The function of public education in the US is to enforce intellectual mediocrity and restrict the natural curiosity that children possess. Technology has a role in this process.
Tech is can be used to liberate (students could use camera phones to get evidence of teacher's sexually abusing them, and open source software could help students learn to code), or it can be used to oppress (schools use security cameras to make sure students only abuse the drugs they are given: aderall and other amphetamine based ADD drugs and not creativity enhancing drugs like cannabis, and large open source based databases could be used to cheaply to track and build psychological profiles of each and every student). Therefore, from the prospective of the policy makers, technology must have a limited role. Students can have access to the web as long as websites that hold dangerous information and allow free contribution, for example wikipedia, are blocked. Students can use graphing calculators as long as they don't write their own programs for them. They can learn chemistry by memorizing chemical equations, but if they actually learn to think critically and devise original solutions, they might be capable of making explosives, so..... any in depth or critical approaches to learning must be marginalized. Evolution can be taught to a small number of AP-biology students, they might go to college and become biotechnologists and can be trusted with real knowledge, but the rabble must be subservient to religious interests and can't be allowed to learn too much.
Sure some individual teachers can be great progressive inspirations for kids, but few of them are allowed any real control over the curriculum by the corporate, religious, and government plutocrats that make public school policy. Students need to drop out so they can actually lean something. Academic studies should focus on how we can get students out of the schools system and save them before its too late, any attempts at reform are impractical at this point. The fact that George Bush won the last election should be enough to demonstrate to the world that there is a crisis in American education. Maybe France or Finland can intervene and save the quarter of our population that is too young to vote and subject to imprisonment and coercive indoctrination for most of their days.
If you want real security, penitration testing is only a small part of the process. Sure, you can pay someone to find valunerabilities....any kid with a copy of nessus, snort, and nmap will do....or you can shell out the big bucks for a Core Impact setup if you get the PHBs paranoid enough. It really won't help fix anything. Even if you do manage to patch every valunerable service and close off everything else that you don't need, you may still be insecure. Policies and procedures are often as important for ensuring security as closing specific holes in software. If your company needs to outsource network security, convince them to get someone who will offer a more complete solution comprising of a specific and custom plan for ensuring the physical, human, and software aspects of security. If you want to get out of your current prediciment, I suggest patching what you can and explaining why other valunerabilities are not relivant. Prove you are smarter then the consultants leeching money that could be yours. If your boss is a real idiot and the security reaserchers he/she hires are dumbasses too, you can safely backdoor the place before you leave!
Its hard to include code and still be legal. Even the GPL is incompatable with the GFDL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gfdl...other free publishing liscences are also hard to complay with. Public domain doesn't give the author enough rights. We need a balanced, standard, easy to use free/open liscence. Creative commons is a good start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_comm ons Free publishing in 2005 is about where free software was in 1991, there is lots of room for standardisation and innovation, but the tools to build upon are already here.
This is just about the cheapest solution you could use. It only requires only a 386sx with two NICs, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 12MByte of RAM, but scales quite well. I actually have it running on an Athlon 1800+ 256mb RAM box serving a medium sized computer lab. It's really easy to set up, but is missing a lot of important utilities since it's floppy based. A cd based distribution or full debian setup with trafic shapeing/prioritisation packages installed (tc/tcng or others) is probably a better idea if you have the hardware for it.
Install EMP/HERF guns and degousing coils around the doors so any magnetic or solid slate device is destroyed upon exiting the building. Ban tinfoil and make sure not to employ anyone with a pacemaker. Tell everyone to leave their cellphones in their cars and use an internal VOIP system for communication. Make sure any company healthcare doesn't cover radiation poisoning/cancer so your premiums don't go up.
If Free and Open Source software aquires a stronghold in the US military, what will the effect be on the more idealistic side of the Free Software movement? Richard Stallman is known to be opposed to the military industrial complex. Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people? I think many open source coders would, if they could, liscence their software in a way that would ban or restrict the right of the US war machine to use it.
Mod it funny if you want, but Sun thin clients probably offer the best price/performance ratio of any setup out there for an office environment. I know of one network (one of the largest corporate law firms in the world) where every user has a PIV desktop that just runs the Citrix ICA client. It is locked down so user's cannot acces any local applications, just boot windows 2000 and run Citrix. All these PCs are a waste of money! A Sun ray thin client would be a great replacement, and could allow every user to upgrade their environment simply by upgrading the Citrix or Sun Ray server, and allow every user to cary the same session to any computer they work at (authenticate via smart card and username/password). It would also allow seamless intigration of remotly accessable apps running on Linux, Solaris, or another version of Linux. Sun thin client laptop's with wifi are also a pritty cool solution. They are finally available for under a grand. Check it out: http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/comet/
One thing a lot of people have missed in this whole debate is that not all record companies are members of the RIAA. The iTunes store actually has a lot of great bands signed to indipendent labels. Alternative Tentacles, and Epitaph records offer mp3/real files from their websites, emusic, and iTunes downloads too. Apple and the RIAA do not own the copywrite to any of the music I choose to listen to, and so I doubt they could successfully sue me for breaking the DRM.
The public schools will kick you out for things your do in your own home, even legal harmless things like run an open proxy/free shell server. It happened to me.
This is ordered bits of information, not mood altering drugs (be it alchohol, marjuana, or methamphetamine). Violent gangs will not be produced. The near industry ban on indipendent artests and resulting RIAA oilgopoly has produced an amazing free p2p culture that is quite illegal, but also a productive non-capitalist economy. A ban on violent video games for children would be the same. Go back to my pornography example....adults are allowed to watch all the porn they want, and they DO watch and pay for a lot of it. Teenagers watch as much or more, but they are smart enough to get it for free. If we didnt' let kids buy some video games they would just download them via conventional ways (ftp, emule, kazaa, bittorrent, http, scp), or even devist their own methods of circumvention. There are probably hundreds of 15/16/17 year old with the intelligence and technical knowledge to crack software and code new, more innovative p2p software to distribute it. I would love nothing more then to have an idealistic libertarian society where all behaviors that don't involve personal harm or property damage would be legal rights, but there is no easy way to get to such a society. Reform generally just helps keep the existing order in power, this is why I support the fascists (I think that is the right word for anyone who restricts free speech) who will make unconstitutional laws. People will only wake up if they see things changing in some way that really effects their lives.
Kids aren't going to stop playing video games because they legaly need mommy to buy the game for them. Its like pornography; its illegal for minors to buy porn, so they aren't able to purchase much...but the age range with the most pron downloads is probably 13-17 year old boys. I think these kinds of restrictions are a good thing because they teach kids how to subvert fascist authority. If we are to live in a free society, we need creative people who can get around the confinements imposed by parents, churches, governments, and corporations. If you give kids too much freedom yearly on, they won't know what to do when that freedom is taken away.
So...lets ban all violent video games, music with naughty words, and any images of the human body that show more skin then an Afghani wearing a burqua! For every prohibition, you create an underground. The more underground our economy is, they less the corporate glutons profit from it and the more average citizens learn to be rebels and freedom fighters.
Schneier knows that overall security is imporved simply by the process of weeding out poor solutions in a public forum. Willingness to go through harsh peer review is what makes the scientific method so successful at explaining the physical world, and the same process should be applied to security. This is why openbsd or linux is more secure then Microsoft windows.
Schneier has also made significant contributions to security products that DO work including the blowfish/twofish encryption algorithm.
I've installed and ran debian on x86 (desktop/server/laptop), mips (sgi), and PA-risc (both 32 and 64 bit). I almost always go with unstable, and it seams robust and.....well....."stable" enough for me. Packages work 99.9% of the time. Droping stable support for non-x86 archs might not be a bad idea. A descision like this could free up reasorces and speed up debian development, hopefully including porting! I say this as someone who basically hates x86; I have several sparc systems I'm setting up right now and vow to never buy intel again. Debian developers should focus on a more agressive development cycle (if anyones working on debian needs a shell for testing on obscure hardware or wants me to try compiling something, you can contract me aim:Da1the0ne or the_oneREMOVE_SPAM_OBFUSCATOR@ameritech.net
Intel was the first to impliment this, true, but sun has a history of great SMP support in both software and hardware; multiprocessing/multithreading could be a widly accepted trend in the industry and sun could take the lead. For more information on SMT/CMT, read up:
How do we know that noone in military prisons outside US boarders are not political prisoners incarcerated due to the authority of the PATRIOT act? How in depth are independent investigations from groups like Human Rights watch or Amnisty International allowed to go?
The most severe abuses probably have not been disclosed at all. Anyone who found out about them has promptly been shipped to guantanamo bay with no public notice...
We need to have some form of auditing of the classified record to ensure that conspiracy nuts like me are just delluded and wrong.:-)
When you spends a certain ammount of time on the internet, you eventually realise there are pictures besides pron and goatse out there. I personally have taken a recent interest in photo art on the web. My favorite artist is Jenni Tampanila. Check out her work here:
(Since this article is almost a re-post, my comment is too)
Solaris 10 is a great technical computing or server OS. GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation. Overall Linux is easier to get up and running. Knoppix is trivial to boot. Paths and default executable placement are simpler in Linux. Linux is more ported. X11 support seams better in most Linux distros. (X worked fine thoughout my install, but when i rebooted, my display was messed up and I had to console login and set X to a lower resolution) Virtual consoles are a big plus when X gets messed up, and solaris misses them badly.
But Solaris has some cool features. Zones, dtrace, exellent SMP support, and surprisingly, a great price/performance ratio. I donno how well sun will do (I would guess they'll make some money in the short term on Opeteron systems and probably in the long term with Fujitsu massivly multi-core SPARC). But the current market for used sun workstations/servers is great because of Sun's overall decline. I was able to get (on ebay) a quad 450mhz ultrasparcII box with 2 gigs of ram, and dual 36 gig scsi drives, quad redundent power supples (800 watt), etc: for a measily $200. Solaris 10 installed great. Sun hardware is built to withstand hell and admins, students, hobbiests, or whoever, who normally couldn't afford this quality should really check it out. I also actually like CDE and the old Motief look. It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows or MacOS.
In addition to allowing me to sample a lot of music is not available in stores or on the radio, I've also been influenced indirectly by p2p, mainly by the RIAA's responce to it. I used to like a lot of major label bands, but have gotten so disguested with the RIAA's anti-technological tactics that I now only buy music from independent artists. This may seem like a purely political act that just limits my choice, but it has actually opened my ears to a lot of good music I wouldn't have heard otherwise. In some genra's, I've found that indy's simply have better music then the big record companies. For example, if you like punk, you can't do better then Epitaph or Alternative Tentacles.
Blu-ray is higher capacity and higher cost. That's why componies that sell better products for higher prices (and when they do it right, get higher profit margins) are supporting it. Sun supported Blu-ray on their systems first, apple is just following their lead in the workstation/high end desktop market.
Might not be that common now, but the ammount of RAM necessary for the latest applications is always increesing. I've looked at SPARC based laptops with dual processors and 16GB of RAM. 64-bit is definitly necessary if you are looking at the high end.
Check it out. http://www.partnersdata.com/cgi-bin/searchit em?id= 8434
If you don't want to bother to get a quote, one of these configured with just about all the extras will run you $46,933 according to a quote I got.
Even if / is read only, if you have root, you should still be able to find some way to leave your mark.
For example, if you have root, you could probably use usermode linux to run an additional version of linux within itself with / on a ramdisk. Even if the system has no hard drive and loads everything from flash firmware or a cd, you need to have some ram. If you are root, you can write to that ram and label it with your identification information and subsequently make it a root partition in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
The function of public education in the US is to enforce intellectual mediocrity and restrict the natural curiosity that children possess. Technology has a role in this process.
Tech is can be used to liberate (students could use camera phones to get evidence of teacher's sexually abusing them, and open source software could help students learn to code), or it can be used to oppress (schools use security cameras to make sure students only abuse the drugs they are given: aderall and other amphetamine based ADD drugs and not creativity enhancing drugs like cannabis, and large open source based databases could be used to cheaply to track and build psychological profiles of each and every student). Therefore, from the prospective of the policy makers, technology must have a limited role. Students can have access to the web as long as websites that hold dangerous information and allow free contribution, for example wikipedia, are blocked. Students can use graphing calculators as long as they don't write their own programs for them. They can learn chemistry by memorizing chemical equations, but if they actually learn to think critically and devise original solutions, they might be capable of making explosives, so..... any in depth or critical approaches to learning must be marginalized. Evolution can be taught to a small number of AP-biology students, they might go to college and become biotechnologists and can be trusted with real knowledge, but the rabble must be subservient to religious interests and can't be allowed to learn too much.
Sure some individual teachers can be great progressive inspirations for kids, but few of them are allowed any real control over the curriculum by the corporate, religious, and government plutocrats that make public school policy. Students need to drop out so they can actually lean something. Academic studies should focus on how we can get students out of the schools system and save them before its too late, any attempts at reform are impractical at this point. The fact that George Bush won the last election should be enough to demonstrate to the world that there is a crisis in American education. Maybe France or Finland can intervene and save the quarter of our population that is too young to vote and subject to imprisonment and coercive indoctrination for most of their days.
If you want real security, penitration testing is only a small part of the process. Sure, you can pay someone to find valunerabilities....any kid with a copy of nessus, snort, and nmap will do....or you can shell out the big bucks for a Core Impact setup if you get the PHBs paranoid enough. It really won't help fix anything. Even if you do manage to patch every valunerable service and close off everything else that you don't need, you may still be insecure. Policies and procedures are often as important for ensuring security as closing specific holes in software. If your company needs to outsource network security, convince them to get someone who will offer a more complete solution comprising of a specific and custom plan for ensuring the physical, human, and software aspects of security. If you want to get out of your current prediciment, I suggest patching what you can and explaining why other valunerabilities are not relivant. Prove you are smarter then the consultants leeching money that could be yours. If your boss is a real idiot and the security reaserchers he/she hires are dumbasses too, you can safely backdoor the place before you leave!
Its hard to include code and still be legal. Even the GPL is incompatable with the GFDL ...other free publishing liscences are also hard to complay with. Public domain doesn't give the author enough rights. We need a balanced, standard, easy to use free/open liscence. Creative commons is a good start.m ons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gfdl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_com
Free publishing in 2005 is about where free software was in 1991, there is lots of room for standardisation and innovation, but the tools to build upon are already here.
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
This is just about the cheapest solution you could use. It only requires only a 386sx with two NICs, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 12MByte of RAM, but scales quite well. I actually have it running on an Athlon 1800+ 256mb RAM box serving a medium sized computer lab. It's really easy to set up, but is missing a lot of important utilities since it's floppy based. A cd based distribution or full debian setup with trafic shapeing/prioritisation packages installed (tc/tcng or others) is probably a better idea if you have the hardware for it.
Install EMP/HERF guns and degousing coils around the doors so any magnetic or solid slate device is destroyed upon exiting the building. Ban tinfoil and make sure not to employ anyone with a pacemaker. Tell everyone to leave their cellphones in their cars and use an internal VOIP system for communication. Make sure any company healthcare doesn't cover radiation poisoning/cancer so your premiums don't go up.
WARNING: NOT SCHOOL/OFFICE SAFE
http://www.b0g.org/wsnm/uploads/octopussy.avi/
If Free and Open Source software aquires a stronghold in the US military, what will the effect be on the more idealistic side of the Free Software movement? Richard Stallman is known to be opposed to the military industrial complex. Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people? I think many open source coders would, if they could, liscence their software in a way that would ban or restrict the right of the US war machine to use it.
Mod it funny if you want, but Sun thin clients probably offer the best price/performance ratio of any setup out there for an office environment. I know of one network (one of the largest corporate law firms in the world) where every user has a PIV desktop that just runs the Citrix ICA client. It is locked down so user's cannot acces any local applications, just boot windows 2000 and run Citrix. All these PCs are a waste of money! A Sun ray thin client would be a great replacement, and could allow every user to upgrade their environment simply by upgrading the Citrix or Sun Ray server, and allow every user to cary the same session to any computer they work at (authenticate via smart card and username/password). It would also allow seamless intigration of remotly accessable apps running on Linux, Solaris, or another version of Linux. Sun thin client laptop's with wifi are also a pritty cool solution. They are finally available for under a grand. Check it out: http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/html/products/mobil e/comet/
One thing a lot of people have missed in this whole debate is that not all record companies are members of the RIAA. The iTunes store actually has a lot of great bands signed to indipendent labels. Alternative Tentacles, and Epitaph records offer mp3/real files from their websites, emusic, and iTunes downloads too. Apple and the RIAA do not own the copywrite to any of the music I choose to listen to, and so I doubt they could successfully sue me for breaking the DRM.
The public schools will kick you out for things your do in your own home, even legal harmless things like run an open proxy/free shell server. It happened to me.
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt
This is ordered bits of information, not mood altering drugs (be it alchohol, marjuana, or methamphetamine). Violent gangs will not be produced. The near industry ban on indipendent artests and resulting RIAA oilgopoly has produced an amazing free p2p culture that is quite illegal, but also a productive non-capitalist economy. A ban on violent video games for children would be the same. Go back to my pornography example....adults are allowed to watch all the porn they want, and they DO watch and pay for a lot of it. Teenagers watch as much or more, but they are smart enough to get it for free. If we didnt' let kids buy some video games they would just download them via conventional ways (ftp, emule, kazaa, bittorrent, http, scp), or even devist their own methods of circumvention. There are probably hundreds of 15/16/17 year old with the intelligence and technical knowledge to crack software and code new, more innovative p2p software to distribute it. I would love nothing more then to have an idealistic libertarian society where all behaviors that don't involve personal harm or property damage would be legal rights, but there is no easy way to get to such a society. Reform generally just helps keep the existing order in power, this is why I support the fascists (I think that is the right word for anyone who restricts free speech) who will make unconstitutional laws. People will only wake up if they see things changing in some way that really effects their lives.
Kids aren't going to stop playing video games because they legaly need mommy to buy the game for them. Its like pornography; its illegal for minors to buy porn, so they aren't able to purchase much...but the age range with the most pron downloads is probably 13-17 year old boys. I think these kinds of restrictions are a good thing because they teach kids how to subvert fascist authority. If we are to live in a free society, we need creative people who can get around the confinements imposed by parents, churches, governments, and corporations. If you give kids too much freedom yearly on, they won't know what to do when that freedom is taken away.
So...lets ban all violent video games, music with naughty words, and any images of the human body that show more skin then an Afghani wearing a burqua! For every prohibition, you create an underground. The more underground our economy is, they less the corporate glutons profit from it and the more average citizens learn to be rebels and freedom fighters.
Schneier knows that overall security is imporved simply by the process of weeding out poor solutions in a public forum. Willingness to go through harsh peer review is what makes the scientific method so successful at explaining the physical world, and the same process should be applied to security. This is why openbsd or linux is more secure then Microsoft windows.
Schneier has also made significant contributions to security products that DO work including the blowfish/twofish encryption algorithm.
I've installed and ran debian on x86 (desktop/server/laptop), mips (sgi), and PA-risc (both 32 and 64 bit). I almost always go with unstable, and it seams robust and.....well....."stable" enough for me. Packages work 99.9% of the time. Droping stable support for non-x86 archs might not be a bad idea. A descision like this could free up reasorces and speed up debian development, hopefully including porting! I say this as someone who basically hates x86; I have several sparc systems I'm setting up right now and vow to never buy intel again. Debian developers should focus on a more agressive development cycle (if anyones working on debian needs a shell for testing on obscure hardware or wants me to try compiling something, you can contract me
aim:Da1the0ne or
the_oneREMOVE_SPAM_OBFUSCATOR@ameritech.net
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/stg/pub/P/par_alg.ht
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=36
http://static.cray-cyber.org/Documentation/Vector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_multith
How do we know that noone in military prisons outside US boarders are not political prisoners incarcerated due to the authority of the PATRIOT act? How in depth are independent investigations from groups like Human Rights watch or Amnisty International allowed to go?
The most severe abuses probably have not been disclosed at all. Anyone who found out about them has promptly been shipped to guantanamo bay with no public notice...
:-)
We need to have some form of auditing of the classified record to ensure that conspiracy nuts like me are just delluded and wrong.
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_i d=421
or by searching the eDonkey/eMule network for "donald knuth" or "god and computers"
http://www.suzi9mm.com/
(Since this article is almost a re-post, my comment is too)
Solaris 10 is a great technical computing or server OS. GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation. Overall Linux is easier to get up and running. Knoppix is trivial to boot. Paths and default executable placement are simpler in Linux. Linux is more ported. X11 support seams better in most Linux distros. (X worked fine thoughout my install, but when i rebooted, my display was messed up and I had to console login and set X to a lower resolution) Virtual consoles are a big plus when X gets messed up, and solaris misses them badly.
But Solaris has some cool features. Zones, dtrace, exellent SMP support, and surprisingly, a great price/performance ratio. I donno how well sun will do (I would guess they'll make some money in the short term on Opeteron systems and probably in the long term with Fujitsu massivly multi-core SPARC). But the current market for used sun workstations/servers is great because of Sun's overall decline. I was able to get (on ebay) a quad 450mhz ultrasparcII box with 2 gigs of ram, and dual 36 gig scsi drives, quad redundent power supples (800 watt), etc: for a measily $200. Solaris 10 installed great. Sun hardware is built to withstand hell and admins, students, hobbiests, or whoever, who normally couldn't afford this quality should really check it out. I also actually like CDE and the old Motief look. It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows or MacOS.
In addition to allowing me to sample a lot of music is not available in stores or on the radio, I've also been influenced indirectly by p2p, mainly by the RIAA's responce to it. I used to like a lot of major label bands, but have gotten so disguested with the RIAA's anti-technological tactics that I now only buy music from independent artists. This may seem like a purely political act that just limits my choice, but it has actually opened my ears to a lot of good music I wouldn't have heard otherwise. In some genra's, I've found that indy's simply have better music then the big record companies. For example, if you like punk, you can't do better then Epitaph or Alternative Tentacles.
e ntacles.com
http://www.epitaph.com
http://www.alternativet
Blu-ray is higher capacity and higher cost. That's why componies that sell better products for higher prices (and when they do it right, get higher profit margins) are supporting it. Sun supported Blu-ray on their systems first, apple is just following their lead in the workstation/high end desktop market.
Might not be that common now, but the ammount of RAM necessary for the latest applications is always increesing. I've looked at SPARC based laptops with dual processors and 16GB of RAM. 64-bit is definitly necessary if you are looking at the high end.
t em?id= 8434
Check it out.
http://www.partnersdata.com/cgi-bin/searchi
If you don't want to bother to get a quote, one of these configured with just about all the extras will run you $46,933 according to a quote I got.
Even if / is read only, if you have root, you should still be able to find some way to leave your mark.
For example, if you have root, you could probably use usermode linux to run an additional version of linux within itself with / on a ramdisk. Even if the system has no hard drive and loads everything from flash firmware or a cd, you need to have some ram. If you are root, you can write to that ram and label it with your identification information and subsequently make it a root partition in some way.