The real question is: are the military funded applications sold through the Appstore? Or is the US army jail breaking their phones? Or is Apple providing the military special unlocked iPhones?
Actually, I'd bet that Apple are providing the military with special phones that are locked to an "Apps Depot" where the military can make available special apps they've sanctioned. You don't want a piece of military hardware able to run any old dodgy thing sold through the app store, and you equally don't want the machine unlocked and potentially vulnerable when the soldiers install the latest piece of iPorn for Unlocked Phones that hits the bazaars. Remember the pirate DVDs/VCDs with viruses and rootkits and all kinds of other goodness on them that went through military laptops a while back?
I don't know if they would give it to you or not, but at only 12 mph it would be real hard to 'get away with it' unless you change the plot a little, like adding a worm hole or something.
What, something like a salvaged Cthonian relic that wants to wipe out the Deep Ones and their fish-people spawn and doesn't approve of insanity in its minions because it "makes their souls taste funny"?
Do you think that the average user will read anything before clicking "Yes"?
...of course they won't, which is why you turn it around to "Hey, this file contains executable code which is, y'know, kind of contrary to the whole concept of a 'document'. Do you want to block execution of this code? [Yes][No, I like to live dangerously]".
Silence, Infidel, before I smite you with the Flaming Command Line of the One True OS! May a billion-node botnet DDoS your P2P sessions, and may Steve Ballmer throw chairs at you for eternity!
A brief except of his next autobiography has just fallen through a rift in time, and landed on my desk. I wanted the lottery numbers, but when you have lemons...
Well, from the Dancing with the Stars section:
"I had what I called a Grey Box, because it accessed the grey goo between the judges and the viewers ears, and made them score me highly and vote for me. I built them out of Dr Pepper cans, Apple ][ Disk controllers and surplus MRI machines. I decided to sell a few for pocket change, and had a really scary meeting with some Upright Italian-American Businessmen at a diner a short drive out of town. They wanted to know all kinds of stuff, like how well they worked on judges and politicians and DAs, and I sold them a few with full plans and a factory in Guatemala just to get out of there. But the really cool thing is that I won the entire competition doing nothing but variations of the Chicken Dance, all because of the Grey Box."
You know, if you have 30 days to live because of liver failure, I think getting cancer is worth extending that by a few months...
Here's the thing. You wouldn't actually have cancer if on this device, not unless the barriers between the blood flow and the cultured liver cancer cells allowed these immortalised cells to enter your body and lodge somewhere else. Then, depending on how well your own immune system took care of the invaders, you could be in *real* trouble. If we're talking about something that most people can't reject there could be real problems - especially if it becomes transmissible, as has been observed with certain cancers in dogs, hamsters and the Tasmanian Devil.
It's a great idea, and I'd hope that we'll see more of this kind of thing in the future, but I'd really like some assurances that either the tissues involved can't survive "naked" in the human body or that the developers of the tissue culture have also developed theraputic antibodies that target it.
That's the one purpose for that big collection of tubes - to let perverts have free access to kids in their own homes without parental oversight. That's what Cerf and Kahn and Metcalfe and Crocker and all those other dirty old men were labouring towards when they were young - the ability to solicit ten year olds from the safety and privacy of their own homes. They, in turn, were groomed by older perverts like Licklider with their human-computer symbiosis claptrap, you can't get solicited by punch-card, no sirree, interactive computing was a massive step backwards from batch processing in terms of child safety. And that Vannevar Bush... the whole reason he wanted a Memex was to store and index microfilmed Japanese etchings like that disgusting octopus one.
Fucking perverts, the lot of them. Life would be so much easier without computers and the internet. We'd only need to worry about old Uncle Pervy and that Mr Tosspot who hangs out near the school, not random perverts half way across the world.
Re:I don't know why I call him Gerald
on
The Mouse Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Buy him a house, you cheap bastard. You've left him homeless long enough.
What will they have in their junk DNA, and what will happen when modern influenza, common cold and herpes viruses get their grubby little gene sequences inserted into it? Best case, the poor neanderthal will die of chicken pox or any number of other diseases for which he's unlikely to have any immunity. Worst case, something like herpes zoster plays swap-the-sequence with a fragment from an ancient virus that Mr Neanderthals's prehistoric gene donor had as a child, and which will make Smallpox look like a coldsore.
Of course, you could keep all such cloned individuals isolated in sterile conditions - but what would that say about those who chose to create the clones and their view of human life?
I could just be talking through my arse, since I'm not an expert on molecular genetics or what I guess you could the emerging field of paleogenetics - but we've had interesting pandemics appear from seemingly nowhere in the past, and fatal results when new diseases were introduced to populations that weren't able to handle them, so a little caution seems prudent.
Netscape 4 and certain HP Laserjet drivers didn't play particularly well together, meaning that it was necessary to place a setting in the windows config files to ensure a particular area of the memory was initialised or allocated in a particular way so they wouldn't fight over it... or at least that's my sendmail-addled recollection of it, nearly ten years on.
WfWG 3.11 with specific, well-engineered apps? Great.
Any MS OS with bloaty, ill-conceived apps from a multitude of vendors, many of which don't play nicely with each other? (I'm looking at you, Netscape and Hewlett-Packard!). Not so much.
I've little doubt that even though there will be no new licences issued by MS, there will continue to be pockets of it in production systems for another decade or two.
You know, from a safety standpoint, twenty years down the road I'd rather have a couple of hundred thousand clunkers on the road running LNG or ethanol or biodiesel or whatever than ammonia. Ammonia probably makes a lot of sense for well-maintained fleets - and its safety record in refrigeration and agricultural applications is pretty good - but I'm not sure I'd like it used as a regular transportation fuel by Joe Public in his poorly-maintained car. I suspect there would be concerns from those who service vehicles, too - a whiff of leaking hydrocarbon fuels isn't something that's likely to put you in hospital.
Not that I don't believe this should be written about... quite the opposite, actually, as the technology and surrounding social and technological environment had changed quite a bit in the intervening decades.
Protip: Don't let your IT department work with anything sharp. That way they can't kill themselves.
You know, any IT professional who needs sharp objects to commit suicide is sadly underqualified. "Down, Not Across" might be the ASR Mantra, but where's the fun in that? Oozing over a few things. Hell, if you've got super-sized UPSen and diesel back-up generators and a whole lot of cables and a leatherman I'm sure you can find more exciting ways to de-install both yourself and Exchange.
Hell, if it came down to it, you could de-install yourself quite spectactularly with the aid of duct tape, a Sun E450 and a four storey drop - and those Suns are pretty blunt.
The university in question will NOT be dumping a load of cash on this, and in fact will probably be saving some. Microsoft. Yahoo and Google all provide this free of charge to Universities - in exchange for getting their stuff and services used by a new bunch of students each and every year, some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate. In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service.
Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else.
Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up. You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
My workplace outsourced student mail to one of the larger players, over my initial objections, but I have to admit that overall it seems to be working out quite well.
I give it six months from release, tops, before someone manages to load homebrew on it - and another three at most before a way of loading dumps of commercial games and patching around the region locking in them is found. Then, maybe 12 months at most before flashcarts for it become mass-market items that any idiot can use.
If we're looking at ONLY a way to work around the region locking, I'd expect an outboard device in less than three months from release.
With a built-in SD slot this thing is going to be GREAT for home-brew once it's cracked. And it will be, sooner or later.
Whether we like them or not, software patents have become a familiar and potentially damaging part of the legal landscape.
Nokia obviously want to use this feature in their software, and don't want to be sued. Nobody else has staked out a claim for this particular concept, so Nokia filed a patent. If it's granted, Nokia get to use this feature and can claim a little bit of money from anyone else who chooses to do so. If it's knocked back on the grounds that it's obvious or that there's prior art and it's therefore unpatentable, then Nokia still get to use that feature without the risk of being sued. They win either way.
Well, with GM cars from the 90s, you could use anything that resembles a key to open it up.
They obviously still used the same lock mechanics they were using in the 80s then. I have a 1983 Holden Camira (the Australian J-car) and have found that to be very true. Other Camira keys, partially inserted Mitsubishi ones, steering lock keys, all kinds of stuff. That makes it particularly annoying that a would-be joyrider completely destroyed both the drivers and passenger side locks in an attempt to get in.
The only real security on the car is the aftermarket steering lock (which is useless against a real car thief) and the fact that it looks like crap.
This just highlights how the burden of anti-spam efforts often gets transferred to legitimate email senders by simplistic blocking. The unacknowledged false-positive problem. I have seen these come to a sudden stop when the company loses an important order because it false-positived the prospect.
That all depends on how you approach it, and how useful the rejection information is. "We don't accept spam" is more likely to get a lost customer than "REJECT [Reason for rejection] - if it wasn't spam, please contact postmaster@bar.baz so we sort this matter out". A polite message that indicates that we acknowledge that we might have fucked up and want to fix things is unlikely to put many noses out of joint - we reject maybe half a million messages per day, and get between two and perhaps eight queries about blocked mail per month. I use a lot of simplictic blocking against most of the interenet, and it works a treat.
I also have a lot of whitelistings at that kind of level in place for places like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, bigpond, optus and a whole lot of other ISPs that we get a lot of legitimate mail from as well as a lot of spam and viruses. They're massive spam sources, especially now that captcha is useless, but I can't block them outright for even a Spamcop listing. They then trickle down to our next level of scanning.
That level of scanning is content-based, and uses ClamAV - with the official, the SANE Security and the MSRBL signatures. They catch a whole lot of phishing and 419 and image- and pdf-spam messages, as well as viruses. Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail mostly have phishing emails caught that way, it's mostly viruses that come from ISP mail relays, and that seems consistent with who and what is sending unwanted mail through those kinds of systems.
Anything that passes that level then goes to Spamassassin, which has had the scores tweaked and which we have a rejection threshold of 15 set for - we have a legitimate need to accept Chinese HTML-Only mail from crappy webail systems with no PTRs wherever possible, hence the relatively high threshold. We have the various URIBL checks apply 15 points - so, if it's got a nasty URL in there, it gets rejected. We apply varying numbers of points for hits against most blacklists - mostly 5, but we've got 15 for the RFC Ignorant BogusMX one and 1 for SORBS and 2 for SORBS-OLD and 2 for SORBS-RECENT so they get 3 for old spam or 5 if they're a recent spam source. We also apply 5 for things like CSMA or PSBL that I couldn't dream of blocking against directly. With some tweaked scores for other tests, I find that we mostly manage to keep gmail spam out while letting gmail real mail through. I got one false-positive reported last week for mail from a gmail user - but it turns out that we'd also rejected 3000 messages from spammers from that same IP address in that same week, and that server was listed in no less than four different blacklists at the time of the rejection. I also noticed that small but significant number of them were rejected due to Sane Security's ClamAV signatures, and they looked like targetted phishing attempts and 419s from the subject lines. Simplistic "You're in SpamCop, we're not accepting your mail" blocking can't be safely used by some organisations against the likes of gmail and hotmail, but there are ways of reasonably cheaply keeping most of their crap out with minimal false-positives.
Obviously, I'm assuming that the fuel for the pumps is less valuable than the helium in the bladders.
...or, less valuable than the fuel savings from changing altitude to catch winds going vaguely in the direction you wish to travel - either with your vessel's own surface area or by deploying kites or sails.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'd bet that Apple are providing the military with special phones that are locked to an "Apps Depot" where the military can make available special apps they've sanctioned. You don't want a piece of military hardware able to run any old dodgy thing sold through the app store, and you equally don't want the machine unlocked and potentially vulnerable when the soldiers install the latest piece of iPorn for Unlocked Phones that hits the bazaars. Remember the pirate DVDs/VCDs with viruses and rootkits and all kinds of other goodness on them that went through military laptops a while back?
...an ARM port of IPCop?
I don't know if they would give it to you or not, but at only 12 mph it would be real hard to 'get away with it' unless you change the plot a little, like adding a worm hole or something.
What, something like a salvaged Cthonian relic that wants to wipe out the Deep Ones and their fish-people spawn and doesn't approve of insanity in its minions because it "makes their souls taste funny"?
Do you think that the average user will read anything before clicking "Yes"?
...of course they won't, which is why you turn it around to "Hey, this file contains executable code which is, y'know, kind of contrary to the whole concept of a 'document'. Do you want to block execution of this code? [Yes][No, I like to live dangerously]".
Well now we know what you think of Islam...
Silence, Infidel, before I smite you with the Flaming Command Line of the One True OS! May a billion-node botnet DDoS your P2P sessions, and may Steve Ballmer throw chairs at you for eternity!
A brief except of his next autobiography has just fallen through a rift in time, and landed on my desk. I wanted the lottery numbers, but when you have lemons...
Well, from the Dancing with the Stars section:
"I had what I called a Grey Box, because it accessed the grey goo between the judges and the viewers ears, and made them score me highly and vote for me. I built them out of Dr Pepper cans, Apple ][ Disk controllers and surplus MRI machines. I decided to sell a few for pocket change, and had a really scary meeting with some Upright Italian-American Businessmen at a diner a short drive out of town. They wanted to know all kinds of stuff, like how well they worked on judges and politicians and DAs, and I sold them a few with full plans and a factory in Guatemala just to get out of there. But the really cool thing is that I won the entire competition doing nothing but variations of the Chicken Dance, all because of the Grey Box."
You know, if you have 30 days to live because of liver failure, I think getting cancer is worth extending that by a few months...
Here's the thing. You wouldn't actually have cancer if on this device, not unless the barriers between the blood flow and the cultured liver cancer cells allowed these immortalised cells to enter your body and lodge somewhere else. Then, depending on how well your own immune system took care of the invaders, you could be in *real* trouble. If we're talking about something that most people can't reject there could be real problems - especially if it becomes transmissible, as has been observed with certain cancers in dogs, hamsters and the Tasmanian Devil.
It's a great idea, and I'd hope that we'll see more of this kind of thing in the future, but I'd really like some assurances that either the tissues involved can't survive "naked" in the human body or that the developers of the tissue culture have also developed theraputic antibodies that target it.
Nice way of saying "we're replacing your bad liver cancer with a good liver cancer in this handy take-home plug-in box".
IT'S FOR THE FUCKING CHILDREN, REMEMBER?
No no no no no no no...
The Internet is FOR FUCKING THE CHILDREN
That's the one purpose for that big collection of tubes - to let perverts have free access to kids in their own homes without parental oversight. That's what Cerf and Kahn and Metcalfe and Crocker and all those other dirty old men were labouring towards when they were young - the ability to solicit ten year olds from the safety and privacy of their own homes. They, in turn, were groomed by older perverts like Licklider with their human-computer symbiosis claptrap, you can't get solicited by punch-card, no sirree, interactive computing was a massive step backwards from batch processing in terms of child safety. And that Vannevar Bush... the whole reason he wanted a Memex was to store and index microfilmed Japanese etchings like that disgusting octopus one.
Fucking perverts, the lot of them. Life would be so much easier without computers and the internet. We'd only need to worry about old Uncle Pervy and that Mr Tosspot who hangs out near the school, not random perverts half way across the world.
Buy him a house, you cheap bastard. You've left him homeless long enough.
What will they have in their junk DNA, and what will happen when modern influenza, common cold and herpes viruses get their grubby little gene sequences inserted into it? Best case, the poor neanderthal will die of chicken pox or any number of other diseases for which he's unlikely to have any immunity. Worst case, something like herpes zoster plays swap-the-sequence with a fragment from an ancient virus that Mr Neanderthals's prehistoric gene donor had as a child, and which will make Smallpox look like a coldsore.
Of course, you could keep all such cloned individuals isolated in sterile conditions - but what would that say about those who chose to create the clones and their view of human life?
I could just be talking through my arse, since I'm not an expert on molecular genetics or what I guess you could the emerging field of paleogenetics - but we've had interesting pandemics appear from seemingly nowhere in the past, and fatal results when new diseases were introduced to populations that weren't able to handle them, so a little caution seems prudent.
No, that's not what I'm talking about at all.
Netscape 4 and certain HP Laserjet drivers didn't play particularly well together, meaning that it was necessary to place a setting in the windows config files to ensure a particular area of the memory was initialised or allocated in a particular way so they wouldn't fight over it... or at least that's my sendmail-addled recollection of it, nearly ten years on.
WfWG 3.11 with specific, well-engineered apps? Great.
Any MS OS with bloaty, ill-conceived apps from a multitude of vendors, many of which don't play nicely with each other? (I'm looking at you, Netscape and Hewlett-Packard!). Not so much.
I've little doubt that even though there will be no new licences issued by MS, there will continue to be pockets of it in production systems for another decade or two.
You know, from a safety standpoint, twenty years down the road I'd rather have a couple of hundred thousand clunkers on the road running LNG or ethanol or biodiesel or whatever than ammonia. Ammonia probably makes a lot of sense for well-maintained fleets - and its safety record in refrigeration and agricultural applications is pretty good - but I'm not sure I'd like it used as a regular transportation fuel by Joe Public in his poorly-maintained car. I suspect there would be concerns from those who service vehicles, too - a whiff of leaking hydrocarbon fuels isn't something that's likely to put you in hospital.
Who else here remembers Bill Landreth's book?
Not that I don't believe this should be written about... quite the opposite, actually, as the technology and surrounding social and technological environment had changed quite a bit in the intervening decades.
You know, any IT professional who needs sharp objects to commit suicide is sadly underqualified. "Down, Not Across" might be the ASR Mantra, but where's the fun in that? Oozing over a few things. Hell, if you've got super-sized UPSen and diesel back-up generators and a whole lot of cables and a leatherman I'm sure you can find more exciting ways to de-install both yourself and Exchange.
Hell, if it came down to it, you could de-install yourself quite spectactularly with the aid of duct tape, a Sun E450 and a four storey drop - and those Suns are pretty blunt.
The university in question will NOT be dumping a load of cash on this, and in fact will probably be saving some. Microsoft. Yahoo and Google all provide this free of charge to Universities - in exchange for getting their stuff and services used by a new bunch of students each and every year, some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate. In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service.
Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else.
Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up. You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
My workplace outsourced student mail to one of the larger players, over my initial objections, but I have to admit that overall it seems to be working out quite well.
...before long astrophysicists will have more words for things that orbit other things than the Inuit have for snow.
I give it six months from release, tops, before someone manages to load homebrew on it - and another three at most before a way of loading dumps of commercial games and patching around the region locking in them is found. Then, maybe 12 months at most before flashcarts for it become mass-market items that any idiot can use.
If we're looking at ONLY a way to work around the region locking, I'd expect an outboard device in less than three months from release.
With a built-in SD slot this thing is going to be GREAT for home-brew once it's cracked. And it will be, sooner or later.
It's probably a lot better than the alternative...
Whether we like them or not, software patents have become a familiar and potentially damaging part of the legal landscape.
Nokia obviously want to use this feature in their software, and don't want to be sued. Nobody else has staked out a claim for this particular concept, so Nokia filed a patent. If it's granted, Nokia get to use this feature and can claim a little bit of money from anyone else who chooses to do so. If it's knocked back on the grounds that it's obvious or that there's prior art and it's therefore unpatentable, then Nokia still get to use that feature without the risk of being sued. They win either way.
They obviously still used the same lock mechanics they were using in the 80s then. I have a 1983 Holden Camira (the Australian J-car) and have found that to be very true. Other Camira keys, partially inserted Mitsubishi ones, steering lock keys, all kinds of stuff. That makes it particularly annoying that a would-be joyrider completely destroyed both the drivers and passenger side locks in an attempt to get in.
The only real security on the car is the aftermarket steering lock (which is useless against a real car thief) and the fact that it looks like crap.
That all depends on how you approach it, and how useful the rejection information is. "We don't accept spam" is more likely to get a lost customer than "REJECT [Reason for rejection] - if it wasn't spam, please contact postmaster@bar.baz so we sort this matter out". A polite message that indicates that we acknowledge that we might have fucked up and want to fix things is unlikely to put many noses out of joint - we reject maybe half a million messages per day, and get between two and perhaps eight queries about blocked mail per month. I use a lot of simplictic blocking against most of the interenet, and it works a treat.
I also have a lot of whitelistings at that kind of level in place for places like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, bigpond, optus and a whole lot of other ISPs that we get a lot of legitimate mail from as well as a lot of spam and viruses. They're massive spam sources, especially now that captcha is useless, but I can't block them outright for even a Spamcop listing. They then trickle down to our next level of scanning.
That level of scanning is content-based, and uses ClamAV - with the official, the SANE Security and the MSRBL signatures. They catch a whole lot of phishing and 419 and image- and pdf-spam messages, as well as viruses. Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail mostly have phishing emails caught that way, it's mostly viruses that come from ISP mail relays, and that seems consistent with who and what is sending unwanted mail through those kinds of systems.
Anything that passes that level then goes to Spamassassin, which has had the scores tweaked and which we have a rejection threshold of 15 set for - we have a legitimate need to accept Chinese HTML-Only mail from crappy webail systems with no PTRs wherever possible, hence the relatively high threshold. We have the various URIBL checks apply 15 points - so, if it's got a nasty URL in there, it gets rejected. We apply varying numbers of points for hits against most blacklists - mostly 5, but we've got 15 for the RFC Ignorant BogusMX one and 1 for SORBS and 2 for SORBS-OLD and 2 for SORBS-RECENT so they get 3 for old spam or 5 if they're a recent spam source. We also apply 5 for things like CSMA or PSBL that I couldn't dream of blocking against directly. With some tweaked scores for other tests, I find that we mostly manage to keep gmail spam out while letting gmail real mail through. I got one false-positive reported last week for mail from a gmail user - but it turns out that we'd also rejected 3000 messages from spammers from that same IP address in that same week, and that server was listed in no less than four different blacklists at the time of the rejection. I also noticed that small but significant number of them were rejected due to Sane Security's ClamAV signatures, and they looked like targetted phishing attempts and 419s from the subject lines. Simplistic "You're in SpamCop, we're not accepting your mail" blocking can't be safely used by some organisations against the likes of gmail and hotmail, but there are ways of reasonably cheaply keeping most of their crap out with minimal false-positives.