directional sense. There's magnetite in some nerve cells in the same region of the nose as the nerve endings which processes smell. This spot is also is fixed to the skull and thus ideal for navigation. It might also be used to smell magnetic dust in the air. Or it might be random evolutionary morpholigic junk or a vestigial leftover of something ancient and now defunct.
The (rest of the?) sense of smell consists of a number of molecular shape detectors, plus sensore for the electric field from ions. The shape detectors seem to be part of the same system that produces antibodies: People with weak senses of smell are sometimes cured when they have a strong immune reaction (such as toxic shock), and smell becomes much more sensitive during a viral prodrome. (Ever notice that your house smells REALLY dusty and everything else smells annoyingly strong the day before the cold/flu hits?)
I've had SunOS/Solaris on my home systems for about a decade now - and have gotten fed up with Sun's closed nature. There were several hacks I wanted to do during that time, and I had to give them up because (variously) the hardware or the software was closed, and I didn't have enough time to reverse engineer it.
Now they've kinda opened the software: I could see it and make local mods - though there are limits on what I can do with it. And they've cut the price to zero - for now.
But it's too little and too late.
Now there's Linux, which is truly Open Source, on architectures that are fully visible. And there's Open/Free/Net BSD. And more to come.
So I used the Y2K upgrade as an excuse to spend the time necessary to migrate completely off SunOS/Solaris. At this point my home network is all Linux (except for one SunOS box that I might turn back on some day - if I ever want to use one particular application that I don't want to spend the time porting).
While I might bring up other OSes in the future (like maybe OpenBSD for a hardened server), it will be really tough to get me to bother with anything that isn't truly Open Source.
And after wasting a decade crippled by lack of source and lack of hardware info, it will be a cold day in hell before I invest more of my life hacking on a Sun operating system.
The KCBS news radio version of the story told of a subscription service that would call the cell phone of every subscriber who was headed into traffic congestion to warn them of it.
(Just what you need - a cell phone call to distract you as you approach the turn behind which traffic is stalled...)
Seems to me that makes it obvious that the system knows perfectly well where each customer is, indexed by the phone's identification.
The cells have always been able to locate you within a couple miles - by signal strength. This was necessary to select the cell that handled your calls. A little hardware and software upgrade to each cell makes it possible to know your location within feet.
Knowing your location within miles is enough for phone calls, but not particularly useful to the police for tracking or apprehension. Knowing it within feet serves both purposes.
But knowing it within feet requires a hardware and software upgrade to essentially ALL the cell base stations - an upgrade that isn't necessary for their mission. That CO$T$.
So the government is mandating the instalation of the extra equipment. And they're looking for an excuse to make it palatable. Traffic statistics is their latest trial balloon.
I don't know what it's like where YOU live. But here in the S.F. Bay area there are already cameras watching traffic along all the major freeways and many non-freewayintersections (and which were often rotated to look at the surrounding neighorhoods, until it was noticed and commented on), under-pavement speed sensors ditto to control the metering lights, regular helicopter patrols during rush hours (which is much of the day here) by both the police and services feeding the radio stations, and police helicopter patrols much of the night.
All that confiscated money and property has bought a LOT of "cop equipment".
They need more traffic info from an expensive forced hardware and software tap on the cell phone systems about as much as Custer needed more Indians. (And how DO you separate "traffic congestion" from people with cell phones walking?)
But for tracking a suspect - or anyone else they don't like who happened to have a cellular phone - it's ideal.
A system that measures the location of the phones closely enough to monitor traffic - and call the phones of particular people who are approaching "traffic congestion" - can provide such tracking information on individuals, with no more than a minor software addition at a central site. Nothing is detectable outside the site except the polling of the cell phones - and the "traffic" application give them an excuse for that.
Anyone who tries to capture and reverse engineer the central site software to audit it for individual-tracking capability can expect the same treatment as Mitnick. So don't expect to find out about the individual-tracking capability until it's been in regular use for so long that they don't mind exposing it.
By the way: Did you know that some of the popular cell-phone models can be turned into room bugs by remote control?
Ethanol can only be separated from water by distilation to a certain point. (I think it's 197 proof, or half that in percentage.) At higher concentrations the water evaporates fast enough to drive the percentage down, rather than up, in each distilation step.
To go beyond that (mainly to produce something that sucks water out of other stuff), they need to extract the water from the ethanol by other means. This gets almost all the way to 100%, but leaves traces of more toxic stuff (such as benzene). That's why you don't want to drink the laboratory alcohol. (It also sucks the water out of your throat, which burns it and leaves you open to infection.)
Of course ethanol itself is slightly toxic (as are vitiamins A, D, B6, and even C). But it's a toxin we have evolved to live with, since our intestinal flora procuce some whenever we've been eating veggies.
They also fed samples to pigs to see if it would poison them. Thus was the term "blind pig" for an illegal bar derived.
I have heard that the enzymes that process alcohol have a preference for ethanol - to the extent that (after inducing vomiting) you can reduce the ultimate damage further by getting roaring drunk on really GOOD booze for a couple days, keeping the enzymes busy mostly on ethanol until the remaining methanol is excreted in sweat and urine.
I have NO idea if this is true. But it's a good excuse for the person who told me to get roaring drunk for a couple days every now and then. "Oops! I think that there was a little methanol in that last batch..." B-)
If it runs on methanol, it will probably also run on ethanol, or a mix of them.
Re:Stallman's right IMHO. In this case that's good
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 2
On the other hand, control or possession of a copy by a non-employee, non-agent, even if subject to nondisclosure would probably constitute, at least, a lending (bailment) of the copy.
But the signing of an NDA creates an association between the parties, making the party of the second part an agent of the party of the first, no less than an employee would be. So giving him a copy is not "distributing to the public". Title remains with the secret's owner.
The copy is a "derivative work" within the meaning of:
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
The owner of the copyleft has licensed the secret's owner to make such derivitive works, in return for agreeing to certain conditions on public distribution. Since giving a copy to his agent is not a public distribution, the terms of the license are not violated.
There are cases, I recall, holding that infringement occurs when a consultant/third-party is given access to copyrighted works for the purpose of repairing software on behalf of the licensee. However, I seem to remember that these cases went off on copying, rather than distribution.
Precicely. The second party got in trouble for making the unauthorized copy. The GPL encourages you to make copies, either unmodified or derivative, and just places certain obligations on those who distribute them publicly.
That should be as long as they don't distribute the modifications outside the corporation. NDA's with outside parties can't be held to overrule the GPL
NDAs with outside parties are made as part of including the outside party in a contract which changes the outside party to an inside party, an agent of the corporation with defined responsibilities. Typically such a person would be a consultant or a prospective hire. This applies whether the "person" is an individual human or another corporation, limited partnership, or what-have-you.
The outside party becomes a "body part" of the corporate "person", like a fingernail or a ganglion. (Ideally - an important section of the brain. B-) )
(I can imagine a company's lawyer trying to hack up a shrink-wrap contract that purports to be an NDA. But since the body of the relationship in such a case would be the company providing code and the customer paying for it, the subterfuge would be transparent, and no doubt immediately struck if it came to court.)
(if the originator of the modifications thinks they [override the copyleft], then they are legally precluded from distributing their modifications by the GPL/copyright law).
But they AREN'T "overriding" the COPYLEFT. They're creating a relationship between the parties which makes the "person" who signed the NDA a part of an association. Granted he's a limited part. But so are the corporate employees and officers.
Once he's part of the association, giving him the modified code is not "distribution". He can still redistribute the UNmodified version. But the modifications (including any HE makes as part of his deal) are the company's undistributed SECRET. And they stay proprietary until the company releases the signatory from the agreement, publishes the secret, or the secret is exposed through no fault of an NDA signatory.
As to the second point, the boundaries are determined by courts, in particular that corporations are legally considered to be individuals. "NDA boundaries" have no legal standing as individuals. Thus distributing outside the corp _is_ distribution, regardless of any NDAs.
"NDA boundaries" do not have to have legal standing as individuals. "NDA boundary" is simply a shorthand term for defining the location of the "skin" of the corporation's (or other association's) "body" with respect to a particular secret.
Does anyone have the coordinates for the alleged "face on Mars"?
Also: The image of "Kermit" that NASA found and published as examples of how you can find all sorts of chance images on the Martian surface?
Didn't they find a "smiley face", too? Shades of _The Watchmen_. B-)
With respect to "the Face on Mars": There's a whole section of the human brain given over to detecting human faces and decoding expressions - which is why we see faces in everything from electric outlets to wear spots in linoleum if they contain even traces of similarity to facial features.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd expect that China would hold off on actual use of its intrusionware until it could use it as part of a coordinated effort.
Shooting at someone makes them tend to put on body armor. Making a series of attacks with intrusionware puts a lot of experts to work rendering that particular style of intrusionware unworkable - and making future intrusionware more difficult to write.
**you** are responsble for what your computer does
Can't handle that? Then get your machine off of the net. This is no different than your kid or one of his friends finding your gun, unsecured laying loose in a drawer, and using it to blow someone away.
It might be argued that having a bulldozer with a lock that can be picked with a hairpin makes you partly to blame when somebody steals it and uses it to knock down a department store. But if you accept that argument...
Who is at fault for the loose security on the bulldozer when all the bulldozers come from each of the handfull of bulldozer factories with such locks, all identical? Must every customer install his own lock? Must every customer become a better locksmith than the experts working at the factories? Shouldn't there at least be something in the manual telling the customers that they need to change the lock?
And who is at fault for the loose security on the bulldozer when the government bans locks that can't be picked with a hairpin?
Let's stick to putting the blame where it belongs: on the criminal.
And let's stick to solving the problem at its sources, which include the government's ban on strong cryptography.
Granted what they pulled off was quite impressive, is it really "hacking" in the true sense of the word?
Loath as I am to give psychopaths any reenforcement...
The trinoo/TFN/stacheldraht tools do show there's some talent under a couple of the black hats.
Some coboys ARE cattle rustlers. Some sailors ARE pirates. And some hackers ARE crackers and/or vandals.
Talent and psychopathy aren't well correlated, so there are a small number of people who have both. About one in a hundred is a psychopath, and that applies to hackers as well as every other group. Some fraction of psychopaths don't learn enlightened self-interest, and so remain amoral and prone to doing great damage to others to obtain minor, short-term benefits to themselves.
Of course, once the tools {and their install tools} are written, it doesn't take brains to install and use them. Just access to the tools and a lack of morals.
Strong authentication all along the data path is what we really need. That won't stop the attacks but it will help point the finger of blame and that can be an excellent incentive to strengthen an organizations security practices.
But strong authentication comes from strong crypto. And strong crypto in the US has been crippled by the US Government's export controls, which remove most of the financial reward for work on it by US programmers. (They can't export their products, so such products can't become a world standard, so they can't become a US standard, so they can't be sold. So the programmers find something else to do, where they CAN make some money.)
And who are the biggest lobbiests against removing those export controls?
The FBI and the NSA.
And why did they want the controls to remain?
So they can read everybody's wiretapped communications (NSA, FBI) and confiscated or copied disks (FBI, NSA).
And maybe so they can install their OWN intrusionware, so they can read it when the traffic hasn't been in the US (NSA, FBI drug warriors) or without having to sieze the computers and tip off those observed (FBI, NSA).
And maybe so they can plant things, disrupt targeted organizations' operations, or play damaging and often fatal "dirty tricks" on those they don't like (as both the FBI and the spook agencies are known to have done in every decade since their inception).
So now their interference with crypto has come home to roost - by leaving the US information infrastructure open to attack, until a large scale attack is under weigh.
Don't they both have charters that say they're supposed to work toward preventing that sort of thing?
Moderator points come in sets of five, not magic moderation rings with an infinite number of wishes. (Unlike the ability of trolls to post.)
Some moderators try to use them mainly for moderating interesting stuff UP, rather than moderating trolls down. If they burn them all on the latter, they don't get to call your attention to important stuff.
Later comments are seen by fewer moderators, and thus less likely to be dinged.
Moderation is done by readers of the already-posted items - not by a hypothetical staff approving or disapproving of postings before they're made. So items following-up an item already moderated down are less likely to be looked at and disapproved, even if the moderator is willing to waste his points on the Nth followup on an off-topic thread.
And moderators can't moderate responses to articles where they've already posted a response. (I, for instance, currently have three moderator points left, and am blowing my ability to use them anywhere in this article by posting this reply.)
So don't look for consistency in moderation. Be greatful you get any benefit from it at all.
Why should I as the average net citizen and as a citizen of the United States care that sites are being taken down[?]
Because it cost the targets a lot of money. And they'll have to make that up. So their prices will go up to make it back. Which means their competitors don't have to cut prices as hard. And Joe Random Consumer ends up footing the bill.
And that's YOU, friend.
And meanwhile, the law enforcement people will spend a lot more money hunting down and prosecuting the perpetrators. Paid for by YOUR tax money. And so your taxes go up, or your other services go down. Bucks out of your pocket again, or inconvenience because your road wasn't fixed or whatever.
And sysadmins at ISPs and thousands of sites all over then internet will spend a bunch of time thrashing around over the issue. They don't work for free. Cost of internet service goes up - or doesn't go down as fast. That gets folded into the price of everything the ISP's customers sell, and into your internet bill. Meanwhile you don't get other fixes as fast.
I could go on.
But there's a silver lining:
The digital anarchy will start patching this set of holes. This kind of DoS attack will get harder, and an unmodified version may become impossible. The net will be more robust.
There is no WAY I'm going to install an FBI-supplied object-only daemon that runs as root.
Given that they claim to have just written this thing, there is absolutely no excuse for not releasing it as source.
Such a program could view any file and report anything it finds to an external source of its own chosing. It could install trapdoors. It could expose private crypto keys. It could monitor traffic on internal nets - or even attack external sites. It could monitor email. I could go on.
But stop a distributed DoS attack? Does this thing sink its hooks into the kernel? (Would you install it if it did?) Or does it just scan all the disks and tables for "bad" source or object code or file/program names, in the hope the perpetrator (or his sysadmin) installs it on his own machine.
This might be worth reverse-engineering. But there's no WAY anybody concerned about his system's security will execute this puppy.
It will be interesting to see if this results in a practical quantum waveguide to replace wiring. Just insert (or remove) an electron at the one end of the pipe and it will produce (or delete) a marage at the other end.
I wonder if the "mirage" could be interpreted as the electrons of the cobalt atom tunneling to the image location and spending a fraction of their time there? That less-than-half strength might be because the nucleus is still at the other location and makes the electron density "prefer" that region because it is lower energy, due to the attraction of the positive charge.
I also wonder what is the speed of propagation of the effect? Switch a gate's output by dropping an electon into an electron trap at one end of the waveguide, and it appears (at, say, 50% density) at the other end, and affects the logic there. How long does it take to happen? Does it exceed the speed of signals in a wire? (That's a very small fraction of lightspeed on a chip, where the wire resistance and stray capacatance form a delay line.) Does it approach that of light in vacuum? Does it EXCEED that of light in vacuum? (Even if the total system can't send signals faster than light in emptyness, which is a very slight improvement on light in quantum vacuum.)
Whatever it is, my bet is that it will happen at tunneling speed.
Doing that would reduce the load on the Russian section of the net.
This would reward them for their misbehavior by reducing their ISP operation costs (helping to pay for the bugging equipment), reducing the amount of traffic they have to filter, and reducing the dilution of the signal they are after (Russian Dissident communication) by extraneous material (such as American animated advertisements).
One definiton of a police state is a country where everybody is on probation.
The problem with a plethora of bad laws that are largely ignored and selectively forced is that it results in a stiuation where everybody is breaking a law.
Once this happens, the exectuive branch has complete freedom to arrest anyone they don't like. The internal rules they make on whom to go after become the effective laws of the land, rendering the legislature moot and making the judiciary a rubber stamp. And any civilian that any policeman, bureaucrat, or executive branch politician doesn't like can be sucked into the system on a charge unrelated to the grudge.
This may be a little off-topic, since it relates to the injunction, not to the police action against Jon.
I noticed that the prosecution entered selected inflamatory Slashdot postings into evidence, to show the intent of the members of the software community was to flout the law, and the judge took notice of this.
ANYONE can post to Slashdot. The PROSECUTION can post to Slashdot, and create as many such inflamatory postings as they wish.
Seems to me that in the absense of any showing that the authors of the postings were bonifide members of the software community, rather than agents of the prosecution, and that their opinions were representative of the community as a whole, the judge should take no notice of them.
I said:
_And Then There Were None_ - one third of the collection _The Great Explosion_ - is the origin of MYOB and TANSTAAFL, and dear to the hearts of Pacifists and Anarchists everywhere.
Actually, it was MYOB, F-IW, and the basic use of "initial slang", i.e. acronyms, as shorthand for homilies. TANSTAAFL showed up in Heinlin's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, another Anarchist utopia story (though a bit more diverse, rather than Russel's more homogeneous Ghands - Ghandi-influenced pacifist anarchists).
There's a story behind TANSTAAFL, too, beyond the one in which it appeared...
Seems that Milton Freedman was attending an economics conference, and went out to lunch with another economist. On their way and during the lunch they continued an old economics debate: "Are there any universal rules of economics?", with Uncle Miltie taking the pro-rules side.
Upon leaving the restaurant Milton said ~You know, that was a marvelous lunch. And the restaurant had excelent service. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was free?~
Of course his dinner partner said "There's no such thing as a free lunch." And Milton pointed out that he'd just stated a universal rule of economics, destroying his own argument and winning the debate for Milton. B-)
And just incidentally creating a beloved homily for Libertarians and other capitalist-anarchists the world over.
Which reminds me... Don't forget to turn them on to L. Neil Smith's "North American Confederacy" series, starting with _The Probability Broach_ and continuing with _The Venus Belt_
Eric Frank Russel's _Wasp_ - the one book I never lend anymore - and of which I have three copies after the one I DID lend was "lost" and I couldn't find it again for ten years. Also by Russel: _The Space Willies_, _And Then There Were None_
Russel and Ian Flemming worked together in the British Department of Dirty Tricks during WW II. This is the think tank that designed the spy techniques and equipment, along with the same for escape from prison camps. (I think they were also responsible for the British Home Guard manual - the difinitive text on guerilla warfare in a modern occupied city.) After the war they both became fiction authors and used their experience in their stories. Flemming went straight to spy fiction, modeling "M" in the James Bond series after himself. Russel did Science Fiction, with a heavy socio-political bent. But some a few of his works draw directly on his war experience, _Wasp_ the most of all. It's his unimplemented plan to drop a saboteur into WW II Japan, recast into an interplanetary war (with the Japanese secret police only lightly disguised...)
_And Then There Were None_ - one third of the collection _The Great Explosion_ - is the origin of MYOB and TANSTAAFL, and dear to the hearts of Pacifists and Anarchists everywhere. The three stories in the collection show how three different hypothetical cultures successfully resist an expansionist empire.
_The Space Willies_ is a hilarious romp where a lone man wins an interstellar war between two multi-species empires. From a prison camp. By making a joke, and then refusing to admit it was a joke. (_Hogan's Heroes_ is a pale shadow.)
Try to get the originally published versions of _The Space Willies_ and _Wasp_. Russel had (or was?) an excelent editor, and the modern reprints of the unedited manuscripts show it. The unedited _Wasp_ is only slightly awkward and still excelent, but _The Space Willies_ was edited down to a half-Ace-Double from a novel, and improved significantly by the tightening, pacing, chaff removal, and even the title change - from _Next of Kin_.
Leinster does fine yarns with with moral and social as well as technical concepts playing key roles, and does them with a vocabulary that makes them accessable to a child (if occasionally annoying an adult). His "Med Ship" series in particular is an excelent introduction to "Golden Age" Science Fiction.
Also from the Golden Age: George O. Smith. Read his _Venus Equilateral_ collection and you'll want to resurrect vacuum tube technology and hunt down the discoveries that got lost when it was abandoned for silicon. (Then go do a web search on "Farnsworth AND Fusion"... B-) ) Or try _Highways in Hiding_ / _The Space Plague_ for a marvelous superman/chase/conspiracy story set in a future where two Psi powers are commonplace and an accepted part of the background! (How do you do secrecy when about half the population are telepaths, and most of the other half clarivoyant? Poker is interesting... B-) )
An AC posts:
No but..
Anarchy+Greed == Chaos
Anarchy+Stupidity == Chaos
Anarchy+Conceit == Chaos
So as you can see, Anarchy is half of Chaos.
On the other hand:
Govenment+Greed == Chaos
Government+Stupidity == Chaos
Government+Conceit == Chaos
But the biggest source of chaos is two or more governments claiming the same hunk of land, population, or resources. So:
Polyarchy == Chaos.
And the more governments, the more chaos.
(What gripes me the most is people - generally in the government or the establishment media - who point to a polyarchy and its associated violence and tell us that this shows us how bad "Anarchy" is.)
It's actually two senses:
Rotational accelleration.
Linear accelleration/gravity.
Look at the inner ear and you'll see three loops at mutual right angles, embedded in the skull. At the point where they connect to the rest of the inner ear, there are nerve ending hairs protruding into the channel, similar to those that connect to the membrane down the center of the coclear spiral to sense sound. When you increase/decrease the component of the rotation of your head around the axis of one of the loops, the fluid in the loop lags behind the structure, pushing the hairs.
I think gravity/linear accelleration is measured by similar hairs with a mass on the end embedded in fluid (for damping) in the same structure - but I'm not sure.
You also have position sensors in your muscles and tension sensors in the tendons, which allow you to figure out the position of your body and the force you're exerting/having exerted on your limbs. This is in addition to the pressure sensors in your skin.
There is some question whether people have a weak magnetic directional sense. There's magnetite in some nerve cells in the same region of the nose as the nerve endings which processes smell. This spot is also is fixed to the skull and thus ideal for navigation. It might also be used to smell magnetic dust in the air. Or it might be random evolutionary morpholigic junk or a vestigial leftover of something ancient and now defunct.
The (rest of the?) sense of smell consists of a number of molecular shape detectors, plus sensore for the electric field from ions. The shape detectors seem to be part of the same system that produces antibodies: People with weak senses of smell are sometimes cured when they have a strong immune reaction (such as toxic shock), and smell becomes much more sensitive during a viral prodrome. (Ever notice that your house smells REALLY dusty and everything else smells annoyingly strong the day before the cold/flu hits?)
I've had SunOS/Solaris on my home systems for about a decade now - and have gotten fed up with Sun's closed nature. There were several hacks I wanted to do during that time, and I had to give them up because (variously) the hardware or the software was closed, and I didn't have enough time to reverse engineer it.
Now they've kinda opened the software: I could see it and make local mods - though there are limits on what I can do with it. And they've cut the price to zero - for now.
But it's too little and too late.
Now there's Linux, which is truly Open Source, on architectures that are fully visible. And there's Open/Free/Net BSD. And more to come.
So I used the Y2K upgrade as an excuse to spend the time necessary to migrate completely off SunOS/Solaris. At this point my home network is all Linux (except for one SunOS box that I might turn back on some day - if I ever want to use one particular application that I don't want to spend the time porting).
While I might bring up other OSes in the future (like maybe OpenBSD for a hardened server), it will be really tough to get me to bother with anything that isn't truly Open Source.
And after wasting a decade crippled by lack of source and lack of hardware info, it will be a cold day in hell before I invest more of my life hacking on a Sun operating system.
RIP, Solaris.
The KCBS news radio version of the story told of a subscription service that would call the cell phone of every subscriber who was headed into traffic congestion to warn them of it.
(Just what you need - a cell phone call to distract you as you approach the turn behind which traffic is stalled...)
Seems to me that makes it obvious that the system knows perfectly well where each customer is, indexed by the phone's identification.
The cells have always been able to locate you within a couple miles - by signal strength. This was necessary to select the cell that handled your calls. A little hardware and software upgrade to each cell makes it possible to know your location within feet.
Knowing your location within miles is enough for phone calls, but not particularly useful to the police for tracking or apprehension. Knowing it within feet serves both purposes.
But knowing it within feet requires a hardware and software upgrade to essentially ALL the cell base stations - an upgrade that isn't necessary for their mission. That CO$T$.
So the government is mandating the instalation of the extra equipment. And they're looking for an excuse to make it palatable. Traffic statistics is their latest trial balloon.
I don't know what it's like where YOU live. But here in the S.F. Bay area there are already cameras watching traffic along all the major freeways and many non-freewayintersections (and which were often rotated to look at the surrounding neighorhoods, until it was noticed and commented on), under-pavement speed sensors ditto to control the metering lights, regular helicopter patrols during rush hours (which is much of the day here) by both the police and services feeding the radio stations, and police helicopter patrols much of the night.
All that confiscated money and property has bought a LOT of "cop equipment".
They need more traffic info from an expensive forced hardware and software tap on the cell phone systems about as much as Custer needed more Indians. (And how DO you separate "traffic congestion" from people with cell phones walking?)
But for tracking a suspect - or anyone else they don't like who happened to have a cellular phone - it's ideal.
A system that measures the location of the phones closely enough to monitor traffic - and call the phones of particular people who are approaching "traffic congestion" - can provide such tracking information on individuals, with no more than a minor software addition at a central site. Nothing is detectable outside the site except the polling of the cell phones - and the "traffic" application give them an excuse for that.
Anyone who tries to capture and reverse engineer the central site software to audit it for individual-tracking capability can expect the same treatment as Mitnick. So don't expect to find out about the individual-tracking capability until it's been in regular use for so long that they don't mind exposing it.
By the way: Did you know that some of the popular cell-phone models can be turned into room bugs by remote control?
Ethanol can only be separated from water by distilation to a certain point. (I think it's 197 proof, or half that in percentage.) At higher concentrations the water evaporates fast enough to drive the percentage down, rather than up, in each distilation step.
To go beyond that (mainly to produce something that sucks water out of other stuff), they need to extract the water from the ethanol by other means. This gets almost all the way to 100%, but leaves traces of more toxic stuff (such as benzene). That's why you don't want to drink the laboratory alcohol. (It also sucks the water out of your throat, which burns it and leaves you open to infection.)
Of course ethanol itself is slightly toxic (as are vitiamins A, D, B6, and even C). But it's a toxin we have evolved to live with, since our intestinal flora procuce some whenever we've been eating veggies.
I have heard that the enzymes that process alcohol have a preference for ethanol - to the extent that (after inducing vomiting) you can reduce the ultimate damage further by getting roaring drunk on really GOOD booze for a couple days, keeping the enzymes busy mostly on ethanol until the remaining methanol is excreted in sweat and urine.
I have NO idea if this is true. But it's a good excuse for the person who told me to get roaring drunk for a couple days every now and then. "Oops! I think that there was a little methanol in that last batch..." B-)
who are the Inheritors of Iridium?
The rumor monger didn't sell me that info. B-) For all I know it's still the same folk.
I hear that the inheritors of the Iridium satellites are prototyping a DSL-rate two-way IP service to go for about $300/month.
Just a rumor...
If it runs on methanol, it will probably also run on ethanol, or a mix of them.
But the signing of an NDA creates an association between the parties, making the party of the second part an agent of the party of the first, no less than an employee would be. So giving him a copy is not "distributing to the public". Title remains with the secret's owner.
The copy is a "derivative work" within the meaning of:
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
The owner of the copyleft has licensed the secret's owner to make such derivitive works, in return for agreeing to certain conditions on public distribution. Since giving a copy to his agent is not a public distribution, the terms of the license are not violated.
There are cases, I recall, holding that infringement occurs when a consultant/third-party is given access to copyrighted works for the purpose of repairing software on behalf of the licensee. However, I seem to remember that these cases went off on copying, rather than distribution.
Precicely. The second party got in trouble for making the unauthorized copy. The GPL encourages you to make copies, either unmodified or derivative, and just places certain obligations on those who distribute them publicly.
NDAs with outside parties are made as part of including the outside party in a contract which changes the outside party to an inside party, an agent of the corporation with defined responsibilities. Typically such a person would be a consultant or a prospective hire. This applies whether the "person" is an individual human or another corporation, limited partnership, or what-have-you.
The outside party becomes a "body part" of the corporate "person", like a fingernail or a ganglion. (Ideally - an important section of the brain. B-) )
(I can imagine a company's lawyer trying to hack up a shrink-wrap contract that purports to be an NDA. But since the body of the relationship in such a case would be the company providing code and the customer paying for it, the subterfuge would be transparent, and no doubt immediately struck if it came to court.)
(if the originator of the modifications thinks they [override the copyleft], then they are legally precluded from distributing their modifications by the GPL/copyright law).
But they AREN'T "overriding" the COPYLEFT. They're creating a relationship between the parties which makes the "person" who signed the NDA a part of an association. Granted he's a limited part. But so are the corporate employees and officers.
Once he's part of the association, giving him the modified code is not "distribution". He can still redistribute the UNmodified version. But the modifications (including any HE makes as part of his deal) are the company's undistributed SECRET. And they stay proprietary until the company releases the signatory from the agreement, publishes the secret, or the secret is exposed through no fault of an NDA signatory.
As to the second point, the boundaries are determined by courts, in particular that corporations are legally considered to be individuals. "NDA boundaries" have no legal standing as individuals. Thus distributing outside the corp _is_ distribution, regardless of any NDAs.
"NDA boundaries" do not have to have legal standing as individuals. "NDA boundary" is simply a shorthand term for defining the location of the "skin" of the corporation's (or other association's) "body" with respect to a particular secret.
Does anyone have the coordinates for the alleged "face on Mars"?
Also: The image of "Kermit" that NASA found and published as examples of how you can find all sorts of chance images on the Martian surface?
Didn't they find a "smiley face", too? Shades of _The Watchmen_. B-)
With respect to "the Face on Mars": There's a whole section of the human brain given over to detecting human faces and decoding expressions - which is why we see faces in everything from electric outlets to wear spots in linoleum if they contain even traces of similarity to facial features.