Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.
You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:
1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task). 2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson) 3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees) 4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself 5. Begun fund-raising.
No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.
Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.
You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.
But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.
Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.
Correct. But, if you examine the implementation the counter is actually incremented enough times to get 16 distinct ports overcoming the fact that AES might provide a duplicate port or two along the way.
Glad you like POPFile. The entire 'blacklist' discussion is moot because that's not the purpose of Signal Spam. To my knowledge Signal Spam has not plans to create a blacklist of any kind. There's a lot of automated processing going on with the messages which is directly targetted currently at the following:
1. Spotting zombies inside French ISPs and getting them shut down. This part is close to automatic since all the ISPs are partners with Signal Spam and can opt to get real-time zombie reports from the service using ARF format.
2. Spotting serious crime (such as pedophile messages) and handing them off to the gendarmerie.
3. Dealing with people who 'unsubscribe' from real mailing lists. Since the legit marketers in France are also partners of Signal Spam if you 'report as spam' something you could unsubscribe from you'll get a response from Signal Spam detailing how to unsubscribe from that specific mailer, and we can inform the mailer as well.
It's not very well known but the unusual name 'bombe' actual caused the entire hip hop explosion in the US, for which Alan Turing is directly responsible. As well we as the Undecidability problem, Turing machines and the Turing test, Turing was responsible, after a demonstration of the code breaking machine to top UK officials at the MOD received a standing ovation, to have remarked "Truly gentlemen this machine represents the finest British engineering, and is da bombe".
It is unknown when the final e from bombe was dropped.
China has cheap broadband access
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 1
One thing that surprised me in TFA was the claim that China has cheap broadband access. Perhaps I suffer from some cliched view of China, but it surprises me to hear that China has cheap broadband. Any knowledgeable person like to fill in the details? Here in France we have very cheap broadband, but doesn't seem like France is producing much zombie spam.
John.
Visit SpamOrHam and help in the fight
One of the things that I'm watching in the error logs of SpamOrHam (web site where volunteers sort messages into spam and ham) is the error rate on the CAPTCHA used. Ignoring what appear to be automated attempts bruteforce the CAPTCHA I see an error rate of around 20% of 100,000s of CAPTCHA's.
That's amazingly high. 1 in 5 CAPTCHA's are incorrectly entered by humans doing their best to do the right thing.
Actually you forget that I'm old enough to have used Usenet when it was in its prime. Most of what you can find on the web was already seen on Usenet long, long ago.
And someone would have had the decency to write a FAQ about it.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of posting this guy's personal information, I did learn from one of his photos about a fetish I'd never come across: CFNM (Clothed Female, Naked Male).
The community is the answer on Ubuntu. And it's interesting because from the outset the Ubuntu folks stated that they wanted to make a friendly distro and it's paid off in terms of how the community operates. I was a really long time Windows user who started with DOS, went to Windows with 3.0 (and remember how 'great' 3.11 was) all the way up to XP.
I finally got tired of Windows crap and decide to go all FOSS and switched my laptop to Linux. First distro I used was SuSE. I bought it just before Novell bought them out and I'd chosen SuSE because RedHat had gone all corporate and it looked like SuSE was more oriented to the end user. It was an OK experience. A bunch of stuff didn't work but hey, that's Linux for you, and searching or posting usually got me answers to questions. Then I switched to Fedora Core 3 because I wanted to be more up to date. SuSE was looking expensive and gone all Novell. The FC3 community was not supportive at all and I had constant crap with the distro.
Finally I switched to Ubuntu. I was actually afraid to do it because I figured that it might be dumbed down, but it's not. And the community is helpful. The root vs sudo thing was weird at first. And the package management is impeccable.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.
Tim Robinson, the man behind the Meccano construction you link to, is a trustee of the Plan 28 charity mentioned above.
You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:
1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task).
2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson)
3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees)
4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself
5. Begun fund-raising.
No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.
Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.
You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.
But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.
Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.
Sounds just like tumbler.
It's true. I could have used the hash as a CPRNG all by itself, but I thought the implementation with a block cipher was clearer.
Your UDP idea is implemented by tumbler.
Your passphrase to determine the ports is pretty much what tumbler does.
Correct. But, if you examine the implementation the counter is actually incremented enough times to get 16 distinct ports overcoming the fact that AES might provide a duplicate port or two along the way.
Clock drift is an issue, hence the fact that three overlapping minutes are kept active at once.
Glad you like POPFile. The entire 'blacklist' discussion is moot because that's not the purpose of Signal Spam. To my knowledge Signal Spam has not plans to create a blacklist of any kind. There's a lot of automated processing going on with the messages which is directly targetted currently at the following:
1. Spotting zombies inside French ISPs and getting them shut down. This part is close to automatic since all the ISPs are partners with Signal Spam and can opt to get real-time zombie reports from the service using ARF format.
2. Spotting serious crime (such as pedophile messages) and handing them off to the gendarmerie.
3. Dealing with people who 'unsubscribe' from real mailing lists. Since the legit marketers in France are also partners of Signal Spam if you 'report as spam' something you could unsubscribe from you'll get a response from Signal Spam detailing how to unsubscribe from that specific mailer, and we can inform the mailer as well.
John.
I wrote the code that is behind this web site. I'll try to answer questions without giving up confidential information if people are interested.
John.
Turing's death is a warning about the dangers of discriminating against people because they are different.
For all values of 'different'.
John.
Naturally Wikipedia has an excellent article on his contribution:
E nigma_machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski#The_
John.
It's not very well known but the unusual name 'bombe' actual caused the entire hip hop explosion in the US, for which Alan Turing is directly responsible. As well we as the Undecidability problem, Turing machines and the Turing test, Turing was responsible, after a demonstration of the code breaking machine to top UK officials at the MOD received a standing ovation, to have remarked "Truly gentlemen this machine represents the finest British engineering, and is da bombe".
It is unknown when the final e from bombe was dropped.
test1 test2 test3 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9
One thing that surprised me in TFA was the claim that China has cheap broadband access. Perhaps I suffer from some cliched view of China, but it surprises me to hear that China has cheap broadband. Any knowledgeable person like to fill in the details? Here in France we have very cheap broadband, but doesn't seem like France is producing much zombie spam.
John.
Visit SpamOrHam and help in the fight
One of the things that I'm watching in the error logs of SpamOrHam (web site where volunteers sort messages into spam and ham) is the error rate on the CAPTCHA used. Ignoring what appear to be automated attempts bruteforce the CAPTCHA I see an error rate of around 20% of 100,000s of CAPTCHA's.
That's amazingly high. 1 in 5 CAPTCHA's are incorrectly entered by humans doing their best to do the right thing.
No wonder people get mad at them.
John.
Actually you forget that I'm old enough to have used Usenet when it was in its prime. Most of what you can find on the web was already seen on Usenet long, long ago.
And someone would have had the decency to write a FAQ about it.
John.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of posting this guy's personal information, I did learn from one of his photos about a fetish I'd never come across: CFNM (Clothed Female, Naked Male).
Thanks Amir!
John.
Yes. It was supposed to be funny.
Pity the mods thought it was flamebait.
John.
I don't see why Google removed the New Media Journal articles. I just sat down and read them and they seemed perfectly Fair and Balanced.
John.
That's all I can say... WTF. Or perhaps WTFITDOS (WTF Is This Doing On Slashdot)?
John.
The community is the answer on Ubuntu. And it's interesting because from the outset the Ubuntu folks stated that they wanted to make a friendly distro and it's paid off in terms of how the community operates. I was a really long time Windows user who started with DOS, went to Windows with 3.0 (and remember how 'great' 3.11 was) all the way up to XP.
I finally got tired of Windows crap and decide to go all FOSS and switched my laptop to Linux. First distro I used was SuSE. I bought it just before Novell bought them out and I'd chosen SuSE because RedHat had gone all corporate and it looked like SuSE was more oriented to the end user. It was an OK experience. A bunch of stuff didn't work but hey, that's Linux for you, and searching or posting usually got me answers to questions. Then I switched to Fedora Core 3 because I wanted to be more up to date. SuSE was looking expensive and gone all Novell. The FC3 community was not supportive at all and I had constant crap with the distro.
Finally I switched to Ubuntu. I was actually afraid to do it because I figured that it might be dumbed down, but it's not. And the community is helpful. The root vs sudo thing was weird at first. And the package management is impeccable.
John.
Their web site states that the 81% number was "year on year" which I interpret to mean that they took the data for years n - 1 to predict year n.
John.