To summarize: the traditional access controls are designed to protect users from each other. This is not enough.
What you need is a capability based system. And by capabilities I don't mean POSIX "capabilities" but the real ones.
This is hardly a new idea. Read some papers by Norman Hardy.
Start from Capability Theory by Sound Bytes and read the referenced articles until you start getting the idea.
Then read about GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s, a 1979 paper by Bill Frantz, Norman Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau.
Then read about KeyKOS, a persistent, pure capability operating system.
Then read about EROS: The Extremely Reliable Operating System.
I think it will be enough for a good start.
As you see all of those problems we discuss today in this article have already been solved in the '70s or '80s at worst. But those who don't know the history are doomed to repeat it.
Let's face it. Broadband over Power Lines is a terrible idea. From any possible standpoint it is utterly idiotic. The only reason anyone has ever started to think about investing in that idea was billion gigabits per second (sic) promised by Luke Stewart with his Media Fusion scam. Wouldn't you agree that all of those disadvantages you write about wouldn't matter so much if that would give us million Tbps (yes, that's million terabits per second) broadband in every home? Wouldn't you agree that million Tbps must have sounded even better in 1998? That is the real reason why people started to look into BPL. They was trying to build it not because they didn't know about the issues you write about, but becuase they wanted to use those very interferences for data transmitted on the magnetic field created by electric currents running through power line wires, not the electricity itself. This is very important to properly understand the BPL phenomenon. It is pointless to talk about the differences between power lines and standard cabling used for data transmission like copper twisted pair as their disadvantage because those very differences were supposed to make BPL much better than any other meduim known before. I think it makes no sense to start another discussion not even mentioning about it.
But I don't want to repeat myself. Please read my
otherposts.
What is sad is that I can shout as loud as I can every time people start to talk about yet another try to deploy BPL and still no one cares. Sad. Very sad. But what else can I do...
It's more like "Scam Artists vs. Common Sense." Seriously, you don't have to worry about HAM because BPL is only a scam.
From the technical standpoint it is an absolutely terrible and utterly stupid idea. Lots of people keep and will keep investing in it but it will never be actually implemented. Don't worry.
Trials of this technology were abandoned in the UK in 1998/1999 (I seem to recall), due to the problem of street lights acting as transmitters, causing significant interference with emergency services transmissions.
There have been lots of trials since 1998 when Edwin Blair invested in Luke Stewart's Media Fusion LLC. All of them failed, but actually for reasons much more fascinating than what you wrote about.
Please read the Dallas Business Journal article from March, Media Fusion founders named in suit by Jeff Bounds:
During the height of the technology boom, William "Luke" Stewart had a vision for what seemed like the ultimate breakthrough for the power industry. And many people believed him.
The self-proclaimed "powerline communications guru"
[even lying that he had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize]
claimed to have developed a system for delivering high-speed Internet access over electrical wires, that would circumvent the telecom network. The network is encumbered by the so-called "last mile" problem of getting data quickly through copper telephone wires built to handle phone calls.
[...] With Dallas entrepreneur Edwin Blair, Stewart in 1998 formed what would become Dallas-based Media Fusion L.L.C. to commercialize the idea. Despite rampant skepticism in the scientific community, they landed some $16 million in financing with backers like retired Navy Rear Admiral James Carey, Democratic Party chairman Terence McAuliffe and former Rep. Robert Livingston, R-La.
[...]
Today, the dream has collapsed. The company has shut down, though some people believe attempts may be made to revive it. And Blair and Stewart are under federal criminal indictment in South Carolina.
"Luke Stewart -- self-proclaimed national treasure -- carries on. Chances are, we haven't heard the last of him, because Stewart sold his vision best to the one person who will never pull the plug: himself. Once you become a man with a Big Idea, the mundane details of the scientific method can never match the thrill of changing the world with a sweep of your hand."
Anyone knows what happened to Luke Stewart since then?
Quoting my post
I forgot the link.
It's
The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test
by Evan Ratliff,
Wired,
November 2001.
Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article.
I quoted only few very short fragments.
The most important point about
Broadband Over Power Lines
is why anyone started to even think about building it.
We have to ask that question before
we start to talk about interference
and other obvious details.
Was it because most of potential Internet users
don't have telephone lines?
No. It was because we cannot have
billion gigabits per second
using copper, while
according to Luke Stewart with power lines
we somehow can.
We can all talk about legal implications and interference issues of "BPL" like there was no tommorow, it might even be very interesting and entertaining, but it all makes no sense whatsoever without a proper context and understanding of the underlying technology.
A very important
yet often overlooked thing
to keep in mind while thinking about
"broadband over power lines,"
as I have already written
countless times with little effect only to be completely ignored every time I've rised this issue,
is the very fact that it all has started as a
scam. That's right, folks.
The idea has been introduced by certain Luke Stewart,
a well known scam artist
who has promised more than billion gigabits per second (sic)
with his "Media Fusion" snake oil.
The idea of sending information via the electrical grid, rather than over telephone copper or fiber-optic cable, has been around for decades. The field, known as power line communications, or PLC, is pockmarked with wasted investments and technical failures. Only within the past few months have several companies begun to deploy limited PLC ventures.
[...]
Stewart, however, had a much grander vision, based on what he considered to be a dramatic discovery: Data could hitch a ride on the magnetic field created by electric currents running through power line wires. By piggybacking on this magnetic field, instead of on the electricity itself, he could obtain almost limitless speeds of transmission.
[...] Media Fusion promised to deliver, within two years, bandwidth at speeds thousands of times faster than what's possible with fiber. Stewart was company chair, while the board of directors included government heavyweights such as former Speaker of the House Robert Livingston; Terry McAullife, a leading Democratic fund-raiser and close friend of then-President Clinton; and Admiral James Carey, former chair of the Federal Maritime Commission. The firm's Web site declared that the ASCM technology would "impact every facet of our life," and the computing power of the network would be "exponentially more powerful than any supercomputer to date."
[emphasis added]
This scam
and those
billions gigabits per second
was the only reason
why "broadband over power lines"
has been ever considered in the first place!
See these links for sources and much more informative details and background.
So I ask you: do we seriously need to be fooled over and over again? Are we doomed to repeat the history of people who have lost a lot of money invested in this completely pointless technology? I really believe we can do better than that. Of course, the question is: why? Why are we lied to? The answer is actually quite simple.
Of course the only problem with BPL is the wire, which severely limits broadband throughput, acts like an antenna, disrupting other services, reduces the range between repeaters, killing economy of the service, acts like an open door, letting interference into BPL, etc.--I don't have to talk about it because it is obvious. But the question is, why not do it without the wire then? Why not use twisted-pair or fiber instead? Simple: because the only justification the power companies have for joining the Internet services market is that they have those wires going everywhere, so it is not surprising that they keep telling us that this wire is better than Cat5, no matter what they and we all know about it.
So instead of talking about the effects of BPL deployment, please just once let's stop to think about it causes.
"The Tech Report has a review of the new Seagate Savvio hard drive. This little SCSI drive is roughly one-third the size of the Cheetah 10K-RPM drives so popular for servers, but the benchmarks all show it performing about the same. Not only that, but noise levels and power consumption are both lower than 3.5" SCSI drives.
Performance the same, lower noise and power consumption--this is all great, but the most important question is: is it equally robust as the full-sized version? This is essential for any even remotely serious server, when the data is worth much more than the hardware by several orders of magnitude and when downtime costs more than many man-months combined. And here the answer might be sadly "no" because anything that is smaller is inevitably easier to scratch, as any given scratch is relatively larger. Just do the math.
Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"
Unlikely. Highly unlikely. But there is another possibility: namely laptops might finally get SCSI drives to achieve much better quality and throughput than the legacy IDE we are usually left with now. I would gladly pay few hudred more to have a good and robust SCSI drive in my laptop. This seems like a very promising product. Let's see how the market will react in the following weeks. Right now it is hard to predict the future but it surely looks promising.
Does Parrot use References Counting (limited by virtual memory)? or
Does Parrot use Mark-Sweep Collection or Copying Collection (limited by physical memory)?
Unlike Perl 5 today, Parrot will not use reference counting. This is one of important difficulties which the Ponie project has to overcome. Please let me quote the most relevant parts of Parrot documentation.
Every single place where an object is referenced, and every single place where a reference is dropped, must properly alter the refcount of the objects being manipulated. One mistake and an object (and everything it references, directly or indirectly) lives forever or dies prematurely. Since a lot of code references objects, that's a lot of places to scatter reference counting code. While some of it can be automated, that's a lot of discipline that has to be maintained.
It's enough of a problem to track down garbage collection systems as it is, and when your garbage collection system is scattered across your entire source base, and possibly across all your extensions, it's a massive annoyance. More sophisticated garbage collection systems, on the other hand, involve much less code. It is, granted, trickier code, but it's a small chunk of code, contained in one spot. Once you get that one chunk correct, you don't have to bother with the garbage collector any more.
Cost
For reference counting to work right, you need to twiddle reference counts every time an object is referenced, or unreferenced. This generally includes even short-lived objects that will exist only briefly before dying. The cost of a reference counting scheme is directly linked to the number of times code references, or unreferences, objects. A tracing system of one sort or another (and there are many) has an average-case cost that's based on the number of live objects.
There are a number of hidden costs in a reference-counting scheme. Since the code to manipulate the reference counts must be scattered throughout the interpreter, the interpreter code is less dense than it would be without reference counts. That means that more of the processor's cache is dedicated to reference count code, code that is ultimately just interpreter bookkeeping, and not dedicated to running your program. The data is also less dense, as there has to be a reference count embedded in it. Once again, that means more cache used for each object during normal running, and lower cache density.
A tracing collector, on the other hand, has much denser code, since all it's doing is running through active objects in a tight loop. If done right, the entire tracing system will fit nicely in a processor's L1 cache, which is about as tight as you can get. The data being accessed is also done in a linear fashion, at least in part, which lends itself well to processor's prefetch mechanisms where they exist. The garbage collection data can also be put in a separate area and designed in a way that's much tighter and more cache-dense.
Having said that, the worst-case performance for a tracing garbage collecting system is worse than that of a reference counting system. Luckily the pathological cases are quite rare, and there are a number of fairly good techniques to deal with those. Refcounting schemes are also more deterministic than tracing systems, which can be an advantage in some cases. Making a tracing collector deterministic can be somewhat expensive.
Self-referential structures live forever
Or nearly forever. Since the only time an object is destroyed is when its refcount drops to zero, data in a self-referential structure
I would hate to sound like a typical Slashdot open-source cheerleader but I've been holding my breadth and I really think that this is trully great news even if not exactly "new" for anyone who knew what had been going on in IBM for quite some time now and the most important question is of course whether we'll see full implementation of Rexx in the next release of Parrot--we can hope so because as we know Rexx (or Restructured Extended Executor--one has to love the old-shool humour of IBM developers!) being a structured high-level programming language which was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read will be a great transition path for anyone who will want to use the unimaginable power of future CPAN (or CP6AN) modules yet won't be experienced enough to fully master the equally unimaginable complexity of Perl 6 grammar yet. This is a very important step in the direction of Perl 6 which we are all looking forward to. One really has to admire the insight of IBM's developer--and indeed executves, let's give credit where it is due!--who perfectly understand that open source is good for them, at least those who I personally spoke to, but what is even more important for us, is that it is good for us as well. This is a win-win scenerio for everyone but Microsoft. Why? Because IBM is not a charity, they are not stupid, they understand that undermining.NET and C# is even more important that Java. A common and portable run-time environment is essential for companies like Sun and IBM and as always IBM is first to understand it. I can only say: Bravo! Keep up the good work! A big "Thank you!" in the name of the entire Slashdot community. Now let us see what great project will follow from that step. I can hardly wait.
No! I will not switch to Windows. Debian works great on PPC, thank you very much. I can switch my underlying architectures like there was no tommorow, switching back and forth not only between Intel and PPC but also M68k, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64--hell, even S/390!--just from the top of my head. Oh, and by the way, I can use different kernels if I don't like Linux. Have I already mentioned security? To make the long story short, I will never switch Debian to Windows, no matter what are they going to port it to. Period. So, please stop asking.
So the iUniverse seems to be somewhat comparable with Lulu. Actually, I know Lulu the best because when I first saw a link to someone's book it was the only such service I knew about, CafePress didn't have books back then, so I've read everything I could on their website. Besides different formats of the book itself (now I see that there are also full-color books available--maybe I should publish a photo album before a book then?--seriously, I feel like a kid in a candy store) there are three options: one can publish a book for free with no ISBN, pay for assigning an ISBN with scannable barcode, or pay more to get the book entered into Ingram's database (so Amazon, Barnes and Noble and even off-line bookstores can easily sell it). Thanks, I'll save your link for later when I have my book ready to choose the best publisher. Well, why even choose? I can use every publisher at the same time. There are just too many possibilities to get anything done...
This is off-topic: I've followed your link to iUniverse (quite frankly I thought that it was a link to some book by David Brin, posted as a joke). I'm starting to write a book which I am going to self-publish using one of those print-on-demand services. It's a lot of time but I want to be up to date with different options. So far I was considering mostly Lulu or CafePress. Lately I've found also Zazzle which seems nice for printing artwork but there are no books yet. Generally instead of looking for those services myself I just save links to those which I find others using. Could you please tell me why would you personally suggest iUniverse instead of Lulu or CafePress, for both the cheapest options possible as well as standard books with ISBN and everything? Have you used them yourself? Thanks.
When I first read the book back in high school I was shocked to discover that it presented a world that most of my peers considered to be desireable. Lots of sex and drugs. Sure, not too much freedom, but lots of sex and drugs. Everything is planned out for you...but lots of sex and drugs. It has its appeal to the modern mentality. Has society changed so much since Huxley's time?
Everything changed after we won the war on drugs.
Now, when there are no drugs any more, there's only sex left, but don't worry, we're working on it.
Holy run-on sentence, Batman!
That's funny you mention it because quite frankly I did preview it and in fact it was not until then when I decided to turn a list of comma separated values into a bullet list as well as [break] the second then single-sentence paragraph into three separate sentences exactly because I was somewhat concerned readability-wise [...]
Funny you mention the run-on sentence.
I did preview the article.
As I previewed the article I decided to turn a list of comma separated values into a bullet list and broke the second single-sentence paragraph into three separate sentences.
I did these two actions because I was somewhat concerned about the readability of the article. [...]
Please take no offence but your version is hardly an improvement, not only because the dissonance between sentences (or impedance mismatch, if you will) makes it sound like a homework written by a six years old child, but most importantly becuase in addition to changing style you have also removed content by dropping quite a few important subtleties and overtones in the form of relations of different parts of the original sentence, as well as my emotional relation thereto. Why not "correct" moretexts while you are at it! They might really need their "run-on sentences" broke into infantile series of three-word statements!
Now, on a much serious matter:
[...] I can understand that for some people interested in the subject my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace.
Some people do not contain enough whitespace.
[Not sure why Pan would mention whitespace in conjunction with people.]
You have probably parsed it as:
"I can understand that some people interested in the subject of my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace"
or "I can understand that for some reason people interested in the subject of my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" instead of the literal and correct "I can understand that for some people interested in the subject my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" which is parsable only one way, using dashes instead of whitespace for indentation:
- I can understand that
- - [that] my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace
- - - [enough] for some people
- - - - [people] interested in the subject
It might be disambiguated using punctuation: "I can understand that, for some people interested in the subject, my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" or
"I can understand that--for some people interested in the subject--my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" but even without such punctuation marks this part of the sentence is unambiguous nonetheless, fot there is no other way whatsoever for it to make any sense assuming it was written correctly in the first place, while you have presumably assumed otherwise (which itself is an insult).
Still, I am most disappointed (if not outright outraged) by the fact that you have completely missed the humour therein! I can only hope that some people who use some language named after a certain BBC show from 1969 are a somewhat better parsers because otherwise I would have to consider the time spent on writing that comment--and indeed submitting the whole story--completely wasted.
Who's Poice?
And isn't this name a bit inappropriate?
There is nothing inappropriate in poicephalus as e.g. poicephalus gulielmi is just a Latin name of Red-fronted Parrot, well known for every bird lover, just like agapornis pullarius is a Latin name of Red-headed Lovebird, another proposed code-name for this release. You are probably thinking about phallus for some reason but instead of looking for Freudian connotations you might want to read more about parrots.
That's funny you mention it because quite frankly I did preview it and in fact it was not until then when I decided to turn a list of comma separated values into a bullet list as well as brake the second then single-sentence paragraph into three separate sentences exactly because I was somewhat concerned readability-wise--though to be fair braking it into two parts and adding "Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links" we owe to Timothy, who has also removed quite a few important links for some reason--but nevertheless I am quite surprised if not outright disappointed that anyone who is even remotely interested in Perl 6 might lack basic linguistic skills to parse a paragraph of simple English, however on the other hand I can understand that for some people interested in the subject my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace.
Why do they need to sniff the password if they can sniff the cookie? Surely the cookie wasn't sent over SSL and the password in plaintext.
It wasn't sent over SSL but of course it wasn't a simple:
Set-Cookie: LOGGED_USER=name;...
but instead included enough information about the client encrypted and signed by the server that simply sending the same data by anyone else wouldn't work.
As an example please consider this simplified idea: the server verifies the password during the login and has to set the session cookie but instead of setting SESSION=username it sets the cookie to SESSION=$session where $session is:
$session = "$username:$signature";
while the $signature is:
$signature = md5_hex("$username:$ip:$secret");
With the $ip being the client's IP address and $secret being some secret string. Now, every time the client sends such a cookie, the server computes the $signature and compares it with the one in the cookie itself, thus making it impossible to use the cookie with someone connecting from a different IP. Of course I am greatly simplifying, but even such a poor man's digital signature using MD5 with a secret value can be quite effective, especially when more info is used.
Of course if the attackers were smarter they would try to invalidate the sessions of other logged-in users, thus forcing them to reauthenticate with their passwords, trying a monkey-in-the-middle attack, hijacking their TCP sessions, etc. but if they were smarter, they wouldn't insert pornography into public websites, now would they?
They include things like week passwords and non-web network threats.
But surely changing your passwords every week is good? (Well, against external attackers - not so good against internal attackers if you have to write your password on a PostIt and stick it to your monitor).
Great pun, but seriously, this reminds me of one story. There was a web-based service to conveniently change personal pages of people working in the lab (photo, bio, links to projects) where everyone were usually logged-in permanently with never-expiring cookies (much like Slashdot). One day some students defeced the info page of one professor changing his photo to goatse.cx picture.
I have done the investigation (eventually leading to expelling said students and further prosecution for sexual molesting--it was a public network with unfiltered access from the library used by minors) and what I have found out was that they broke into the account by sniffing a password from HTTP traffic while the victim was changing it for security reasons! I checked it and she was the only person who kept changing her password. The password was a random string of 32 alphanumeric characters, changed every morning. Other people had passwords like "pass," "clit" or "arse" (I kid you not!) but those accounts were not broken into since those passwords were not changed periodically via HTTP, effectively remaining secret. The only person paying attention to security was the least secure one. Interesting, is it not? Since that very incident I always keep saying that security layers are like the layers of onion indeed, but it is a rotten onion.
I have just read this thread and found your post and the answers thereto particularily interesting. (Pun not intended.) Especially this part:
Go EU go! With your sociopathic urge to unite
Unlike the United States of America, which is just a loose union of totally independent and sovereign states?
Still, maybe those guys could take some advice from a citizen of a country who already made that mistake?
Do you suggest that the union of the United States of America should be abandoned?
Do you suggest that all, or even some states should leave the union and get an independent sovereignty? (When was the last time some of the United States wanted to leave the union? What happened then?) Only a US separatist could make a consistent and sound argument against the European Union and its "sociopathic urge to unite" but if you do support the union of United States but are opposed to a much looser European Union (let me repeat, much looser--do you really think France, Poland, United Kingdom or Germany would ever voluntarily give up their sovereignty? Do you know the history of those very nations in the last few millennia?) then you must realise that such an advice would sound a little bit hypocritical, mustn't you?
"You're not buying the game. You're buying a license to use the game on this computer. So you don't own it, and you cannot do anything you want with it. You *do* own the disk that it's on, but you don't own that data. See what I mean?" I understood at the time only somewhat, but my dad was good to explain, because I still remember that.
Great explanation. Did he also show you Don't Copy That Floppy video, while he was at it? If you had said "that's a lot of money just to own a book" would he have replied: "You're not buying the book. You're buying a license to read the book. So you don't own it, and you cannot do anything you want with it. You do own the paper that it's on, but you don't own that words. See what I mean?" Because that is exactly the same. Books, music, software--it is all the same copyright law, meant to temporarily regulate the right to publish the creative expression (print books, press CDs), not use it (read books, play games, listen to music) and I personally find books the only media that people can be remotely reasonable about. Do you really think you need to obtain the right to read a book, because otherwise reading it is illegal?
Some time ago, I have bought a Blizzard game because of Bnetd. Today, I have destroyed it because of Blizzard. I am not only going to never buy anything from any company doing any business with Blizzard but I am actually looking for materials which can compromise Blizzard executives to post them on a dedicated anti-Blizzard website. Now please tell me, whose actions was harmful for Blizzard again?
Sorry, I hit Submit before I finished writing my post...
I have no geography you insensitive clods!
Take it however you want, its funny so many different ways...
Could you please enumerate at least one way? Because I think it was not only not funny at all, but actually quite distasteful. I don't think that blindness is a good subject to joke about. Please think about it next time. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
What you need is a capability based system. And by capabilities I don't mean POSIX "capabilities" but the real ones. This is hardly a new idea. Read some papers by Norman Hardy. Start from Capability Theory by Sound Bytes and read the referenced articles until you start getting the idea. Then read about GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s, a 1979 paper by Bill Frantz, Norman Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau. Then read about KeyKOS, a persistent, pure capability operating system. Then read about EROS: The Extremely Reliable Operating System. I think it will be enough for a good start. As you see all of those problems we discuss today in this article have already been solved in the '70s or '80s at worst. But those who don't know the history are doomed to repeat it.
Let's face it. Broadband over Power Lines is a terrible idea. From any possible standpoint it is utterly idiotic. The only reason anyone has ever started to think about investing in that idea was billion gigabits per second (sic) promised by Luke Stewart with his Media Fusion scam. Wouldn't you agree that all of those disadvantages you write about wouldn't matter so much if that would give us million Tbps (yes, that's million terabits per second) broadband in every home? Wouldn't you agree that million Tbps must have sounded even better in 1998? That is the real reason why people started to look into BPL. They was trying to build it not because they didn't know about the issues you write about, but becuase they wanted to use those very interferences for data transmitted on the magnetic field created by electric currents running through power line wires, not the electricity itself. This is very important to properly understand the BPL phenomenon. It is pointless to talk about the differences between power lines and standard cabling used for data transmission like copper twisted pair as their disadvantage because those very differences were supposed to make BPL much better than any other meduim known before. I think it makes no sense to start another discussion not even mentioning about it. But I don't want to repeat myself. Please read my other posts. What is sad is that I can shout as loud as I can every time people start to talk about yet another try to deploy BPL and still no one cares. Sad. Very sad. But what else can I do...
It's more like "Scam Artists vs. Common Sense." Seriously, you don't have to worry about HAM because BPL is only a scam. From the technical standpoint it is an absolutely terrible and utterly stupid idea. Lots of people keep and will keep investing in it but it will never be actually implemented. Don't worry.
There have been lots of trials since 1998 when Edwin Blair invested in Luke Stewart's Media Fusion LLC. All of them failed, but actually for reasons much more fascinating than what you wrote about. Please read the Dallas Business Journal article from March, Media Fusion founders named in suit by Jeff Bounds:
Please read the entire article and more importantly my other comment to this story where I include much more details about the whole BPL scam. Very interesting read.
"Luke Stewart -- self-proclaimed national treasure -- carries on. Chances are, we haven't heard the last of him, because Stewart sold his vision best to the one person who will never pull the plug: himself. Once you become a man with a Big Idea, the mundane details of the scientific method can never match the thrill of changing the world with a sweep of your hand."
Anyone knows what happened to Luke Stewart since then?
Quoting my post I forgot the link. It's The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff, Wired, November 2001. Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article. I quoted only few very short fragments.
The most important point about Broadband Over Power Lines is why anyone started to even think about building it. We have to ask that question before we start to talk about interference and other obvious details. Was it because most of potential Internet users don't have telephone lines? No. It was because we cannot have billion gigabits per second using copper, while according to Luke Stewart with power lines we somehow can.
We can all talk about legal implications and interference issues of "BPL" like there was no tommorow, it might even be very interesting and entertaining, but it all makes no sense whatsoever without a proper context and understanding of the underlying technology. A very important yet often overlooked thing to keep in mind while thinking about "broadband over power lines," as I have already written countless times with little effect only to be completely ignored every time I've rised this issue, is the very fact that it all has started as a scam. That's right, folks. The idea has been introduced by certain Luke Stewart, a well known scam artist who has promised more than billion gigabits per second (sic) with his "Media Fusion" snake oil.
This scam and those billions gigabits per second was the only reason why "broadband over power lines" has been ever considered in the first place! See these links for sources and much more informative details and background.
So I ask you: do we seriously need to be fooled over and over again? Are we doomed to repeat the history of people who have lost a lot of money invested in this completely pointless technology? I really believe we can do better than that. Of course, the question is: why? Why are we lied to? The answer is actually quite simple.
Of course the only problem with BPL is the wire, which severely limits broadband throughput, acts like an antenna, disrupting other services, reduces the range between repeaters, killing economy of the service, acts like an open door, letting interference into BPL, etc.--I don't have to talk about it because it is obvious. But the question is, why not do it without the wire then? Why not use twisted-pair or fiber instead? Simple: because the only justification the power companies have for joining the Internet services market is that they have those wires going everywhere, so it is not surprising that they keep telling us that this wire is better than Cat5, no matter what they and we all know about it.
So instead of talking about the effects of BPL deployment, please just once let's stop to think about it causes.
Performance the same, lower noise and power consumption--this is all great, but the most important question is: is it equally robust as the full-sized version? This is essential for any even remotely serious server, when the data is worth much more than the hardware by several orders of magnitude and when downtime costs more than many man-months combined. And here the answer might be sadly "no" because anything that is smaller is inevitably easier to scratch, as any given scratch is relatively larger. Just do the math.
Unlikely. Highly unlikely. But there is another possibility: namely laptops might finally get SCSI drives to achieve much better quality and throughput than the legacy IDE we are usually left with now. I would gladly pay few hudred more to have a good and robust SCSI drive in my laptop. This seems like a very promising product. Let's see how the market will react in the following weeks. Right now it is hard to predict the future but it surely looks promising.
Unlike Perl 5 today, Parrot will not use reference counting. This is one of important difficulties which the Ponie project has to overcome. Please let me quote the most relevant parts of Parrot documentation.
Parrot FAQ:
I would hate to sound like a typical Slashdot open-source cheerleader but I've been holding my breadth and I really think that this is trully great news even if not exactly "new" for anyone who knew what had been going on in IBM for quite some time now and the most important question is of course whether we'll see full implementation of Rexx in the next release of Parrot--we can hope so because as we know Rexx (or Restructured Extended Executor--one has to love the old-shool humour of IBM developers!) being a structured high-level programming language which was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read will be a great transition path for anyone who will want to use the unimaginable power of future CPAN (or CP6AN) modules yet won't be experienced enough to fully master the equally unimaginable complexity of Perl 6 grammar yet. This is a very important step in the direction of Perl 6 which we are all looking forward to. One really has to admire the insight of IBM's developer--and indeed executves, let's give credit where it is due!--who perfectly understand that open source is good for them, at least those who I personally spoke to, but what is even more important for us, is that it is good for us as well. This is a win-win scenerio for everyone but Microsoft. Why? Because IBM is not a charity, they are not stupid, they understand that undermining .NET and C# is even more important that Java. A common and portable run-time environment is essential for companies like Sun and IBM and as always IBM is first to understand it. I can only say: Bravo! Keep up the good work! A big "Thank you!" in the name of the entire Slashdot community. Now let us see what great project will follow from that step. I can hardly wait.
No! I will not switch to Windows. Debian works great on PPC, thank you very much. I can switch my underlying architectures like there was no tommorow, switching back and forth not only between Intel and PPC but also M68k, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, IA-64--hell, even S/390!--just from the top of my head. Oh, and by the way, I can use different kernels if I don't like Linux. Have I already mentioned security? To make the long story short, I will never switch Debian to Windows, no matter what are they going to port it to. Period. So, please stop asking.
So the iUniverse seems to be somewhat comparable with Lulu. Actually, I know Lulu the best because when I first saw a link to someone's book it was the only such service I knew about, CafePress didn't have books back then, so I've read everything I could on their website. Besides different formats of the book itself (now I see that there are also full-color books available--maybe I should publish a photo album before a book then?--seriously, I feel like a kid in a candy store) there are three options: one can publish a book for free with no ISBN, pay for assigning an ISBN with scannable barcode, or pay more to get the book entered into Ingram's database (so Amazon, Barnes and Noble and even off-line bookstores can easily sell it). Thanks, I'll save your link for later when I have my book ready to choose the best publisher. Well, why even choose? I can use every publisher at the same time. There are just too many possibilities to get anything done...
This is off-topic: I've followed your link to iUniverse (quite frankly I thought that it was a link to some book by David Brin, posted as a joke). I'm starting to write a book which I am going to self-publish using one of those print-on-demand services. It's a lot of time but I want to be up to date with different options. So far I was considering mostly Lulu or CafePress. Lately I've found also Zazzle which seems nice for printing artwork but there are no books yet. Generally instead of looking for those services myself I just save links to those which I find others using. Could you please tell me why would you personally suggest iUniverse instead of Lulu or CafePress, for both the cheapest options possible as well as standard books with ISBN and everything? Have you used them yourself? Thanks.
Which is not a problem since our busy sex lifes would keep us from watching them anyway.
Am I right?
Everything changed after we won the war on drugs. Now, when there are no drugs any more, there's only sex left, but don't worry, we're working on it.
Tit for Tat? I don't know the Bible very well, but wasn't it Eye for Eye, Tit for Tit?
My version:
Your version:
Please take no offence but your version is hardly an improvement, not only because the dissonance between sentences (or impedance mismatch, if you will) makes it sound like a homework written by a six years old child, but most importantly becuase in addition to changing style you have also removed content by dropping quite a few important subtleties and overtones in the form of relations of different parts of the original sentence, as well as my emotional relation thereto. Why not "correct" more texts while you are at it! They might really need their "run-on sentences" broke into infantile series of three-word statements!
Now, on a much serious matter:
You have probably parsed it as: "I can understand that some people interested in the subject of my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" or "I can understand that for some reason people interested in the subject of my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" instead of the literal and correct "I can understand that for some people interested in the subject my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" which is parsable only one way, using dashes instead of whitespace for indentation:
It might be disambiguated using punctuation: "I can understand that, for some people interested in the subject, my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" or "I can understand that--for some people interested in the subject--my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace" but even without such punctuation marks this part of the sentence is unambiguous nonetheless, fot there is no other way whatsoever for it to make any sense assuming it was written correctly in the first place, while you have presumably assumed otherwise (which itself is an insult).
Still, I am most disappointed (if not outright outraged) by the fact that you have completely missed the humour therein! I can only hope that some people who use some language named after a certain BBC show from 1969 are a somewhat better parsers because otherwise I would have to consider the time spent on writing that comment--and indeed submitting the whole story--completely wasted.
There is nothing inappropriate in poicephalus as e.g. poicephalus gulielmi is just a Latin name of Red-fronted Parrot, well known for every bird lover, just like agapornis pullarius is a Latin name of Red-headed Lovebird, another proposed code-name for this release. You are probably thinking about phallus for some reason but instead of looking for Freudian connotations you might want to read more about parrots.
That's funny you mention it because quite frankly I did preview it and in fact it was not until then when I decided to turn a list of comma separated values into a bullet list as well as brake the second then single-sentence paragraph into three separate sentences exactly because I was somewhat concerned readability-wise--though to be fair braking it into two parts and adding "Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links" we owe to Timothy, who has also removed quite a few important links for some reason--but nevertheless I am quite surprised if not outright disappointed that anyone who is even remotely interested in Perl 6 might lack basic linguistic skills to parse a paragraph of simple English, however on the other hand I can understand that for some people interested in the subject my story might indeed contain not nearly enough whitespace.
It wasn't sent over SSL but of course it wasn't a simple:
Set-Cookie: LOGGED_USER=name; ...
but instead included enough information about the client encrypted and signed by the server that simply sending the same data by anyone else wouldn't work.
As an example please consider this simplified idea: the server verifies the password during the login and has to set the session cookie but instead of setting SESSION=username it sets the cookie to SESSION=$session where $session is:
$session = "$username:$signature";
while the $signature is:
$signature = md5_hex("$username:$ip:$secret");
With the $ip being the client's IP address and $secret being some secret string. Now, every time the client sends such a cookie, the server computes the $signature and compares it with the one in the cookie itself, thus making it impossible to use the cookie with someone connecting from a different IP. Of course I am greatly simplifying, but even such a poor man's digital signature using MD5 with a secret value can be quite effective, especially when more info is used.
Of course if the attackers were smarter they would try to invalidate the sessions of other logged-in users, thus forcing them to reauthenticate with their passwords, trying a monkey-in-the-middle attack, hijacking their TCP sessions, etc. but if they were smarter, they wouldn't insert pornography into public websites, now would they?
Great pun, but seriously, this reminds me of one story. There was a web-based service to conveniently change personal pages of people working in the lab (photo, bio, links to projects) where everyone were usually logged-in permanently with never-expiring cookies (much like Slashdot). One day some students defeced the info page of one professor changing his photo to goatse.cx picture. I have done the investigation (eventually leading to expelling said students and further prosecution for sexual molesting--it was a public network with unfiltered access from the library used by minors) and what I have found out was that they broke into the account by sniffing a password from HTTP traffic while the victim was changing it for security reasons! I checked it and she was the only person who kept changing her password. The password was a random string of 32 alphanumeric characters, changed every morning. Other people had passwords like "pass," "clit" or "arse" (I kid you not!) but those accounts were not broken into since those passwords were not changed periodically via HTTP, effectively remaining secret. The only person paying attention to security was the least secure one. Interesting, is it not? Since that very incident I always keep saying that security layers are like the layers of onion indeed, but it is a rotten onion.
I have just read this thread and found your post and the answers thereto particularily interesting. (Pun not intended.) Especially this part:
Still, maybe those guys could take some advice from a citizen of a country who already made that mistake?
Do you suggest that the union of the United States of America should be abandoned? Do you suggest that all, or even some states should leave the union and get an independent sovereignty? (When was the last time some of the United States wanted to leave the union? What happened then?) Only a US separatist could make a consistent and sound argument against the European Union and its "sociopathic urge to unite" but if you do support the union of United States but are opposed to a much looser European Union (let me repeat, much looser--do you really think France, Poland, United Kingdom or Germany would ever voluntarily give up their sovereignty? Do you know the history of those very nations in the last few millennia?) then you must realise that such an advice would sound a little bit hypocritical, mustn't you?
Great explanation. Did he also show you Don't Copy That Floppy video, while he was at it? If you had said "that's a lot of money just to own a book" would he have replied: "You're not buying the book. You're buying a license to read the book. So you don't own it, and you cannot do anything you want with it. You do own the paper that it's on, but you don't own that words. See what I mean?" Because that is exactly the same. Books, music, software--it is all the same copyright law, meant to temporarily regulate the right to publish the creative expression (print books, press CDs), not use it (read books, play games, listen to music) and I personally find books the only media that people can be remotely reasonable about. Do you really think you need to obtain the right to read a book, because otherwise reading it is illegal?
Some time ago, I have bought a Blizzard game because of Bnetd. Today, I have destroyed it because of Blizzard. I am not only going to never buy anything from any company doing any business with Blizzard but I am actually looking for materials which can compromise Blizzard executives to post them on a dedicated anti-Blizzard website. Now please tell me, whose actions was harmful for Blizzard again?
Sorry, I hit Submit before I finished writing my post...
Could you please enumerate at least one way? Because I think it was not only not funny at all, but actually quite distasteful. I don't think that blindness is a good subject to joke about. Please think about it next time. Thanks.
> Take it however you want, its funny so many different ways... Could you please enumerate at least *one* way? Thanks.