Gates is right that there are a lot of malicious people (usually young dweebs with some kind of Oedipal complex against Microsoft) out there. An operating system will never be bulletproof against such attacks (just read Goedel, Escher, Bach).
The way to control it is to lock malicious hackers up for a long long time. The message has to go out that, contrary to the movie War Games, this is not a game, and you may end up in jail for ten years.
The sentence this week for one of the MS Blaster perps (18 months) was inadequate, but a start. It's not really enough of a punishment. They need to know: release a virus and ten years of your life will be snuffed out.
Vigorous prosecution put the kibosh on phreaking, and it will do so for malicious hacking too. Of course it will never be eliminated, but incarceration and social ostracism will take most of the wind out of their sails.
When the Communications Decency Act was being argued in the Supreme Court, opponents of the act contended that a "technologic fix" was sufficient, i.e., filters. This was disingenuous, but served the argument to overturn the law. Immediately afterwards, the same lawyers set to work suing libraries and universities who had the temerity to install filters.
What is needed is a rejection of this idea that the internet be a wild west of no laws, with the burden of protection on the individual. The telephone spam problem was solved with a LAW (shudder), not some kludgy filter, vigilante blacklist, "Bayesian analysis" or other wankoid spy-vs-spy nonsense.
Freenet is shady and an idea that will never work--some kind of libertarian fantasy with no there there. Even if it worked ideally, it means your server could be passing, say, child porn. Or pirated information. Live free or die, blah blah.
If I ran a server and someone was engaged in such nefarious activity, they would be "censored" pronto, as in rm -rf *--how in the world can not knowing what's going on (the Sgt. Schultz method?) be an improvement?
Good job PayPal in not making payments to anonymous recipients.
There are some interesting references to companies/technologies that Gilder thinks are going to change everything in the 7-layer world:
Corvis -- link "using colors of light both to bear the message and to determine the path of the circuit. It radically collapses the top layers of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) stack.. A "switchless" web of always-on fixed lambdas (wavelengths of light) can function as both the physical and logical layers of the Net because the intelligence is embedded in the path.",p>
Broadwing -- Broadwing Subsidiary of Corvis. "In uniting Corvis, a cutting edge equipment provider, with Broadwing, an infrastructure builder and service provider, [Corvis CEO David] Huber is also betting that IP networks are not inherently modular, where equipment from a thousand providers can easily be cobbled together to deliver high-bandwidth, low-latency services..."
EZchip -- EZchip "." Where until now data flowing through the seven layers and numerous sub-layers were parsed and modified by a gaggle of hundreds of chips connected by thousands of wires and glue-logic galore, EZ puts all seven layers of the OSI stack onto one-chip, performing all the essential functions of an Internet router on a single sliver of silicon. The "layers" are once again transcended when EZ's software tools allow programmers to tell the chip what to do without even referring to the rigid layers, channelizations, protocols, and interfaces used in the previous software environment."
It's true he's a Reaganite, but Reaganites aren't wrong 100% of the time. They aren't that useful.
'Course, I also remember something about a company called "Global Crossing."
He concludes:
"The telecom industry is nowhere near some mythical paradox of perfection or cul de sac bargain basement of commoditization. It is still engaged in a thrilling adventure of putting together worldwide webs of glass and light that reach from your doorstep or teleputer to every other person and machine on the planet. It is long distance and it is local, it is packetted and circuited, it is multithreaded and aggregated, it is broadband and narrowcast, all at once. These crystal palaces of light and air will be hard to do and the world will reward the pioneers who manage to build them."
You didn't do a good job of refuting anything in my post.
Again:
1) Bush has done everything a frank opponent of space would do (cancel existing programs). That you agree with him about the worthlessness of the current space program is immaterial.
2) The idea that the $400 billion expenditure and vision (ha!) should not be mentioned in the State of the Union is ludicrous--unless of course he doesn;t mean it. Which he doesn't.
3) It hardly needs to be pointed out that Bush I's Mars proposal meant ZIP. It went nowhere, just as this one will. So we are left with cancellations, and no replacement efforts.
4) He is a proven liar. 600 dead soldiers and countless wounded later, he does not deserve a second chance.
The GWB Mars plan isn't worth the paper it's printed on. He (or rather his scriptwriter) is no more sincere about really mounting such an effort than W's daddy was. He just had to say something coincident with the release of the Rogers report on the Columbia disaster. So what policy changes did he really suggest? Cancellation of all current space efforts (Shuttle, Hubble, Space Station, many other NASA projects, ASAP). In other words, his actions are isomorphic to what a frank space opponent would do. To appear "visionary" and not just like a Luddite space exploration opponent, he finessed it by coming up with a dishonest Moon/Mars scheme that will never happen. Proof of the plan's vaporware nature is that there was no mention of this "vision" in the State of the Union speech that occurred the very same week.
GHWB also had a problem with the "vision thing" and came up with similar smoke and mirrors about Mars before his own doomed election effort in 1992. As an indication of his insincerity, he put Dan Quayle in charge of the effort.
Bush, a chip off the old block, is a proven liar and doesn't deserve a second chance. Twelve more soldiers killed today. He should be indicted.
Many of the JPL scientists are Bible-thumpers in their spare time--e.g., Jennifer Harris, Peter Smith. The latter was praising the lord in a press conference after the Pathfinder landing.
Seems like an odd mix to me, but Mars has always evoked a quasi-religious fervor in the search for life there. No matter how much evidence rolls in that it's a cold, dry, dead planet, true believers won't let it go, despite lack of evidence. Life always just has to be hiding in the next layer down, currently beneath the surface. Likewise there's room for God in the first femtosecond of the Big Bang maybe? So that's the faith connection I guess.
>They wouldn't
Bullshit! The manned program has long used English units. There are gauges in the Shuttle read acceleration in slugs/sec^2!--very little metric instrumentation, for the benefit of the pilots who learned it the old way. Or should I say current way, as most Americans still use English exclusively, and will for the foreseeable future.
The Mars Orbiter snafu was between a military subcontractor using English vs, *JPL* which uses metric in its unmanned world.
Pillinger is clearly insane. Or what do they say in England--eccentric? Who told him that Darwin-do looked good, his worst enemy? He believes that the Mars meteorites show signs of life. On sample return missions he says: "Bring me a piece of Mars, and I will tell you all about the planet!" Time for the lithium. Cue "Goin' into Eden, yea brother..."
While Beagle 2 would have been good for Jolly Old and all that, it's no great scientific loss. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers will be arriving Jan. 4 and Jan. 25 and each blows the socks off Beagle 2. That is the Big Show! Those Rovers will be autonomous, operating in opposite hemispheres, and capable of wandering 1 km or more. They will use Mars Odyssey (or Mars Global Surveyor), currently functioning satellites, to upload their data. Each is effectively a highly capable field geologist. They have microscopes and will be taking pictures of the crystalline structures of the rocks!! The wide field cameras are way beyond Pathfinder's. On and on. MER budget was $800 million, Beagle 2 was $40 million. You get what you pay for.
Forrester Research is the same outfit that hyped the bubble and a techie SHORTAGE not long ago.Their old press agent, Red Herring, is mercifully defunct. Why are they still around? We should all have fiber optic connectors on our brains right now, and a brickless society.
Do they wear turbans with rubies on them? I hope so--that at least would be entertaining.
But that kind of encryption only protects you aginst eavesdroppers along the line, and is not a system for anonymous communication. Ebay has a record of everything I bought, bid on, paid for, etc. As they should.
All bulletproof anonymous systems are not and cannot be made transparent--they require one's grandmother to maintain key rings, certificates, illusory webs-of-trust and all kinds of wonkish things that are ridiculous to deal with if one is doing nothing wrong. And that, of course, is the bottom line and always will be.
Shirky: "In any system where a user's identity is in the hands of a third party, that third party cannot be trusted."
The classic Mafia version of this is: "Two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead."
Most people don't think that way, and even if they did they are unlikely to trust any technological system that promises absolute anonymity. The cypherpunks' fantasies are no more ready for prime time now than ever. Main problem is that anonymous communication is a chimeral fantasy, and any scheme to even experiment with their implementation is complex and onerous to all but people who like to read Schneier for fun, and play secret agent.
Above all, cypherpunks chase anonymity like it's a virtue, when most of the worst aspects of the net are caused by anonymity and unaccountability.
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware.
Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2).
Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.
The RFID flap is the most interesting thing to come out of WSIS. And even it's pretty lame.
Don't worry about ANY policy coming out of this group. I went to their web site http://www.itu.int/wsis/ the other day and subjected myself to a lot of their streaming video. First off, it was almost all politicians--can you say vacuous platitudes? Boring as hell, and they were all saying the same thing: "Information should be FREE for all the oppressed peoples of the world, kumbaya." If they weren't politicians they were NGO types.
Basically a series of three-minute hates against the US as the 800-pound gorilla of the internet--they were polite enough not to mention the US by name usually, but that was the subtext.
Bunch of utopian dreamers. Since when has ANYTHING been free? The little problem of IP rights was hardly even mentioned, only by the Iranian president briefly. He used the amusing phrase "Network Order" to describe US hegemony, a play on "New World Order"
But the Slashdot spin doesn't stem from inherent idiocy, but rather its general stealing-stuff-is-kewl ethos. Another example of zealotry trumping thought.
Clearly, if stealing music was legitimized, at best the money flow to artists and their associates would slow to a trickle. Basic economics, no need for hand-waving fun with statistics. The only value-added that people would pay for would be transport and delivery services, & even that money would not go to the creators unless there was some kind of surcharge (which also is decried here as tyranny).
IMO, the Rhapsody model is the most interesting, since people can listen and be exposed to all kinds of music on demand for a nominal flat subscription (thus boosting sales by such exposure and musical education), and only pay extra for the privilege of burning songs. Yeah, yeah, you can get around that too. I have to laugh at some of my never-pay-for-anything geek friends who assure me that with audio capture programs they can rip anything going through their sounds cards. Yeah, if it floats your boat to mess around for 10 minutes adjusting levels and trimming ends so you can steal a song. I'd rather pay 75 cents. Funny thing, I never hear any geeks actually talking about music. The ethos seems to be some kind of pack-rat mentality of spending hour after hour amassing a large collection of stuff, never listened to, to beat The Man or something. A real human comedy there.
The piracy model simply doesn't work. Real world solutions are necessarily more complex and messy (laws, law enforcement, civil suits, gray areas) but that's life (as opposed to geek/libertarianoid fantasies).
Slashdot Mirror
The way to control it is to lock malicious hackers up for a long long time. The message has to go out that, contrary to the movie War Games, this is not a game, and you may end up in jail for ten years.
The sentence this week for one of the MS Blaster perps (18 months) was inadequate, but a start. It's not really enough of a punishment. They need to know: release a virus and ten years of your life will be snuffed out.
Vigorous prosecution put the kibosh on phreaking, and it will do so for malicious hacking too. Of course it will never be eliminated, but incarceration and social ostracism will take most of the wind out of their sails.
When the Communications Decency Act was being argued in the Supreme Court, opponents of the act contended that a "technologic fix" was sufficient, i.e., filters. This was disingenuous, but served the argument to overturn the law. Immediately afterwards, the same lawyers set to work suing libraries and universities who had the temerity to install filters. What is needed is a rejection of this idea that the internet be a wild west of no laws, with the burden of protection on the individual. The telephone spam problem was solved with a LAW (shudder), not some kludgy filter, vigilante blacklist, "Bayesian analysis" or other wankoid spy-vs-spy nonsense.
If I ran a server and someone was engaged in such nefarious activity, they would be "censored" pronto, as in rm -rf *--how in the world can not knowing what's going on (the Sgt. Schultz method?) be an improvement?
Good job PayPal in not making payments to anonymous recipients.
Corvis -- link "using colors of light both to bear the message and to determine the path of the circuit. It radically collapses the top layers of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) stack.. A "switchless" web of always-on fixed lambdas (wavelengths of light) can function as both the physical and logical layers of the Net because the intelligence is embedded in the path." ,p>
Broadwing -- Broadwing Subsidiary of Corvis. "In uniting Corvis, a cutting edge equipment provider, with Broadwing, an infrastructure builder and service provider, [Corvis CEO David] Huber is also betting that IP networks are not inherently modular, where equipment from a thousand providers can easily be cobbled together to deliver high-bandwidth, low-latency services..."
EZchip -- EZchip "." Where until now data flowing through the seven layers and numerous sub-layers were parsed and modified by a gaggle of hundreds of chips connected by thousands of wires and glue-logic galore, EZ puts all seven layers of the OSI stack onto one-chip, performing all the essential functions of an Internet router on a single sliver of silicon. The "layers" are once again transcended when EZ's software tools allow programmers to tell the chip what to do without even referring to the rigid layers, channelizations, protocols, and interfaces used in the previous software environment."
It's true he's a Reaganite, but Reaganites aren't wrong 100% of the time. They aren't that useful.
'Course, I also remember something about a company called "Global Crossing."
He concludes:
"The telecom industry is nowhere near some mythical paradox of perfection or cul de sac bargain basement of commoditization. It is still engaged in a thrilling adventure of putting together worldwide webs of glass and light that reach from your doorstep or teleputer to every other person and machine on the planet. It is long distance and it is local, it is packetted and circuited, it is multithreaded and aggregated, it is broadband and narrowcast, all at once. These crystal palaces of light and air will be hard to do and the world will reward the pioneers who manage to build them."
You didn't do a good job of refuting anything in my post. Again: 1) Bush has done everything a frank opponent of space would do (cancel existing programs). That you agree with him about the worthlessness of the current space program is immaterial. 2) The idea that the $400 billion expenditure and vision (ha!) should not be mentioned in the State of the Union is ludicrous--unless of course he doesn;t mean it. Which he doesn't. 3) It hardly needs to be pointed out that Bush I's Mars proposal meant ZIP. It went nowhere, just as this one will. So we are left with cancellations, and no replacement efforts. 4) He is a proven liar. 600 dead soldiers and countless wounded later, he does not deserve a second chance.
GHWB also had a problem with the "vision thing" and came up with similar smoke and mirrors about Mars before his own doomed election effort in 1992. As an indication of his insincerity, he put Dan Quayle in charge of the effort.
Bush, a chip off the old block, is a proven liar and doesn't deserve a second chance. Twelve more soldiers killed today. He should be indicted.
Seems like an odd mix to me, but Mars has always evoked a quasi-religious fervor in the search for life there. No matter how much evidence rolls in that it's a cold, dry, dead planet, true believers won't let it go, despite lack of evidence. Life always just has to be hiding in the next layer down, currently beneath the surface. Likewise there's room for God in the first femtosecond of the Big Bang maybe? So that's the faith connection I guess.
>They wouldn't Bullshit! The manned program has long used English units. There are gauges in the Shuttle read acceleration in slugs/sec^2!--very little metric instrumentation, for the benefit of the pilots who learned it the old way. Or should I say current way, as most Americans still use English exclusively, and will for the foreseeable future. The Mars Orbiter snafu was between a military subcontractor using English vs, *JPL* which uses metric in its unmanned world.
If they licensed the C-band in Iraq, it might be hard to tell an AA missile facility from a rural ISP.
While Beagle 2 would have been good for Jolly Old and all that, it's no great scientific loss. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers will be arriving Jan. 4 and Jan. 25 and each blows the socks off Beagle 2. That is the Big Show! Those Rovers will be autonomous, operating in opposite hemispheres, and capable of wandering 1 km or more. They will use Mars Odyssey (or Mars Global Surveyor), currently functioning satellites, to upload their data. Each is effectively a highly capable field geologist. They have microscopes and will be taking pictures of the crystalline structures of the rocks!! The wide field cameras are way beyond Pathfinder's. On and on. MER budget was $800 million, Beagle 2 was $40 million. You get what you pay for.
Evidently a software problem: http://www.copperas.com/express/beagle.html
Forrester Research is the same outfit that hyped the bubble and a techie SHORTAGE not long ago.Their old press agent, Red Herring, is mercifully defunct. Why are they still around? We should all have fiber optic connectors on our brains right now, and a brickless society.
Do they wear turbans with rubies on them? I hope so--that at least would be entertaining.
"they have has some notorious security flaws that have allowed spammers to set up open relays on ms boxes" Most open relays are *nix boxes.
Aha, and you exhale what?
But that kind of encryption only protects you aginst eavesdroppers along the line, and is not a system for anonymous communication. Ebay has a record of everything I bought, bid on, paid for, etc. As they should. All bulletproof anonymous systems are not and cannot be made transparent--they require one's grandmother to maintain key rings, certificates, illusory webs-of-trust and all kinds of wonkish things that are ridiculous to deal with if one is doing nothing wrong. And that, of course, is the bottom line and always will be.
Shirky: "In any system where a user's identity is in the hands of a third party, that third party cannot be trusted." The classic Mafia version of this is: "Two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead." Most people don't think that way, and even if they did they are unlikely to trust any technological system that promises absolute anonymity. The cypherpunks' fantasies are no more ready for prime time now than ever. Main problem is that anonymous communication is a chimeral fantasy, and any scheme to even experiment with their implementation is complex and onerous to all but people who like to read Schneier for fun, and play secret agent. Above all, cypherpunks chase anonymity like it's a virtue, when most of the worst aspects of the net are caused by anonymity and unaccountability.
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware. Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2). Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.
The RFID flap is the most interesting thing to come out of WSIS. And even it's pretty lame. Don't worry about ANY policy coming out of this group. I went to their web site http://www.itu.int/wsis/ the other day and subjected myself to a lot of their streaming video. First off, it was almost all politicians--can you say vacuous platitudes? Boring as hell, and they were all saying the same thing: "Information should be FREE for all the oppressed peoples of the world, kumbaya." If they weren't politicians they were NGO types. Basically a series of three-minute hates against the US as the 800-pound gorilla of the internet--they were polite enough not to mention the US by name usually, but that was the subtext. Bunch of utopian dreamers. Since when has ANYTHING been free? The little problem of IP rights was hardly even mentioned, only by the Iranian president briefly. He used the amusing phrase "Network Order" to describe US hegemony, a play on "New World Order"
But the Slashdot spin doesn't stem from inherent idiocy, but rather its general stealing-stuff-is-kewl ethos. Another example of zealotry trumping thought.
Clearly, if stealing music was legitimized, at best the money flow to artists and their associates would slow to a trickle. Basic economics, no need for hand-waving fun with statistics. The only value-added that people would pay for would be transport and delivery services, & even that money would not go to the creators unless there was some kind of surcharge (which also is decried here as tyranny).
IMO, the Rhapsody model is the most interesting, since people can listen and be exposed to all kinds of music on demand for a nominal flat subscription (thus boosting sales by such exposure and musical education), and only pay extra for the privilege of burning songs. Yeah, yeah, you can get around that too. I have to laugh at some of my never-pay-for-anything geek friends who assure me that with audio capture programs they can rip anything going through their sounds cards. Yeah, if it floats your boat to mess around for 10 minutes adjusting levels and trimming ends so you can steal a song. I'd rather pay 75 cents. Funny thing, I never hear any geeks actually talking about music. The ethos seems to be some kind of pack-rat mentality of spending hour after hour amassing a large collection of stuff, never listened to, to beat The Man or something. A real human comedy there.
The piracy model simply doesn't work. Real world solutions are necessarily more complex and messy (laws, law enforcement, civil suits, gray areas) but that's life (as opposed to geek/libertarianoid fantasies).