Just read the article, and the stego reference reminded me of another paper on the Peacefire site. Another good read for ideas on covert internet activity.
A phrack article a few years ago had a cool idea of sending data in the payload field of ICMP packets. Not sure if this was covered in the article, but the phrack article was cool reading.
Give GNATS a try. It seems to be actively maintained, it has various front ends (tk, web, email, command line), it's pretty lean, and it does the trick.
It isn't very pretty, though. I don't know how the setup is, but we use it where I work (large public university), and it works. Our version is a little dated, so there may be some improvements.
I hear that Bugzilla is nice, though I haven't tried it myself.
As my wife is found of saying, "Get your panties out of a bunch!"
Wanting to support Lucas and hating the MPAA are not mutually exclusive. Besides... I still won't buy a new DVD of this movie. I'll camp out on the various used DVD sites until one pops up.
I can be excited about this development and still support the cause.
So remember kids, the laws are written for the protection of big business, not for the people or small business.
Don't forget to boycott big music labels and movie studios.
I've been doing this for about 18 months now. I haven't bought a new CD or movie title during that time, and I have no plans to do so in the near future.
Instead, I buy exclusively from places like Second Spin, which sell used CDs and DVDs. I don't mind buying new pr0n DVDs once in a while, as those studios aren't in bed with the major media companies.
Yes, I'll grab a current hit single once in a while via Napster. I certainly don't loose any sleep over it.
To quelch my need for new music, I've recently been tuning XMMS to the "Hi Fi" channels on MP3.com and, quite frankly, there's a lot of good music out there. I was going to bring a radio into my cubicle at work, but the streams I find online are usually so much better. I'm slowly weaning myself from the top-40 stuff on the radio.
The MPAA & the RIAA must bend with the coming storm, or they will break.
Just how many people do they think they are really loosing the service too? The sheep-to-geek ratio is so high, the few who bother to hack the hardware will not hurt the "bottom line".
I mean, I could buy one and simply not sign up. anyway, hack or no hack. I'm sure that'll happen a few times. Roping someone into an agreement like this (2 years?!?) is just lame.
If they had a "DSL ready" model with an ethernet port, I'd bite for up to maybe $300. I've got DSL at home, and my wife surfs on a crusty old laptop from another room. She'd love one of these things!
If they decrypted it, then that would be public proof that they could decrypt it. One of the gov'ment's strengths is that we just don't know what its full capabilities are, especially when it comes to Spooks. This keeps the sheep in constan fear of the wolf.
Does anyone even know what algorithm Kevin used?
One could always take the fall for the rest of us. Send a PGP encrypted email to someone at the whitehouse. Make a threat about killing, say, Janet Reno, and wait for yourself to disappear.:) Make sure the subject line is menacing enough to get someone's attention. When we all notice you've suddenly vanished, we'll have proof They can crack PGP.
Then bypass the "official" DNS namespace altogether.
Humor me for a moment...
The DNS concept is very simple, in both design and in implimentation. It would not be a stretch to create (quite quickly) a new suite of programs, daemons, and programs for popular OS's to have a "fallback" name space. One which is run by grassroots geeks who hate the NSI and etoys.com of the world. New (cool and creative TLD's could be added at will. If The "official" etoy.com is being held hostage, then the resolver would query the alternate name space if the query of the official one fails.
"That's just peachy," you say. "But who gives a rat's posterior if there are no registrants in the new name space?"
Very good point. I'd suggest an alliance with an internet industry that's large, powereful, and one that would likely dig even more name space to pollute: the porn industry!
The average user just loves to add new plugins to their OS/browser. Plus the press would gobble the story up and spit it far and wide. "Activists create alternate name space to fight Corporate Evil!" Pretty soon, even OS/browser producers will add the feature and it will become just another given on the net.
Those who manage the name space can thumb their noses at the likes of etoys and NSI and actually right some wrongs.
Of course, the political hell of not only managing millions of registrations (anbd doing so fairly) will be hard, but that's another discussion.
I would think that authorities would get a little upset with the anonymity this kind of disposable tool brings with it. Granted, it's not near as untraceable as the Iridium phones, but at least your name isn't tied to the accouting systems anywhere.
I'd love these things (if the the bang-for-the-buck was good, unlike their calling-card cousins), and would probably use them if they delivered what is promised.
I'm almost certain a recycling mechanism would be in place, much like the disposable camera system. Though this analogy is weak, as your pictures are held hostage by the fact that you must return the camera to get them. I imagine maybe a deposit/refund system would work. The phone with time costs you $30, but you get $10 back for returning the phone.
Can you imagine vending machines dispensing cell phones and SIM (correct term?) chips for extra time? Very neat idea.
I agree. This was one of my favorite King stories ever. The rules of the Walk were so simple -- keep walking or you're toast. Truly a morbid King classic.
I remember when I read (and then saw) Running Man, I told people we'd be seeing things like that. Most laughed. A few years later we had American Gladiators. Hmmm...
I guess I was just widening the off-topic Y2K issue addressed in the NPR piece you cited. I apologize for not adding anything to the OpenSource heart of this discussion. But I found that piece very interesting.
As for your question... I think both male and female hackers and code grinders would ask for help equally. That's just how things work in that arena. They tend to thrive on the exchange of ideas and past methods, and exchanges rarely begin without someone asking something.
Don't discount the other possible reason cited in that NPR article.
As we all know, men are less likely to ask for directions when doing anything. Women aren't.
As the Y2K thing is relatively uncharted territory, many men are said to be intimidated by it. They'd have to swallow thier pride and ask for help, so they don't take on such projects. Women don't care, and so have no problem taking on such things.
I'm posting this now from an Ultra-2 machine, running Caldera's Open Linux 2.3 (sparc64 version). Very impressive installation (boot cdrom, click a few buttons, play tetris, reboot). Though I haven't done any benchmarks, it seems a fair bit more peppy than the Solaris 2.6 installation it was running previously. If I could only get a decent (native linux sparc64 compile) web browser, I'd be much happier. KDE's kfm does okay (at least/. reads well), but I'd be much happier with Netscape or Opera (hint-hint!).
I was stuck in an odd position dealing with this sort of thing.
My advice is for this kind of think, try to work the "word of the "law" to your advantage. Poorly-written company handbooks can sometimes be your friend.:)
I was a sysadmin for a small (50 or so employees) company. It was pretty much a grass-roots organization. I think we had maybe 2 levels of management. I don't think monitoring employees ever crossed the minds of "management".
Then we merged with another larger company. Things really changed over night. Though the company now wasn't *that* much bigger (250 employees), we became so bogged down with bullshit corporate red tape it wasn't even funny. I think the Titanic had a smaller turning radius than this little company.
Well, the new "HQ" totally flipped when they found out we weren't firewalled. So we whipped up a linux box and in a day had our internet connection locked down. It turns out they really didn't give a shit about security -- they just wanted everyone to go through thier firewall, which they dutifully logged all access.
(An aside: These morons, who tried to push thier "Security" on us really had things wide open. For grins, I hopped onto my personal ISP account one night from home. I was able to use their proxy server to proxy behind their firewall. Of course I informed them, and it was quickly fixed -- but I never got so much as a thank you.:) I don't know how many port scans I did on their firewall from the outside, but they never once noticed. But they bought a firewall appliance -- a BSDI box with a gui administration front-end -- so it must be secure.)
Anyway, morale took a major hit. People were always cursing under thier breath about "big brother" and such. I was as much as victim as my users were, so I tried to do the best I could.
My view, as an admin, was that while the Company had the right to monitor thier resources, users had no obligation to make it any easier. I set up a junkbuster proxy at our site, which proxied off of the "official" corporate firewall. All connections were logged at HQ's box (I turned off junkbuster logging), but they could only narrow it down to our site. If an abuse was brought to my attention, only then would I consider other measures.
Furthermore, our Intellectual Property Agreement wasted a lot of paper on trying to protect company data/info/etc. So I felt a moral obligation to protect my email from anyone hacking the mail servers. Naturally I used PGP -- I even had a registered copy for my office workstaion. I encouraged others to use PGP as well, but as most here might expect, it was too much trouble. I was never called on the encryption, but I would have held out for a court order to unlock my mail.
It's a shame, too, as there were several cases where the corporate goons did a sweep of everyone's mailbox. I was browsing the event logs on our local Exchange server, when I noticed that one of the corporate admins had systematically opened up every one of our mailboxes. I enquired and pressed for a justification.
Here's what I got: Being a software comany, they held several user conferences a year. At the most recent conference, it was alleged that a competitor got a hold of a list of customers who were attending and chartered a riverboat dinner cruise that same time/location as our conference and invited everyone who was registered to come to our event. Naturally, management suspected one of their own and went on a witch hunt. I thought the whole thing amusing, and somewhat clever on the part of our competitor. I would expect nothing less from players of a sales-driven industry like ours. I don't know if any of our customers even took the offer, but it sure pissed off our top brass. So they went through everyone's mail in a vain attempt to catch someone.
I objected to this. Though our competitor's sneaky trick may have hurt our ego, I personally don't consider a list of conference attendees to be proprietary/sensitive data, certianly nothing to warrant an invasion of privacy. I thought the manager who authorized the scan was way out of line. I stated that even though the company had every legal right to do this, I felt as custodians of computer resources, we had an ethical obligation to use our power only when really really reall warranted. I also felt we should publicly expand on just what we were capable of monitoring -- as a deterrent. I was immediately shot down by an over-zealous officer of the company. Paraphrased, "When the police tap the phone line of a criminal they don't tell him when and how they do it." His logic was faulty in that he assumed everyone was guilty from the beginning, but I didn't press the issue further. I just made it a point to answer honestly and completely whenever one of my users asked about what was monitored and how the technology worked. I even offered advice on how to circumvent the monitoring, if possible.
My holy grail during this time was to find a proxy on the net that was like Anonymizer but 1) used SSL (admins can't watch traffic) and 2) somehow hid the destination URL (unlike anonymizer). I never found such a service, and I have since been fired from that company (for a completely different issue). I now work at a large public university, where at least invasions of privacy are protected by law. Better yet, I admin unix rather than NT.:)
Odd coincidence today. A few years back, I had a huge interest in Chaum's digital money system, DigiCash. Back then, it didn't seem too widely spread to be of use to me, so every 6 months or so I check up on it. Today I went to their site on a whim only to find they went bankrupt!
And then this slashdot post.
As far as I know, DigiCash (wasn't there an "e-cash" that used Chaum's system?), was the only system that allowed anonymous payments. This is what I found most useful. I was pretty distressed when I heard that DigiCash went under.
I don't think this product is viable. From the glossy web pages, I found nothing about privacy, real encryption, or anything more beneficial over the credit card number over SSL payment.
Oh, sure, I can give some "money" to my buddy with a Palm (any word on an HP48 port?), but is that really useful?
I wanted DigiCash. Are there products that allow for truly anonymous transactions?
Firstly, let me say that I love the/. style of information distribution. I wish I only knew of other sites, with other narrow focuses, of the same quality.
I've pretty much given up on traditional news media. My exposure to current events is 95% from National Public Radio during my drive to/from work. But even NPR goes astray. The excessive Clinton trial coverage really irritated me, for example.
When I bumped into/. a few weeks ago, I was instantly hooked. Every morning I had to get my fix while drinking my first cup of coffee at the office. I still do. I get a heads-up on news and events (usually) much faster than "official" online news sources, and certainly TV news sources.
ZDTV recently became available on my cable service. While much is Wired-like fluff, I do enjoy some of the shows, like the often tounge-and-cheek The Screen Savers (no flames, please). The only problem is now that I read Slashdot, almost everything is old news to me. I don't know whether this is a blessing or a curse.
Anyhow, this thirst for current information and community debate reminds me of my similar taste for usenet. Though I'm not sure if I missed the official Golden Age when I was most involved (1990-1993), I felt usenet was still of sufficient quality back then. I could even appreciate the Usenet Olympics.
However, as most of us know, usenet went to hell in a handbasket very quickly. (Some may feel it had already gone to hell even before the years I was involved, but nevermind...) Today I find it pretty much useless, save for a very few highly technical groups.
As this kind of forum gets more popular, will clusters of people like Slashdot fall prey to the idiots, trolls, spammers, etc. that ruined usenet? Are the few moderation mechanisms in the system good enough to keep such garbage out?
How much do you pay for a decent sound card? $150 US? How much do you pay for a decent processor $150 US?
So a decent CPU/soundcard would then cost $300? I'd rather shell out $150 than $300. I'm sure the cost won't be 1-to-1, but the complex CPUs will cost more than simpler ones.
If all of the components were in the same IC, possibly even from the same die, cost will take a nosedive, because the manufacturing process is ONE step--make the IC. So you upgrade your sound? You get a faster processor, better network card and scsi controller, and the lastest holographic generator to boot. All for the same price that you would put out for a sound card today.
If everything is in ONE place, you then get ONE choice. (Well, there will likely be several one-stop CPU vendors.) And then ONE standard for each vendor (or maybe the lot of them).
However, let's say Intel changes the socket specs for each successive CPU?
Wanna run an i2003 CPU in that i2001 board? You must upgrade the whole thing! Every year has a new (non-backward-compatible) board/CPU combo. Disposable PCs!
What scares me is that the piece-meal upgrades that breath new life to those old [3,4,5,6]86 machines running *BSD and Linux will become a thing of the past since once something breaks, you're SOL.
Software written for the Merced may not run on a PIII, but software written for older x86s will still run on the Merced. Just as current x86 chips can emulate "real mode" for older apps, so the Merced will be able to use and/or emulate the processing modes used in current x86s.
No. No! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!
I realize there's a huge existing application (and talent) base in supporting legacy CPUs and OSs. But this has really got to stop, folks!
Can't Intel start with a clean slate for the CPU, sans all x86 baggage and then provide a software solution for legacy apps? I never had the pleasure of using an Alpha box, but didn't hey have something called FX!32 (or similar) for the NT Alpha which ran Win32 binaries? Did it work well?
Same damned thing with Microsoft. Each new OS carries tons of crap from the previous one.
Even MS's "32-bit" apps carry old "16-bit" junk around.
Once I made the following leap of logic, running NT Workstation 4 at home: Since I'll only be running Win32 apps, NT shouldn't need to create/support short filenames. I turned off the registry key for 8.3 filenames. I installed Office 97. And then... it just didn't work right. Various errors, complaints about not finding files, etc. convinced me that it just wasn't rid of Win16 baggage.
"Whoops! That FPU died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..."
Though I may counter some of original gripes by saying this, there are some integrations that make good sense. Moving things like the FPU and cache onto the same die as the CPU (or into the CPU itself) can certainly help performance.
However, wouldn't you loose the performance gains of cards that can think on their own? Maybe I'm out of date (or out of clues) but can you get "bus mastering" SCSI card benefits if everything's in the CPU?
And this leads to another subtlety. In the context of the original article, does "integration" equate to "on the die" or "in the CPU"? Does it really matter, and what are the pros and cons of each?
I saw this integration trend coming a while back. I used to tell my buddies, "Some day, we'll just have a motherboard with one huge socket. And we'll be using CPU's this big." as I held my hands up to approximate a waffle-sized square. They would chuckle at me.
I see this for the masses. However, I can't see any power user liking this. Take gamers, for example. Aren't most high-end sound and 3D chipsets designed by smaller independent companies? I don't think Intel could put out a high-quality graphics capable board.
Wouldn't this leave a small niche for traditional motherboards and componnets? We might pay a slightly higher price, but they would still be around. Wouldn't they?
(Please tell me they would be!)
Can you imagine a world where everything's on the CPU? "Whoops! That SCSI controller died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..." That would just suck!
Unless all expandability moved outside the case. Maybe a really (really really really) high-speed external bus standard will come about. So you will then start seeing external 3D graphics adapters and SCSI adpaters.
Slashdot Mirror
Just read the article, and the stego reference reminded me of another paper on the Peacefire site. Another good read for ideas on covert internet activity.
A phrack article a few years ago had a cool idea of sending data in the payload field of ICMP packets. Not sure if this was covered in the article, but the phrack article was cool reading.
It isn't very pretty, though. I don't know how the setup is, but we use it where I work (large public university), and it works. Our version is a little dated, so there may be some improvements.
I hear that Bugzilla is nice, though I haven't tried it myself.
Okay, so they lock user Foo from logging in. Damn! Now I'll have to re-register the login Bar. Then Baz... etc.
They could block IP's but that would seriously piss off a lot of people, probably to the point of a class-action suit against them.
Lars must have thought of this one.
I use it on my 700MHz k7m system, and it works well.
Wanting to support Lucas and hating the MPAA are not mutually exclusive. Besides... I still won't buy a new DVD of this movie. I'll camp out on the various used DVD sites until one pops up.
I can be excited about this development and still support the cause.
And to think everyone pooh-poohed the petition!
Don't forget to boycott big music labels and movie studios.
I've been doing this for about 18 months now. I haven't bought a new CD or movie title during that time, and I have no plans to do so in the near future.
Instead, I buy exclusively from places like Second Spin, which sell used CDs and DVDs. I don't mind buying new pr0n DVDs once in a while, as those studios aren't in bed with the major media companies.
Yes, I'll grab a current hit single once in a while via Napster. I certainly don't loose any sleep over it.
To quelch my need for new music, I've recently been tuning XMMS to the "Hi Fi" channels on MP3.com and, quite frankly, there's a lot of good music out there. I was going to bring a radio into my cubicle at work, but the streams I find online are usually so much better. I'm slowly weaning myself from the top-40 stuff on the radio.
The MPAA & the RIAA must bend with the coming storm, or they will break.
I mean, I could buy one and simply not sign up. anyway, hack or no hack. I'm sure that'll happen a few times. Roping someone into an agreement like this (2 years?!?) is just lame.
If they had a "DSL ready" model with an ethernet port, I'd bite for up to maybe $300. I've got DSL at home, and my wife surfs on a crusty old laptop from another room. She'd love one of these things!
Link it to /dev/null. Works for me.
Does anyone even know what algorithm Kevin used?
One could always take the fall for the rest of us. Send a PGP encrypted email to someone at the whitehouse. Make a threat about killing, say, Janet Reno, and wait for yourself to disappear. :) Make sure the subject line is menacing enough to get someone's attention. When we all notice you've suddenly vanished, we'll have proof They can crack PGP.
Humor me for a moment...
The DNS concept is very simple, in both design and in implimentation. It would not be a stretch to create (quite quickly) a new suite of programs, daemons, and programs for popular OS's to have a "fallback" name space. One which is run by grassroots geeks who hate the NSI and etoys.com of the world. New (cool and creative TLD's could be added at will. If The "official" etoy.com is being held hostage, then the resolver would query the alternate name space if the query of the official one fails.
"That's just peachy," you say. "But who gives a rat's posterior if there are no registrants in the new name space?"
Very good point. I'd suggest an alliance with an internet industry that's large, powereful, and one that would likely dig even more name space to pollute: the porn industry!
The average user just loves to add new plugins to their OS/browser. Plus the press would gobble the story up and spit it far and wide. "Activists create alternate name space to fight Corporate Evil!" Pretty soon, even OS/browser producers will add the feature and it will become just another given on the net.
Those who manage the name space can thumb their noses at the likes of etoys and NSI and actually right some wrongs.
Of course, the political hell of not only managing millions of registrations (anbd doing so fairly) will be hard, but that's another discussion.
Is this even feasible?
The anonymity would be of great value, though most people don't know (or care) how much their privacy is invaded.
Imagine a drug dealer and one of his clients decided to "meet" on a local party line (most are free anymore). Talk in "code" slang and they are safe.
Better yet... modem adapters! Totally (well... almost) anonymous surfing, chatting, etc., though that would chew up cell time fast.
I'd love these things (if the the bang-for-the-buck was good, unlike their calling-card cousins), and would probably use them if they delivered what is promised.
I'm almost certain a recycling mechanism would be in place, much like the disposable camera system. Though this analogy is weak, as your pictures are held hostage by the fact that you must return the camera to get them. I imagine maybe a deposit/refund system would work. The phone with time costs you $30, but you get $10 back for returning the phone.
Can you imagine vending machines dispensing cell phones and SIM (correct term?) chips for extra time? Very neat idea.
I remember when I read (and then saw) Running Man, I told people we'd be seeing things like that. Most laughed. A few years later we had American Gladiators. Hmmm...
Who says life doesn't imitate art?
As for your question... I think both male and female hackers and code grinders would ask for help equally. That's just how things work in that arena. They tend to thrive on the exchange of ideas and past methods, and exchanges rarely begin without someone asking something.
As we all know, men are less likely to ask for directions when doing anything. Women aren't.
As the Y2K thing is relatively uncharted territory, many men are said to be intimidated by it. They'd have to swallow thier pride and ask for help, so they don't take on such projects. Women don't care, and so have no problem taking on such things.
I'm posting this now from an Ultra-2 machine, running Caldera's Open Linux 2.3 (sparc64 version). Very impressive installation (boot cdrom, click a few buttons, play tetris, reboot). Though I haven't done any benchmarks, it seems a fair bit more peppy than the Solaris 2.6 installation it was running previously. If I could only get a decent (native linux sparc64 compile) web browser, I'd be much happier. KDE's kfm does okay (at least /. reads well), but I'd be much happier with Netscape or Opera (hint-hint!).
I was stuck in an odd position dealing with this sort of thing.
:)
:) I don't know how many port scans I did on their firewall from the outside, but they never once noticed. But they bought a firewall appliance -- a BSDI box with a gui administration front-end -- so it must be secure.)
:)
My advice is for this kind of think, try to work the "word of the "law" to your advantage. Poorly-written company handbooks can sometimes be your friend.
I was a sysadmin for a small (50 or so employees) company. It was pretty much a grass-roots organization. I think we had maybe 2 levels of management. I don't think monitoring employees ever crossed the minds of "management".
Then we merged with another larger company. Things really changed over night. Though the company now wasn't *that* much bigger (250 employees), we became so bogged down with bullshit corporate red tape it wasn't even funny. I think the Titanic had a smaller turning radius than this little company.
Well, the new "HQ" totally flipped when they found out we weren't firewalled. So we whipped up a linux box and in a day had our internet connection locked down. It turns out they really didn't give a shit about security -- they just wanted everyone to go through thier firewall, which they dutifully logged all access.
(An aside: These morons, who tried to push thier "Security" on us really had things wide open. For grins, I hopped onto my personal ISP account one night from home. I was able to use their proxy server to proxy behind their firewall. Of course I informed them, and it was quickly fixed -- but I never got so much as a thank you.
Anyway, morale took a major hit. People were always cursing under thier breath about "big brother" and such. I was as much as victim as my users were, so I tried to do the best I could.
My view, as an admin, was that while the Company had the right to monitor thier resources, users had no obligation to make it any easier. I set up a junkbuster proxy at our site, which proxied off of the "official" corporate firewall. All connections were logged at HQ's box (I turned off junkbuster logging), but they could only narrow it down to our site. If an abuse was brought to my attention, only then would I consider other measures.
Furthermore, our Intellectual Property Agreement wasted a lot of paper on trying to protect company data/info/etc. So I felt a moral obligation to protect my email from anyone hacking the mail servers. Naturally I used PGP -- I even had a registered copy for my office workstaion. I encouraged others to use PGP as well, but as most here might expect, it was too much trouble. I was never called on the encryption, but I would have held out for a court order to unlock my mail.
It's a shame, too, as there were several cases where the corporate goons did a sweep of everyone's mailbox. I was browsing the event logs on our local Exchange server, when I noticed that one of the corporate admins had systematically opened up every one of our mailboxes. I enquired and pressed for a justification.
Here's what I got: Being a software comany, they held several user conferences a year. At the most recent conference, it was alleged that a competitor got a hold of a list of customers who were attending and chartered a riverboat dinner cruise that same time/location as our conference and invited everyone who was registered to come to our event. Naturally, management suspected one of their own and went on a witch hunt. I thought the whole thing amusing, and somewhat clever on the part of our competitor. I would expect nothing less from players of a sales-driven industry like ours. I don't know if any of our customers even took the offer, but it sure pissed off our top brass. So they went through everyone's mail in a vain attempt to catch someone.
I objected to this. Though our competitor's sneaky trick may have hurt our ego, I personally don't consider a list of conference attendees to be proprietary/sensitive data, certianly nothing to warrant an invasion of privacy. I thought the manager who authorized the scan was way out of line. I stated that even though the company had every legal right to do this, I felt as custodians of computer resources, we had an ethical obligation to use our power only when really really reall warranted. I also felt we should publicly expand on just what we were capable of monitoring -- as a deterrent. I was immediately shot down by an over-zealous officer of the company. Paraphrased, "When the police tap the phone line of a criminal they don't tell him when and how they do it." His logic was faulty in that he assumed everyone was guilty from the beginning, but I didn't press the issue further. I just made it a point to answer honestly and completely whenever one of my users asked about what was monitored and how the technology worked. I even offered advice on how to circumvent the monitoring, if possible.
My holy grail during this time was to find a proxy on the net that was like Anonymizer but 1) used SSL (admins can't watch traffic) and 2) somehow hid the destination URL (unlike anonymizer). I never found such a service, and I have since been fired from that company (for a completely different issue). I now work at a large public university, where at least invasions of privacy are protected by law. Better yet, I admin unix rather than NT.
Odd coincidence today. A few years back, I had a huge interest in Chaum's digital money system, DigiCash. Back then, it didn't seem too widely spread to be of use to me, so every 6 months or so I check up on it. Today I went to their site on a whim only to find they went bankrupt!
And then this slashdot post.
As far as I know, DigiCash (wasn't there an "e-cash" that used Chaum's system?), was the only system that allowed anonymous payments. This is what I found most useful. I was pretty distressed when I heard that DigiCash went under.
I don't think this product is viable. From the glossy web pages, I found nothing about privacy, real encryption, or anything more beneficial over the credit card number over SSL payment.
Oh, sure, I can give some "money" to my buddy with a Palm (any word on an HP48 port?), but is that really useful?
I wanted DigiCash. Are there products that allow for truly anonymous transactions?
Firstly, let me say that I love the /. style of information distribution. I wish I only knew of other sites, with other narrow focuses, of the same quality.
/. a few weeks ago, I was instantly hooked. Every morning I had to get my fix while drinking my first cup of coffee at the office. I still do. I get a heads-up on news and events (usually) much faster than "official" online news sources, and certainly TV news sources.
I've pretty much given up on traditional news media. My exposure to current events is 95% from National Public Radio during my drive to/from work. But even NPR goes astray. The excessive Clinton trial coverage really irritated me, for example.
When I bumped into
ZDTV recently became available on my cable service. While much is Wired-like fluff, I do enjoy some of the shows, like the often tounge-and-cheek The Screen Savers (no flames, please). The only problem is now that I read Slashdot, almost everything is old news to me. I don't know whether this is a blessing or a curse.
Anyhow, this thirst for current information and community debate reminds me of my similar taste for usenet. Though I'm not sure if I missed the official Golden Age when I was most involved (1990-1993), I felt usenet was still of sufficient quality back then. I could even appreciate the Usenet Olympics.
However, as most of us know, usenet went to hell in a handbasket very quickly. (Some may feel it had already gone to hell even before the years I was involved, but nevermind...) Today I find it pretty much useless, save for a very few highly technical groups.
As this kind of forum gets more popular, will clusters of people like Slashdot fall prey to the idiots, trolls, spammers, etc. that ruined usenet? Are the few moderation mechanisms in the system good enough to keep such garbage out?
How much do you pay for a decent sound card? $150 US? How much do you pay for a decent processor $150 US?
So a decent CPU/soundcard would then cost $300? I'd rather shell out $150 than $300. I'm sure the cost won't be 1-to-1, but the complex CPUs will cost more than simpler ones.
If all of the components were in the same IC, possibly even from the same die, cost will take a nosedive, because the manufacturing process is ONE step--make the IC. So you upgrade your sound? You get a faster processor, better network card and scsi controller, and the lastest holographic generator to boot. All for the same price that you would put out for a sound card today.
If everything is in ONE place, you then get ONE choice. (Well, there will likely be several one-stop CPU vendors.) And then ONE standard for each vendor (or maybe the lot of them).
However, let's say Intel changes the socket specs for each successive CPU?
Wanna run an i2003 CPU in that i2001 board? You must upgrade the whole thing! Every year has a new (non-backward-compatible) board/CPU combo. Disposable PCs!
What scares me is that the piece-meal upgrades that breath new life to those old [3,4,5,6]86 machines running *BSD and Linux will become a thing of the past since once something breaks, you're SOL.
Software written for the Merced may not run on a PIII, but software written for older x86s will still run on the Merced. Just as current x86 chips can emulate "real mode" for older apps, so the Merced will be able to use and/or emulate the processing modes used in current x86s.
No. No! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!
I realize there's a huge existing application (and talent) base in supporting legacy CPUs and OSs. But this has really got to stop, folks!
Can't Intel start with a clean slate for the CPU, sans all x86 baggage and then provide a software solution for legacy apps? I never had the pleasure of using an Alpha box, but didn't hey have something called FX!32 (or similar) for the NT Alpha which ran Win32 binaries? Did it work well?
Same damned thing with Microsoft. Each new OS carries tons of crap from the previous one.
Even MS's "32-bit" apps carry old "16-bit" junk around.
Once I made the following leap of logic, running NT Workstation 4 at home: Since I'll only be running Win32 apps, NT shouldn't need to create/support short filenames. I turned off the registry key for 8.3 filenames. I installed Office 97. And then... it just didn't work right. Various errors, complaints about not finding files, etc. convinced me that it just wasn't rid of Win16 baggage.
What a joke.
"Whoops! That FPU died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..."
Though I may counter some of original gripes by saying this, there are some integrations that make good sense. Moving things like the FPU and cache onto the same die as the CPU (or into the CPU itself) can certainly help performance.
However, wouldn't you loose the performance gains of cards that can think on their own? Maybe I'm out of date (or out of clues) but can you get "bus mastering" SCSI card benefits if everything's in the CPU?
And this leads to another subtlety. In the context of the original article, does "integration" equate to "on the die" or "in the CPU"? Does it really matter, and what are the pros and cons of each?
I saw this integration trend coming a while back. I used to tell my buddies, "Some day, we'll just have a motherboard with one huge socket. And we'll be using CPU's this big." as I held my hands up to approximate a waffle-sized square. They would chuckle at me.
I see this for the masses. However, I can't see any power user liking this. Take gamers, for example. Aren't most high-end sound and 3D chipsets designed by smaller independent companies? I don't think Intel could put out a high-quality graphics capable board.
Wouldn't this leave a small niche for traditional motherboards and componnets? We might pay a slightly higher price, but they would still be around. Wouldn't they?
(Please tell me they would be!)
Can you imagine a world where everything's on the CPU? "Whoops! That SCSI controller died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..." That would just suck!
Unless all expandability moved outside the case. Maybe a really (really really really) high-speed external bus standard will come about. So you will then start seeing external 3D graphics adapters and SCSI adpaters.
Hmmm.....