You really think this was in some tech manual? This was just a bunch of college kids that knew a bunch about computers and could read between the lines, even though some of the information was plainly available. This was a case of security through obscurity, and I'd also like to point out that this sort of hacking was from a bunch of computer geeks who cut their teeth on mainframe computers and the early 8-bit micros like the Apple ][ and Comodore systems. While technical documentation was pretty good for those early systems, you still had to push to find stuff that wasn't "officially" listed in the specs. We just happened to find another "undocumented" feature in the VAX systems, that is all. There is stuff like this in a Pentium CPU as well (undocumented CPU instructions and status register bits), so it really shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
Had I been doing some of this stuff in a commercial, professional environment, I more than likely would have been fired. Instead, I was at a very permissive college where the faculty actually encouraged this sort of behavior, on the theory that we were learning about computer architechture by doing this sort of hacking, and the system was bought principly for our use anyway. As long as we didn't screw up the system too bad for the rest of the students, we were welcome and encouraged to see how far we could go.
The professors at the college were under the mistaken belief at the time that software-only attacks really couldn't do that much damage, and for the most part they were correct. The worst-case situation was like I described, where the system OS had to be rebuilt.
Honestly, I sincerely hope that NASA does NOT become the agency to do space treaties. As consultants to full-time diplomats, perhaps. As members of the negotiation team, yeah, I could see that.
As the principle body charged with the negotiations? I shudder at the thought. NASA is so ill equipped to do such a thing it is incredible. They also have their own interests in mind, and I can see NASA negotiating away commercial spaceflight simply because they don't see any practical reason to keep it.
Space treaties that have been written to date are so awful that I just cringe to think of what else could be come up with next. They are also meaningless for the most part, because most of the nations that sign them don't have spaceflight capabilities anyway, nor do they think there is any reason to believe that it could happen in the near future for them. Satellite communications is enough for the moment for most of those countries, and it does mainly a good PR move, particularly when they can show they support a globally popular treaty that the USA doesn't want to sign.
The X-Prize Foundation originally tried to raise all fo the funding to make the prize essentially open-ended. They got to about $5 million before they hit close to a brick wall in raising much more money other than nickle and dimes that the occasional space enthuisist was sending forward. That was when they "bought" an insurance police to get the rest of the money, on the condition that it had to be won by the end of 2004.
This is why there is a time limit. It wasn't there originally, but once there were several teams making some serious progress toward the goal, they decided to make the prize fully-funded if it were to be won. It also put a little bit of time pressure on some of the teams, who had earlier been trying to refine their vehicles rather than really pushing for the deadline.
First of all, it was an early version of VMS, and I'm not really absolutely sure that this software was the cause, but the coincidence was just too good to be true. In terms of the processor status register having an effect on processor protection, there are reserved bits that are meant for kernel mode software in the CPU, and in some parts of the VAX documentation it even mentions them, just not in the normal assembly language sections. The only way to set the bits is to push the status register onto the stack, flip the bits manually, then pop them back into the status register. Normally this is done with a subroutine jump, but if you know where the state of the register is stored at in the stack, you can edit it and put it back.
The Sysadmin did try a bunch of other things first, and it was DEC that acutally suggested that he reload VMS onto the system. There were some serious security breeches I didn't mention, including how I got clear-text version of the password file from my individual user account (no privledges, supposedly). Let's just say that we had fun hacking that system, and the primary users were primarily CS students, so we had a whole lot of fun pulling pranks on each other, together with a 24/7 computer lab at a relatively small college (about 2000 students, with only about 150 CS students total...if you included the CS 101 crowd as well). What is more, these exploits paled in comparison to early tales when the college was hooked up to the early MECC system on an old CDC Cyber mainframe. Now that was real fun hacking, but I was in junior high school when all that fun was going on, and just hitting it from the outside barely able to run my own software and simple BASIC programs that I had written for that system at the time. That old system made the VAX seem positivlely modern.
The problem was that in order to crash a VAX, it had to be intentional. Kinda like you were saying.
With the help of a couple of buddies of mine during our CS assembly class, we poured through the documentation and wrote a memory worm, I.E. from straight out of Core Wars, we wrote "IMP" but for VAX-11 assembly. This is where you have the program make a copy of itself and transfer machine operation to the new copy you just made. This ends up filling all of RAM with a copy of itself, unless you have memory protections in place.
Then to make life a little bit more interesting, after running it under normal user mode with boring results like memory access errors, and running it under the VMS debugger utility to make sure it was doing what we wanted it to do, we fiddled with the processor status bits, including the "reserved" bits, changing the software to kernel mode and a couple of other "undocumented" features. We could run it without any software protection at that point. "Accidentily" we pressed the "Run" command in the debugger, then the system went down almost immediately... or at least nobody could get anything else to work.
Immediately we ran to the sysadmin and told the story to him. He thought we were off our rocker, and didn't believe us that we could shut down the system. After about a 1/2 hour, he decided to do a cold reboot of the VAX, after pulling out the manual for trying to figure out just how to do that. It still wouldn't reboot at that point. Finally, he had to re-install the OS from tape and rebuild the hard-drives from scratch, as if it were a fresh out-of-the-box computer (actually, worse than that). Because he was a pretty clueful sysadmin, he got everybody back up and going in about 2 days (regular tape backups of just about everything). This "club" of ours (we did register with college as a formal club... beer napkin, as the club charter, and all) still claimed "credit" for the mishap, but DEC said we were full of it and couldn't have done it. Since the computer was still under warentee at the time with essentially an unlimited service contract from DEC, it really didn't cost the school anything to deal with the issue, other than the downtime of the computer.
Yeah, we had fun with the VAX. I also loved the games of Pong and Breakout we made with the VT100 terminals (These are ASCII-only terminals). Weird glitches that would form every now and again because of time slices to other users, but otherwise pretty fun games. Not to mention Empire tournaments.
While I would admit that the mark of 100 km is arbitrary, I would like to offer this more scientific definition of the "boundary" of space:
When changes in "atmospheric content and pressure" have a much larger influence due to conditions on the Sun rather than with weather conditions on the Earth, you are no longer within the atmosphere of the Earth.
This definition can also be applied equally to Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or any other body that maintains its own atmosphere. By this definition, this occurs on the surface when you are talking about the Moon. (And IMHO a good way to define planet, but that is another story).
With regards to the Earth, this happens at about 100 km, so there is some strong reasoning for this altitude. Does the 1 meter differance mean anything? Does the fact that you are 20 one day and 21 the next mean anything when you buy a beer?
Sometimes you have to establish arbitrary limits, but it helps if they are grounded on something that is even approximately close to "reality" based on what is going on.
BTW, Space Ship One is going to try for 110 km anyway, just to make sure they are clearly above the arbitrary altitude.
In regards to people that flew the first flight of 100 miles or 1000 miles, you had better believe that it was a big deal when it happened. That happened so quickly after the first flight though that is didn't make so much of a big impact among the general public. Back in the 1920's records like this were being broken all of the time, and it was a big deal with the popular news media at the time (read the newspapers at your local library if you don't believe me)
While I would agree that Werner Von Braun was good at promoting the ida of spaceflight, it was indeed JFK who "caught the vision" and was able to get it moving. When you are President of the United States of America, there are very people who are going to say "No" to any crazy idea you come up with.
The program that Eisenhower originally established (it was his administration that started NASA) would have had the moon landings in the 1980's or 1990's, much like how Bush is currently "pushing" for in regards with "Moon, Mars, & Beyond", and that is considerably more vision than his father or his predecessor in regards to a national space program. The ISS was clearly a vision of Reagan (for good or ill). If we had a President of the USA that had the drive of JFK to move the space program further, we would be going to Mars sometime in the next 5 years.
There are other things about the Kennedy adminstration I am not too happy with, but his enthusiasm for space is not one of them. It is a case of how a single individual, in the right place, can have a significant impact on the history of all of mankind. This is also why people want to become President of the USA, because they can have this sort of impact. That in this case the technology situation was also ripe for something like to occur should also be noted.
My point on moderation. I prefer to comment when I disagree, so that I can vent my ideas, even when I have moderation points. I usually let them burn.
I usually agree with a few points, and I'm glad that we both agree here that the X-Prize is a laudable endeavor. I just hope the X-Prize Foundation spells out clearly where their next goal is going to be, and I hope it is LEO at least.
NASA was started to consolidate flight research centers. They were scattered in several agencies, although the NCA, widely considered the predecessor to NASA, did operate many of them. With the importation of V-2 rockets from Germany (with a little help from the U.S. Amry going in and taking the rockets by force) rocket research really started to get into high gear. This is where the term "rocket scientist" really came into its own, because before that a rocket scientist was a crazy lunatic like Goddard or Oberth who loved to blow things up.
Both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army got into a competition (not with Russia, but with each other) trying to see who could develop these rockets first and claim supremacy on their use. This was no different than what these two military branches did with aircraft just a mere 20 years earlier, including several officers who were involved with the early testing of military aircraft. Both the Navy and the Army Air Corp (later reorganized as the U.S. Air Force) launched thousands of rockets, learning quite a bit regarding how to build them, how to handle them, and what they really could be used for (in addition to putting a nuke on the top of them... that was obvious even to Hitler during WWII).
Later on, particularly after Sputnik achieved orbit, the Eisenhower Administration looked around and saw three competing space programs in the U.S. government. That was the Army, Navy, and a very anemic NCA which was a civilian program. What happened was a transfer of many of the people involved with the Army and Navy programs to the NCA, which was then renamed to become NASA. The parallels with what happened after 9/11 to form the TSA and the Dept. of Homeland Security can compared to how NASA was formed, and this is almost typical knee jerk reaction by Congress.
Because most of the working rocketry projects were already military, NASA took on a military flavor. And of course since many NASA personnel still had connections to the military, those people involved still tried to push goals that would benefit their respective armed services for weapons research. It paid off with the missile programs that are still maintained by the Air Force and Navy, which I guess was your "thinly veiled military control of the program".
NASA was concieved as a civilian-run agency from the beginning because it was obvious to everybody involved that spaceflight would take on aspects that were clearly non-military as well. In addition to trying to sell the program to the American people by trying to give ordinary citizens a "stake" in the program, there was an implied concept that commercial interests would also get involved. AT&T built one of the first commercial satellites (Telestar) and even paid for the whole thing out of their own pocket, including the rocket construction and the salaries of most of the ground crew (by contract through NASA) to get the thing up into space. What happened to kill the Telestar program should speak volumes for what was to come from NASA and is still an issue today.
The big push to seriously expand NASA occured during the Kennedy administration, where JFK was litterally reading some science fiction books, and got a sort of stary-eyed vision about where NASA could go. It was entirely his idea to get astronauts to the moon, and to push for NASA to become even more under civilian control. This was when the second batch of astronauts was announced, and included for the first time civilians like Neil Armstrong who did not hold military rank.
Regarding Columbia: You are doing a huge disservice to the memory of those astronauts to even repeat a wild rumor that has no basis in fact. While there are many things I can complain about regarding how NASA dealt with Columbia, it was not an intentional and deliberate action to kill astronauts. If that were the case, there would be no astronaut corp left at NASA, and they more than anybody else would know more about those issues than any tin-hat conspiracy
Look, you need to start somewhere. The Wright brothers didn't claim trans-atlantic flight, that was Charles Lindburgh, and that was to claim the Ortig prize.
The whole point of the X-prize competition is to encourage the development of rocket vehicles that would be capable of spaceflight, and you have to start somewhere. The X-prize tried to set a goal high enough that it would be difficult to obtain (many thought it was impossible for people to do this on their own dime) but yet easy enough that private individuals could actually get something going. The X-prize has done that with flying colors.
I would agree that the next reasonable goal that should be set is a 4-10 orbit minimum spaceflight that has all of the other characteristics of the X-prize as well, including pilot, two passengers, and minimal turn-around preparation (NASA hasn't figured this one out yet). Would this be enough for you? I doubt it. You would then say that real astronauts can only be those that travel to other planets/star systems/galaxies (always setting the bar higher because what has happened is not good enough).
I'm not totally sure about the X-Prize races they want to make, which seems to be the goal for the next round of X-Prize vehicles. There is something behind what the X-Prize Foundation is trying here, but they are trying to make a NASCAR type competition but for passenger spaceflight. Awards for setting records (highest flight, farthest flight, most number of passengers, most effecient). I would be more inclined to try not to fix the system, but rather set lofty goals and let people's imagination run wild. Turning it into a NASCAR competition is just going to make a bunch of fake rockets that give the appearance of passenger spaceflight, but really don't do anything. (Like the NASCAR vehicles that have painted decals for headlights.) While I would be willing to donate to the "Ansari X-Prize" competition if goals were set like orbital or lunar spaceflight, I don't know if I can stomache this current plan they are seemingly going for. That is a legitimate realm of criticism.
The actual text of this bill really isn't that long. For the link impared, this is the formal text of the bill:
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004'.
SEC. 2. INTENTIONAL INDUCEMENT OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.
Section 501 of title 17, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
(g)(1) In this subsection, the term `intentionally induces' means intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.
(2) Whoever intentionally induces any violation identified in subsection (a) shall be liable as an infringer.
(3) Nothing in this subsection shall enlarge or diminish the doctrines of vicarious and contributory liability for copyright infringement or require any court to unjustly withhold or impose any secondary liability for copyright infringement.
*******************
With all the knee jerk anti-Republican anti-anything sentiment on/., I am really surprised that nobody actually posted the contents of the bill itself.
The problem with this bill is that it is overly broad and can mean quite a bit to many people, and is so broad that it actually forces judges into interpreting this in whatever manner they really want to. This is especially surprising when Mr. Hatch's own website is railing on the fact that judges are ruling in areas he feels should be regulated by congress. A clue to Senator Hatch: If you don't want judges making arbitrary rulings, don't give them bills like this that allow this sort of broad judgement that makes them to have to create new laws for every arbitrary and silly concept that comes up.
Frankly, this is a poorly written bill, and should be killed for that reason alone.
What, from my reading of the above text can tell, this allows any system that allows bits to be copied in any manner, including chip manufacturers that incorporate the "MOV" opcode in their CPUs, to be potential targets of this legislation. By creating the "MOV" opcode in their CPU designs, they are intentionally creating a device that "intentionally aids, abets, induces, and procures and creates acts a reasonable person would find to induce copyright infringement". We are not talking P2P networks, but going much lower than that here.
Computers are information storage and retrevial devices. They work because they copy data and information all over the place. You can litterally sneeze, press the wrong key, and send a "copy" of any data that is on your computer to anybody in the world that is connected to your PC.
How this would more than likely be read by judges is that stuff like DeCSS would be illegal, because its purpose is to defeat copyright protection. I even think that was the intention of Sen. Hatch in this case. That is also why P2P networks of most sorts would also be declared illegal, although that is starting to get into more grey areas.
Where I wish that legslation would have gone, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is to go after hardcore(??) software pirates. I.E. people who make it their livelyhood to produce copies of copyrighted works without payment to the original authors/companies that make the copyrighted material. I could name many cases that I know of personally where for-profit companies, in some cases even with a business license and chartered corporations, in the USA (not some far-off country that has more liberal copyright laws), have copied computer software with impunity and only bought a single copy when they've sold hundreds of copies out of their store or business.
Linux does not cause invasion of privacy. This is no different than what happens when you send e-mail, and is exactly the same problem that happens with e-mail spoofers that claim to be somebody else. Not particuarly hard to do, but you need to use software that has been modified to get this to work. Regular e-mail browsers don't normally let you "spoof" your e-mail account, because there really isn't a point to doing so, but if you are a script kiddie it is no problem.
BTW, this isn't restricted to Linux, but to any operating system that allows the user to enter byte codes in some manner to cause direct manipulation of the CPU (or virtual CPU) registers... I.E. software written by programmers. This software can be easily written in Windows or TRS-80 DOS as well (the TRS-80 might be a real challenge though).
OK, I get it now, computer devices of any kind that have a CPU are an invasion of privacy!
Also, VOIP providers are not sending too much information to end users. They are simply sending information. Period. The problem is that phone companies _**MUST**_ send information about the caller, in part to establish billing records, because of federal wiretap/tracing laws, and to help with troubleshooting/diagnostics of telephone equipment. Try to troubleshoot phone equipment and identify failures without knowing the phone number and being able to trace its connection route. This is the real reason for the TRACERT program with most TCP/IP software collections when trying to trace TCP networks.
Keep in mind that when you set up one of these Asterisk PBX systems, you are in effect becoming you own telephone company (sans regulation, but that is a different story), and you are no longer talking to the phone company as an end-user but rather as a peer. And before you start cracking jokes about having the world's smallest telephone company, there are some very tiny exchanges dating back to the 1920's that still have less than 100 telephones on the POTS network, and are treated as a telephone company, complete with FCC filings and state utility regulation. So when I say that you become your own telephone company, I am not kidding here either. With the Asterisk system you could even in theory send wires over to your neighbors and hook them up to your network, as long as you follow federal and state laws. As long as you keep them within your home or business, you are pretty much free to do what you want.
With the main voice connection being made through TCP/IP packet switched networks, just about anybody can set themselves up to help establish "peerage" to you as well, so an arbitrary law to restrict this information to some users in some circumstances just won't work. If anybody gets this data (like your supposedly blocked phone number), then everybody in theory can be able to get it.
I'm still trying to learn more about this issue. There is an "Open Source" group that is trying to put together an independent e-voting system.
The site I was thinking about was the GPL'd E-vote site that also has a source forge website for development of this system. I think this project has some very good merits, but unfortunately they also have the attitude of "if we make it they will come". I wish them luck, and if this really does succeed I hope this project at least forms the initial basis for proper e-voting systems. The sample ballot they have made shows just what this could really turn into.
In terms of voter fraud, the problem is that trying to uncover registration fraud (which is a totally different beast from tampering with ballots after/while they are cast) is difficult at best unless you really do properly identify each individual and confirm citizenship/voter elegibility (like disqualifications for committing a certain kinds of felonies). With SCOTUS saying it is unconstititional to determine identities of voters, and with voter registration cards being handed out like campaign literature (sometimes even with campaign literature), how can you tell just who is registered and if that person really exists?
Obituaries are sometimes used to remove people from voting rolls, but what if they are missed? Where I live, the only sure way to get dropped from the voting lists is to not vote for an extended period of time, like 10 years or so.
It became a local issue here that some non-citizens were voting in the local election. State law allows for "poll observers", presumably representatives of local political parties but it can be any member of the general public. You may have to be an actual resident of the precint that you are "observing", but I don't know of any other restriction. Mainly what these observers are allowed to do is drive the poll workers nuts and get in everybody's hair. Officially they can "challenge" an individual ballot, which gets put into a seperate stack and the voter registration information if verified somehow. Election judges also can put ballots into this "provisional" category, and there are certain rules that require ballots be put there anyway, such as late registration or if the judge suspects there might be something not quite correct. Generally only about 2-3% of all the ballots are of "provisional" status.
The issue came up regarding illegal aliens in particular voting in local elections. Some people thought it was stupid to even suggest the idea, but it became an election issue and is still being discussed. A group of local citizen threatened to act as "poll watchers" and challenge everybody that was of a certain ethnic minority. Federal election officials came in and has made a minor issue into a major one, and the real issue regarding if non-citizens are voting was never really addressed.
The state Lt. Governor, who is in this state constitutionally responsible for the state election system, made IMHO a rather stupid statement: "We have determined that there is not even one non-citizen registered to vote in this state." How that was determined and the blanket 100% certainty makes me wonder if this really is a bigger issue than is being made out right now. If you can't keep non-citizens from voting, how about duplicate registrations (being registered to vote in more than one precinct, even with the same name, and voting in each precinct), or controlling people voting in behalf of somebody else, like a boss, union rep, or voting through extortion. At the moment it can't even be verified that this might be happening, so the presumption is that it is not happening. I consider that strong logic (yeah, right!*) Not a single issue I've mentioned here even has to deal with an election judge, because the fraud occurs even before the voting booth opens up.
My point exactly. After looking at this, I came to think that a really good "test" for this would be some very heavilly publicized minor election, particularly if you could get some "white hat" hackers to help participate. Something like the election for a college student body president, something big enough to matter, but minor enough that it only gives a scare of what it would mean on the national level.
Publicize ahead of time that this election might, or even is likely to be hacked. I mean, this is the point, and I think college students might even go along with this if is proves a point. Have a legitimate campaign, do some very heavy statistical sample polling of the student body prior to the election to find out just who would be likely to win if the election really were held, then have the hackers make the school mascot the winner of the contest.
Maybe I'm just wishing here, but I'm hoping that something like this doesn't happen (the school mascot of a major university winning an election) in a major contest, like U.S. Senator or even the President of the USA. The point is that most people here on/. are fully aware of the implications that election fraud can have on democracy, but for some reason trying to explain this concept to the general public is incredibly difficult.
It is telling that the people really pushing for e-voting are politicians, and the people screaming that more caution should be given regarding expansion of technology in this matter needs a more careful reasoned approach are Electrical Engineers and Computer Science types. And this is not strictly because many programmers and circuit designers are getting grey hair either.
I am adding my voice from the "Right" that feels that e-voting machines as currently designed (by Diebold and the few others) are a fraud of collasial proportions.
I also think that Democrats, as well as Republicans, are just as guilty of trying to cause this train wreck, and any voter fraud will be an equal opportunity exersize done by both parties.
While I don't think we can resonably expect to reduce the size of the American government to pre-Hoover Administration levels, it would be a nice goal.
I agree with you that government simply needs to get our of our lives. Last night I had a run-in with the Police that was absolutely stupid, and was really unnecessary. I hate to have to wake up with a Police officer shining a flashlight into my eyes at 1 A.M. and waking me up. For no damn good reason either. Too many people want the government to solve problems that are much easier solved by simply being a good neighbor and rolling up your sleeves and asking "how can I help?" The fact that I'm writing this message should show just how stupid that invasion of over 20 police officers into my home really was.
I support the invasion of Iraq on many levels and for many reasons. I think Bush is doing a pretty good job, and I'm litterally praying to God and thanking him that a President Gore wasn't around on 9/11. Do I think Bush is ready for asension/exhaltation? NO He is a good man in a tough job during difficult times, and his opponents have little to show how they would do things different other than sit on their hands and do nothing. Do I think Bush has messed up some issues? Absolutely! Do I think there may be a better candidate than Bush this November? I'm not certain, and I may in fact vote for somebody else. He still has several months to prove to me he is worth something in terms of getting my vote. In 2000 I didn't vote for Bush, but I didn't vote for Gore either. I did vote, however.
Keep in mind that there are several things that are attempted to be done with e-voting systems of any kind (even Diebold's):
Voter Verification Voters need to be verified that they and only they have voted on a particlar ballot, and that they are only voting in one precint and have only voted once and that they are elegible to vote because they are a citizen of that particular city/county/state/nation that really can vote in that election. E-Voting allows more flexability to be able to do this, and keeps people from hitting all of the polling places claiming that you just "moved in" to that precint. Other systems can and do this verification, but having the voting rolls dealt with electonically can expedite the procedure, and can potentially help keep voters only voting in a single precint. They can also potentially pull up additional information such as a photo ID or other verification information than is commonly used currently to determine if the person casting the vote really is elegible to vote. If the photo is of somebody in their late 90s and the person voting is another gender or race and in their mid 20s, you can suspect voter fraud occuring.
Simplification/rapid updating of ballot books When ballot books are printed, they have to be prepared often several weeks to even a couple of months ahead of time. Often a candidate dies before the election, becomes disqualified, or something else happens that might force a change on the ballot itself. Perhaps some local issue has come up, and the city counsil (or state legislature) would like to put it on the ballot. Tranditional system put an early cut-off time period before this can happen, and often the excuse as to why a certain issue isn't on the ballot is because the ballots have already been printed. Dead candidates that win cause even more headaches, and IMHO put the legitimacy of democracies into jeapordy. On the simplification side, by having electronic information available additional information could be put on a ballot. When you are voting for a referendum, for example, a quick short reference could be on the screen, but a "see more info" button could be available for you to read the full text that you are voting for. Where I live an "official" voting guide is published by the state government that presents pros and cons written by supporters and people opposed to different issues. Candidates are also allowed to write a short platform statement, usually about 100 words or so, to express why they think they deserve the job. Why couldn't this same information be available to you when you are voting. Far too often I have been in the voting booth, particularly for local political offices like dog catcher, and have absolutely no idea who any of the candidates are or why they want the job. How do I know that the person I am voting for is not the next Charles Manson follower? The instant native language support is also an issue, and voting instructions in Klingon can even be given for relatively little cost, but you have already covered this issue.
Consistancy in voting One issue that bubble ballots have, as do the punch cards, and even the classic paper ballot...place X here type, is that sometimes it is hard to determine just for whom you are voting. If you are voting with any of these systems sometimes it appears as though you have voted for more than one candidate, or none at all. That was what the whole debacle in Florida was about, and is really the #1 reason why computer-based voting systems that involved a computer terminal for the voter are being developed (I.E. e-voting). The mechanical level voting machines were also developed for the very same reason, and the fraud issues are almost identical in many cases. Still, when you vote, if there is some audit trail that lets you see the people that you are voting for as you are handing in the ballot, just to make sure that it is putting the correct vote for whom you actually did vote, and gives you the chance to change your mind befo
Seriously. I proposed this earlier, but for political parties like the Communist Party of the USA, or the American Nazi Party. If you want the job (even if you are constitutionally inelegable) I say that you are nominated.
*I* won't vote for you, but something does need to be done to wake people up about what the problems are regarding e-voting. I'm just glad that "mainstream" media sources are beginning to see this problem.
Yes, both mechanical, electrical, and software. And software disassmembly is perhaps the hardest, but the easiest to get rid of garbage that should never have been there in the first place.
The test for a real hacker: Ever dis/reassemble any device, get it working, and get another really cool device from the left over parts?
All I said is that this should have been put in the science.slashdot.org section rather than on the main page. Yes, this is news, and I regularly read the science section anyway (and grateful that the gaming section is off to itself). I wouldn't have missed this story had it been put there, but much fewer people. At least I knew how to check the "No Karma Bonus" button on the post.
While this is sort of a dupe, it is from a different news source. Instead of some Australian newspapers (who deserves the scoop), it is straight from NASA. So in a way it is a dup.
I don't see why this got posted on the main page though. As a follow-up in the Science section only, perhaps, but not up front like this.
There is one and only one reason I can come up with for crashing Gallileo into Jupiter (well, two reasons):
1) Perhaps, by some long shot, some form of life is actually found on Europa. We need to find out if that life originated on Europa or if it came from Earth. With Martian rocks being found in Antarctica, I don't see any reason that rocks from the Earth havn't made it to Jupiter, with a few "passengers" along for the ride (like when the K-T incident asteroid hit the Earth). Even that would be an interesting discovery though, so until a good very well sterilized space probe can be built, let's try to keep the variables down. That is called science.
2) They wanted to see what it would be like to plunge into a gas giant. In some ways I wish that it would have been built to do this rather than simply plunge into the depth. A few pictures of Jupiter from inside the atmosphere would have been incredible. I hope some space probe in the near (> 100 years) future actually gets around to doing something like that.
Why should I care one little bit about the political philosophies of Sir Aurthr C. Clarke?
I like his stories, and he has inspired litterally millions of people to go beyond this world we live on, including coming up with the original idea of geo-sync communications satellites. Still, if I want to go there why should I care one little bit about his feeling in this area.
Yes, I know this was a joke, and I'll try to take it as such. I just want to make sure that it stays the joke and not something that is unfortunately taken seriously, like Al Gore's inventor status over the Internet. Now that really is a good joke.
In terms of real $$$ that might have been earned from legitimate customers buying products they thought were legitimate, but in fact were pirated movies?
Yeah, you may be correct. And this is the real problem that needs to be addressed. None of the copy protection schemes that I've seen from the MPAA really address this system. I have seen a compressed version of this whole copy protection paranoia hit the software industry, from people messing around with data storage formats, encrypted object code, and dongels. None of it works, and very quickly the hacks to defeat any system get published on the internet. All of these schemes tend to screw up software anyway, and add bugs where there were none before.
As a software developer trying to sell software commercially, the best thing you can do for your customers is to simply give the data (whatever it is, audio, video, x86 object code, etc.) free and clear, and then simply use courts for those who are doing blatent copyright violations, such as a competitor who is giving away free copies of the really cool software utility that you wrote, when in fact it is only going to your customers.
In all this, I don't see the MPAA doing one little bit to stop the blatent wholesale copyright violators at all. I havn't even heard of a major pirate being shut down (you would think the MPAA would want to make a lot of noise when that happens, just to discourage people, like when a major Cocaine shippment gets seized by the DEA). Instead, I see them shooting themselves in the foot with both slapping indy film makers and with alienating their customers from ever watching their movies.
There is one and only one way that I could possibly see that you could make an "unhackable" DVD disc.
It is called "One-Time Pad encryption", and is what the NSA and CIA use when they really are paranoid about somebody trying to read some of their communications. Basically, you get a random noise source (often background microware radiation hiss or even more often some radioactive source and using the unpredictible nature of individual decay particles, that way producing true random numbers) and then with that source of numbers you produce something that would go into a custom player. Each person with this special player could recieve discs that could only be played on that individual player, and anybody else would litterally see just random noise on an individual DVD-disc.
Now here is the nasty part of that system: If you produce more than one DVD using the same one-time pad, the code can be cracked. That is why it is called one-time pad, because once used it can never be used again. The NSA has usually a pile of CD-ROMs or DVDs with these codes on them (or some other digital medium), and they burn/destroy the discs as soon as they use one, with a duplicate of that disc available with the person sending/receiving a message, who either decodes/encodes the data and then similary destroys the disk.
Now a modified version of this could in theory be able to stop a random hacker from getting a disc from the U.S. Postal Service and decoding it, but there is still one more place of vunerability:
The player itself must decode the movie. I think most Academy members would object to the disc being destroyed in the process of watching it (perhaps they got a phone call in the middle of watching a scene and want to back it up for a moment to catch what was going on), and then there is one other vunerability.
The movie must be viewed at some point, and regardless of what other encryption schemes are done, it must be decoded to some very simple colorspace (RGB or with video usually YUV triplet pixel values) that can then be displayed on some viewing system. The whole point of this is that Robert Redford or Tom Hanks can watch a nominated movie at home, in their underware, whenever or however they feel like it. Or with a few friends if they so choose. Even then what is stopping somebody from pulling out a camcorder and filming the TV/projection screen that is showing the movie, and don't get me to rattle on about Macrovision or watermarking... that doesn't work and ruins the image anyway.
I gave the most plausable system from somebody who has worked with multimedia systems before, and even with this hyper-paranoid system it can still be cracked.
Copyright violation acts are an inner ethics issue, like not killing somebody or not shoplifting. Some things can be done to help discourage breaking the law or stopping people from doing things like this, but if you are really interested in accomplishing the goal (like killing the President of the USA), there really isn't anything that can be done to stop it from happening. All security does in these cases is to simply put up "speed bumps" to make it harder to accomplish, and weed out the rank amatures from the professionals. Unfortunately in this world there are people who totally lack ethics and would do anything and say anything, sometimes just for fun, like feeding your grandmother to the Ravanous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
The problem really isn't Microsoft either. Remember, they got into the internet way late in the game.
In order to make a secure OS, you need to do it from the beginning. You absolutely can't put security into any software package after the fact. You can leave places where security can be hooked in to make it more secure at a later date, but it has to be in the overall architechture design.
In this respect, Linux got a little bit of a boost with the fact that Unix in general has been designed from the beginning to be with much more secure system. I don't think it was a deliberate move on the part of Linus Torvalds, but he was copying the overall design that came from people who had done some serious thinking about security, For Unix gurus, by the time Linux came into being, were already thinking of security implications.
Windows does what Windows was designed for: A GUI interface on a cohesive set of generic APIs that control generic I/O devices of a single user IBM-PC compatable computer system. Inter-PC communication was intended to be significantly slower than the CPU speed, and even then was only supposed to be connecting people in the same room, or at most the same building.
That Windows is being used for applications that don't fit the above description is a testament to the stupidity of the people who are using it in manners other than that simple explaination. Computer viruses would still be a problem with Windows, but it would take much longer for them to propogate, and the I/O vectors for virus propogation would be restricted to disc media of some sort.
The security problems that Windows is facing right now is the fact that executable software can be sent into a computer through means other than a floppy drive or CD-ROM. The avenues that these worms are coming into most people's computers take advantage of the fact that the internet is a pervasive technology, where data can be tranfered without the knowledge of the person using the computer.
I happen to know of one local restaurant where I live that was also a part of a national chain. After failing 3 food inspection surveys by the local Dept. of Health they revoked their business license, and the building had to be demolished. I think the franchisee also lost their franchise. That is a little harsh, but that is how it should be.
The point here is that while the threat of legal action might try to keep some people honest, there are those cases that do come up where you actually have to enforce the law, and unfortunately it has to happen when the situation gets really out of hand.
I would have to agree that for a restaurant you need to keep high standards. A friend of mine pointed out that you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the quality of their bathroom. If they keep a clean and tidy bathroom it is likely that they also keep a clean and tidy kitchen. Very rarely do they keep a clean bathroom and a messy kitchen.
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You really think this was in some tech manual? This was just a bunch of college kids that knew a bunch about computers and could read between the lines, even though some of the information was plainly available. This was a case of security through obscurity, and I'd also like to point out that this sort of hacking was from a bunch of computer geeks who cut their teeth on mainframe computers and the early 8-bit micros like the Apple ][ and Comodore systems. While technical documentation was pretty good for those early systems, you still had to push to find stuff that wasn't "officially" listed in the specs. We just happened to find another "undocumented" feature in the VAX systems, that is all. There is stuff like this in a Pentium CPU as well (undocumented CPU instructions and status register bits), so it really shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
Had I been doing some of this stuff in a commercial, professional environment, I more than likely would have been fired. Instead, I was at a very permissive college where the faculty actually encouraged this sort of behavior, on the theory that we were learning about computer architechture by doing this sort of hacking, and the system was bought principly for our use anyway. As long as we didn't screw up the system too bad for the rest of the students, we were welcome and encouraged to see how far we could go.
The professors at the college were under the mistaken belief at the time that software-only attacks really couldn't do that much damage, and for the most part they were correct. The worst-case situation was like I described, where the system OS had to be rebuilt.
Honestly, I sincerely hope that NASA does NOT become the agency to do space treaties. As consultants to full-time diplomats, perhaps. As members of the negotiation team, yeah, I could see that.
As the principle body charged with the negotiations? I shudder at the thought. NASA is so ill equipped to do such a thing it is incredible. They also have their own interests in mind, and I can see NASA negotiating away commercial spaceflight simply because they don't see any practical reason to keep it.
Space treaties that have been written to date are so awful that I just cringe to think of what else could be come up with next. They are also meaningless for the most part, because most of the nations that sign them don't have spaceflight capabilities anyway, nor do they think there is any reason to believe that it could happen in the near future for them. Satellite communications is enough for the moment for most of those countries, and it does mainly a good PR move, particularly when they can show they support a globally popular treaty that the USA doesn't want to sign.
The X-Prize Foundation originally tried to raise all fo the funding to make the prize essentially open-ended. They got to about $5 million before they hit close to a brick wall in raising much more money other than nickle and dimes that the occasional space enthuisist was sending forward. That was when they "bought" an insurance police to get the rest of the money, on the condition that it had to be won by the end of 2004.
This is why there is a time limit. It wasn't there originally, but once there were several teams making some serious progress toward the goal, they decided to make the prize fully-funded if it were to be won. It also put a little bit of time pressure on some of the teams, who had earlier been trying to refine their vehicles rather than really pushing for the deadline.
First of all, it was an early version of VMS, and I'm not really absolutely sure that this software was the cause, but the coincidence was just too good to be true. In terms of the processor status register having an effect on processor protection, there are reserved bits that are meant for kernel mode software in the CPU, and in some parts of the VAX documentation it even mentions them, just not in the normal assembly language sections. The only way to set the bits is to push the status register onto the stack, flip the bits manually, then pop them back into the status register. Normally this is done with a subroutine jump, but if you know where the state of the register is stored at in the stack, you can edit it and put it back.
The Sysadmin did try a bunch of other things first, and it was DEC that acutally suggested that he reload VMS onto the system. There were some serious security breeches I didn't mention, including how I got clear-text version of the password file from my individual user account (no privledges, supposedly). Let's just say that we had fun hacking that system, and the primary users were primarily CS students, so we had a whole lot of fun pulling pranks on each other, together with a 24/7 computer lab at a relatively small college (about 2000 students, with only about 150 CS students total...if you included the CS 101 crowd as well). What is more, these exploits paled in comparison to early tales when the college was hooked up to the early MECC system on an old CDC Cyber mainframe. Now that was real fun hacking, but I was in junior high school when all that fun was going on, and just hitting it from the outside barely able to run my own software and simple BASIC programs that I had written for that system at the time. That old system made the VAX seem positivlely modern.
The problem was that in order to crash a VAX, it had to be intentional. Kinda like you were saying.
With the help of a couple of buddies of mine during our CS assembly class, we poured through the documentation and wrote a memory worm, I.E. from straight out of Core Wars, we wrote "IMP" but for VAX-11 assembly. This is where you have the program make a copy of itself and transfer machine operation to the new copy you just made. This ends up filling all of RAM with a copy of itself, unless you have memory protections in place.
Then to make life a little bit more interesting, after running it under normal user mode with boring results like memory access errors, and running it under the VMS debugger utility to make sure it was doing what we wanted it to do, we fiddled with the processor status bits, including the "reserved" bits, changing the software to kernel mode and a couple of other "undocumented" features. We could run it without any software protection at that point. "Accidentily" we pressed the "Run" command in the debugger, then the system went down almost immediately... or at least nobody could get anything else to work.
Immediately we ran to the sysadmin and told the story to him. He thought we were off our rocker, and didn't believe us that we could shut down the system. After about a 1/2 hour, he decided to do a cold reboot of the VAX, after pulling out the manual for trying to figure out just how to do that. It still wouldn't reboot at that point. Finally, he had to re-install the OS from tape and rebuild the hard-drives from scratch, as if it were a fresh out-of-the-box computer (actually, worse than that). Because he was a pretty clueful sysadmin, he got everybody back up and going in about 2 days (regular tape backups of just about everything). This "club" of ours (we did register with college as a formal club... beer napkin, as the club charter, and all) still claimed "credit" for the mishap, but DEC said we were full of it and couldn't have done it. Since the computer was still under warentee at the time with essentially an unlimited service contract from DEC, it really didn't cost the school anything to deal with the issue, other than the downtime of the computer.
Yeah, we had fun with the VAX. I also loved the games of Pong and Breakout we made with the VT100 terminals (These are ASCII-only terminals). Weird glitches that would form every now and again because of time slices to other users, but otherwise pretty fun games. Not to mention Empire tournaments.
While I would admit that the mark of 100 km is arbitrary, I would like to offer this more scientific definition of the "boundary" of space:
When changes in "atmospheric content and pressure" have a much larger influence due to conditions on the Sun rather than with weather conditions on the Earth, you are no longer within the atmosphere of the Earth.
This definition can also be applied equally to Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or any other body that maintains its own atmosphere. By this definition, this occurs on the surface when you are talking about the Moon. (And IMHO a good way to define planet, but that is another story).
With regards to the Earth, this happens at about 100 km, so there is some strong reasoning for this altitude. Does the 1 meter differance mean anything? Does the fact that you are 20 one day and 21 the next mean anything when you buy a beer?
Sometimes you have to establish arbitrary limits, but it helps if they are grounded on something that is even approximately close to "reality" based on what is going on.
BTW, Space Ship One is going to try for 110 km anyway, just to make sure they are clearly above the arbitrary altitude.
In regards to people that flew the first flight of 100 miles or 1000 miles, you had better believe that it was a big deal when it happened. That happened so quickly after the first flight though that is didn't make so much of a big impact among the general public. Back in the 1920's records like this were being broken all of the time, and it was a big deal with the popular news media at the time (read the newspapers at your local library if you don't believe me)
While I would agree that Werner Von Braun was good at promoting the ida of spaceflight, it was indeed JFK who "caught the vision" and was able to get it moving. When you are President of the United States of America, there are very people who are going to say "No" to any crazy idea you come up with.
The program that Eisenhower originally established (it was his administration that started NASA) would have had the moon landings in the 1980's or 1990's, much like how Bush is currently "pushing" for in regards with "Moon, Mars, & Beyond", and that is considerably more vision than his father or his predecessor in regards to a national space program. The ISS was clearly a vision of Reagan (for good or ill). If we had a President of the USA that had the drive of JFK to move the space program further, we would be going to Mars sometime in the next 5 years.
There are other things about the Kennedy adminstration I am not too happy with, but his enthusiasm for space is not one of them. It is a case of how a single individual, in the right place, can have a significant impact on the history of all of mankind. This is also why people want to become President of the USA, because they can have this sort of impact. That in this case the technology situation was also ripe for something like to occur should also be noted.
My point on moderation. I prefer to comment when I disagree, so that I can vent my ideas, even when I have moderation points. I usually let them burn.
I usually agree with a few points, and I'm glad that we both agree here that the X-Prize is a laudable endeavor. I just hope the X-Prize Foundation spells out clearly where their next goal is going to be, and I hope it is LEO at least.
This is utter BS.
NASA was started to consolidate flight research centers. They were scattered in several agencies, although the NCA, widely considered the predecessor to NASA, did operate many of them. With the importation of V-2 rockets from Germany (with a little help from the U.S. Amry going in and taking the rockets by force) rocket research really started to get into high gear. This is where the term "rocket scientist" really came into its own, because before that a rocket scientist was a crazy lunatic like Goddard or Oberth who loved to blow things up.
Both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army got into a competition (not with Russia, but with each other) trying to see who could develop these rockets first and claim supremacy on their use. This was no different than what these two military branches did with aircraft just a mere 20 years earlier, including several officers who were involved with the early testing of military aircraft. Both the Navy and the Army Air Corp (later reorganized as the U.S. Air Force) launched thousands of rockets, learning quite a bit regarding how to build them, how to handle them, and what they really could be used for (in addition to putting a nuke on the top of them... that was obvious even to Hitler during WWII).
Later on, particularly after Sputnik achieved orbit, the Eisenhower Administration looked around and saw three competing space programs in the U.S. government. That was the Army, Navy, and a very anemic NCA which was a civilian program. What happened was a transfer of many of the people involved with the Army and Navy programs to the NCA, which was then renamed to become NASA. The parallels with what happened after 9/11 to form the TSA and the Dept. of Homeland Security can compared to how NASA was formed, and this is almost typical knee jerk reaction by Congress.
Because most of the working rocketry projects were already military, NASA took on a military flavor. And of course since many NASA personnel still had connections to the military, those people involved still tried to push goals that would benefit their respective armed services for weapons research. It paid off with the missile programs that are still maintained by the Air Force and Navy, which I guess was your "thinly veiled military control of the program".
NASA was concieved as a civilian-run agency from the beginning because it was obvious to everybody involved that spaceflight would take on aspects that were clearly non-military as well. In addition to trying to sell the program to the American people by trying to give ordinary citizens a "stake" in the program, there was an implied concept that commercial interests would also get involved. AT&T built one of the first commercial satellites (Telestar) and even paid for the whole thing out of their own pocket, including the rocket construction and the salaries of most of the ground crew (by contract through NASA) to get the thing up into space. What happened to kill the Telestar program should speak volumes for what was to come from NASA and is still an issue today.
The big push to seriously expand NASA occured during the Kennedy administration, where JFK was litterally reading some science fiction books, and got a sort of stary-eyed vision about where NASA could go. It was entirely his idea to get astronauts to the moon, and to push for NASA to become even more under civilian control. This was when the second batch of astronauts was announced, and included for the first time civilians like Neil Armstrong who did not hold military rank.
Regarding Columbia: You are doing a huge disservice to the memory of those astronauts to even repeat a wild rumor that has no basis in fact. While there are many things I can complain about regarding how NASA dealt with Columbia, it was not an intentional and deliberate action to kill astronauts. If that were the case, there would be no astronaut corp left at NASA, and they more than anybody else would know more about those issues than any tin-hat conspiracy
Look, you need to start somewhere. The Wright brothers didn't claim trans-atlantic flight, that was Charles Lindburgh, and that was to claim the Ortig prize.
The whole point of the X-prize competition is to encourage the development of rocket vehicles that would be capable of spaceflight, and you have to start somewhere. The X-prize tried to set a goal high enough that it would be difficult to obtain (many thought it was impossible for people to do this on their own dime) but yet easy enough that private individuals could actually get something going. The X-prize has done that with flying colors.
I would agree that the next reasonable goal that should be set is a 4-10 orbit minimum spaceflight that has all of the other characteristics of the X-prize as well, including pilot, two passengers, and minimal turn-around preparation (NASA hasn't figured this one out yet). Would this be enough for you? I doubt it. You would then say that real astronauts can only be those that travel to other planets/star systems/galaxies (always setting the bar higher because what has happened is not good enough).
I'm not totally sure about the X-Prize races they want to make, which seems to be the goal for the next round of X-Prize vehicles. There is something behind what the X-Prize Foundation is trying here, but they are trying to make a NASCAR type competition but for passenger spaceflight. Awards for setting records (highest flight, farthest flight, most number of passengers, most effecient). I would be more inclined to try not to fix the system, but rather set lofty goals and let people's imagination run wild. Turning it into a NASCAR competition is just going to make a bunch of fake rockets that give the appearance of passenger spaceflight, but really don't do anything. (Like the NASCAR vehicles that have painted decals for headlights.) While I would be willing to donate to the "Ansari X-Prize" competition if goals were set like orbital or lunar spaceflight, I don't know if I can stomache this current plan they are seemingly going for. That is a legitimate realm of criticism.
The actual text of this bill really isn't that long. For the link impared, this is the formal text of the bill:
/., I am really surprised that nobody actually posted the contents of the bill itself.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004'.
SEC. 2. INTENTIONAL INDUCEMENT OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.
Section 501 of title 17, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
(g)(1) In this subsection, the term `intentionally induces' means intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures, and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement based upon all relevant information about such acts then reasonably available to the actor, including whether the activity relies on infringement for its commercial viability.
(2) Whoever intentionally induces any violation identified in subsection (a) shall be liable as an infringer.
(3) Nothing in this subsection shall enlarge or diminish the doctrines of vicarious and contributory liability for copyright infringement or require any court to unjustly withhold or impose any secondary liability for copyright infringement.
*******************
With all the knee jerk anti-Republican anti-anything sentiment on
The problem with this bill is that it is overly broad and can mean quite a bit to many people, and is so broad that it actually forces judges into interpreting this in whatever manner they really want to. This is especially surprising when Mr. Hatch's own website is railing on the fact that judges are ruling in areas he feels should be regulated by congress. A clue to Senator Hatch: If you don't want judges making arbitrary rulings, don't give them bills like this that allow this sort of broad judgement that makes them to have to create new laws for every arbitrary and silly concept that comes up.
Frankly, this is a poorly written bill, and should be killed for that reason alone.
What, from my reading of the above text can tell, this allows any system that allows bits to be copied in any manner, including chip manufacturers that incorporate the "MOV" opcode in their CPUs, to be potential targets of this legislation. By creating the "MOV" opcode in their CPU designs, they are intentionally creating a device that "intentionally aids, abets, induces, and procures and creates acts a reasonable person would find to induce copyright infringement". We are not talking P2P networks, but going much lower than that here.
Computers are information storage and retrevial devices. They work because they copy data and information all over the place. You can litterally sneeze, press the wrong key, and send a "copy" of any data that is on your computer to anybody in the world that is connected to your PC.
How this would more than likely be read by judges is that stuff like DeCSS would be illegal, because its purpose is to defeat copyright protection. I even think that was the intention of Sen. Hatch in this case. That is also why P2P networks of most sorts would also be declared illegal, although that is starting to get into more grey areas.
Where I wish that legslation would have gone, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is to go after hardcore(??) software pirates. I.E. people who make it their livelyhood to produce copies of copyrighted works without payment to the original authors/companies that make the copyrighted material. I could name many cases that I know of personally where for-profit companies, in some cases even with a business license and chartered corporations, in the USA (not some far-off country that has more liberal copyright laws), have copied computer software with impunity and only bought a single copy when they've sold hundreds of copies out of their store or business.
The key is the act of copyright
What utter BS.
Linux does not cause invasion of privacy. This is no different than what happens when you send e-mail, and is exactly the same problem that happens with e-mail spoofers that claim to be somebody else. Not particuarly hard to do, but you need to use software that has been modified to get this to work. Regular e-mail browsers don't normally let you "spoof" your e-mail account, because there really isn't a point to doing so, but if you are a script kiddie it is no problem.
BTW, this isn't restricted to Linux, but to any operating system that allows the user to enter byte codes in some manner to cause direct manipulation of the CPU (or virtual CPU) registers... I.E. software written by programmers. This software can be easily written in Windows or TRS-80 DOS as well (the TRS-80 might be a real challenge though).
OK, I get it now, computer devices of any kind that have a CPU are an invasion of privacy!
Also, VOIP providers are not sending too much information to end users. They are simply sending information. Period. The problem is that phone companies _**MUST**_ send information about the caller, in part to establish billing records, because of federal wiretap/tracing laws, and to help with troubleshooting/diagnostics of telephone equipment. Try to troubleshoot phone equipment and identify failures without knowing the phone number and being able to trace its connection route. This is the real reason for the TRACERT program with most TCP/IP software collections when trying to trace TCP networks.
Keep in mind that when you set up one of these Asterisk PBX systems, you are in effect becoming you own telephone company (sans regulation, but that is a different story), and you are no longer talking to the phone company as an end-user but rather as a peer. And before you start cracking jokes about having the world's smallest telephone company, there are some very tiny exchanges dating back to the 1920's that still have less than 100 telephones on the POTS network, and are treated as a telephone company, complete with FCC filings and state utility regulation. So when I say that you become your own telephone company, I am not kidding here either. With the Asterisk system you could even in theory send wires over to your neighbors and hook them up to your network, as long as you follow federal and state laws. As long as you keep them within your home or business, you are pretty much free to do what you want.
With the main voice connection being made through TCP/IP packet switched networks, just about anybody can set themselves up to help establish "peerage" to you as well, so an arbitrary law to restrict this information to some users in some circumstances just won't work. If anybody gets this data (like your supposedly blocked phone number), then everybody in theory can be able to get it.
I'm still trying to learn more about this issue. There is an "Open Source" group that is trying to put together an independent e-voting system.
The site I was thinking about was the GPL'd E-vote site that also has a source forge website for development of this system. I think this project has some very good merits, but unfortunately they also have the attitude of "if we make it they will come". I wish them luck, and if this really does succeed I hope this project at least forms the initial basis for proper e-voting systems. The sample ballot they have made shows just what this could really turn into.
In terms of voter fraud, the problem is that trying to uncover registration fraud (which is a totally different beast from tampering with ballots after/while they are cast) is difficult at best unless you really do properly identify each individual and confirm citizenship/voter elegibility (like disqualifications for committing a certain kinds of felonies). With SCOTUS saying it is unconstititional to determine identities of voters, and with voter registration cards being handed out like campaign literature (sometimes even with campaign literature), how can you tell just who is registered and if that person really exists?
Obituaries are sometimes used to remove people from voting rolls, but what if they are missed? Where I live, the only sure way to get dropped from the voting lists is to not vote for an extended period of time, like 10 years or so.
It became a local issue here that some non-citizens were voting in the local election. State law allows for "poll observers", presumably representatives of local political parties but it can be any member of the general public. You may have to be an actual resident of the precint that you are "observing", but I don't know of any other restriction. Mainly what these observers are allowed to do is drive the poll workers nuts and get in everybody's hair. Officially they can "challenge" an individual ballot, which gets put into a seperate stack and the voter registration information if verified somehow. Election judges also can put ballots into this "provisional" category, and there are certain rules that require ballots be put there anyway, such as late registration or if the judge suspects there might be something not quite correct. Generally only about 2-3% of all the ballots are of "provisional" status.
The issue came up regarding illegal aliens in particular voting in local elections. Some people thought it was stupid to even suggest the idea, but it became an election issue and is still being discussed. A group of local citizen threatened to act as "poll watchers" and challenge everybody that was of a certain ethnic minority. Federal election officials came in and has made a minor issue into a major one, and the real issue regarding if non-citizens are voting was never really addressed.
The state Lt. Governor, who is in this state constitutionally responsible for the state election system, made IMHO a rather stupid statement: "We have determined that there is not even one non-citizen registered to vote in this state." How that was determined and the blanket 100% certainty makes me wonder if this really is a bigger issue than is being made out right now. If you can't keep non-citizens from voting, how about duplicate registrations (being registered to vote in more than one precinct, even with the same name, and voting in each precinct), or controlling people voting in behalf of somebody else, like a boss, union rep, or voting through extortion. At the moment it can't even be verified that this might be happening, so the presumption is that it is not happening. I consider that strong logic (yeah, right!*) Not a single issue I've mentioned here even has to deal with an election judge, because the fraud occurs even before the voting booth opens up.
My wife is an el
My point exactly. After looking at this, I came to think that a really good "test" for this would be some very heavilly publicized minor election, particularly if you could get some "white hat" hackers to help participate. Something like the election for a college student body president, something big enough to matter, but minor enough that it only gives a scare of what it would mean on the national level.
/. are fully aware of the implications that election fraud can have on democracy, but for some reason trying to explain this concept to the general public is incredibly difficult.
Publicize ahead of time that this election might, or even is likely to be hacked. I mean, this is the point, and I think college students might even go along with this if is proves a point. Have a legitimate campaign, do some very heavy statistical sample polling of the student body prior to the election to find out just who would be likely to win if the election really were held, then have the hackers make the school mascot the winner of the contest.
Maybe I'm just wishing here, but I'm hoping that something like this doesn't happen (the school mascot of a major university winning an election) in a major contest, like U.S. Senator or even the President of the USA. The point is that most people here on
It is telling that the people really pushing for e-voting are politicians, and the people screaming that more caution should be given regarding expansion of technology in this matter needs a more careful reasoned approach are Electrical Engineers and Computer Science types. And this is not strictly because many programmers and circuit designers are getting grey hair either.
Thank you for saying this.
I am adding my voice from the "Right" that feels that e-voting machines as currently designed (by Diebold and the few others) are a fraud of collasial proportions.
I also think that Democrats, as well as Republicans, are just as guilty of trying to cause this train wreck, and any voter fraud will be an equal opportunity exersize done by both parties.
While I don't think we can resonably expect to reduce the size of the American government to pre-Hoover Administration levels, it would be a nice goal.
I agree with you that government simply needs to get our of our lives. Last night I had a run-in with the Police that was absolutely stupid, and was really unnecessary. I hate to have to wake up with a Police officer shining a flashlight into my eyes at 1 A.M. and waking me up. For no damn good reason either. Too many people want the government to solve problems that are much easier solved by simply being a good neighbor and rolling up your sleeves and asking "how can I help?" The fact that I'm writing this message should show just how stupid that invasion of over 20 police officers into my home really was.
I support the invasion of Iraq on many levels and for many reasons. I think Bush is doing a pretty good job, and I'm litterally praying to God and thanking him that a President Gore wasn't around on 9/11. Do I think Bush is ready for asension/exhaltation? NO He is a good man in a tough job during difficult times, and his opponents have little to show how they would do things different other than sit on their hands and do nothing. Do I think Bush has messed up some issues? Absolutely! Do I think there may be a better candidate than Bush this November? I'm not certain, and I may in fact vote for somebody else. He still has several months to prove to me he is worth something in terms of getting my vote. In 2000 I didn't vote for Bush, but I didn't vote for Gore either. I did vote, however.
Seriously. I proposed this earlier, but for political parties like the Communist Party of the USA, or the American Nazi Party. If you want the job (even if you are constitutionally inelegable) I say that you are nominated.
*I* won't vote for you, but something does need to be done to wake people up about what the problems are regarding e-voting. I'm just glad that "mainstream" media sources are beginning to see this problem.
Yes, both mechanical, electrical, and software. And software disassmembly is perhaps the hardest, but the easiest to get rid of garbage that should never have been there in the first place.
The test for a real hacker: Ever dis/reassemble any device, get it working, and get another really cool device from the left over parts?
All I said is that this should have been put in the science.slashdot.org section rather than on the main page. Yes, this is news, and I regularly read the science section anyway (and grateful that the gaming section is off to itself). I wouldn't have missed this story had it been put there, but much fewer people. At least I knew how to check the "No Karma Bonus" button on the post.
While this is sort of a dupe, it is from a different news source. Instead of some Australian newspapers (who deserves the scoop), it is straight from NASA. So in a way it is a dup.
I don't see why this got posted on the main page though. As a follow-up in the Science section only, perhaps, but not up front like this.
There is one and only one reason I can come up with for crashing Gallileo into Jupiter (well, two reasons):
1) Perhaps, by some long shot, some form of life is actually found on Europa. We need to find out if that life originated on Europa or if it came from Earth. With Martian rocks being found in Antarctica, I don't see any reason that rocks from the Earth havn't made it to Jupiter, with a few "passengers" along for the ride (like when the K-T incident asteroid hit the Earth). Even that would be an interesting discovery though, so until a good very well sterilized space probe can be built, let's try to keep the variables down. That is called science.
2) They wanted to see what it would be like to plunge into a gas giant. In some ways I wish that it would have been built to do this rather than simply plunge into the depth. A few pictures of Jupiter from inside the atmosphere would have been incredible. I hope some space probe in the near (> 100 years) future actually gets around to doing something like that.
Why should I care one little bit about the political philosophies of Sir Aurthr C. Clarke?
I like his stories, and he has inspired litterally millions of people to go beyond this world we live on, including coming up with the original idea of geo-sync communications satellites. Still, if I want to go there why should I care one little bit about his feeling in this area.
Yes, I know this was a joke, and I'll try to take it as such. I just want to make sure that it stays the joke and not something that is unfortunately taken seriously, like Al Gore's inventor status over the Internet. Now that really is a good joke.
In terms of real $$$ that might have been earned from legitimate customers buying products they thought were legitimate, but in fact were pirated movies?
Yeah, you may be correct. And this is the real problem that needs to be addressed. None of the copy protection schemes that I've seen from the MPAA really address this system. I have seen a compressed version of this whole copy protection paranoia hit the software industry, from people messing around with data storage formats, encrypted object code, and dongels. None of it works, and very quickly the hacks to defeat any system get published on the internet. All of these schemes tend to screw up software anyway, and add bugs where there were none before.
As a software developer trying to sell software commercially, the best thing you can do for your customers is to simply give the data (whatever it is, audio, video, x86 object code, etc.) free and clear, and then simply use courts for those who are doing blatent copyright violations, such as a competitor who is giving away free copies of the really cool software utility that you wrote, when in fact it is only going to your customers.
In all this, I don't see the MPAA doing one little bit to stop the blatent wholesale copyright violators at all. I havn't even heard of a major pirate being shut down (you would think the MPAA would want to make a lot of noise when that happens, just to discourage people, like when a major Cocaine shippment gets seized by the DEA). Instead, I see them shooting themselves in the foot with both slapping indy film makers and with alienating their customers from ever watching their movies.
There is one and only one way that I could possibly see that you could make an "unhackable" DVD disc.
It is called "One-Time Pad encryption", and is what the NSA and CIA use when they really are paranoid about somebody trying to read some of their communications. Basically, you get a random noise source (often background microware radiation hiss or even more often some radioactive source and using the unpredictible nature of individual decay particles, that way producing true random numbers) and then with that source of numbers you produce something that would go into a custom player. Each person with this special player could recieve discs that could only be played on that individual player, and anybody else would litterally see just random noise on an individual DVD-disc.
Now here is the nasty part of that system: If you produce more than one DVD using the same one-time pad, the code can be cracked. That is why it is called one-time pad, because once used it can never be used again. The NSA has usually a pile of CD-ROMs or DVDs with these codes on them (or some other digital medium), and they burn/destroy the discs as soon as they use one, with a duplicate of that disc available with the person sending/receiving a message, who either decodes/encodes the data and then similary destroys the disk.
Now a modified version of this could in theory be able to stop a random hacker from getting a disc from the U.S. Postal Service and decoding it, but there is still one more place of vunerability:
The player itself must decode the movie. I think most Academy members would object to the disc being destroyed in the process of watching it (perhaps they got a phone call in the middle of watching a scene and want to back it up for a moment to catch what was going on), and then there is one other vunerability.
The movie must be viewed at some point, and regardless of what other encryption schemes are done, it must be decoded to some very simple colorspace (RGB or with video usually YUV triplet pixel values) that can then be displayed on some viewing system. The whole point of this is that Robert Redford or Tom Hanks can watch a nominated movie at home, in their underware, whenever or however they feel like it. Or with a few friends if they so choose. Even then what is stopping somebody from pulling out a camcorder and filming the TV/projection screen that is showing the movie, and don't get me to rattle on about Macrovision or watermarking... that doesn't work and ruins the image anyway.
I gave the most plausable system from somebody who has worked with multimedia systems before, and even with this hyper-paranoid system it can still be cracked.
Copyright violation acts are an inner ethics issue, like not killing somebody or not shoplifting. Some things can be done to help discourage breaking the law or stopping people from doing things like this, but if you are really interested in accomplishing the goal (like killing the President of the USA), there really isn't anything that can be done to stop it from happening. All security does in these cases is to simply put up "speed bumps" to make it harder to accomplish, and weed out the rank amatures from the professionals. Unfortunately in this world there are people who totally lack ethics and would do anything and say anything, sometimes just for fun, like feeding your grandmother to the Ravanous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
The problem really isn't Microsoft either. Remember, they got into the internet way late in the game.
In order to make a secure OS, you need to do it from the beginning. You absolutely can't put security into any software package after the fact. You can leave places where security can be hooked in to make it more secure at a later date, but it has to be in the overall architechture design.
In this respect, Linux got a little bit of a boost with the fact that Unix in general has been designed from the beginning to be with much more secure system. I don't think it was a deliberate move on the part of Linus Torvalds, but he was copying the overall design that came from people who had done some serious thinking about security, For Unix gurus, by the time Linux came into being, were already thinking of security implications.
Windows does what Windows was designed for: A GUI interface on a cohesive set of generic APIs that control generic I/O devices of a single user IBM-PC compatable computer system. Inter-PC communication was intended to be significantly slower than the CPU speed, and even then was only supposed to be connecting people in the same room, or at most the same building.
That Windows is being used for applications that don't fit the above description is a testament to the stupidity of the people who are using it in manners other than that simple explaination. Computer viruses would still be a problem with Windows, but it would take much longer for them to propogate, and the I/O vectors for virus propogation would be restricted to disc media of some sort.
The security problems that Windows is facing right now is the fact that executable software can be sent into a computer through means other than a floppy drive or CD-ROM. The avenues that these worms are coming into most people's computers take advantage of the fact that the internet is a pervasive technology, where data can be tranfered without the knowledge of the person using the computer.
I happen to know of one local restaurant where I live that was also a part of a national chain. After failing 3 food inspection surveys by the local Dept. of Health they revoked their business license, and the building had to be demolished. I think the franchisee also lost their franchise. That is a little harsh, but that is how it should be.
The point here is that while the threat of legal action might try to keep some people honest, there are those cases that do come up where you actually have to enforce the law, and unfortunately it has to happen when the situation gets really out of hand.
I would have to agree that for a restaurant you need to keep high standards. A friend of mine pointed out that you can tell the quality of a restaurant by the quality of their bathroom. If they keep a clean and tidy bathroom it is likely that they also keep a clean and tidy kitchen. Very rarely do they keep a clean bathroom and a messy kitchen.