The vulnerability is affecting kernels compiled with 32-bit compatibility support. Enabling this option seems to be the default, even on x64 systems that do not have 32-bit libraries and cannot execute 32-bit binaries. You can say
Slackware forum has a link to the white hat's page. Here you can get a very neat proggy that will root you in less than 200 if you are still unpatched.
A LOT of hosts still get rooted because of weak passwords. A LOT of valuable hosts get rooted through social engineering. Just because you've seen rooted hosts, doesn't mean that there is any wide-scale deployment of anything.
If Google gave a rat's ass about user privacy, they could start by making OTR-style encryption built into chat (which, by the way, has nothing to do with Google's own "off-the-record" feel-good do-nothing option). The problem is not "a few bad apples", the problem is systemic: Google cannot give users privacy because it would contradicts its business strategy and make its services illegal in some jurisdictions. Only a free software communication platform can be expected to provide its users with actual privacy.
Exactly. Ever since I played my first computer game, it became very important to me to make accurate real-time and real-life decisions leading to more gaming, with as little downtime as possible.
There are definitely classes really suited for open notes. Like a stats class where one has to run the hypothesis testing. There are many procedures, each with its own set of mind-numbing formulas, and the hardest part, the one requiring thinking, is picking the right testing procedure for a given word problem. Last time I did that I made it completely open-notes. No one should be forced to memorize these, even though they are the most simplistic models one can imagine.
My own teaching experience is confined to undergrad classes, but what you are saying totally makes sense. I am sure there are classes where a powerful calculator is essential, but this is still fully compatible with banning networked devices during a test. My major point is whitelisting in preference to blacklisting.
At the same time, I've yet find any mathematical application that can perform as well or better than my TI-89, or is as easy to use.
When I need a calculator, I just fire up python or clisp, and gnuplot or kmplot for graphing. There ain't nothing really that compares with python for calculating arithmetic expressions. And kmplot, by the way, is seriously amazing for flashy things like estimating roots, plotting derivatives, and (my favorite) drawing implicit functions of two variables. I always get confused by TI, may be because my first calculator was a programmable beast with reverse Polish ops (and so also a stack), and memory capable of holding 100 instructions (button actions and things like conditional goto). Different culture.
if everyone has internet access built in their brains, why would we prevent students from using it?
The purpose of an exam is to establish whether or not a particular individual acquired certain knowledge and skills. Allowing surreptitious communication with the outside world makes the entire project moot.
First off -- I applaud your use of open-note exams. That is the ONLY real-world way to learn and demonstrate knowledge.
I partially disagree. Memorization has its place in learning. For example, if one is taking a proper mathematical analysis class but they do not know (by heart!) the formal definition of the limit by midterm, then one is left to wonder how much actual analysis they can do. Ditto for Newton's laws of motion, for example, in the corresponding physics class. In every discipline there are these basic things one needs to understand thoroughly—without having to look them up—to even begin to appreciate the rest of the results. The parent may say: is it not enough to test whether a student solve problems? I do not think it is quite enough. Parent's student may now be able to solve a calculus problem when he is given a one and told it is a calculus problem. My student, who actually remembers the basics of analysis, will be able to pose calculus problems in her field of interest and in her very life: to see things in nature or in the society that can be modeled using limits and derivatives. IMHO, this is better learning. I do agree mostly, though: at least in mathematics, rote memorization should be reserved for just a few central concepts.
As for the root question, I tend to side with people who say: ban all devices but a simple calculator, and design the test in a way that would make even that device unnecessary (don't bother buying them: these things are, like, $1). Whether it's a written test for 100 people or a tête-à-tête in an office, we absolutely have to prevent all communication in order for the examination to have any meaning. Jamming would accomplish that, but it is unsafe and dickish. In the future, when people have wireless adapters in their heads, every test taker will have to be surrounded by a Faraday cage, but for now whitelisting devices is the way to go. For special needs like language translation, have single-purpose devices pre-approved. Do they even make them anymore, now that there are much more capable robots on the internet? Who cares, it's not your problem. No matter what, flatly ban everything that has even a hint of a rumor of the networking capacity.
What part exactly of Wikileaks's actions do you find cowboyish? The fact that they are redacting documents without getting any official guidance or compensation? Before blaming Wikileaks for anything, let us recall that Wikileaks does not actually leak anything: Bradley Mannings do. And if Wikileaks is taken down or even comes under sufficient pressure, the leaks won't magically disappear. The future wistleblowers will simply opt for spreading the data directly over the internet, now 100% raw and unedited.
I've known people in my high school (the Russian equivalent of it) who wrote DOS viruses in assembly back in 94-96. Great times. One virus, at least, made a splash in Ukraine, or so I've been told. So there you have it: bored high school students. If no one else did it, it would be more than enough, but nowadays one can actually make money doing that.
A great question. From the security standpoint, a working microkernel would make it possible to run some binary blobs safely, but, and this is really interesting, not a network driver. Never. Such a driver does not need to escalate anything. By definition, it already has the ultimate access to one piece of hardware that allows it to see all raw network traffic and connect in perfect secrecy to any host on the net. Secrecy from the OS, of course, not from a forensic tool down the wire, but the latter one cannot be guaranteed to work. And before I drop any cash on a stand-alone network monitor, I will at least consider simply buying a card that has a legit driver.
Hehe I am not a hardware kind of guy, but I've known of Broadcom chipsets for years and years, thanks to what seemed like a tireless effort to make their cards incompatible with Linux. This is a tremendous good news for the free software community. I think that we are at a place now where we should take a dysfunctional open-source driver over an apparently (!) perfect closed-sourced blob, since the latter is COMPLETELY useless in production due to the security considerations.
I feel you. I gear my work towards free Web publishing these days, and so I do not hesitate to link to Wikipedia if it has something that someone can find relevant or useful. Why the hell not? Linkage is what makes the Web about 1000 times better than the plain text. But I do not automatically hate people who reject Wikipedia citations: since it officially has no original research, there really is no good reason to cite it in print. One should simply paraphrase it while citing the original research.
Okay, well suppose I want to be sucker punched by a stranger out of the blue or have my genitals grabbed by a stranger without invitation. That's what I should do to them?
Yes, that's what this instance of the golden rule is saying. Which is why the rabbinical version (the sane one) tells you not to do things unto others which you do not want to be done to you.
The golden rule isn't a rule of morality at all, actually.
I don't think morality means what you think it means. The golden rule is the most vanilla example of a moral guide, and has been presented that way by many religions and philosophies for thousands of years.
Paper [pdf] by Mark Morris, Raghvendra Sahai, Keith Matthews, Judy Cheng, Jessica Lu, Mark Claussen and Carmen Sanchez-Contreras.
Abstract. [some formatting may be lost] The extreme carbon star, AFGL 3068, is losing mass at a rate in excess of 104
M yr1 , and has so far been detected only in the infrared because it is hidden by a thick
dust photosphere having a color temperature of 300K. Using the ACS camera on HST, we
have imaged AFGL 3068 with broad-band lters at 0.6 and 0.8 m and nd a thin, apparently
continuous spiral arc winding 4 or 5 times around the location of the star, from angular radii of
2 to 10 arcsec. We interpret this as the projection of nested spiral shells such as were predicted
to occur when the mass-losing star is a member of a binary system. In this case, the illumination
is presumably provided by ambient galactic starlight. Subsequent near-IR observations with the
NIRC2 camera on the Keck II telescope using adaptive optics reveal that AFGL 3068 has two
components separated by 0.11 arcsec, or 109 AU at a distance of 1 kpc. One very red component
is presumably the mass-losing carbon star, while the other component is apparently a much
bluer companion. Assuming each component has mass M(M ), and ignoring the projection of
the separation vector, we nd the binary period to be 810 M0.5 yrs, strikingly comparable to
the 710-yr separation of the shells obtained from the known outow velocity of 14.7 km s1 .
I'm sure the elite are going to destroy Wikileaks one way or another, and all the thoughtful "critics" of Wikileaks around here and elsewhere are going to give a big "hurrah".
Yeah, but I am optimistic about the internet. It seems very plausible to me that by squashing wikileaks (if that is even possible now) they will accomplish just what killing supernova did for the torrent trackers. ??AA's next big target was TPB, but they completely lost traction by then: they failed to make an example out of the most egregious offender, and they cannot even begin to think about possibly some day controlling the actual distribution of files.
The Internet is a gigantic super-brain. It is still young and fast-growing, so things go bad here and there some of the time. But in just a few decades (I give it 2) it will be more intelligent and arguably more important for humans than any particular state, and at that point no one will be able to "shut down the Internet" in a country like USA. It will be about as feasible as shutting down all roads in the country today.
There is a gradient between human and non-human, it's not a yes-and-no issue. There are other species besides humans, too. A full-grown pig can be smarter, more social, more emphatic, more experienced, more friendly than a 1 year old child, but it's OK to kill them for food. Come on dude, get a perspective. It is already legal to abort an unwanted child (imho, as it should be) 12 weeks into it in many industrialized countries. Embryos used to harvest stem cells, on the other hand, are 50-150 cells total. Really? You want to insist those things are human? You know what's just as bad as dehumanizing humans? Humanizing chemicals, micro-organisms, and also things like wooden statues, fate, and chance.
Slashdot Mirror
The vulnerability is affecting kernels compiled with 32-bit compatibility support. Enabling this option seems to be the default, even on x64 systems that do not have 32-bit libraries and cannot execute 32-bit binaries. You can say
zcat /proc/config.gz | grep CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION
to see if you have it on. More info, and the origina hack.
Slackware forum has a link to the white hat's page. Here you can get a very neat proggy that will root you in less than 200 if you are still unpatched.
A LOT of hosts still get rooted because of weak passwords. A LOT of valuable hosts get rooted through social engineering. Just because you've seen rooted hosts, doesn't mean that there is any wide-scale deployment of anything.
If Google gave a rat's ass about user privacy, they could start by making OTR-style encryption built into chat (which, by the way, has nothing to do with Google's own "off-the-record" feel-good do-nothing option). The problem is not "a few bad apples", the problem is systemic: Google cannot give users privacy because it would contradicts its business strategy and make its services illegal in some jurisdictions. Only a free software communication platform can be expected to provide its users with actual privacy.
Exactly. Ever since I played my first computer game, it became very important to me to make accurate real-time and real-life decisions leading to more gaming, with as little downtime as possible.
There are definitely classes really suited for open notes. Like a stats class where one has to run the hypothesis testing. There are many procedures, each with its own set of mind-numbing formulas, and the hardest part, the one requiring thinking, is picking the right testing procedure for a given word problem. Last time I did that I made it completely open-notes. No one should be forced to memorize these, even though they are the most simplistic models one can imagine.
My own teaching experience is confined to undergrad classes, but what you are saying totally makes sense. I am sure there are classes where a powerful calculator is essential, but this is still fully compatible with banning networked devices during a test. My major point is whitelisting in preference to blacklisting.
At the same time, I've yet find any mathematical application that can perform as well or better than my TI-89, or is as easy to use.
When I need a calculator, I just fire up python or clisp, and gnuplot or kmplot for graphing. There ain't nothing really that compares with python for calculating arithmetic expressions. And kmplot, by the way, is seriously amazing for flashy things like estimating roots, plotting derivatives, and (my favorite) drawing implicit functions of two variables. I always get confused by TI, may be because my first calculator was a programmable beast with reverse Polish ops (and so also a stack), and memory capable of holding 100 instructions (button actions and things like conditional goto). Different culture.
if everyone has internet access built in their brains, why would we prevent students from using it?
The purpose of an exam is to establish whether or not a particular individual acquired certain knowledge and skills. Allowing surreptitious communication with the outside world makes the entire project moot.
First off -- I applaud your use of open-note exams. That is the ONLY real-world way to learn and demonstrate knowledge.
I partially disagree. Memorization has its place in learning. For example, if one is taking a proper mathematical analysis class but they do not know (by heart!) the formal definition of the limit by midterm, then one is left to wonder how much actual analysis they can do. Ditto for Newton's laws of motion, for example, in the corresponding physics class. In every discipline there are these basic things one needs to understand thoroughly—without having to look them up—to even begin to appreciate the rest of the results. The parent may say: is it not enough to test whether a student solve problems? I do not think it is quite enough. Parent's student may now be able to solve a calculus problem when he is given a one and told it is a calculus problem. My student, who actually remembers the basics of analysis, will be able to pose calculus problems in her field of interest and in her very life: to see things in nature or in the society that can be modeled using limits and derivatives. IMHO, this is better learning. I do agree mostly, though: at least in mathematics, rote memorization should be reserved for just a few central concepts.
As for the root question, I tend to side with people who say: ban all devices but a simple calculator, and design the test in a way that would make even that device unnecessary (don't bother buying them: these things are, like, $1). Whether it's a written test for 100 people or a tête-à-tête in an office, we absolutely have to prevent all communication in order for the examination to have any meaning. Jamming would accomplish that, but it is unsafe and dickish. In the future, when people have wireless adapters in their heads, every test taker will have to be surrounded by a Faraday cage, but for now whitelisting devices is the way to go. For special needs like language translation, have single-purpose devices pre-approved. Do they even make them anymore, now that there are much more capable robots on the internet? Who cares, it's not your problem. No matter what, flatly ban everything that has even a hint of a rumor of the networking capacity.
What's the app called?
Oh, I can play it without using flash? How?
I would watch those videos if they weren't wrapped into a shit tornado also known as Adobe Flash.
What part exactly of Wikileaks's actions do you find cowboyish? The fact that they are redacting documents without getting any official guidance or compensation? Before blaming Wikileaks for anything, let us recall that Wikileaks does not actually leak anything: Bradley Mannings do. And if Wikileaks is taken down or even comes under sufficient pressure, the leaks won't magically disappear. The future wistleblowers will simply opt for spreading the data directly over the internet, now 100% raw and unedited.
I've known people in my high school (the Russian equivalent of it) who wrote DOS viruses in assembly back in 94-96. Great times. One virus, at least, made a splash in Ukraine, or so I've been told. So there you have it: bored high school students. If no one else did it, it would be more than enough, but nowadays one can actually make money doing that.
A great question. From the security standpoint, a working microkernel would make it possible to run some binary blobs safely, but, and this is really interesting, not a network driver. Never. Such a driver does not need to escalate anything. By definition, it already has the ultimate access to one piece of hardware that allows it to see all raw network traffic and connect in perfect secrecy to any host on the net. Secrecy from the OS, of course, not from a forensic tool down the wire, but the latter one cannot be guaranteed to work. And before I drop any cash on a stand-alone network monitor, I will at least consider simply buying a card that has a legit driver.
Hehe I am not a hardware kind of guy, but I've known of Broadcom chipsets for years and years, thanks to what seemed like a tireless effort to make their cards incompatible with Linux. This is a tremendous good news for the free software community. I think that we are at a place now where we should take a dysfunctional open-source driver over an apparently (!) perfect closed-sourced blob, since the latter is COMPLETELY useless in production due to the security considerations.
I feel you. I gear my work towards free Web publishing these days, and so I do not hesitate to link to Wikipedia if it has something that someone can find relevant or useful. Why the hell not? Linkage is what makes the Web about 1000 times better than the plain text. But I do not automatically hate people who reject Wikipedia citations: since it officially has no original research, there really is no good reason to cite it in print. One should simply paraphrase it while citing the original research.
Okay, well suppose I want to be sucker punched by a stranger out of the blue or have my genitals grabbed by a stranger without invitation. That's what I should do to them?
Yes, that's what this instance of the golden rule is saying. Which is why the rabbinical version (the sane one) tells you not to do things unto others which you do not want to be done to you.
The golden rule isn't a rule of morality at all, actually.
I don't think morality means what you think it means. The golden rule is the most vanilla example of a moral guide, and has been presented that way by many religions and philosophies for thousands of years.
ESA page with the full-size image.
Paper [pdf] by Mark Morris, Raghvendra Sahai, Keith Matthews, Judy Cheng, Jessica Lu, Mark Claussen and Carmen Sanchez-Contreras.
Abstract. [some formatting may be lost] The extreme carbon star, AFGL 3068, is losing mass at a rate in excess of 104 M yr1 , and has so far been detected only in the infrared because it is hidden by a thick dust photosphere having a color temperature of 300K. Using the ACS camera on HST, we have imaged AFGL 3068 with broad-band lters at 0.6 and 0.8 m and nd a thin, apparently continuous spiral arc winding 4 or 5 times around the location of the star, from angular radii of 2 to 10 arcsec. We interpret this as the projection of nested spiral shells such as were predicted to occur when the mass-losing star is a member of a binary system. In this case, the illumination is presumably provided by ambient galactic starlight. Subsequent near-IR observations with the NIRC2 camera on the Keck II telescope using adaptive optics reveal that AFGL 3068 has two components separated by 0.11 arcsec, or 109 AU at a distance of 1 kpc. One very red component is presumably the mass-losing carbon star, while the other component is apparently a much bluer companion. Assuming each component has mass M(M ), and ignoring the projection of the separation vector, we nd the binary period to be 810 M0.5 yrs, strikingly comparable to the 710-yr separation of the shells obtained from the known outow velocity of 14.7 km s1 .
I'm sure the elite are going to destroy Wikileaks one way or another, and all the thoughtful "critics" of Wikileaks around here and elsewhere are going to give a big "hurrah".
Yeah, but I am optimistic about the internet. It seems very plausible to me that by squashing wikileaks (if that is even possible now) they will accomplish just what killing supernova did for the torrent trackers. ??AA's next big target was TPB, but they completely lost traction by then: they failed to make an example out of the most egregious offender, and they cannot even begin to think about possibly some day controlling the actual distribution of files.
But the work is underway to produce babes, right?
May be gaining followers was not his point. Looks more to me like he punished the Discovery channel, successfully.
The Internet is a gigantic super-brain. It is still young and fast-growing, so things go bad here and there some of the time. But in just a few decades (I give it 2) it will be more intelligent and arguably more important for humans than any particular state, and at that point no one will be able to "shut down the Internet" in a country like USA. It will be about as feasible as shutting down all roads in the country today.
They are behind a paywall, so this number will probably just get smaller from now on.
There is a gradient between human and non-human, it's not a yes-and-no issue. There are other species besides humans, too. A full-grown pig can be smarter, more social, more emphatic, more experienced, more friendly than a 1 year old child, but it's OK to kill them for food. Come on dude, get a perspective. It is already legal to abort an unwanted child (imho, as it should be) 12 weeks into it in many industrialized countries. Embryos used to harvest stem cells, on the other hand, are 50-150 cells total. Really? You want to insist those things are human? You know what's just as bad as dehumanizing humans? Humanizing chemicals, micro-organisms, and also things like wooden statues, fate, and chance.