I would check out the Egypt - Asia portion of FLAG, the fiber line around the globe (what the Stephenson article in Wired was about). I dunno, but I think that run is longer than a transpacific cable . . .
Actually it is not. Food stockpiles, sometimes called reserves or holdbacks, are created to help control prices on certain commodities. Farmers (or anyone else making or growing certain kinds of commodities) have an increased risk of bankruptcy in years of very high and very low production. In the big years, the price goes in the dumper and they can't recover their costs. In the bad years, they are more likely to have lost their crop, and the same thing occurs.
A reserve program holds a certain proportion of a year's crop in storage (when that is feasible) off the market to suppor the price, and then sells it to cover storage costs in a year with a better market, distributing the rest of the reciepts to those farmers who contributed to the reserve -- at least in theory. Many of these programs have been curtailed, and none of them were run by the military, unless you count warehousing old cases of MRE's.
Moglen makes an interesting point, especially in regard to the investor's conference call noted above -- shame Sigma. Out them to their customers and distributors, especially as they apparently have had problems before. Emphasis below is mine:
We have even, once or twice, faced enterprises which, under US copyright law, were engaged in deliberate, criminal copyright infringement: taking the source code of GPL'd software, recompiling it with an attempt to conceal its origin, and offering it for sale as a proprietary product. I have assisted free software developers other than the FSF to deal with such problems, which we have resolved--since the criminal infringer would not voluntarily desist and, in the cases I have in mind, legal technicalities prevented actual criminal prosecution of the violators--by talking to redistributors and potential customers. ``Why would you want to pay serious money,'' we have asked, ``for software that infringes our license and will bog you down in complex legal problems, when you can have the real thing for free?'' Customers have never failed to see the pertinence of the question. The stealing of free software is one place where, indeed, crime doesn't pay.
While it would be easy to deflect a direct question about this by deferring to one's lawyers or such, questions about having a major distributor dropping your product over such an allegation would be much more difficult to deflect, and would be of great interest to investors.
Neither of these are dumb-ass questions -- Yes, the CHP is the overall state police force in CA. And they would handle it because they handle security for state offices and such as well as any crimes in this case are probably state, not federal crimes.
Funny, but Bell Labs thinks it still belongs to Lucent . . . Bell Labs' own site has a rather prominent Lucent logo on it, and the Avaya Labs site states that "It's a brand new research lab, but it can boast of a rich, 75-year-old heritage from Bell Labs". It's a spin off . . .
Truste, a nonprofit group financed by Internet companies that creates standards for privacy policies, agreed to endorse Yahoo's move after an extended discussion with the company. "I would not call what Yahoo did `best practices,' " said Fran Maier, the group's executive director. "To the extent possible, you would like companies to honor the preferences that were previously set by the users. But on the other hand, we don't want to tell companies they can't do something when their business strategy changes. We have to balance those things."
Let me get this straight -- Truste wants companies to follow privacy policies (which the companies themselves until they don't want to follow them anymore . . .
All that Truste ever really did was claim to police how well these companies disclosed and followed their own policies -- not dictate what their policies would be. IIRC, there already are laws about false advertising and misleading business practices. So, what is Truste and their "seal" besides a public relations exercise?
You mean like the exclusion areas that (25 miles, IIRC) that are already established and working around launch areas? (And that were patrolled on launch days before 9/11).
If you read the article, the current proposal is to put the earthside connection somewhere on a platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- this should not be that difficult to handle.
Are you objecting to Lessig's ideas, or agreeing with them? Lessig's positions on issues like this (such as the continual extension of copyright) are well known and cited in this article as well as the many other writings on his own site.
As for Lessig being aligned with our 'corporate masters', I really don't think that Microsoft would agree . . .
Half right. The quality of the case is not the criteria the decision is based on, but it is a limiting factor in how sweeping the decision can be -- and how binding a precedent can be as well. IMHO, they have not so much struck down CTS as an ADA covered disability, as said that it takes more than a diagnosis.
I think if you will peruse either Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica or the various history articles on NASA's web site (look up the URL's yourself) you will find that there were two different flight profiles for the X-15. In both cases, the powered segment was generally quite brief, running around 80 to 120 seconds of and 8 to 12 minuite flight. The high speed profile was 'relatively' flat, as you state. But the high altitude profile, which resulted in the 62 mile altitude you refer to, is described as a ballistic trajectory, the central three minuites or so required use of reaction controls to maintain stability, as aerodynamic controls no longer worked at the extreme altitudes involved. One approximate description of a suborbital ballistic trajectory is parabolic.
---start disclaimer---
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television.
---end disclaimer---
When I took constiutional law in grad school we were specifically informed that not only did the 1st amendment apply to the states (both through the 14th as stated by AC above, as well as many state constitutions), as agencies of the states, it applies to public schools. The limitation in the case of primary and secondary education is that the persons affected are minors and that school administrators have both a quasi-parental relationship (this is the law, not reality!) to students, and school administrators also have governmental responsibilities to maintain order and safety on campus. Once you are out of high school and in college, the 1st amendment applied with a vengeance if you are at a public college or university.
One thing you might consider -- many countries (such as Italy) do not have much of an truly independent hardware or software industry. They are part of the general Western economy and largely use American or German software on systems built in France or Britain or the US (all with parts from Taiwan ).
In fixing Y2K bugs (and I was involved in correcting quite a few real stinkers throughout the 90's) here in the US, we were often fixing them for users all over the world.
Re:Yeah, this is beliveable.. but old
on
Inside Echelon
·
· Score: 3
Actually this is quite believeable and real -- just not very new. Almost all of this has been reported on for decades, with only the 'Echelon' brand name and big huhu with the Europeans (the NATO members among them damm well knew about this long ago) being new. Its old news gathered from better authors repackaged for those who were not paying attention and have been watching too many X-Files episodes.
For example, Campbell cites "TOP SECRET UMBRA" as the top level compartment for SIGINT. Well, it was -- in the 1960's. (It doesn't matter that much as the entire system is being completely revised eliminating TOP SECRET entirely -- see FAS's web site which is generally much better on this kind of thing when John Pike has time to update it.)
It's an important issue, but it would pay to use better sources. To see how old this information is check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers or William Burrows's Deep Black.
there are few things more irritating than a crpto geek . . . ask my wife . .
IANALAIDNPOOT - I am not a lawyer, and I do not play one on TV ---
I would suggest perusal of 10 Big Myths about copyright explained from Brad Templeton of ClariNet and EFF. I would suggest concentrating on the following items:
"If it doesn't have a copyright notice, it's not copyrighted."
"If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation." (in regard to donating the proceeds to charity)
"If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
"My posting was just fair use!"
"If I make up my own stories, but base them on another work, my new work belongs to me." (in regard to compilation copyright)
Was the original series a Good Thing? Yes.
Did everyone involved with this book have good intentions? I think so.
Was this the right thing to do? Well, I don't know about right, but it is at least doubtful that it was the legal thing to do. As the person above claiming to be a lawyer states, the Slashdot bunch, and therefore Andover, have explicitly not claimed copyright or ownership of the original messages -- which means that the original poster retains all rights to that material. Just because you can't get a hold of one or all of the posters does not give you permission to use the posts, IMHO it bars you from using them as you cannot establish ownership yourself, and in publishing them you are asserting just such a right over that material.
Many of us would not read or post to Slashdot if we were not concerned about issues like privacy, the GPL, and IP. While nothing, in my opinion, ever justifies hate mail, nobody should at least have been surprised that many Slashdotters would be concerned about this.
Already some around here are making the 'well, OS Brand X is more secure than OS Brand Y' kind of statment. This poster is saying something that many of us know, but for some reason many commerce sites have not caught on to...
it does not matter how secure the OS is if you set it up and administer it insecurely
Moving the database to a secure machine that is not accessible from the internet (as well as the other measures this poster lists) is a minimum precaution. True, you have to actually know something about communicating with a DBMS and more than HTML and the server scripting language of your choice. But this is not amateur hour anymore -- not when you are handling live financial information.
atheism is NOT a religion; it is based on logic and reason; religion is based on faith and presumption
Well, I don't know about atheism being a religion, although it has seemed to be one for some atheists I have known personally. If atheism is not a religion it is most definitely a belief --
a mental attitude of acceptance or assent toward a proposition without the full intellectual knowledge required to guarantee its truth.... Belief in someone or something is basically different from belief that a proposition is true.
When those of us who are theists (those who believe in a personal supernatural being that intervenes in history -- that covers a lot of territory, religiously -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Hindus perhaps, I'm not sure) discuss God, we are not talking about Santa Claus, some magical figure that "defies the laws of physics" as you put it. I think you may misunderstand the word "supernatural" as it applies in this kind of a discussion, as opposed to the Blair Witch Project. "Supernatural" is not magical, weird, or necessarily occult: it comes from the Latin meaning above or greater than nature. Or in another way, outside of nature, and therefore, the "laws of physics".
Here's an example from physics. For more than a thousand years, the accepted "laws of physics" were understood to be the body of Greek and Hellenistic theories about the natural world that is often referred to as Aristotelean physics. Based on the experience of phenomena that was available, these theories worked just fine. Much later on, observations from astronomy, coupled with much better mathematical tools, allowed Newton to rework physics completely once again, based on a wider base of experience. And, incidentally, the Newtonian theories still work just fine for the phenomena they were intended. Starting in the 19th century, new phenomena such as radioactivity led theorists such as Planck, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, et. al. to construct brand new "laws of physics", some of which seemed, and seem nonsense, unless you understand the domain of phenomena they were intended to make sense of. But they are very practical -- the computers that you and I are using depend on a knowledge of quantum mechanics.
To us, God is a person outside the natural world, and is the person who created it. This set of theories or beliefs are what we use to make certain phenomena -- our experence of our own human experience, of values such a truth or beauty or justice, make sense. Can we "prove" the existence of God? Well, to some extent, it is a meaningless question, if you mean can I prove the existence of God the same way I prove the existence of Peoria or Phobos. If God is outside the frame of natural experience in the manner I state above, I can no more "prove" his existence than Einstein could have meaningfully discussed the truth of Special Relativity before such experiments as the Michaelson-Morley demonstration.
In the very same way, you cannot disprove the existence of God either, you can just choose whether or not it makes sense for you to believe that there is a God. The issue is not whether or not religious persons use reason or logic (I would say about the same percentage do as non-religious persons - too few) but the body of experience that religious persons apply logic and reason to in evaluating their beliefs.
Why do I believe? Because when I consider all of my life's experiences, I can make more sense of what I know by believing in God. In making the important decisions of my life, I believe that those decisons made in light of that belief have been good decisions. But comfort has little to do with it. As you move from simple theistic belief to true religion, you move from simple intellectual assent, to a relationship that involves trust, accountability, and cost. I am a Christian, and a Roman Catholic, both by choice. I would be much more comfortable (in some ways) as the agnostic I once was, than having to face up to the responsibilities that result from confronting what I see as the truth.
BTW, I can honor Jon's attitude, even if I don't share it.
Just to give the good Commander a little benefit of the doubt, he clearly indicated that the words on the header were someone else's words, and labeling this as from the "you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept." shoud have been fair warning.
Also, as someone who works on NT as well as other OS's, there is no reason why such attacks cannot be mounted from MS OS's. It's just that the set of tools that apparently were involved in this set of attacks work on Solaris and Linux boxes. For example, another similar attack strategy, IIRC, has been identified for Macs running OS9.
The main point of the post is dead on -- the problem is large numbers of unneccessarily insecure machines on the net -- in this case *nix boxes -- that act as hosts or agents for staging the attack. CERT has been warning about this general topic for many months, with specific warnings about just this kind of technique using the tools (TRINOO and TFN2K) now suspected. There are specific things you can do to prevent your servers hosting this kind of attack, but too many sites have not carried out these safeguards -- and this week has proved it. Ingress filtering and better packet filters on the backbones will cut back on smurfing, but there are ways around that. If you are a sysadmin, and you are not monitoring the CERT current activity page as well as others, subscribing to some of the appropirate mailing lists and keeping your systems up to date accordingly, this will keep on happening, and Microsoft has nothing to do with it.
Excuse me, but you should read the story again. Here are three excepts - First from the story itself:
Northwest hired two computer forensic experts from Ernst & Young to copy the hard drives of the 21 individuals named in the lawsuit. The judge limited the search to union activities relating to the sickout or e-mail to 43 individuals, well beyond the number of people named in the original lawsuit.
The second is a quote from one of the defendants' lawyers:
"We are trusting them [Ernst & Young] totally. We don't know them. We didn't hire them. In fact, they were hired by Northwest. But we are put into the position of having to trust them," she said.
Griffin, a veteran Northwest flight attendant based in Honolulu, surrendered his Packard Bell desktop and Fujitsu laptop at the Ernst & Young office in Honolulu. He was met there by two forensic examiners who flew to Honolulu from Washington, D.C., and Texas.
The final quote is atributed to the local union president:
She said Ernst & Young's computer forensic examiners spent two full days in the union's offices last week, copying hard drives.
The reporters went out of their way to carefully state several times that the judge authorized the search of the home computers -- they never stated in any way that the police was involved, and there is no indication that anything else was subpoenaed. This was a search by Ernst and Young, acting as agents of Northwest, of computers as part of discovery in a lawsuit by means of subpoena -- something that goes on all the time.
Not only am I not a lawyer, I don't even look like one.
One important distinction to add here is that it apppears that this is a civil action by Northwest for damages against the union and two individual flight attendants that ran a web site. (Much of the rhetoric about this story here seems to be invoking issues such as warrants that apply in criminal cases.) Their homes were not searched and the police did not show up on their doorsteps demanding their computers. Most likely, as part of the discovery process, subpoenas were issued by the judge for information on the computers. Since Northwest had been able to show that it had a basic case that it had been improperly damaged (according to the story), the judge ruled that the company had the right to have reasonable access to the information they needed to make their case. The two flight attendants in this case, probably on the specific advice of counsel, turned their computers over to an (allegedly) expert party, Ernst and Young, at that firm's offices. This is normal procedure in civil cases.
A previous story that is linked to has the following quote:
Local 2000 President Billie Davenport said Monday that the union signed the agreement with Northwest because the union has never tried to disrupt Northwest's flight operations and never would unless it receives permission from the National Mediation Board. Under the federal Railway Labor Act, all job actions against airlines are illegal unless the mediation board declares contract negotiations at an impasse and permits a strike or other "self-help" activity.
Most workers do have a right to strike, but this right is limited in some cases (like this one), and the kinds of things you can do in support of a strike are limited. As the government itself is not a party here (beyond supplying a judge) this is not a First Amendment issue. In fact, the judge appears to be concerned that his ruling not become one:
The judge also noted that nothing in his most recent order "shall be construed to prohibit any legal activity, including, but not limited to, picketing, rallies, leafleting, Internet use or dissemination of information, provided that such activities do not disrupt" Northwest's airline operations.
This is not a story about corporate bullies, or invasion of privacy -- it is about the liability of web site operators for the actions of people who post anonymously on their sites. In that way it is like the DeCSS case.
This article asserts that the mass DoS attacks have moved on to E*Trade and Datek Online.
What is becoming clear to me is that someone has been planning this out very carefully. I'm wondering if there have been any quiet blackmail messages sent to site owners -- "Send us a cool half milliion or you're next."
Whovever feels like can moderate my previous note down -- the closing tag disappeared on posting (no kidding).
I can really understand concern about this change -- there are already reporters such as Andrew Leonard over on Salon (who has been a good friend to open source) who believe that at least the appearance of editorial independence has been permanently compromised.
But I can understand some other things as well. Slashdot has always basically been the web site that Rob and Jeff and friends have kept going with bailing wire and Perl for similarly minded crazies. As one of those crazies, I have always tried to be a little grateful to the guys for letting the rest of us come in and play too.
It is very easy for the average slashdotter (many of whom are students) to urge: "Don't touch that Evil Money -- stay pure and poor, just like the good old days!!!" I know no better way to kill something that to try to prevent it from changing. Some of the most pathetic "sights" on the net are those whining that USENET, or GOPHER or whatever is just not what it was and is being "ruined" by all the changes that the newbies bring (I have lived through the imminent death of USENET about three times now) that we need to ACT NOW! to "save" it. Anything you can save by keeping it fron changing is only good for taxidermy.
Slashdot (along with the grits, MEEPTs, firsts, and Natalie Portman) continues to evolve, and the bridge crew here has to evolve as well and make the best lives for themselves that they can -- and that is what we are talking about here. Jeff and Rob and so forth risked their own resources and time to get this thing started, and it is up to them and their buisiness partners to work things out the best they can. So cut them (just a little) slack, OK?
And at the end of the day, the future of Slashdot is not really up to them, it it up to us. If Slashdot ceases to be independent, we'll know fast enough -- things generally aren't that subtle. The slash tarball is available, there are more than one or two Perl hackers around and we haven't run out of bandwith or IP addresses yet. If it is time to move on, we will find somewhere to go, or build it ourselves, in good open source fashion. Just like many of us moved from USENET to here.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been just 20 short years away from practical fusion power generation for the past 50 years . . .
I would check out the Egypt - Asia portion of FLAG, the fiber line around the globe (what the Stephenson article in Wired was about). I dunno, but I think that run is longer than a transpacific cable . . .
Actually it is not. Food stockpiles, sometimes called reserves or holdbacks, are created to help control prices on certain commodities. Farmers (or anyone else making or growing certain kinds of commodities) have an increased risk of bankruptcy in years of very high and very low production. In the big years, the price goes in the dumper and they can't recover their costs. In the bad years, they are more likely to have lost their crop, and the same thing occurs.
A reserve program holds a certain proportion of a year's crop in storage (when that is feasible) off the market to suppor the price, and then sells it to cover storage costs in a year with a better market, distributing the rest of the reciepts to those farmers who contributed to the reserve -- at least in theory. Many of these programs have been curtailed, and none of them were run by the military, unless you count warehousing old cases of MRE's.
This feels more like The Man Who Sold the Moon
While it would be easy to deflect a direct question about this by deferring to one's lawyers or such, questions about having a major distributor dropping your product over such an allegation would be much more difficult to deflect, and would be of great interest to investors.
Neither of these are dumb-ass questions -- Yes, the CHP is the overall state police force in CA. And they would handle it because they handle security for state offices and such as well as any crimes in this case are probably state, not federal crimes.
Funny, but Bell Labs thinks it still belongs to Lucent . . . Bell Labs' own site has a rather prominent Lucent logo on it, and the Avaya Labs site states that "It's a brand new research lab, but it can boast of a rich, 75-year-old heritage from Bell Labs". It's a spin off . . .
Let me get this straight -- Truste wants companies to follow privacy policies (which the companies themselves until they don't want to follow them anymore . . .
All that Truste ever really did was claim to police how well these companies disclosed and followed their own policies -- not dictate what their policies would be. IIRC, there already are laws about false advertising and misleading business practices. So, what is Truste and their "seal" besides a public relations exercise?
You mean like the exclusion areas that (25 miles, IIRC) that are already established and working around launch areas? (And that were patrolled on launch days before 9/11).
If you read the article, the current proposal is to put the earthside connection somewhere on a platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- this should not be that difficult to handle.
Are you objecting to Lessig's ideas, or agreeing with them? Lessig's positions on issues like this (such as the continual extension of copyright) are well known and cited in this article as well as the many other writings on his own site.
As for Lessig being aligned with our 'corporate masters', I really don't think that Microsoft would agree . . .
There's an .pdf article with some interesting ideas linked to this at Lessig's site - Reclaiming a Commons
IANAL, AIDPOOTV
Half right. The quality of the case is not the criteria the decision is based on, but it is a limiting factor in how sweeping the decision can be -- and how binding a precedent can be as well. IMHO, they have not so much struck down CTS as an ADA covered disability, as said that it takes more than a diagnosis.
I think if you will peruse either Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica or the various history articles on NASA's web site (look up the URL's yourself) you will find that there were two different flight profiles for the X-15. In both cases, the powered segment was generally quite brief, running around 80 to 120 seconds of and 8 to 12 minuite flight. The high speed profile was 'relatively' flat, as you state. But the high altitude profile, which resulted in the 62 mile altitude you refer to, is described as a ballistic trajectory, the central three minuites or so required use of reaction controls to maintain stability, as aerodynamic controls no longer worked at the extreme altitudes involved. One approximate description of a suborbital ballistic trajectory is parabolic.
---start disclaimer---
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television.
---end disclaimer---
When I took constiutional law in grad school we were specifically informed that not only did the 1st amendment apply to the states (both through the 14th as stated by AC above, as well as many state constitutions), as agencies of the states, it applies to public schools. The limitation in the case of primary and secondary education is that the persons affected are minors and that school administrators have both a quasi-parental relationship (this is the law, not reality!) to students, and school administrators also have governmental responsibilities to maintain order and safety on campus. Once you are out of high school and in college, the 1st amendment applied with a vengeance if you are at a public college or university.
In fixing Y2K bugs (and I was involved in correcting quite a few real stinkers throughout the 90's) here in the US, we were often fixing them for users all over the world.
For example, Campbell cites "TOP SECRET UMBRA" as the top level compartment for SIGINT. Well, it was -- in the 1960's. (It doesn't matter that much as the entire system is being completely revised eliminating TOP SECRET entirely -- see FAS's web site which is generally much better on this kind of thing when John Pike has time to update it.)
It's an important issue, but it would pay to use better sources. To see how old this information is check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers or William Burrows's Deep Black.
there are few things more irritating than a crpto geek . . . ask my wife . .
I would suggest perusal of 10 Big Myths about copyright explained from Brad Templeton of ClariNet and EFF. I would suggest concentrating on the following items:
Was the original series a Good Thing? Yes.
Did everyone involved with this book have good intentions? I think so.
Was this the right thing to do? Well, I don't know about right, but it is at least doubtful that it was the legal thing to do. As the person above claiming to be a lawyer states, the Slashdot bunch, and therefore Andover, have explicitly not claimed copyright or ownership of the original messages -- which means that the original poster retains all rights to that material. Just because you can't get a hold of one or all of the posters does not give you permission to use the posts, IMHO it bars you from using them as you cannot establish ownership yourself, and in publishing them you are asserting just such a right over that material.
Many of us would not read or post to Slashdot if we were not concerned about issues like privacy, the GPL, and IP. While nothing, in my opinion, ever justifies hate mail, nobody should at least have been surprised that many Slashdotters would be concerned about this.
Why wait - the appropriate garment already exists
here
Send lawyers, drugs, and money. Dad get me out of this. -- Warren Zevon
it does not matter how secure the OS is if you set it up and administer it insecurely
Moving the database to a secure machine that is not accessible from the internet (as well as the other measures this poster lists) is a minimum precaution. True, you have to actually know something about communicating with a DBMS and more than HTML and the server scripting language of your choice. But this is not amateur hour anymore -- not when you are handling live financial information.
atheism is NOT a religion; it is based on logic and reason; religion is based on faith and presumption
Well, I don't know about atheism being a religion, although it has seemed to be one for some atheists I have known personally. If atheism is not a religion it is most definitely a belief --
When those of us who are theists (those who believe in a personal supernatural being that intervenes in history -- that covers a lot of territory, religiously -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Hindus perhaps, I'm not sure) discuss God, we are not talking about Santa Claus, some magical figure that "defies the laws of physics" as you put it. I think you may misunderstand the word "supernatural" as it applies in this kind of a discussion, as opposed to the Blair Witch Project. "Supernatural" is not magical, weird, or necessarily occult: it comes from the Latin meaning above or greater than nature. Or in another way, outside of nature, and therefore, the "laws of physics".
Here's an example from physics. For more than a thousand years, the accepted "laws of physics" were understood to be the body of Greek and Hellenistic theories about the natural world that is often referred to as Aristotelean physics. Based on the experience of phenomena that was available, these theories worked just fine. Much later on, observations from astronomy, coupled with much better mathematical tools, allowed Newton to rework physics completely once again, based on a wider base of experience. And, incidentally, the Newtonian theories still work just fine for the phenomena they were intended. Starting in the 19th century, new phenomena such as radioactivity led theorists such as Planck, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, et. al. to construct brand new "laws of physics", some of which seemed, and seem nonsense, unless you understand the domain of phenomena they were intended to make sense of. But they are very practical -- the computers that you and I are using depend on a knowledge of quantum mechanics.
To us, God is a person outside the natural world, and is the person who created it. This set of theories or beliefs are what we use to make certain phenomena -- our experence of our own human experience, of values such a truth or beauty or justice, make sense. Can we "prove" the existence of God? Well, to some extent, it is a meaningless question, if you mean can I prove the existence of God the same way I prove the existence of Peoria or Phobos. If God is outside the frame of natural experience in the manner I state above, I can no more "prove" his existence than Einstein could have meaningfully discussed the truth of Special Relativity before such experiments as the Michaelson-Morley demonstration.
In the very same way, you cannot disprove the existence of God either, you can just choose whether or not it makes sense for you to believe that there is a God. The issue is not whether or not religious persons use reason or logic (I would say about the same percentage do as non-religious persons - too few) but the body of experience that religious persons apply logic and reason to in evaluating their beliefs.
Why do I believe? Because when I consider all of my life's experiences, I can make more sense of what I know by believing in God. In making the important decisions of my life, I believe that those decisons made in light of that belief have been good decisions. But comfort has little to do with it. As you move from simple theistic belief to true religion, you move from simple intellectual assent, to a relationship that involves trust, accountability, and cost. I am a Christian, and a Roman Catholic, both by choice. I would be much more comfortable (in some ways) as the agnostic I once was, than having to face up to the responsibilities that result from confronting what I see as the truth.
BTW, I can honor Jon's attitude, even if I don't share it.
Claude
Also, as someone who works on NT as well as other OS's, there is no reason why such attacks cannot be mounted from MS OS's. It's just that the set of tools that apparently were involved in this set of attacks work on Solaris and Linux boxes. For example, another similar attack strategy, IIRC, has been identified for Macs running OS9.
The main point of the post is dead on -- the problem is large numbers of unneccessarily insecure machines on the net -- in this case *nix boxes -- that act as hosts or agents for staging the attack. CERT has been warning about this general topic for many months, with specific warnings about just this kind of technique using the tools (TRINOO and TFN2K) now suspected. There are specific things you can do to prevent your servers hosting this kind of attack, but too many sites have not carried out these safeguards -- and this week has proved it. Ingress filtering and better packet filters on the backbones will cut back on smurfing, but there are ways around that. If you are a sysadmin, and you are not monitoring the CERT current activity page as well as others, subscribing to some of the appropirate mailing lists and keeping your systems up to date accordingly, this will keep on happening, and Microsoft has nothing to do with it.
Paranoiac whining will not get us anywhere.
The second is a quote from one of the defendants' lawyers:
The final quote is atributed to the local union president:
The reporters went out of their way to carefully state several times that the judge authorized the search of the home computers -- they never stated in any way that the police was involved, and there is no indication that anything else was subpoenaed. This was a search by Ernst and Young, acting as agents of Northwest, of computers as part of discovery in a lawsuit by means of subpoena -- something that goes on all the time.
One important distinction to add here is that it apppears that this is a civil action by Northwest for damages against the union and two individual flight attendants that ran a web site. (Much of the rhetoric about this story here seems to be invoking issues such as warrants that apply in criminal cases.) Their homes were not searched and the police did not show up on their doorsteps demanding their computers. Most likely, as part of the discovery process, subpoenas were issued by the judge for information on the computers. Since Northwest had been able to show that it had a basic case that it had been improperly damaged (according to the story), the judge ruled that the company had the right to have reasonable access to the information they needed to make their case. The two flight attendants in this case, probably on the specific advice of counsel, turned their computers over to an (allegedly) expert party, Ernst and Young, at that firm's offices. This is normal procedure in civil cases.
A previous story that is linked to has the following quote:
Most workers do have a right to strike, but this right is limited in some cases (like this one), and the kinds of things you can do in support of a strike are limited. As the government itself is not a party here (beyond supplying a judge) this is not a First Amendment issue. In fact, the judge appears to be concerned that his ruling not become one:
This is not a story about corporate bullies, or invasion of privacy -- it is about the liability of web site operators for the actions of people who post anonymously on their sites. In that way it is like the DeCSS case.
What is becoming clear to me is that someone has been planning this out very carefully. I'm wondering if there have been any quiet blackmail messages sent to site owners -- "Send us a cool half milliion or you're next."
I can really understand concern about this change -- there are already reporters such as Andrew Leonard over on Salon (who has been a good friend to open source) who believe that at least the appearance of editorial independence has been permanently compromised.
But I can understand some other things as well. Slashdot has always basically been the web site that Rob and Jeff and friends have kept going with bailing wire and Perl for similarly minded crazies. As one of those crazies, I have always tried to be a little grateful to the guys for letting the rest of us come in and play too.
It is very easy for the average slashdotter (many of whom are students) to urge: "Don't touch that Evil Money -- stay pure and poor, just like the good old days!!!" I know no better way to kill something that to try to prevent it from changing. Some of the most pathetic "sights" on the net are those whining that USENET, or GOPHER or whatever is just not what it was and is being "ruined" by all the changes that the newbies bring (I have lived through the imminent death of USENET about three times now) that we need to ACT NOW! to "save" it. Anything you can save by keeping it fron changing is only good for taxidermy.
Slashdot (along with the grits, MEEPTs, firsts, and Natalie Portman) continues to evolve, and the bridge crew here has to evolve as well and make the best lives for themselves that they can -- and that is what we are talking about here. Jeff and Rob and so forth risked their own resources and time to get this thing started, and it is up to them and their buisiness partners to work things out the best they can. So cut them (just a little) slack, OK?
And at the end of the day, the future of Slashdot is not really up to them, it it up to us. If Slashdot ceases to be independent, we'll know fast enough -- things generally aren't that subtle. The slash tarball is available, there are more than one or two Perl hackers around and we haven't run out of bandwith or IP addresses yet. If it is time to move on, we will find somewhere to go, or build it ourselves, in good open source fashion. Just like many of us moved from USENET to here.