"By taking the lead and creating products that..."
Excuse me, but no.
Every major communications company has been working on something like this for years. One of the major problems being the infrastructure to support it. That's one of the reasons you might not have heard about it. Lack of infrastructre to install the box doesn't mean you can't have the box working in the lab waiting for the day when the bandwidth is available.
Why do you think Motorola bought General Instruments? The company states that "Motorola has a Global Commitment to broadband multimedia/communications solutions." Which is true.
Only only advantage to the deal is that Nokia might have the communications connections to actually sell the thing. Then again GI has a install base of over 15 million.
Intel and Nokia now see how much money they'll be missing in the upcoming broadband revolution and want a piece. This is also why Sony is selling the Playstation2 as a "home gateway" unit.
They aren't taking the lead, they're already behind.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2 "It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Every major communications company has been working on something like this for years. One of the major problems being the infrastructure to support it. That's one of the reasons you might not have heard about it. Lack of infrastructre to install the box doesn't mean you can't have the box working in the lab waiting for the day when the bandwidth is available.
Why do you think Motorola bought General Instruments? The company states that "Motorola has a Global Commitment to broadband multimedia/communications solutions." Which is true.
Only only advantage is that Nokia might have the communications connections to actually sell the thing. Then again GI has a install base of over 15 million.
Intel and Nokia now see how much money they'll be missing in the upcoming broadband revolution and want a piece. This is also why Sony is selling the Playstation2 as a "home gateway" unit.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2 "It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
So what? As has been stated before, netscape is delayed, not dead.
Remember the days when IE was the underdog? IE 2.0 was a seriously junior league bit of code. Then bam! out of the blue comes ie 3 (or 4?) and suddenly netscape begins to lose market share.
My point is, there is still plenty of room for netscape to manuver and come out on top. There is still plenty of time for another browser to appear out of nowhere and take over.
It's just a matter of a group of people sitting down to write a good software architecture. Maybe Netscape has done this with their code rewrite. Maybe Opera did this from the start. I dunno.
Think of the "browser war" as a soccer tournament. Netscape's losing at halftime during the first game of a tournament. Opera and the K browser got bye's through the first round.
So, are you the guy watching from the sidelines, or are you going to grab a bucket of water for the tired players? YOu can whine, or you can jump on mozilla, or the k browser, or any number of browser projects.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2 "It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Kudos to Jane's. But what about other slashdot articles? I think that in order to get a complete veiw for their article Jane's should check out the slashdot archives as well. There are a number of interesting points brought up in archived posts that were not mentioned in the "Jane's needs you help" posts from two days ago. They may have been outside Jane's questions, but they are still valid.
A quick slashdot search for cyberterrorism yields:
They need a nice big picture. For example, interesting information on what is going on in the hacker community could come from the "Hackers Against LoU" article.
And wasn't there an article somewhere about the US Military running a massive test crack against themselves last summer? If I remember correctly, one of their teams managed to get into the systems of a Navy Destroyer? "You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2 "It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Excellent. Regardless of your opinion of BSD vs Linux, OpenBSD support is a win for both camps and the Open Source movement as a whole.
Hopefully, with OpenBSD starting to pick up steam, a beneficial competition will develop between the two systems that envolves more coding than arguing.
Anyways, score one for the home team. Begin the happy dance of your choice.
October 30, 2003 Redmond (AP) - Intense fighting continued today between the US Army and Microsoft Loyalist Forces, in an effort by the Justice Department to sanction the company for "conduct unbecoming of a corporation seeking World Domination." The battle is the latest step in the long drawn out legal battle into Microsoft's business practices.
The army was called in last week after the DOE confirmed that Microsoft had in fact successfully perform an underground test of a nuclear warhead. According to an internal Microsoft memo leaked to the press, Chairman Gates is overjoyed by Microsofts new found status as a nuclear power. In an excerpt of the memo, Gates states: "Let's see them try to fuck with me now." and later "Who's the man? Bill's the man!"
The attack on the Microsoft Compound has not gone as well as the Pentagon expected, mainly due to underestimating the loyalty of the elite Microsoft Ninjas, and the fact that half the Army's equipment runs Windows CE.
"I was driving along in my jeep, when it happened." reports Colonal Stephens who was injured yesterday morning. "The dashboard Mp3 player started laughing at me, and then it blew up in my face! That bastard took my face!!!"
Private Shaftoe of the 23rd Infantry had this to say about the decimation of his unit two days ago: "There was just one guy. One scrawny little guy with glasses. And Rodney's like, 'hey, no problem, I'll deal with it' so he goes up to handcuff the kid. And the kid starts foaming at the mouth! And then he just ups and rips off rodneys head!! With his bare hands!!!"
General Simmons confirms the private's story. "They're all hyped up on Jolt and Pizza. How can you fight someone that doesn't sleep? They've been playing Doom an Quake longer than I've been alive! How can I fight that? There's no strategy against that."
According to experts at AMD, the only hope left is in pushing Microsoft even farther into the fight. "The trick is to get them to commit the last of their processing power," states a company spokesman. "Once that's done, then all their Itanium chips should enter into a massive core meltdown, rendering their systems useless, as well as giving off enough radiation to sterilize the whole lot of 'em."
So here's what th article has to say about the nets' performance:
Even the best existing systems fail completely hen as little as 10 percent of hubbub masks a speaker's voice. At slightly higher noise levels, the likelihood that a human listener can identify spoken test words is mere chance. By contrast, Berger and Liaw's system functions at 60 percent recognition with a hubbub level 560 times the strength of the target stimulus.
With just a minor adjustment, the system can identify different speakers of the same word with superhuman acuity.
I see where konstant is going with his bit about computer listening for cues, hence the "minor adjustment" mentioned above. I cannot agree one way or the other without seeing uh hearing the actual tests.
But I can theorize wihtout any proof whatsoever =)
But since neral nets are trained, wouldn't make sense to train the net to listen at low noise levels, and then steadilly increase the level of white noise as performance includes? Baby steps. The net has to know what it is listening for inside of the noise before it can actually pick it out.
Anyone know about neral net trainging, or has more info on this project? Maybe saw it in a lab?
The project I work on has the option of PPP over ATM (for real-time data feed). It was explained to me that the main attraction for this was that PPP use is easilly determined, and therefore easilly billed, while straight ethernet use is not. (For areas where bandwidth is still charged by the minute)
Unless broadband ISP's in the US plan to back away from a flat rate unlimited access, why should they bother with PPP? Maybe I'm missing the use of "authentication"
1) As far as the user is concerned, Cable Modems are ethernet. The only time you would have to connect to your provider is if you wanted to use their server services for email, web hosting, etc. My housemates and I have a Time Warner cable modem now (wired the house yadda yadda...) and have yet to do anything with their servers. DHCP and IP Masquesading take care of it all. No need to be force fed AOL's content, and you should be able to easilly leapfrog around any attempts at censorship. 2) AOL may be entering Broadband, but the cable companies and baby bells are the huge segment of the market. There's nothing to tick off the FCC about yet.
3) On the other hand, there's ISP down here in Texas that has a saying "If you've got AOL, you're SOL."
4) Some cable providers have stated commitments to add servers/switches if and when neighborhood bandwidth decreases to an unsatisfactory level. If a big player like AOL starts nipping at their market share, they should be even more willing to keep their customers happy.
Cyberwarfare is the use of networked computers to attack an opponent. With the continuing addition of systems to computer networks, this makes the attack range of Cyberwar/terrorism very great.
Yes, cyberwar would target financail institutions, etc. but it could also very easily be used against the domestic populus. I realize that my examples are big What If's, but they are possible. Hacker stories in the 80's were all aobut this type of thing: For example, take Utilities. Power, water, gas. What would happen if they were shut down? Say that all the stoplights in the city went haywire. Accidents could occur. I live in Texas where you have stoplights on highways. The sun can be very bright, and the lights hard to see. What happens at the intersection of two fast roads, when both directions have a green light?
What if someone could abuse a cities Utilities to cuase a Riot? People and property would be injured. What if the cell networks and phone lines were taken off line at the same time? Emergency reponse by police and ambulances would be hampered. And if the Hospitals lost power? What about Airports? How many systems need to be compromised there before someone is hurt?
Granted that FIDNET as it is talked about now has some serious Issues. But the issue is bigger than that, I'm going to try to bring up some points, but I may miss some, and may be wrong on some...
Keep in mind that there is a wide variety of people in the world. All too often posts here end up with examples of US and THEM. In a post above, ponytails vs. the guy in ties. The tech students in school right now is a much more varied group of people than there was 10 or 20 years ago.
Asking a question like what self respecting geek would work for the FBI is the same as asking "who goes to work for the FBI in the first place?" or "How does the NSA get people?" The NSA is what, three, four times the size of the CIA?
I think that it may be as simple as service. How does the Military get bright intelligent minds when all they do is Destroy? People want to work on cool stuff. People want to serve. (BTW, my father was career army out of West Point. I am proud of that and support the Military) Nationalism and Patriotism are very strong principles.
The only way to prevent a situation like FIDNET is for another Organization to rise up and take its place. The solution may be sitting in the open source community, but if it is, it won't EVOLVE fast enough to fix this problem. Look at it like this. Hidden in the community is a football team, and the organization I talk about would be the coach, making sure everyone came to practice and showed up to games.
There is another issue that Cyberterrorism IS NOT the same as cracking. The tech is the same, but the purposes and final goals are not. The FBI/Government knows about Terrorism. We as a group are not prepared to deal with it. Your team may have a star Quarterback. But the coach has a whole team of Offensive and Defense Coordinators to figure out the game strategy. What happens if the Quarterback sets up a play that allows that lineman to come around the side and sack him? The QB's smart and fast. His runningbacks were all out in the open and hauling ass downfield. It's just that this one guy came around the side, and BOOM down he goes. What does setting up a secure linux/UNIX/NT server have to do with someone attacking the power grid? We're talking about security at a NATIONAL LEVEL much much more complex than making sure a ISP or a bank is secure.
I bet you that there are PLENTY of security guys who would be willing to work on the counter-terrorism aspect. Why? It's New. It's Different. No ones really done it before. It's very very serious. There is a very real possiblity of innocent people dying. Would you save a life if you could?
And right now the only place you can get access to it is through government work.
Our efforts would be best spent trying to raise public knowledge of what is occuring so that when somethign like FIDNET occurs, it has the correct set of powers so that it saves life and injury without giving up privacy.
Ok. I'm tired of hearing about Media Lab and Xybernaut.
Check out Carnege Mellon's Institute for Complex engineering Systems. They've been doing the wearables for as long as anyone else.
I did a lot of undergrad work for this group, and their projects are as good/better than the stuff coming out of Media Lab, you just don't hear about it. Their wearable for speech translation currently translates between english, croatian, french and I believe one of the oriental languages (?). Pretty interesting stuff.
Yes, but what about the permanent bit? some other comment (sorry no link) thinks that it means the cache of another processor. Use one to translate, then ship it somewhere else for execution. But that would imply a multiprocessor while I think it is a single CPU (possibbly multiple processing units).
But why have any reference to permanent storage if the data just gets shipped back and forth between caches?
Yes yes. But what about circuitry for permanently storing memory stores temporarily stored when a determination is made that a sequence of translated instructions will execute without exception or error on the host processor
Wha'dup with the "permanently storing memory stores temporarially stored?" It's pretty much decided that temporarially stored implies a cache. Take the code, translate it. Store it in the cache until it is verfied, then execute it.
Sounds like their temporary cache of instructions can be sent somewhere else for storage once they have been verified.
Hmmm. HHHMMMMmmmmmm.....
So does that mean it can execute, say x86, code in emulation, and at the same time translate into native transmeta opcode in order to be run natively at a later time? It's doable. I can picture a basic flow diagram circuit in my head right now.
So do we care more about the vid phone option or being able to get 384kbps while walking through the mall?
I don't really see the use for a cellular vidphone. Maybe nice to prove the capabilities of the WCDMA, but come on now. Can you imagine someone driving down the road with one of these? I'm not joking. They'll do it.
I could see the use for business people (the old seeing-your-opponent-while-making-the-deal thing), but other than that this is *definitely* within the realms of Cyberclysm.
Although it would be usefull to be driving down the road, see an accident, and be able to show it to the police before they get there. Maybe get a doctor on the other end in case there is a major injury?
Well, the two articles do seem to paint a rosy picture of the future. Wheather you have a computer tell you what to buy, or your next cell phone will be able to wipe that bit of spicy brown mustard from your chin, we're apparently all going to Hell.
But what about the possibility of self-correction within the system? Hmmm? It's possible. Happens all the time in other systems.
Do I need to have sports scores on my phone? Nope. not big on sports. Does my roomate who loves Notre Dame football? Yes. Would I like slashdot headlines sent to my pager? Sure. And I think you would too;)
Eventually people will learn that the newest fastest thing is not necessarilly the best thing, and will start to control their spending.
Also keep in mind that the people that buy all these new fangeled cellphone ans such are a Minority of the population. Most people really don't care. They want a tv, vcr, cable, and a phone. So the Palm has sold a couple of million units. That's nothing compared to the 250+ million people in the USA
We are a part of that Minority, so our views on the matter are biased. We see and hear about every new thing that comes down the pipe. By the time one item makes or breaks it, most of the time we're focusing on the next thing that is almost ready, and forget about the last one.
Did this whole issue arise becuase we are blinded by our own interests? Or is it real?
Yes yes. Subversion would be quite simple too. Remember the/. post about the india/pakistani cyberwar? What about the porn-jacking of sites that's been all over the news lately?
Say a regualar user wakes up one mroning and boots up their agent website. Suddenly Tide has a rating of a 9. Holy Shnikies! I better go buy some Tide! Oh-my-josh! Being in a Sucide Cult is now a 10!!! Where's my razor?
Something like this would definitely give rise to the cracker-for-hire industry.
You know what? I read the article. And I read the article that prompted the original discussion last week. I read them because I wanted to know "why" and for the most part the findings make sense to me.
This topic and others have brought up some various negative and paranoid statements from the slashdot community. And the reasons elude me. One day there could be a post about, say, images of electron clouds (the pics are rather pretty by the way). Yay! says slashdot. Three cheers for the researchers who figured it out!
But then an article like the autism one comes along, and suddenly its Boo! Your Wrong! Bad Scientists!! And a huge argument ensues.
Someone please enlighten me. Why is it that it is wrong for society to ask "why is the geek a geek?" but it is ok to ask "Why do atoms react like they do?" Is understanding the human psyche as a whole less important to the future of humanity? How can we understand the universe if we cannot understand ourselves?
So basically, Why ask why?
Really. of all the classes in the world to be in, being a geek isn't so bad. Sure people will want to label us, and group us. But do away with us? Oh, Please. They like their playstations too much. Who's going to fix it for them when it breaks?
Of course they could put us all in playstation work camps. Until we figure out the wire mod to get us past the security system at the gate.
Ahem. My final year in college I was on the intramural championship football team when we beet the ROTC frat. Half the linemen were CS, the running backs usually business, and the QB was a math major. And I still trip over my own feet daily.
Besides that...
I believe that the article may be describing the "Geek Walk" which is the strange ability of (some) geeks to walk on the balls of their feet without their heels ever touching the ground. They kind of bounce along on their toes. It is quite funny when the geek in question has a cowlick 'cuase it bounces all over the place.;)
I personally have seen this many many many times. And I do feel that there is a direct correspondance to the severeity of the "Geek Walk" and the amount of pure genius the geek has. =)
When I was younger I trained myself to stop walking like this. Does that mean that i am now less of a geek?
I think it's been posted here before, but there is a big difference between an honest to goodness news article and a Company Press Release. Which is what the cygnus article is.
Of course the company will put a spin on their press releases. The better they sound, the more product they sell. Simple. But if this action helps out something like embedded Linux in the process, more power to 'em.
You are correct that the stock kernels are missing some stuff. To the best of my knowledge, Linux cannot currently run inside a doorknob. Other embedded system can and do.
And there are also other embedded systems that, for example, run Win95. I worked on one in college.
So I just skimmed the eCos whitepaper which can be found linked from the eCos page For those of you ho are unfamiliar with how embedded systems are designed/work/react this whitepaper should be informative. From the quick glance I gave it, eCos seems quite nice with the key feature being POSIX compliant. eCos seems to implement a process model where POSIX threads are also available. Thank God. I've been getting tired of this holy war going on between the process based embedded systems camp and the thread based embedded systems camp.
I think that the point that should be made is that while Cygnus will be supporting work for both eCos and embedded Linux, eCos is their baby. Now before someone gets all huffy and ticked off, note that eCos is a real time embedded system, and Opensource. And when it comes to embedded systems, designing real time into the kernel is a major boon as opposed to something like rt-linux where linux is essentially run as a process of a smaller real-time kernel (yes, that is an oversimplification, but basically true).
Quite frankly, I do not see embedded linux being able to run inside a doorknob anytime soon, there's a lot of work still to be done. eCos already has that ability, and according to the whitepaper Linux and gdb can be used as the development platform. The real point is that all the reasons I have heard of for wanting embedded Linux, seem to be embodied in eCos. POSIX compliant, open source, real time embedded system.
Ahem. Go Cygnus, go Cygnus, go Cygnus, go. (Insert cheerleaders and dance routine here)
Now all we need is support for broadband multimedia to take the settop box market away from CE. The fact that CE is pretty much guaranteed to have directx and realaudio/video is a *major* selling point.
And if you don't like what I had to say about embedded Linux, you know what you can do? Go code it. Get its development going that much faster.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not an origional concept. At all.
"By taking the lead and creating products that..."
Excuse me, but no.
Every major communications company has been working on something like this for years. One of the major problems being the infrastructure to support it. That's one of the reasons you might not have heard about it. Lack of infrastructre to install the box doesn't mean you can't have the box working in the lab waiting for the day when the bandwidth is available.
Why do you think Motorola bought General Instruments? The company states that "Motorola has a Global Commitment to broadband multimedia/communications solutions." Which is true.
Only only advantage to the deal is that Nokia might have the communications connections to actually sell the thing. Then again GI has a install base of over 15 million.
Intel and Nokia now see how much money they'll be missing in the upcoming broadband revolution and want a piece. This is also why Sony is selling the Playstation2 as a "home gateway" unit.
They aren't taking the lead, they're already behind.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
This is not an origional concept. At all.
Every major communications company has been working on something like this for years. One of the major problems being the infrastructure to support it. That's one of the reasons you might not have heard about it. Lack of infrastructre to install the box doesn't mean you can't have the box working in the lab waiting for the day when the bandwidth is available.
Why do you think Motorola bought General Instruments? The company states that "Motorola has a Global Commitment to broadband multimedia/communications solutions." Which is true.
Only only advantage is that Nokia might have the communications connections to actually sell the thing. Then again GI has a install base of over 15 million.
Intel and Nokia now see how much money they'll be missing in the upcoming broadband revolution and want a piece. This is also why Sony is selling the Playstation2 as a "home gateway" unit.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
So what? As has been stated before, netscape is delayed, not dead.
Remember the days when IE was the underdog? IE 2.0 was a seriously junior league bit of code. Then bam! out of the blue comes ie 3 (or 4?) and suddenly netscape begins to lose market share.
My point is, there is still plenty of room for netscape to manuver and come out on top. There is still plenty of time for another browser to appear out of nowhere and take over.
It's just a matter of a group of people sitting down to write a good software architecture. Maybe Netscape has done this with their code rewrite. Maybe Opera did this from the start. I dunno.
Think of the "browser war" as a soccer tournament. Netscape's losing at halftime during the first game of a tournament. Opera and the K browser got bye's through the first round.
So, are you the guy watching from the sidelines, or are you going to grab a bucket of water for the tired players? YOu can whine, or you can jump on mozilla, or the k browser, or any number of browser projects.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Kudos to Jane's. But what about other slashdot articles? I think that in order to get a complete veiw for their article Jane's should check out the slashdot archives as well. There are a number of interesting points brought up in archived posts that were not mentioned in the "Jane's needs you help" posts from two days ago. They may have been outside Jane's questions, but they are still valid.
A quick slashdot search for cyberterrorism yields:
FIDNET, Cyberwarfare, and Reality
CIA Considering Cyberwarfare
Pentagon Cyber Wars
Hackers Against LoU Cyberwarfare
They need a nice big picture. For example, interesting information on what is going on in the hacker community could come from the "Hackers Against LoU" article.
And wasn't there an article somewhere about the US Military running a massive test crack against themselves last summer? If I remember correctly, one of their teams managed to get into the systems of a Navy Destroyer?
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Excellent. Regardless of your opinion of BSD vs Linux, OpenBSD support is a win for both camps and the Open Source movement as a whole.
Hopefully, with OpenBSD starting to pick up steam, a beneficial competition will develop between the two systems that envolves more coding than arguing.
Anyways, score one for the home team. Begin the happy dance of your choice.
October 30, 2003
Redmond (AP) - Intense fighting continued today between the US Army and Microsoft Loyalist Forces, in an effort by the Justice Department to sanction the company for "conduct unbecoming of a corporation seeking World Domination." The battle is the latest step in the long drawn out legal battle into Microsoft's business practices.
The army was called in last week after the DOE confirmed that Microsoft had in fact successfully perform an underground test of a nuclear warhead. According to an internal Microsoft memo leaked to the press, Chairman Gates is overjoyed by Microsofts new found status as a nuclear power. In an excerpt of the memo, Gates states: "Let's see them try to fuck with me now." and later "Who's the man? Bill's the man!"
The attack on the Microsoft Compound has not gone as well as the Pentagon expected, mainly due to underestimating the loyalty of the elite Microsoft Ninjas, and the fact that half the Army's equipment runs Windows CE.
"I was driving along in my jeep, when it happened." reports Colonal Stephens who was injured yesterday morning. "The dashboard Mp3 player started laughing at me, and then it blew up in my face! That bastard took my face!!!"
Private Shaftoe of the 23rd Infantry had this to say about the decimation of his unit two days ago: "There was just one guy. One scrawny little guy with glasses. And Rodney's like, 'hey, no problem, I'll deal with it' so he goes up to handcuff the kid. And the kid starts foaming at the mouth! And then he just ups and rips off rodneys head!! With his bare hands!!!"
General Simmons confirms the private's story. "They're all hyped up on Jolt and Pizza. How can you fight someone that doesn't sleep? They've been playing Doom an Quake longer than I've been alive! How can I fight that? There's no strategy against that."
According to experts at AMD, the only hope left is in pushing Microsoft even farther into the fight. "The trick is to get them to commit the last of their processing power," states a company spokesman. "Once that's done, then all their Itanium chips should enter into a massive core meltdown, rendering their systems useless, as well as giving off enough radiation to sterilize the whole lot of 'em."
So here's what th article has to say about the nets' performance:
Even the best existing systems fail completely hen as little as 10 percent of hubbub masks a speaker's voice. At slightly higher noise levels, the likelihood that a human listener can identify spoken test words is mere chance. By contrast, Berger and Liaw's system functions at 60 percent recognition with a hubbub level 560 times the strength of the target stimulus.
With just a minor adjustment, the system can identify different speakers of the same word with superhuman acuity.
I see where konstant is going with his bit about computer listening for cues, hence the "minor adjustment" mentioned above. I cannot agree one way or the other without seeing uh hearing the actual tests.
But I can theorize wihtout any proof whatsoever =)
But since neral nets are trained, wouldn't make sense to train the net to listen at low noise levels, and then steadilly increase the level of white noise as performance includes? Baby steps. The net has to know what it is listening for inside of the noise before it can actually pick it out.
Anyone know about neral net trainging, or has more info on this project? Maybe saw it in a lab?
The project I work on has the option of PPP over ATM (for real-time data feed). It was explained to me that the main attraction for this was that PPP use is easilly determined, and therefore easilly billed, while straight ethernet use is not. (For areas where bandwidth is still charged by the minute)
Unless broadband ISP's in the US plan to back away from a flat rate unlimited access, why should they bother with PPP? Maybe I'm missing the use of "authentication"
1) As far as the user is concerned, Cable Modems are ethernet. The only time you would have to connect to your provider is if you wanted to use their server services for email, web hosting, etc. My housemates and I have a Time Warner cable modem now (wired the house yadda yadda...) and have yet to do anything with their servers. DHCP and IP Masquesading take care of it all. No need to be force fed AOL's content, and you should be able to easilly leapfrog around any attempts at censorship.
2) AOL may be entering Broadband, but the cable companies and baby bells are the huge segment of the market. There's nothing to tick off the FCC about yet.
3) On the other hand, there's ISP down here in Texas that has a saying "If you've got AOL, you're SOL."
4) Some cable providers have stated commitments to add servers/switches if and when neighborhood bandwidth decreases to an unsatisfactory level. If a big player like AOL starts nipping at their market share, they should be even more willing to keep their customers happy.
Basically, if it Cyber Warfare wasn't dangerous, they wouldn't call it WARFARE.
Cyberwarfare is the use of networked computers to attack an opponent. With the continuing addition of systems to computer networks, this makes the attack range of Cyberwar/terrorism very great.
Yes, cyberwar would target financail institutions, etc. but it could also very easily be used against the domestic populus. I realize that my examples are big What If's, but they are possible. Hacker stories in the 80's were all aobut this type of thing: For example, take Utilities. Power, water, gas. What would happen if they were shut down? Say that all the stoplights in the city went haywire. Accidents could occur. I live in Texas where you have stoplights on highways. The sun can be very bright, and the lights hard to see. What happens at the intersection of two fast roads, when both directions have a green light?
What if someone could abuse a cities Utilities to cuase a Riot? People and property would be injured. What if the cell networks and phone lines were taken off line at the same time? Emergency reponse by police and ambulances would be hampered. And if the Hospitals lost power? What about Airports? How many systems need to be compromised there before someone is hurt?
Granted that FIDNET as it is talked about now has some serious Issues. But the issue is bigger than that, I'm going to try to bring up some points, but I may miss some, and may be wrong on some...
Keep in mind that there is a wide variety of people in the world. All too often posts here end up with examples of US and THEM. In a post above, ponytails vs. the guy in ties. The tech students in school right now is a much more varied group of people than there was 10 or 20 years ago.
Asking a question like what self respecting geek would work for the FBI is the same as asking "who goes to work for the FBI in the first place?" or "How does the NSA get people?" The NSA is what, three, four times the size of the CIA?
I think that it may be as simple as service. How does the Military get bright intelligent minds when all they do is Destroy? People want to work on cool stuff. People want to serve. (BTW, my father was career army out of West Point. I am proud of that and support the Military) Nationalism and Patriotism are very strong principles.
The only way to prevent a situation like FIDNET is for another Organization to rise up and take its place. The solution may be sitting in the open source community, but if it is, it won't EVOLVE fast enough to fix this problem. Look at it like this. Hidden in the community is a football team, and the organization I talk about would be the coach, making sure everyone came to practice and showed up to games.
There is another issue that Cyberterrorism IS NOT the same as cracking. The tech is the same, but the purposes and final goals are not. The FBI/Government knows about Terrorism. We as a group are not prepared to deal with it. Your team may have a star Quarterback. But the coach has a whole team of Offensive and Defense Coordinators to figure out the game strategy. What happens if the Quarterback sets up a play that allows that lineman to come around the side and sack him? The QB's smart and fast. His runningbacks were all out in the open and hauling ass downfield. It's just that this one guy came around the side, and BOOM down he goes. What does setting up a secure linux/UNIX/NT server have to do with someone attacking the power grid? We're talking about security at a NATIONAL LEVEL much much more complex than making sure a ISP or a bank is secure.
I bet you that there are PLENTY of security guys who would be willing to work on the counter-terrorism aspect. Why? It's New. It's Different. No ones really done it before. It's very very serious. There is a very real possiblity of innocent people dying. Would you save a life if you could?
And right now the only place you can get access to it is through government work.
Our efforts would be best spent trying to raise public knowledge of what is occuring so that when somethign like FIDNET occurs, it has the correct set of powers so that it saves life and injury without giving up privacy.
Ok. I'm tired of hearing about Media Lab and Xybernaut.
Check out Carnege Mellon's Institute for Complex engineering Systems. They've been doing the wearables for as long as anyone else.
I did a lot of undergrad work for this group, and their projects are as good/better than the stuff coming out of Media Lab, you just don't hear about it. Their wearable for speech translation currently translates between english, croatian, french and I believe one of the oriental languages (?). Pretty interesting stuff.
Gotcha. the patent is definitely being printed for later perusal tonight.
You have to admit that translating code to native in parallel with actually execution would be pretty cool though.
Yes, but what about the permanent bit? some other comment (sorry no link) thinks that it means the cache of another processor. Use one to translate, then ship it somewhere else for execution. But that would imply a multiprocessor while I think it is a single CPU (possibbly multiple processing units).
But why have any reference to permanent storage if the data just gets shipped back and forth between caches?
Yes yes. But what about circuitry for permanently storing memory stores temporarily stored when a determination is made that a sequence of translated instructions will execute without exception or error on the host processor
Wha'dup with the "permanently storing memory stores temporarially stored?" It's pretty much decided that temporarially stored implies a cache. Take the code, translate it. Store it in the cache until it is verfied, then execute it.
Sounds like their temporary cache of instructions can be sent somewhere else for storage once they have been verified.
Hmmm. HHHMMMMmmmmmm.....
So does that mean it can execute, say x86, code in emulation, and at the same time translate into native transmeta opcode in order to be run natively at a later time? It's doable. I can picture a basic flow diagram circuit in my head right now.
So do we care more about the vid phone option or being able to get 384kbps while walking through the mall?
I don't really see the use for a cellular vidphone. Maybe nice to prove the capabilities of the WCDMA, but come on now. Can you imagine someone driving down the road with one of these? I'm not joking. They'll do it.
I could see the use for business people (the old seeing-your-opponent-while-making-the-deal thing), but other than that this is *definitely* within the realms of Cyberclysm.
Although it would be usefull to be driving down the road, see an accident, and be able to show it to the police before they get there. Maybe get a doctor on the other end in case there is a major injury?
In that case, I'm wrong.
So is it, or is it not cyberclysm-ish?
Well, the two articles do seem to paint a rosy picture of the future. Wheather you have a computer tell you what to buy, or your next cell phone will be able to wipe that bit of spicy brown mustard from your chin, we're apparently all going to Hell.
;)
But what about the possibility of self-correction within the system? Hmmm? It's possible. Happens all the time in other systems.
Do I need to have sports scores on my phone? Nope. not big on sports. Does my roomate who loves Notre Dame football? Yes. Would I like slashdot headlines sent to my pager? Sure. And I think you would too
Eventually people will learn that the newest fastest thing is not necessarilly the best thing, and will start to control their spending.
Also keep in mind that the people that buy all these new fangeled cellphone ans such are a Minority of the population. Most people really don't care. They want a tv, vcr, cable, and a phone. So the Palm has sold a couple of million units. That's nothing compared to the 250+ million people in the USA
We are a part of that Minority, so our views on the matter are biased. We see and hear about every new thing that comes down the pipe. By the time one item makes or breaks it, most of the time we're focusing on the next thing that is almost ready, and forget about the last one.
Did this whole issue arise becuase we are blinded by our own interests? Or is it real?
Yes yes. Subversion would be quite simple too. Remember the /. post about the india/pakistani cyberwar? What about the porn-jacking of sites that's been all over the news lately?
Say a regualar user wakes up one mroning and boots up their agent website. Suddenly Tide has a rating of a 9. Holy Shnikies! I better go buy some Tide! Oh-my-josh! Being in a Sucide Cult is now a 10!!! Where's my razor?
Something like this would definitely give rise to the cracker-for-hire industry.
Sorry. The jingle was stuck in my head.
You know what? I read the article. And I read the article that prompted the original discussion last week. I read them because I wanted to know "why" and for the most part the findings make sense to me.
This topic and others have brought up some various negative and paranoid statements from the slashdot community. And the reasons elude me. One day there could be a post about, say, images of electron clouds (the pics are rather pretty by the way). Yay! says slashdot. Three cheers for the researchers who figured it out!
But then an article like the autism one comes along, and suddenly its Boo! Your Wrong! Bad Scientists!! And a huge argument ensues.
Someone please enlighten me. Why is it that it is wrong for society to ask "why is the geek a geek?" but it is ok to ask "Why do atoms react like they do?" Is understanding the human psyche as a whole less important to the future of humanity? How can we understand the universe if we cannot understand ourselves?
So basically, Why ask why?
Really. of all the classes in the world to be in, being a geek isn't so bad. Sure people will want to label us, and group us. But do away with us? Oh, Please. They like their playstations too much. Who's going to fix it for them when it breaks?
Of course they could put us all in playstation work camps. Until we figure out the wire mod to get us past the security system at the gate.
Physical awkwardness/funny gait
;)
Ahem. My final year in college I was on the intramural championship football team when we beet the ROTC frat. Half the linemen were CS, the running backs usually business, and the QB was a math major. And I still trip over my own feet daily.
Besides that...
I believe that the article may be describing the "Geek Walk" which is the strange ability of (some) geeks to walk on the balls of their feet without their heels ever touching the ground. They kind of bounce along on their toes. It is quite funny when the geek in question has a cowlick 'cuase it bounces all over the place.
I personally have seen this many many many times. And I do feel that there is a direct correspondance to the severeity of the "Geek Walk" and the amount of pure genius the geek has. =)
When I was younger I trained myself to stop walking like this. Does that mean that i am now less of a geek?
I think it's been posted here before, but there is a big difference between an honest to goodness news article and a Company Press Release. Which is what the cygnus article is.
Of course the company will put a spin on their press releases. The better they sound, the more product they sell. Simple. But if this action helps out something like embedded Linux in the process, more power to 'em.
You are correct that the stock kernels are missing some stuff. To the best of my knowledge, Linux cannot currently run inside a doorknob. Other embedded system can and do.
And there are also other embedded systems that, for example, run Win95. I worked on one in college.
So I just skimmed the eCos whitepaper which can be found linked from the eCos page For those of you ho are unfamiliar with how embedded systems are designed/work/react this whitepaper should be informative. From the quick glance I gave it, eCos seems quite nice with the key feature being POSIX compliant. eCos seems to implement a process model where POSIX threads are also available. Thank God. I've been getting tired of this holy war going on between the process based embedded systems camp and the thread based embedded systems camp.
I think that the point that should be made is that while Cygnus will be supporting work for both eCos and embedded Linux, eCos is their baby. Now before someone gets all huffy and ticked off, note that eCos is a real time embedded system, and Opensource. And when it comes to embedded systems, designing real time into the kernel is a major boon as opposed to something like rt-linux where linux is essentially run as a process of a smaller real-time kernel (yes, that is an oversimplification, but basically true).
Quite frankly, I do not see embedded linux being able to run inside a doorknob anytime soon, there's a lot of work still to be done. eCos already has that ability, and according to the whitepaper Linux and gdb can be used as the development platform. The real point is that all the reasons I have heard of for wanting embedded Linux, seem to be embodied in eCos. POSIX compliant, open source, real time embedded system.
Ahem. Go Cygnus, go Cygnus, go Cygnus, go. (Insert cheerleaders and dance routine here)
Now all we need is support for broadband multimedia to take the settop box market away from CE. The fact that CE is pretty much guaranteed to have directx and realaudio/video is a *major* selling point.
And if you don't like what I had to say about embedded Linux, you know what you can do? Go code it. Get its development going that much faster.
ok. sorry. my bad.
What a minute. Say the ban goes through. Net commerce goes up. In response, other state and federal taxes go up to cover the loss.
But a majority of the country isn't on the net.
So they, having to pay more moeny to the government, get screwed.
And what about the poor? There are plenty of people in the country who cannot afford a net connection. How do they benefit? More tax rebates?
This would really only benefit the techno-elite. Which regardless of what you're political affiliation, sucks.
I'm thrilled so many people think it won't happen. It really is a great big chance to get bitten in the a$$.