Jeff's been generating amazing ideas at an amazing rate since the early 80s - sadly AFAIK none of them have really gone anywhere, as others have said he's had the touch of death for consoles too numerous to mention:(
Yes. This is another way of saying that the education system in the US, compared to that in Europe (where the results of a poll like this would be much, much less depressing), is shit.
First you call them ignorant (which is true). Then you call them stupid. Then you call them religious fundamentalists. Then back to ignorant. These are all very separate categories Different sets, but union (intersection (a, b, c) ) seems to return an awfully large fraction of set (c) -- religious people...
even though I wrote the code myself and know exactly what it's doing, I still want to anthropomorphize it and believe its doing it intelligently instead of just randomly selecting points and discarding those that don't give good results. That way, madness lies... or possibly genius. It's hard for me to tell...
Mystery #1: how on earth Americans can have been fooled by Bush, not just once but twice, the second time ignoring four years' worth of evidence of what an evil fuck he is...
Finally, a way to give the net.kooks at ORSN et al -- and other purveyors of alternative DNS roots -- some sort of credibility... prove that the kooks were right all along! The cabal does exist, and they're running the US government. What a stroke of genius! This single act could be the single most harmful thing to hit the net since Cantor and Seigel:(
Sure. Read the definition I linked to; a jury of your peers would have to accept that you believed the threat was serious for an offence to have been committed. A kid shouting "I'll fucking kill you!" in a playground fight doesn't pass the believability test. (Note that it's the victim's state of mind that counts. So, if the woman in the article is, perhaps, a little naive but takes the threats seriously, it doesn't matter that you , or the police, would take it seriously.
I personally have no problem being watched as long as I can watch back. It would be interesting to know where the politicians are at 2 AM.
But some people would like to shoot or blow up politicians. Therefore it is unlikely that such technology would be implemented. (Not that it would happen anyway, but that'd be the reason given to instantly dismiss the idea.)
So where's the manual that says how to subvert a 1984-style world back into something that free people would care to live in?
Well, I would link to it, but you can be disappeared now for possession of terrorist training materials, so that probably wouldn't be the wisest move...
Actually, there's no such thing, within the world of the book 1984 at any rate. If you read the book, the moral is that the state wins. "If you want to picture the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." (from memory, that's the last line of the book, but it's years since I last read it.)
Why would you want to do such a thing, just to fuck up an attempt to detect & prevent crime which is new, effective, and AFAIK has virtually NO negative consequences for civil liberties, privacy etc? (So long as they're sited by an algorithm running on data about gun crime, rather than (say) ethnicity or income levels.)
Making threats to kill is illegal in the UK. I must be getting old, because I'm going to say that the police should take such offences more seriously, and yes that should include calling the ISP to connect IPs to human beings.
Personally, I would just go for "Pour ma part, je souhaite la bienvenue à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNIs", but I am not a native francophone and my English sucks too.
For anyone who cares, acronyms never get plurialized in french, so it's more "à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNI".
BTW --
"bb" == "big brother"? I haven't looked at that much, but I've seen the agent UI and I nearly threw up from the vertigo of being flung back in time to 1996 and VB5. Egad, it was like when desktop published first took off and lo! the departmental newsletters were many, and terrible;)
Think about it. Symantec is a billion dollar company selling a product that barely works. Nobody is spending that kind of money making operating systems more secure. Now far be it from me to defend the great satan, but to be fair Microsoft have spent a lot more than that on improving security since Bill "got it" and sent his memo back in, what was it, 2003? They still haven't trained themselves to make the right call when it comes to usability vs functionality (see UAC, and so on and on) but Vista is a lot more secure out of the box than XP SP2 - which itself was an improvment over 2000. (Which, admittedly, was worse than NT4 which was worse than 3.51, but that's beside the point.)
It probably won't show up in the botnet stats even once Vista is ubiquitous, though, as you still have to allow the user to install arbitrary binaries, which means the attacker just has to fool them. And they've had a lot of practice with that over the last few years. There IS no technical solution to this, unless you completely close the ecosystem - prevent the user installing arbitrary executables, shut down the internet as we know it -- or find an infalliable on-demand method of deducing what a given program is going to do; and if you've got a solution to the halting problem, I'm sure we'd ALL like to hear it;)
Unfortunately malware will be with us as long as we have the mark 1 human sitting in front of the keyboard. All the attacker has to do is convince the user to install $evil_binary and boom, game over. If you've got a patch for human stupidity, send code!
Virus problems will continue as long as there are people wanting to write viruses, as they are simply an electronic version of spray painting walls, defacing monuments, or other useless and harmful activities that have persisted since the beginnings of civilization A nit-pick with an otherwise interesting comment: very few virus writers are doing it for fame and 1337ness points these days. They're here for the money. Anyone capable of writing an effective virus (and who doesn't mind dealing with full-on criminals) can cash in quite successfully.
I've looked over someone's shoulder at the latter - it seems pretty good, it runs on SNMP - I tinkered with NAGIOS five years ago and found it good, but a little dangerous if you didn't read the docs before firing it up (back then, anyway, it auto-discovered the local network by strobing everything in sight with Nmap scans)... but I've no experience of any of these in production. I've been asked to build out a new office network, which will be a template for future local offices, and getting the monitoring right is going to be crucial, so any actual experience of production use gratefully received!
Slashdot Mirror
Jeff's been generating amazing ideas at an amazing rate since the early 80s - sadly AFAIK none of them have really gone anywhere, as others have said he's had the touch of death for consoles too numerous to mention :(
Dennett strikes again!
Yes. This is another way of saying that the education system in the US, compared to that in Europe (where the results of a poll like this would be much, much less depressing), is shit.
"Think of the human body as being like a car. Now, you may ask, why is the exhaust so close to the ignition?" -- Barry Cryer
((c) Douglas Adams 1979)
Mystery #1: how on earth Americans can have been fooled by Bush, not just once but twice, the second time ignoring four years' worth of evidence of what an evil fuck he is...
Finally, a way to give the net.kooks at ORSN et al -- and other purveyors of alternative DNS roots -- some sort of credibility... prove that the kooks were right all along! The cabal does exist, and they're running the US government. What a stroke of genius! This single act could be the single most harmful thing to hit the net since Cantor and Seigel :(
could be the human race is run...
Vallllllllllldiiiiiiiisssssss!!!! The only person to post to more lists in one day than Gadi Evron!
John Carpenter already demonstrated how to shut down brains with light. You just need a shaky grasp of metaphysics, and a very big bomb...
...answer the question!
Sure. Read the definition I linked to; a jury of your peers would have to accept that you believed the threat was serious for an offence to have been committed. A kid shouting "I'll fucking kill you!" in a playground fight doesn't pass the believability test. (Note that it's the victim's state of mind that counts. So, if the woman in the article is, perhaps, a little naive but takes the threats seriously, it doesn't matter that you , or the police, would take it seriously.
But some people would like to shoot or blow up politicians. Therefore it is unlikely that such technology would be implemented. (Not that it would happen anyway, but that'd be the reason given to instantly dismiss the idea.)
Well, I would link to it, but you can be disappeared now for possession of terrorist training materials, so that probably wouldn't be the wisest move...
Actually, there's no such thing, within the world of the book 1984 at any rate. If you read the book, the moral is that the state wins. "If you want to picture the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." (from memory, that's the last line of the book, but it's years since I last read it.)
Why would you want to do such a thing, just to fuck up an attempt to detect & prevent crime which is new, effective, and AFAIK has virtually NO negative consequences for civil liberties, privacy etc? (So long as they're sited by an algorithm running on data about gun crime, rather than (say) ethnicity or income levels.)
Making threats to kill is illegal in the UK. I must be getting old, because I'm going to say that the police should take such offences more seriously, and yes that should include calling the ISP to connect IPs to human beings.
For anyone who cares, acronyms never get plurialized in french, so it's more "à nos nouveaux maîtres OVNI".
(Yes, I'am french.)
That explains your outRAAAYJJEOUS accente!BTW -- "bb" == "big brother"? I haven't looked at that much, but I've seen the agent UI and I nearly threw up from the vertigo of being flung back in time to 1996 and VB5. Egad, it was like when desktop published first took off and lo! the departmental newsletters were many, and terrible ;)
It probably won't show up in the botnet stats even once Vista is ubiquitous, though, as you still have to allow the user to install arbitrary binaries, which means the attacker just has to fool them. And they've had a lot of practice with that over the last few years. There IS no technical solution to this, unless you completely close the ecosystem - prevent the user installing arbitrary executables, shut down the internet as we know it -- or find an infalliable on-demand method of deducing what a given program is going to do; and if you've got a solution to the halting problem, I'm sure we'd ALL like to hear it ;)
Unfortunately malware will be with us as long as we have the mark 1 human sitting in front of the keyboard. All the attacker has to do is convince the user to install $evil_binary and boom, game over. If you've got a patch for human stupidity, send code!
Already done, thirty-five years ago.
I've looked over someone's shoulder at the latter - it seems pretty good, it runs on SNMP - I tinkered with NAGIOS five years ago and found it good, but a little dangerous if you didn't read the docs before firing it up (back then, anyway, it auto-discovered the local network by strobing everything in sight with Nmap scans)... but I've no experience of any of these in production. I've been asked to build out a new office network, which will be a template for future local offices, and getting the monitoring right is going to be crucial, so any actual experience of production use gratefully received!