There's definitely a lot of talk that goes on about what different sorts of trade offs are going to produce in terms of social outcomes; there's also a lot of interest in issues like how to make the network available in some form to areas that have an infrastructure deficit. To address a couple other issues on your blog, there's definitely a lot of international involvement going on; people from Japan, Germany, India, Korea, the US & UK, China, and several other countries have all been involved in one way or another, and a number of others with varying levels of participation. In terms of who gets to participate in the conversation, it's really just a question of who wants to. Everyone listed as a researcher or supporter of Clean Slate volunteered, rather than being picked by some rigorous selection process. It's basically 1) a who's-who of leading network researchers, filtered by 2) who wanted to collaborate with the people had already spoke up to join the program. There are also other big players that have their own programs; NSF, for one. No one has appointed Clean Slate the arbiter of what the Internet becomes; it's basically just some people who have said "we have an interest in having this discussion, and seeing if cool projects and papers emerge from it." Certain groups and regions are under-represented; they're generally also under-represented in academia as a whole, and in network/computer research in particular. That's a problem, but it's one that faculty at a university can't really correct. I'm sure they would love to involve a female Laotian network researcher in a discussion about how to wire a sparsely populated country riddled with unexploded ordinance, but likely no such person exists, or the language barrier is too high, or there simply aren't resources available to carry out meaningful research. There are scholarships given out to attend a lot of conferences that address these issues, and there's a real desire to involve an international perspective.
Additionally, when you talk about results or implementations coming out of the program, what you're talking about are research platforms and research papers. If some vendor or someone else with some clout wants to adopt a technology that is described or prototyped by Clean Slate as a product, they can do that, just as someone could take the open source reference code and make a project out of it. There's zero interest right now on the part of the people doing this work in (say) going through an RFC or IEEE process or something to make any of these things standards. Those are long, political processes that produce no new research, generally. The 'implementation' being installed at several universities is a reference version of OpenFlow that was primarily designed and implemented by research students at Stanford as a research platform. They and research people at different schools around the country are looking at using it as a platform to perform experiments, and not really for anything else. If someone wants to make a product out of it, they can do that, but it's all open source licensed and described in detail in papers that are available to anyone.
So in terms of consequences, my question would be this: how do you make a generally useful tool, and mitigate it being used for evil? The answer, as people have pointed out for years and years about networking tools of other sorts, is you can't. You need to make it possible to construct a highly secure network, or else it's totally useless for high-value platforms like the financial sector or the government. Those same features can be used by a totalitarian government, just like Linux is used by the Chinese to create custom Linux distros and the Great Firewall. You need to enable strong anonymity, or else it's useless for revealing human rights violations or other government abuses. But those same features can be used by pedophiles to trade child porn, or terrorists to plot attacks. You can't make a knife and guarantee that t
DNRTFA, but just to give some perspective here: if you talk to people involved in the security research community, they've talked a lot in the past several years about what they call a 'digital Pearl Harbor'. That's the idea that given the security holes in the existing network framework, it's almost inevitable that some kind of large-scale event will take place that will kill public confidence in the internet. Not talking about the security of any single OS or system or website here; rather, the fact that on current networks, for the whole thing to be secure, every single box on the network needs to be secured, which is, in practice, almost impossible. Large-scale DDOS attacks, identity theft, spoofing, botnets- the idea is that one or more of these will be pointed at internet infrastructure in a concerted way to disrupt something huge- say the American stock exchange system, or POS credit-card processing for an entire region of the world, or a digitally coordinated run on the banking system. Something that, by virtue of its scale and impact, forces a re-think of the entire system, or pushes a lot of things that have migrated online back offline, because of security or liability concerns.
This is sort of the 'motivating example' for research into a 'new internet'; networking technologies that would provide the ability (nor the requirement) for better identification and authentication of users, that would offer richer options for preventing unauthorized access, etc. On top of this, it would be nice to give network operators the ability to make their own decisions about policies related to resource (like bandwidth) usage, rather than being very tightly constrained by the structure of the existing protocol stack. What would be nice, in an ideal world, would be to enable everyone to create the network that they need, and then provide a mechanism to negotiate between themselves if you need to talk across networks. My public access wireless network for my apartment building might not care who you are. But if you want to talk to a bank, it might like to have a verification of your identity before it allows you to create a connection. Let the bank ask my network for additional credentials, and I can then either pass them along, or do business elsewhere.
That's much closer to the idea that researchers are pursuing: give people a platform for creating networks that work the way that the network owner works, rather than just the way that the hardware designer wants. In other words, there's a lot of talk about duplicating the success of Linux as a network application platform in the network infrastructure space. Linux doesn't demand that you use a specific server or client or storage format; why does the network hardware essentially assume that you're going to use certain types of authentication (most often none), only certain types of packets, and always going to want to route them the same way? The current suite of protocols, along with some often hardware-level assumptions, make it difficult to create a network that is more secure than the current internet, even in your own private network, but also make it difficult to create a network that offers better privacy or anonymity. The research in the 'next internet' tends to be focused into the area of enabling choice in these areas, rather than fixing a single policy. Unfortunately, media coverage of this research is pretty abominable and usually results in a chorus of Slashdot 'from my cold dead hands' knee jerks.
> Ugh. Why are we even talking about this. . ?... because it's one of the major topics in network research in academia and private research right now? Also, because the reason that we have the Internet that we have now is because, many years ago, a bunch of researchers ignored the people who said: "we have a phone system. It already works. No one will ever invest in replacing it. Circuit switching is the only thing that makes sense. A de-centralized packet switched network with no central operator will never work."
In other words: because good research and technological innovation comes from asking big questions and tackling large-scale, important problems, not by listing reasons why they can't or won't be solved. Even if you don't solve the problem you set out to solve (nuclear weapon-proof communications network, anyone?), there's a good chance of creating something significant.
(Disclaimer: In a former life, I was affiliated with the Stanford Clean Slate program by virtue of being a staffer working for one of the involved professors)
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding a lot of the goals of the Clean Slate program, and by extension a lot of the other academic debate going on about creating a 'clean slate' network. One of the major philosophical influences on these efforts is the success of Linux as a platform for innovating in the software sphere. What most of the researchers involved in Clean Slate would like to see, in terms of a research platform, is a comparable platform for the network itself that enables much more radical choices to be made on the part of the network operator (business, school, individual) than the current architecture currently allows. Policy, right now- things like anonymity, identification, roaming, usage charges, access restrictions- is in this bizarre state where it consists of one part bolt-on hacks (anything that has to do with security or authentication) and things that are built into the protocols themselves and can't be easily changed (TCP's idea of what the best utilization pattern and sharing of bandwidth are). Clean Slate says: wouldn't it be neat if we could enable people to make these choices themselves for their own networks, in a simple way. Wouldn't it be neat if we could enable people to create policy or protocol decisions that we, the designers, can't currently anticipate without having to re-engineer the entire network from scratch again.
When these researchers are saying: "lets re-think anonymity", they're not saying "lets come up with a new answer and apply it globally". They're saying: "right now, one particular view of how anonymity should work is hard-coded into the network protocols. Why should that one-size-fits-all solution be the case, and everything else have to be handled with custom hardware or dirty tricks?" Similar situations exist for security, authentication, shared resource utilization, etc. In too many cases, decisions about how to solve these problems that made sense in one environment- the technical limitations of the Internet many years ago- have been permanently encoded into technical standards that carry on, zombie-like, regardless of whether or not they still fit the present situation, or would be appropriate for a network even farther in the future.
So it's not about locking everything down into CorpNet. It's about instead creating a framework where you can implement CorpNet if you want, and I can implement AnarchistCollectiveNet, and someone else can implement CommunitySupportedAccessNet, and someone else, using the same basic framework, can implement Internet1.0 for their own network. To do that, you need a slightly richer set of primitive operations than the current Internet allows, and you need a mechanism for writing an enforcing policy that can be kept up to date. This is why a lot of talk about 'network virtualization' gets thrown around.
The real problem is not that people can't write 'screw the king' on their cars. It's that the lese majesty laws inhibit open discussion of the role of the monarchy in Thai politics (hint: the government would prefer you to think there isn't one), and shields groups that are close to the monarchy from criticism. The law doesn't just say that you can't insult the king; it says that you can't criticize not only the king, but anyone in the royal family. A Western author was arrested for repeating what is a commonly known fact among Thais and people who follow Thai politics: that the Crown Prince is unpopular, and widely felt to relate poorly to regular people. That's a violation of the law. To say or imply that the the Thai monarchy has ever taken any actions that are contrary to the interest of Thai people or their government is a violation of the law. Furthermore, the law is not primarily used to punish foreigners who slip up in handling Thai money; while a few extreme occurrences do get punished, by and large the law is used instead to suppress political dialogue. This suppression generally benefits right wing, authoritarian and pro-military groups at the expense of more liberal and pro-democratic groups.
The question is: where are these 'true internet journalists'. 99% of the blog postings on current events or politics that I see are just summarizing or editorializing on events reported by someone else. There are stories that certainly could be broken by internet writers if they were willing to do what paid journalists for the old media do- either sit down and do a lot of research, or pick up the phone and call people who are involved in the issue in question and get information. But that doesn't really happen. Either people are commenting on the work of others and drawing attention to it, or they are affiliated with some organization that differs from the 'old media' only in that it publishes online instead of on paper.
In the recent troubles, the royal consort (Queen) was seen at the funeral of a PAD (Peoples Alliance for Democracy, the anti-elected government faction). The Rural Thais would not act against the king. The Economist was attempting to draw conclusions without a sufficient understanding of the people (Thai culture is far more complex then western culture). The king was attempting not to take sides this was exacerbated by his health issues.
The notion that Tha culture is 'more complex' and therefore somehow incomprehensible to Westerners is just an old orientalist canard. Rural Thais might not act against the king directly, but if they continue to feel that their interests are being denigrated in favor of the interests of the Bangkok elite, it will have significant consequences for future governments, and for whoever takes the throne after the current king.
The king has a great deal of influence with the people but he cant dictate policy directly or indirectly and stays out of politics for the most part. The King is the only part of political stability the nation has and I'd hate to think what will happen when he dies.
The idea that the king 'stays out of politics' is a common aphorism, but it's hard to say how true it really is. It's very hard for writers in Thailand to say anything about the role of the king in politics. The Economist and other Western journalists have written about how the king has likely taken an active hand in several of the coups- essentially overturning the democratic system when it's felt by members of the aristocracy that a democratic movement has gotten out of hand and needs to be reigned in. Publishing these kind of works basically guarantees that they will lose the ability to report from inside Thailand.
It's true that respect for the king has been a stabilizing factor in many cases, but the thesis put forward by some of the critics is that overall his interventions in politics have prevented the development of a more robust and stable democracy in Thailand- rather than coping with short-term crises through democratic means, royal and military intervention have been used. It means that after the king passes away, Thailand will be in much worse shape than it would be if they had been force to deal with these sorts of issues directly. Of course, these sorts of counter-factuals are easy for historians to make, but hard to prove.
With how tolerant the Thai people are you have to deliberately insult the king to get them to act on it.
To me, the insults or criticism is less significant than the fact that it's not possible to write honestly about politics in Thailand. Looking critically at the role the monarchy plays is simply not possible from inside Thailand, or in the Thai press. This also prevents criticism of other political groups that have ties to the monarchy. It's certainly true that the king isn't responsible for the lese majesty laws, and that he has pardoned those who have run afoul of them; on the other hand, there was talk at one point that Thaksin would be charged with lese majesty (before the coup and the trial in absentia). I have little faith that he would have been pardoned if it had happened.
Yelling 'free hugs' in an airport would probably get you in trouble. On the other hand you can- and in fact someone has- publish a book suggesting that Lincoln was secretly gay without getting in any meaningful trouble. Do the same thing in Thailand with a member of the royal family, and you're in a lot of trouble.
More importantly, despite the official legal story about the Thai king being 'powerless' according to the law, there have been suggestions that the monarchy exerts a great deal of influence over Thai politics through indirect channels. At least one author has suggested that this interference is one reason why democratic governments tend to be so fragile in Thailand, and why there have been so many coups and revisions to the constitution. This kind of discussion about the interests and actors who influence government affairs is vitally necessary to the functioning of a democracy, but the lese majesty laws guarantee that this won't happen in an open and honest way in Thailand.
Interestingly, everyone always talks about how the king is 'universally beloved'. The Economist was almost certainly banned for an article published recently where they pointed out that the recent government crisis has started to put some dents in this image. They interviewed rural Thais (anonymously, of course) who felt betrayed that the monarchy was quietly supporting a political movement that seems intent on disenfranchising rural and ethnic minority Thais. The monarchy has been able to preserve its prestige by depicting itself as the protector of all Thais- as rescuing the country when things go badly out of kilter. During the most recent crisis, their support for a vocal minority over a very popular elected government who has catered to people outside of the Bangkok elite has damaged that perception.
a) internet news is all about repeating stuff someone else found first;
This is exactly why the internet journalism is still a long way away from being able to fill the role of the traditional media. Real journalism has nothing to do with link farming or writing editorials about issues that have already been reported. Very little breaking of actual news- the work of establishing what the facts on the ground are when an event is underway, or following leads over a long period to discover a story- is done by internet media. What do you repeat when there's no one to repeat?
The delay is not in clicking 'create account' on the administrative interface, or running a list of names through a Perl script; it's in processing the paperwork that ensures that the people getting accounts are who they say they are, and that their account access is appropriately restricted.
Good to know that rigorous competition in the marketplace has totally eliminated misuse of 'reply-all' in the private sector. I look forward to continuing to have a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canadians and Swedes.
Why? The point is there, the delivery isn't well formed though. Lending money to folks regardless of race, creed, or gender, who don't have the means to pay it back is going to lose every time.
Because nothing about the regulations that the GP poster was talking about ever required banks to lend to people who were unable to pay. Because banks who were subject to those regulations were not responsible for the majority of the sub-prime loans that trashed the market. You're correct that lending to people with bad credit, who can't possible repay their loan, is a bad idea. The idea that banks were compelled to do that by legislation that put an end to certain discriminatory lending practices (like "redlining", the practice of identifying minority neighborhoods and declaring that no resident of that neighborhood, and no home within it, was a reasonable credit risk) is complete nonsense. Banks started extending sub-prime mortgages to unsafe lenders because they thought there were profits to be made in doing so, not because they were compelled to lend by anti-discrimination laws.
It's pretty simple. In the old days, two people walk into a bank. They both have modest, working-class jobs and good credit history from auto loans and store credit cards. They are both asking for loans in about the same amount. One guy is buying a house in a working-class white neighborhood. The other is buying a house in a working class black neighborhood. What happened before the CRA was that the first guy got a loan, and the second guy either got denied or had his fees and rates jacked up. The CRA simply said that if you were challenged on it, you had to be able to show that you were consistently following through with your risk calculations without regards to race or the ethnic makeup of certain neighborhoods. A good borrower asking to buy a house fairly appraised at $200,000 in a historically black neighborhood couldn't be charged twice the rate as the same borrower buying in a white neighborhood.
Now if the person asking to borrow is an obvious credit risk- bad history, no income, loan principle vastly in excess of their income or earning capability- you can still deny them under the CRA. You just can't deny people who's mailing address is in one zip code, and lend to people from another zip code. Nothing compels you to lend to bad risk borrowers.
Some right-wing pundits are claiming that this was somehow responsible for the sub-prime meltdown. They claim that in order to avoid the appearance of discrimination, banks were making bad loans to minorities in order to pad their numbers for loans to minority borrowers and neighborhoods. But this simply isn't true; in fact, most of the lenders making sub-prime loans were never subject to the CRA. Even if the CRA was compelling banks to make loans they otherwise wouldn't (which there is no evidence for), the private lenders who wrote most of the sub-prime loans had no need to give the appearance of compliance, and could make decisions purely based on the risk/reward profile of their customers. They decided that people with low incomes and poor payment histories were a good bet, because they could re-package the debt as mortgage-backed securities and resell the risk. They didn't make loans to poor people who couldn't pay because the law compelled them, or out of the goodness of their hearts; they did it because they believed there was a profit to be made. Meanwhile, the CRA regulated banks, which conservatives claim were being forced to lend to bad borrowers, were making far fewer sub-prime loans, and weren't attempting to commoditize their debt aggressively the way the private lenders were.
The real truth is that the growing housing market, low interest rates in the wake of the dot com bust, and the unregulated market in debt-backed securities created a toxic environment. Private lenders saw great potential profits in lending to the sub-prime market, and believed that debt-backed securities gave them a way to avo
Fannie May and Freddy Mac got permission to buy sub-prime mortgages in response to the growth of that sector of the market among private lenders. Congress and the Bush administration put through a law that allowed the FM companies to buy out sub-prime loans instead of buying CRA-regulated loans as part of their obligation to buy low-income loans. Fannie May and Freddy Mac have nothing to do with originating loans, as most people fail to realize; they buy loans from others that comply with their regulations in order to keep the mortgage market flowing. Their regs were changed by Congress to allow them to buy into the sub-prime market. The sub-prime market emerged not because of the FM companies, but because private lenders discovered that by extending loans to marginal borrowers and then re-selling them as mortgage backed securities, you could make a lot of money without significant risk. The Congressional reg change helped the sub-prime market grow, but nothing about that regulatory change was done to benefit poor worthy borrowers; it was done to allow Freddy Mac and Fannie May to maximize their profits as semi-private entities. The narrative of attempts to help low income minorities ruining the economy just doesn't hold any water.
...,who are the original spark that started the fire, I do not want to claim it's "their fault", but they are part of the problem)
This whole post is total bullshit. The notion that, somehow, attempts to counter historic discrimination against blacks and other minorities set off the economic crisis is just foolish. The regulations imposed on certain banks were very modest, and were essentially designed to prevent worthy borrowers from being denied due to where their house was located ("redlining"). Nothing in the CRA requires banks to extend loans to people who can't pay them back. Most of the banks that were hit hardest by the mortgage crises weren't even subject to the CRA, because they weren't commercial banks. Yet the whiners in the pundit class persist in arguing that armies of poor people strong-armed poor, defenseless banks into making bad sub-prime loans. Never mind the studies that have shown that CRA-regulated banks were less likely to make subprime loans, and less likely to re-sell their loans. Never mind the fact that only one in four sub-prime loans originated from a CRA-regulated bank. Yep... poor people. The secret masters of our economy.
And Jimmy Carter? He might have been a tool of a president, but blaming him for Iran is bizarre. Horrible policy making in the region going back to WWII sunk Iran. Jimmy was just lucky enough to be there when the music stopped.
Good point- if you take the relatively minor step of adding the 'parent' attribute to all of your machines in the Nagios config, it can produce a nice map of your logical network, with near-real time updating of host and service health,
MRTG can graph pretty much anything. It's primarily used for bandwidth (I think- given the name), but a former company used it to graph pretty much everything about all its servers: CPU load, motherboard temperature, bandwidth, disk capacity, web server hits, mail system access. It's written in perl and pretty easy to customize, from what I understand; essentially, anything that can dump two numbers into a file can be used to produce a graph, and the look and feel of the graph can be changed in the config.
It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.
The Bay Area has one of the best cycling promotion programs in the US. Bike magazines consistently vote San Francisco in the top five (and often #1) biking city in the country. San Jose and Santa Clara County have made significant investments in bike infrastructure in the last 10 years, including hundreds of miles of on-road bike lanes and a number of dedicated paved trails. CalTrain and other public transit systems have bike racks and bike cars, and don't charge extra for bringing a bike onto the train or sticking it on the rack on a bus.
More could be done. But simply put, biking isn't a solution for the entire area because it is too spread out. You just can't get all the places you need to go in a reasonably timely fashion on a bike without some significant additional interlinks.
I agree to a certain extent but what side do you fall on when there is a conflict? You're saying schools should provide structured experiences... great... I'm saying they should be optional, not forced. What's so bad about that?
A school should never consider making something that is central to its mission as an educational institution optional. I'm saying that the type of civic education provided by this type of work could be considered to be at the core of what the school is supposed to do, if we believe that the school is responsible for laying the foundation for producing citizens rather than just workers. We don't make science optional, even though some people might object to what is taught, because teaching science is vital to the mission of the school as an educational institution.
With respect to Obama's specific plan, keep in mind as well that most of what change.gov says is that he wants to set targets for community service in schools; there's not yet any indication that it is going to be required. It could be something like the Presidential Fitness Program where students who meet the goals receive special recognition, or schools who incorporate it into their curriculum receive access to grant funding. Things like this are very common already. I'm just saying that if they chose to make part of it compulsory, I can see a rationale for doing so.
There are lots of people who are against the idea of a nanny state for sound reasons.
So there are- including myself- but I think there's some confusion here. In a nanny state, we would be placing compulsions on random citizens "for their own good". That's stupid. I would adamantly oppose, for instance, a national service system that compelled all college students or grads to do community service, even if it was compensated. If you want to sign up for a system where you get paid for service (like Americorp, or Obama's tuition credit program), great. College students are 18+ and are undergoing a voluntary self-directed education focused on a particular subject or career goal.
High school students, on the other hand, are already in essence in the hands of the state by virtue of compulsory education. Making slight changes to the curriculum that every student already participates in- so long as those changes are not in conflict with the educational mission of the system, and there is a legitimate government interest in encouraging that aspect of education- seem to me in a separate category from placing such an obligation on a citizen not already enrolled in a program where most of their daily activities are governed by government policy. We've already said- through multiple different pieces of legislation- that people under 18 in state-run educational programs have a different status than an adult citizen. The government can't place significantly greater burdens on the exercise of their rights without good cause, and without legislative authorization, but changing the curriculum in a way that alters their educational activities slightly without essentially changing the character of the restrictions on their rights already placed by participation in the school system doesn't seem like a very big change.
I mean... I strongly suspect that you would be against the schools who decided that all students must say the pledge of allegiance and HAD to include the "under God" part in it, right? You would probably see it as a free speech issue. But you're not seeing this forced community service as a similar issue of freedom, which is very confusing to me.
The state has no legitimate interest in compelling my assertion of belief in any particular god- indeed, for the state to do so conflicts with my rights as an individual. The state does have an interest in educating students about their community and the needs of their community because schools are preparing students, in essence, to be voting A
As you can see, merely being based upon a preexisting work isn't enough. In practice, the derivative has to recast, transform, or adapt the preexisting work. An adaptation, like "Harry Potter: The Opera" would be a derivative. A sequel book, such as "Harry Potter and the Endless Revenue Stream" would be a derivative work. But as the court pointed out, a mere reference guide is not a derivative work, because it does not recast, transform, or adapt the thing to which it is a guide. This was covered pretty well in the Beanie Baby case, and the point was repeated in this case.
But if you're going to publish a 'reference' book, you have to do so in such a way that it doesn't take on the qualities of a derivative work. If you take long quotes from a book and then insert additional explanatory text around them in the same style, you haven't created a guidebook, you've created a modified version of the source work.
So? Copyright does not include a right to profit. Imagine the absurd results that would occur if it did: A scathing review of the latest book or movie that caused it to be a big flop would constitute copyright infringement! Even if it didn't copy so much as a word. Likewise, a rival author who wrote a series of dreadful books about vampires which drew away the audience for Harry Potter could be accused of infringing on the basis that her (bad) original works were undercutting Rowling's profits, despite a total lack of copying anything.
Effect on the author's ability to profit from their work is one criteria in judging if a use is fair use.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm the only sixth grader in the room, but anyone else think they might want to rethink the lettering in that little sign in the picture?
There's definitely a lot of talk that goes on about what different sorts of trade offs are going to produce in terms of social outcomes; there's also a lot of interest in issues like how to make the network available in some form to areas that have an infrastructure deficit. To address a couple other issues on your blog, there's definitely a lot of international involvement going on; people from Japan, Germany, India, Korea, the US & UK, China, and several other countries have all been involved in one way or another, and a number of others with varying levels of participation. In terms of who gets to participate in the conversation, it's really just a question of who wants to. Everyone listed as a researcher or supporter of Clean Slate volunteered, rather than being picked by some rigorous selection process. It's basically 1) a who's-who of leading network researchers, filtered by 2) who wanted to collaborate with the people had already spoke up to join the program. There are also other big players that have their own programs; NSF, for one. No one has appointed Clean Slate the arbiter of what the Internet becomes; it's basically just some people who have said "we have an interest in having this discussion, and seeing if cool projects and papers emerge from it." Certain groups and regions are under-represented; they're generally also under-represented in academia as a whole, and in network/computer research in particular. That's a problem, but it's one that faculty at a university can't really correct. I'm sure they would love to involve a female Laotian network researcher in a discussion about how to wire a sparsely populated country riddled with unexploded ordinance, but likely no such person exists, or the language barrier is too high, or there simply aren't resources available to carry out meaningful research. There are scholarships given out to attend a lot of conferences that address these issues, and there's a real desire to involve an international perspective.
Additionally, when you talk about results or implementations coming out of the program, what you're talking about are research platforms and research papers. If some vendor or someone else with some clout wants to adopt a technology that is described or prototyped by Clean Slate as a product, they can do that, just as someone could take the open source reference code and make a project out of it. There's zero interest right now on the part of the people doing this work in (say) going through an RFC or IEEE process or something to make any of these things standards. Those are long, political processes that produce no new research, generally. The 'implementation' being installed at several universities is a reference version of OpenFlow that was primarily designed and implemented by research students at Stanford as a research platform. They and research people at different schools around the country are looking at using it as a platform to perform experiments, and not really for anything else. If someone wants to make a product out of it, they can do that, but it's all open source licensed and described in detail in papers that are available to anyone.
So in terms of consequences, my question would be this: how do you make a generally useful tool, and mitigate it being used for evil? The answer, as people have pointed out for years and years about networking tools of other sorts, is you can't. You need to make it possible to construct a highly secure network, or else it's totally useless for high-value platforms like the financial sector or the government. Those same features can be used by a totalitarian government, just like Linux is used by the Chinese to create custom Linux distros and the Great Firewall. You need to enable strong anonymity, or else it's useless for revealing human rights violations or other government abuses. But those same features can be used by pedophiles to trade child porn, or terrorists to plot attacks. You can't make a knife and guarantee that t
DNRTFA, but just to give some perspective here: if you talk to people involved in the security research community, they've talked a lot in the past several years about what they call a 'digital Pearl Harbor'. That's the idea that given the security holes in the existing network framework, it's almost inevitable that some kind of large-scale event will take place that will kill public confidence in the internet. Not talking about the security of any single OS or system or website here; rather, the fact that on current networks, for the whole thing to be secure, every single box on the network needs to be secured, which is, in practice, almost impossible. Large-scale DDOS attacks, identity theft, spoofing, botnets- the idea is that one or more of these will be pointed at internet infrastructure in a concerted way to disrupt something huge- say the American stock exchange system, or POS credit-card processing for an entire region of the world, or a digitally coordinated run on the banking system. Something that, by virtue of its scale and impact, forces a re-think of the entire system, or pushes a lot of things that have migrated online back offline, because of security or liability concerns.
This is sort of the 'motivating example' for research into a 'new internet'; networking technologies that would provide the ability (nor the requirement) for better identification and authentication of users, that would offer richer options for preventing unauthorized access, etc. On top of this, it would be nice to give network operators the ability to make their own decisions about policies related to resource (like bandwidth) usage, rather than being very tightly constrained by the structure of the existing protocol stack. What would be nice, in an ideal world, would be to enable everyone to create the network that they need, and then provide a mechanism to negotiate between themselves if you need to talk across networks. My public access wireless network for my apartment building might not care who you are. But if you want to talk to a bank, it might like to have a verification of your identity before it allows you to create a connection. Let the bank ask my network for additional credentials, and I can then either pass them along, or do business elsewhere.
That's much closer to the idea that researchers are pursuing: give people a platform for creating networks that work the way that the network owner works, rather than just the way that the hardware designer wants. In other words, there's a lot of talk about duplicating the success of Linux as a network application platform in the network infrastructure space. Linux doesn't demand that you use a specific server or client or storage format; why does the network hardware essentially assume that you're going to use certain types of authentication (most often none), only certain types of packets, and always going to want to route them the same way? The current suite of protocols, along with some often hardware-level assumptions, make it difficult to create a network that is more secure than the current internet, even in your own private network, but also make it difficult to create a network that offers better privacy or anonymity. The research in the 'next internet' tends to be focused into the area of enabling choice in these areas, rather than fixing a single policy. Unfortunately, media coverage of this research is pretty abominable and usually results in a chorus of Slashdot 'from my cold dead hands' knee jerks.
> Ugh. Why are we even talking about this. . ? ... because it's one of the major topics in network research in academia and private research right now? Also, because the reason that we have the Internet that we have now is because, many years ago, a bunch of researchers ignored the people who said: "we have a phone system. It already works. No one will ever invest in replacing it. Circuit switching is the only thing that makes sense. A de-centralized packet switched network with no central operator will never work."
In other words: because good research and technological innovation comes from asking big questions and tackling large-scale, important problems, not by listing reasons why they can't or won't be solved. Even if you don't solve the problem you set out to solve (nuclear weapon-proof communications network, anyone?), there's a good chance of creating something significant.
(Disclaimer: In a former life, I was affiliated with the Stanford Clean Slate program by virtue of being a staffer working for one of the involved professors)
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding a lot of the goals of the Clean Slate program, and by extension a lot of the other academic debate going on about creating a 'clean slate' network. One of the major philosophical influences on these efforts is the success of Linux as a platform for innovating in the software sphere. What most of the researchers involved in Clean Slate would like to see, in terms of a research platform, is a comparable platform for the network itself that enables much more radical choices to be made on the part of the network operator (business, school, individual) than the current architecture currently allows. Policy, right now- things like anonymity, identification, roaming, usage charges, access restrictions- is in this bizarre state where it consists of one part bolt-on hacks (anything that has to do with security or authentication) and things that are built into the protocols themselves and can't be easily changed (TCP's idea of what the best utilization pattern and sharing of bandwidth are). Clean Slate says: wouldn't it be neat if we could enable people to make these choices themselves for their own networks, in a simple way. Wouldn't it be neat if we could enable people to create policy or protocol decisions that we, the designers, can't currently anticipate without having to re-engineer the entire network from scratch again.
When these researchers are saying: "lets re-think anonymity", they're not saying "lets come up with a new answer and apply it globally". They're saying: "right now, one particular view of how anonymity should work is hard-coded into the network protocols. Why should that one-size-fits-all solution be the case, and everything else have to be handled with custom hardware or dirty tricks?" Similar situations exist for security, authentication, shared resource utilization, etc. In too many cases, decisions about how to solve these problems that made sense in one environment- the technical limitations of the Internet many years ago- have been permanently encoded into technical standards that carry on, zombie-like, regardless of whether or not they still fit the present situation, or would be appropriate for a network even farther in the future.
So it's not about locking everything down into CorpNet. It's about instead creating a framework where you can implement CorpNet if you want, and I can implement AnarchistCollectiveNet, and someone else can implement CommunitySupportedAccessNet, and someone else, using the same basic framework, can implement Internet1.0 for their own network. To do that, you need a slightly richer set of primitive operations than the current Internet allows, and you need a mechanism for writing an enforcing policy that can be kept up to date. This is why a lot of talk about 'network virtualization' gets thrown around.
The real problem is not that people can't write 'screw the king' on their cars. It's that the lese majesty laws inhibit open discussion of the role of the monarchy in Thai politics (hint: the government would prefer you to think there isn't one), and shields groups that are close to the monarchy from criticism. The law doesn't just say that you can't insult the king; it says that you can't criticize not only the king, but anyone in the royal family. A Western author was arrested for repeating what is a commonly known fact among Thais and people who follow Thai politics: that the Crown Prince is unpopular, and widely felt to relate poorly to regular people. That's a violation of the law. To say or imply that the the Thai monarchy has ever taken any actions that are contrary to the interest of Thai people or their government is a violation of the law. Furthermore, the law is not primarily used to punish foreigners who slip up in handling Thai money; while a few extreme occurrences do get punished, by and large the law is used instead to suppress political dialogue. This suppression generally benefits right wing, authoritarian and pro-military groups at the expense of more liberal and pro-democratic groups.
The question is: where are these 'true internet journalists'. 99% of the blog postings on current events or politics that I see are just summarizing or editorializing on events reported by someone else. There are stories that certainly could be broken by internet writers if they were willing to do what paid journalists for the old media do- either sit down and do a lot of research, or pick up the phone and call people who are involved in the issue in question and get information. But that doesn't really happen. Either people are commenting on the work of others and drawing attention to it, or they are affiliated with some organization that differs from the 'old media' only in that it publishes online instead of on paper.
In the recent troubles, the royal consort (Queen) was seen at the funeral of a PAD (Peoples Alliance for Democracy, the anti-elected government faction). The Rural Thais would not act against the king. The Economist was attempting to draw conclusions without a sufficient understanding of the people (Thai culture is far more complex then western culture). The king was attempting not to take sides this was exacerbated by his health issues.
The notion that Tha culture is 'more complex' and therefore somehow incomprehensible to Westerners is just an old orientalist canard. Rural Thais might not act against the king directly, but if they continue to feel that their interests are being denigrated in favor of the interests of the Bangkok elite, it will have significant consequences for future governments, and for whoever takes the throne after the current king.
The king has a great deal of influence with the people but he cant dictate policy directly or indirectly and stays out of politics for the most part. The King is the only part of political stability the nation has and I'd hate to think what will happen when he dies.
The idea that the king 'stays out of politics' is a common aphorism, but it's hard to say how true it really is. It's very hard for writers in Thailand to say anything about the role of the king in politics. The Economist and other Western journalists have written about how the king has likely taken an active hand in several of the coups- essentially overturning the democratic system when it's felt by members of the aristocracy that a democratic movement has gotten out of hand and needs to be reigned in. Publishing these kind of works basically guarantees that they will lose the ability to report from inside Thailand.
It's true that respect for the king has been a stabilizing factor in many cases, but the thesis put forward by some of the critics is that overall his interventions in politics have prevented the development of a more robust and stable democracy in Thailand- rather than coping with short-term crises through democratic means, royal and military intervention have been used. It means that after the king passes away, Thailand will be in much worse shape than it would be if they had been force to deal with these sorts of issues directly. Of course, these sorts of counter-factuals are easy for historians to make, but hard to prove.
With how tolerant the Thai people are you have to deliberately insult the king to get them to act on it.
To me, the insults or criticism is less significant than the fact that it's not possible to write honestly about politics in Thailand. Looking critically at the role the monarchy plays is simply not possible from inside Thailand, or in the Thai press. This also prevents criticism of other political groups that have ties to the monarchy. It's certainly true that the king isn't responsible for the lese majesty laws, and that he has pardoned those who have run afoul of them; on the other hand, there was talk at one point that Thaksin would be charged with lese majesty (before the coup and the trial in absentia). I have little faith that he would have been pardoned if it had happened.
Yelling 'free hugs' in an airport would probably get you in trouble. On the other hand you can- and in fact someone has- publish a book suggesting that Lincoln was secretly gay without getting in any meaningful trouble. Do the same thing in Thailand with a member of the royal family, and you're in a lot of trouble.
More importantly, despite the official legal story about the Thai king being 'powerless' according to the law, there have been suggestions that the monarchy exerts a great deal of influence over Thai politics through indirect channels. At least one author has suggested that this interference is one reason why democratic governments tend to be so fragile in Thailand, and why there have been so many coups and revisions to the constitution. This kind of discussion about the interests and actors who influence government affairs is vitally necessary to the functioning of a democracy, but the lese majesty laws guarantee that this won't happen in an open and honest way in Thailand.
Interestingly, everyone always talks about how the king is 'universally beloved'. The Economist was almost certainly banned for an article published recently where they pointed out that the recent government crisis has started to put some dents in this image. They interviewed rural Thais (anonymously, of course) who felt betrayed that the monarchy was quietly supporting a political movement that seems intent on disenfranchising rural and ethnic minority Thais. The monarchy has been able to preserve its prestige by depicting itself as the protector of all Thais- as rescuing the country when things go badly out of kilter. During the most recent crisis, their support for a vocal minority over a very popular elected government who has catered to people outside of the Bangkok elite has damaged that perception.
a) internet news is all about repeating stuff someone else found first;
This is exactly why the internet journalism is still a long way away from being able to fill the role of the traditional media. Real journalism has nothing to do with link farming or writing editorials about issues that have already been reported. Very little breaking of actual news- the work of establishing what the facts on the ground are when an event is underway, or following leads over a long period to discover a story- is done by internet media. What do you repeat when there's no one to repeat?
The delay is not in clicking 'create account' on the administrative interface, or running a list of names through a Perl script; it's in processing the paperwork that ensures that the people getting accounts are who they say they are, and that their account access is appropriately restricted.
Or, send them an invoice from your consulting firm for about six times whatever your daily rate is.
Yeah, that way you'll have a lot of time to look for a new job.
Good to know that rigorous competition in the marketplace has totally eliminated misuse of 'reply-all' in the private sector. I look forward to continuing to have a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canadians and Swedes.
Because nothing about the regulations that the GP poster was talking about ever required banks to lend to people who were unable to pay. Because banks who were subject to those regulations were not responsible for the majority of the sub-prime loans that trashed the market. You're correct that lending to people with bad credit, who can't possible repay their loan, is a bad idea. The idea that banks were compelled to do that by legislation that put an end to certain discriminatory lending practices (like "redlining", the practice of identifying minority neighborhoods and declaring that no resident of that neighborhood, and no home within it, was a reasonable credit risk) is complete nonsense. Banks started extending sub-prime mortgages to unsafe lenders because they thought there were profits to be made in doing so, not because they were compelled to lend by anti-discrimination laws.
It's pretty simple. In the old days, two people walk into a bank. They both have modest, working-class jobs and good credit history from auto loans and store credit cards. They are both asking for loans in about the same amount. One guy is buying a house in a working-class white neighborhood. The other is buying a house in a working class black neighborhood. What happened before the CRA was that the first guy got a loan, and the second guy either got denied or had his fees and rates jacked up. The CRA simply said that if you were challenged on it, you had to be able to show that you were consistently following through with your risk calculations without regards to race or the ethnic makeup of certain neighborhoods. A good borrower asking to buy a house fairly appraised at $200,000 in a historically black neighborhood couldn't be charged twice the rate as the same borrower buying in a white neighborhood.
Now if the person asking to borrow is an obvious credit risk- bad history, no income, loan principle vastly in excess of their income or earning capability- you can still deny them under the CRA. You just can't deny people who's mailing address is in one zip code, and lend to people from another zip code. Nothing compels you to lend to bad risk borrowers.
Some right-wing pundits are claiming that this was somehow responsible for the sub-prime meltdown. They claim that in order to avoid the appearance of discrimination, banks were making bad loans to minorities in order to pad their numbers for loans to minority borrowers and neighborhoods. But this simply isn't true; in fact, most of the lenders making sub-prime loans were never subject to the CRA. Even if the CRA was compelling banks to make loans they otherwise wouldn't (which there is no evidence for), the private lenders who wrote most of the sub-prime loans had no need to give the appearance of compliance, and could make decisions purely based on the risk/reward profile of their customers. They decided that people with low incomes and poor payment histories were a good bet, because they could re-package the debt as mortgage-backed securities and resell the risk. They didn't make loans to poor people who couldn't pay because the law compelled them, or out of the goodness of their hearts; they did it because they believed there was a profit to be made. Meanwhile, the CRA regulated banks, which conservatives claim were being forced to lend to bad borrowers, were making far fewer sub-prime loans, and weren't attempting to commoditize their debt aggressively the way the private lenders were.
The real truth is that the growing housing market, low interest rates in the wake of the dot com bust, and the unregulated market in debt-backed securities created a toxic environment. Private lenders saw great potential profits in lending to the sub-prime market, and believed that debt-backed securities gave them a way to avo
Fannie May and Freddy Mac got permission to buy sub-prime mortgages in response to the growth of that sector of the market among private lenders. Congress and the Bush administration put through a law that allowed the FM companies to buy out sub-prime loans instead of buying CRA-regulated loans as part of their obligation to buy low-income loans. Fannie May and Freddy Mac have nothing to do with originating loans, as most people fail to realize; they buy loans from others that comply with their regulations in order to keep the mortgage market flowing. Their regs were changed by Congress to allow them to buy into the sub-prime market. The sub-prime market emerged not because of the FM companies, but because private lenders discovered that by extending loans to marginal borrowers and then re-selling them as mortgage backed securities, you could make a lot of money without significant risk. The Congressional reg change helped the sub-prime market grow, but nothing about that regulatory change was done to benefit poor worthy borrowers; it was done to allow Freddy Mac and Fannie May to maximize their profits as semi-private entities. The narrative of attempts to help low income minorities ruining the economy just doesn't hold any water.
This whole post is total bullshit. The notion that, somehow, attempts to counter historic discrimination against blacks and other minorities set off the economic crisis is just foolish. The regulations imposed on certain banks were very modest, and were essentially designed to prevent worthy borrowers from being denied due to where their house was located ("redlining"). Nothing in the CRA requires banks to extend loans to people who can't pay them back. Most of the banks that were hit hardest by the mortgage crises weren't even subject to the CRA, because they weren't commercial banks. Yet the whiners in the pundit class persist in arguing that armies of poor people strong-armed poor, defenseless banks into making bad sub-prime loans. Never mind the studies that have shown that CRA-regulated banks were less likely to make subprime loans, and less likely to re-sell their loans. Never mind the fact that only one in four sub-prime loans originated from a CRA-regulated bank. Yep... poor people. The secret masters of our economy.
And Jimmy Carter? He might have been a tool of a president, but blaming him for Iran is bizarre. Horrible policy making in the region going back to WWII sunk Iran. Jimmy was just lucky enough to be there when the music stopped.
Good point- if you take the relatively minor step of adding the 'parent' attribute to all of your machines in the Nagios config, it can produce a nice map of your logical network, with near-real time updating of host and service health,
MRTG can graph pretty much anything. It's primarily used for bandwidth (I think- given the name), but a former company used it to graph pretty much everything about all its servers: CPU load, motherboard temperature, bandwidth, disk capacity, web server hits, mail system access. It's written in perl and pretty easy to customize, from what I understand; essentially, anything that can dump two numbers into a file can be used to produce a graph, and the look and feel of the graph can be changed in the config.
The Bay Area has one of the best cycling promotion programs in the US. Bike magazines consistently vote San Francisco in the top five (and often #1) biking city in the country. San Jose and Santa Clara County have made significant investments in bike infrastructure in the last 10 years, including hundreds of miles of on-road bike lanes and a number of dedicated paved trails. CalTrain and other public transit systems have bike racks and bike cars, and don't charge extra for bringing a bike onto the train or sticking it on the rack on a bus.
More could be done. But simply put, biking isn't a solution for the entire area because it is too spread out. You just can't get all the places you need to go in a reasonably timely fashion on a bike without some significant additional interlinks.
I broke my web cam, and I've been trying to find someone who will sell me a human eye...
Correcting for the money spent to get them up there, I think that's pretty competitive with a lot of American SUVs...
A school should never consider making something that is central to its mission as an educational institution optional. I'm saying that the type of civic education provided by this type of work could be considered to be at the core of what the school is supposed to do, if we believe that the school is responsible for laying the foundation for producing citizens rather than just workers. We don't make science optional, even though some people might object to what is taught, because teaching science is vital to the mission of the school as an educational institution.
With respect to Obama's specific plan, keep in mind as well that most of what change.gov says is that he wants to set targets for community service in schools; there's not yet any indication that it is going to be required. It could be something like the Presidential Fitness Program where students who meet the goals receive special recognition, or schools who incorporate it into their curriculum receive access to grant funding. Things like this are very common already. I'm just saying that if they chose to make part of it compulsory, I can see a rationale for doing so.
So there are- including myself- but I think there's some confusion here. In a nanny state, we would be placing compulsions on random citizens "for their own good". That's stupid. I would adamantly oppose, for instance, a national service system that compelled all college students or grads to do community service, even if it was compensated. If you want to sign up for a system where you get paid for service (like Americorp, or Obama's tuition credit program), great. College students are 18+ and are undergoing a voluntary self-directed education focused on a particular subject or career goal.
High school students, on the other hand, are already in essence in the hands of the state by virtue of compulsory education. Making slight changes to the curriculum that every student already participates in- so long as those changes are not in conflict with the educational mission of the system, and there is a legitimate government interest in encouraging that aspect of education- seem to me in a separate category from placing such an obligation on a citizen not already enrolled in a program where most of their daily activities are governed by government policy. We've already said- through multiple different pieces of legislation- that people under 18 in state-run educational programs have a different status than an adult citizen. The government can't place significantly greater burdens on the exercise of their rights without good cause, and without legislative authorization, but changing the curriculum in a way that alters their educational activities slightly without essentially changing the character of the restrictions on their rights already placed by participation in the school system doesn't seem like a very big change.
The state has no legitimate interest in compelling my assertion of belief in any particular god- indeed, for the state to do so conflicts with my rights as an individual. The state does have an interest in educating students about their community and the needs of their community because schools are preparing students, in essence, to be voting A
Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. 107.
But if you're going to publish a 'reference' book, you have to do so in such a way that it doesn't take on the qualities of a derivative work. If you take long quotes from a book and then insert additional explanatory text around them in the same style, you haven't created a guidebook, you've created a modified version of the source work.
Effect on the author's ability to profit from their work is one criteria in judging if a use is fair use.