a. this is last years story
b. it was dumb then: if you through in enough extra dimensions and presume a few "hidden" parameters, you could get a theory that would not only "explain" all sequences of notes ever written but explain my girlfriend's choices in shoes...as a function of every third word in speeches of a randomly selected political candidate.
whether stupid or malicious may not matter. It appears that either way there is leakage of ID/access info to third parties. Since an exploit has essentially been divulged here [i.e. decompile a backup and see what id+password combos you find] alarm is appropriate. after all "pulling the software" does not remove every last copy from the reach of interested parties...you have heard of google cache?
I tripped over a bug even more likely to be unintentional in my TurboTax online tax prep sessions this weekend: after cycling through the password reset process three times with no luck and a weird "this link was already used" message I scraped all the URL parameters off of the confirmation emails intuit sent me. Guess what? All but the final, successful exchange contained superfluous parameters for user id and authentication id. It looks for all the world like a failure to reset the buffer in the server that dishes the password reset emails...resulting in parameters from other users who had been sent their reset tokens just prior to mine tacked on the end of the url intended for me. [it was only a url with a single parameter set that finally worked properly]. I did nothing with them and they expire quickly so probably no damage done. But jeeze: does someone out there have my "authid=xxxxxxx"? [do you think intuit provides a "contact us 24/7 about security issues" link on their https pages? not one I could find]
you mention rad hardening...some of that tech. would have been first needed in military satellites and so not necessarily divulged in a patent. One kind of rad hardened circuit that used to be prohibitive but with advances in solid state fab requires a particular kind of redundancy. It has been described in prior literature kinda like this:
build a functional duplicate of each storage or processing element in a parallel layer so that...
each element is aligned right over its corresponding element in the 2nd layer.
bias the logic of one layer such that the burst of conduction band electrons that would accompany a gamma ray hit will report a false "1" if anything.
bias the corresponding logic in the other layer so that that same burst of electrons...which will befall it at exactly the same time an place as its aligned circuit...will fault to a "0",if anything
gate the primary layer's output by the !XOR of the two layers: whatever the state of the circuit was supposed to be, it will be disabled until the transient from the gamma ray has been quenched
golf, yes. Lobby? why go that far when congresspeople are often golfers themselves and use the social life of golf club membership for some of their contacts and influence peddling?
e.g. do a google search on the keywords "country club congressional influence" and you find we even have laws about not giving country club memberships to legislators. Golfing junkets were one of the bigger bribe-in-kind affairs that finally got Abramoff noticed in the press and headed to jail.
Fortunately for woodlands and municipal water supplies, the popularity of this bizarre sport is on the wain. [Myself, I'd go mountain biking with that extra hour of daylight.]
no, that wasn't it at all, you don't have to back track through congress to find some lobby [you suggest barbecue manufacturers?] as the source of this pointless rigmarole. Just look at the congresscritters themselves. The daylight savings times have basically been legislated to coincide with golf season in the Washington DC area. The last two week adjustment to the DLST was really just the cryptic recognition that global warming has expanded the number of days when it is warm enough on average to get in 18 holes...if you can knock off work by 3:00. Think about it. Did the number of hours of daylight change at any time in history? no, but the temperatures do. Do you think anything of legislative importance gets hatched by big shots waiting to tee off on the back 9 and not wanting a lot of gossipy eavesdroppers around? I do.
if used by 911 dispatchers, with feedback from police, fire an EMTs, this sort of a system could lead to police who knew where ambush was possible, firemen who knew when a building was condemned or had toxic or explosive contents, alleyways too narrow for an ambulance and so forth...before they scramble.
.25 probability that serious gamers don't have the time/interest for procreating and die out...leaving an older generation to play the games. (Why else any interest in retro games like pac-man;?)
we were using that stuff to build prehensile manipulators, right out of the box for a UROP project at MIT. The line I draw is this : if I know what I want to build, how little imagination and inventiveness do I have to apply to the given parts to make the end product. Its a lot like the difference between programming a RISC architecture in assembler vs some bloated "every instruction any engineer ever fancied" CISC machine. On the other hand...if its a case of "you can't get there from here" due to a poverty of basic mechanical components like u-joints or worm gears thats no good either. And its that trade off that Technics does better than all the new HERE, LET US JUST DO STARWARS/PIRATES/WTF FOR YOU kinds of stuff. Those kits are for kids who grew up watching TV.
The neatest thing I ever saw was back in the mid 60's: a kid I knew built a mold with legos, poured plaster of paris into it, then picked away the blocks to reveal a railroad bridge for his model train set that was the spitting image of a scaled masonry bridge. That was with nothing but basic blocks
we are not afflicted with confusing choices among an abundance of features and a range of competing prices here in the US. you go to Verizon or you go to ATT and they say "bend over and show me your wallet" Then they say "here is your phone, have a nice day"
seriously...they routinely say their bottom-of-the-line phones are really worth about $300 and you have to sign up for 2 years of their spotty service with a bunch of hidden surcharges to to get the crappy phone for $50. The crappy phones never have over a 1-year guarantee. Mine always quit working about 16 or 18 months into the contract. so before the 2 years is up you are replacing the #&%^^# phone and...to get the discount on the inflated price...extending your service contract another 2 years. Its the communications equivalent of living like a poor coal miner who does not own the house he lives in and owes two years pay to the company store.
Thats all there is to it here in the US so who needs advice? Just bend over.
that is a great article and a sound perspective on our business...But I still love Java.
I feel entitled to that. I'd written in Fortran, Pascal, BLISS, C and half a dozen assembly languages from IBM 360 to PDP and Intel 80** and I earned my appreciation for how much Java was doing for me and exactly what it could not do for me.
I have a garage full of tools that could be used for burglary..and I do loan one now and then to my neighbors. The possession of tools that are exclusively used for harming or stealing is one thing but leaving it up to the imagination of law enforcement authorities to decide what is dual use is scary.
But getting in trouble for distributing or just having tools points does not seem to cover those who know how to MAKE the tools.
There is another analogy the I don't see addressed in this this UK "guidance": its illegal to carry an unlicensed or concealed handgun but nobody has any way to monitor or regulate the hands and feet of a highly trained martial arts master. So if I just happen to know how to code, basically from scratch, my own packet sniffers, key loggers, root kits, binary disk file editors, sneaky event handlers buried in image file formats etc etc and I hire myself out to random customers or employers, what can the authorities do?
Before I read the comments, I didn't even know what Silverlight is. and like the article suggests, that ignorance may reflect as poorly on MS as it does on me.
I am living with someone who is well up the learning curve for Flash 3 Action scripts. These prices will force the little people to look at the MS "alternative" but her employer is gung ho for a rich client-side and the money is insignificant. Besides...
is SL really a Flash alternative?
The video presentation is not even the interesting part to companies that have data [YOUR DATA] that you want formatted and readable in some custom way, or graphed just the way you like it. Can you easily make animated and interactive graphs with SL? Does it have object and event interfaces to let you create UI that can react to nearly any item the user might click on? Does it natively support [ie, know how to render] tabular and XML structured data as it is fetched from the server?
But, since we have already spilled so many pixels over how much of the problem is the tools and how much is the resistance of the workers to interruptions, does anyone have recommendations for better tools? or at least tools that give you options for working smarter?
Not using the "alert" feature on gmail, for instance, leaves a chunk of my bandwidth in tact.
ask a guy who might know. Vint Cerf wrote an article in IEEE Computer back on January that put forth his worries that our data comms bandwidth and our content packaging automation will outstrip human capacities to absorb and understand [I think it already has...most people don't even know how much of the flood of data has passed them by]. You may have a problem with the link [to the abstract] because Computer is a subscription journal for IEEE members. Cerf's short piece is mostly concerned with the way the explosion of ways and speeds for copy, transmit and search have and will continue to put all DRM attempts in a losing position. He also thinks the 75 years-after-death copy right is overkill.
Why just Generators? Does someone on the FCC have a friend in the generator business? This sounds more like an opportunity to accelerate the photovoltaics market and production learning curve. and some of those cell towers are up on towers that could also support small scale wind power generation...they don't all have to be a colossus with 150 foot blades.
but ATT is ripping out the last of the pay phones...who ya gonna call if you can't call at all?
the 210k number is a moving target...coverage is still lousy in ex-urbs but getting better. By the time the 210k all have backup, the number will be 250k or something.
well, there is a program started by the DA in Phoenix AZ that puts names and mugshots of persons convicted of DUI on billboards and on a website. The whiners say "invades my privacy" and the victims [those still alive] of drunk drivers say a little shame for the bastards is the very least they deserve. I would think that such shaming public exposure of a person's tendency to behave dangerously is a public service but not an invitation to murder. In the case of the DUI miscreants it should be a warning to liqour stores and bars: "DO NOT SERVE THIS PERSON".
IN the case of tiny-brained construction workers seething with irrational fear and getting their instruction from voices in the cab of their pick-ups...lets start a database of people who listen to conservative talk radio, they are already paranoid anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
a. this is last years story
b. it was dumb then: if you through in enough extra dimensions and presume a few "hidden" parameters, you could get a theory that would not only "explain" all sequences of notes ever written but explain my girlfriend's choices in shoes...as a function of every third word in speeches of a randomly selected political candidate.
whether stupid or malicious may not matter. It appears that either way there is leakage of ID/access info to third parties. Since an exploit has essentially been divulged here [i.e. decompile a backup and see what id+password combos you find] alarm is appropriate. after all "pulling the software" does not remove every last copy from the reach of interested parties...you have heard of google cache? I tripped over a bug even more likely to be unintentional in my TurboTax online tax prep sessions this weekend: after cycling through the password reset process three times with no luck and a weird "this link was already used" message I scraped all the URL parameters off of the confirmation emails intuit sent me. Guess what? All but the final, successful exchange contained superfluous parameters for user id and authentication id. It looks for all the world like a failure to reset the buffer in the server that dishes the password reset emails...resulting in parameters from other users who had been sent their reset tokens just prior to mine tacked on the end of the url intended for me. [it was only a url with a single parameter set that finally worked properly]. I did nothing with them and they expire quickly so probably no damage done. But jeeze: does someone out there have my "authid=xxxxxxx"? [do you think intuit provides a "contact us 24/7 about security issues" link on their https pages? not one I could find]
golf, yes. Lobby? why go that far when congresspeople are often golfers themselves and use the social life of golf club membership for some of their contacts and influence peddling?
e.g. do a google search on the keywords "country club congressional influence" and you find we even have laws about not giving country club memberships to legislators. Golfing junkets were one of the bigger bribe-in-kind affairs that finally got Abramoff noticed in the press and headed to jail.
Fortunately for woodlands and municipal water supplies, the popularity of this bizarre sport is on the wain. [Myself, I'd go mountain biking with that extra hour of daylight.]
no, that wasn't it at all, you don't have to back track through congress to find some lobby [you suggest barbecue manufacturers?] as the source of this pointless rigmarole. Just look at the congresscritters themselves. The daylight savings times have basically been legislated to coincide with golf season in the Washington DC area. The last two week adjustment to the DLST was really just the cryptic recognition that global warming has expanded the number of days when it is warm enough on average to get in 18 holes...if you can knock off work by 3:00. Think about it. Did the number of hours of daylight change at any time in history? no, but the temperatures do. Do you think anything of legislative importance gets hatched by big shots waiting to tee off on the back 9 and not wanting a lot of gossipy eavesdroppers around? I do.
if used by 911 dispatchers, with feedback from police, fire an EMTs, this sort of a system could lead to police who knew where ambush was possible, firemen who knew when a building was condemned or had toxic or explosive contents, alleyways too narrow for an ambulance and so forth...before they scramble.
or using the Funds Race googlemap application on Huffington Post to tell him how much he gave to which candidate's campaign.
.25 probability that serious gamers don't have the time/interest for procreating and die out...leaving an older generation to play the games. (Why else any interest in retro games like pac-man;?)
/.ed already!
we were using that stuff to build prehensile manipulators, right out of the box for a UROP project at MIT. The line I draw is this : if I know what I want to build, how little imagination and inventiveness do I have to apply to the given parts to make the end product. Its a lot like the difference between programming a RISC architecture in assembler vs some bloated "every instruction any engineer ever fancied" CISC machine. On the other hand...if its a case of "you can't get there from here" due to a poverty of basic mechanical components like u-joints or worm gears thats no good either. And its that trade off that Technics does better than all the new HERE, LET US JUST DO STARWARS/PIRATES/WTF FOR YOU kinds of stuff. Those kits are for kids who grew up watching TV.
The neatest thing I ever saw was back in the mid 60's: a kid I knew built a mold with legos, poured plaster of paris into it, then picked away the blocks to reveal a railroad bridge for his model train set that was the spitting image of a scaled masonry bridge. That was with nothing but basic blocks
we are not afflicted with confusing choices among an abundance of features and a range of competing prices here in the US. you go to Verizon or you go to ATT and they say "bend over and show me your wallet" Then they say "here is your phone, have a nice day"
...they routinely say their bottom-of-the-line phones are really worth about $300 and you have to sign up for 2 years of their spotty service with a bunch of hidden surcharges to to get the crappy phone for $50. The crappy phones never have over a 1-year guarantee. Mine always quit working about 16 or 18 months into the contract. so before the 2 years is up you are replacing the #&%^^# phone and...to get the discount on the inflated price...extending your service contract another 2 years. Its the communications equivalent of living like a poor coal miner who does not own the house he lives in and owes two years pay to the company store.
Thats all there is to it here in the US so who needs advice? Just bend over.
seriously
that is a great article and a sound perspective on our business...But I still love Java.
I feel entitled to that. I'd written in Fortran, Pascal, BLISS, C and half a dozen assembly languages from IBM 360 to PDP and Intel 80** and I earned my appreciation for how much Java was doing for me and exactly what it could not do for me.
don't you think this brings us a step closer to the "pigoons" of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake ?
... that answers my question .
Also buy into Norman Spinrad's balloon/bicycles
I have a garage full of tools that could be used for burglary..and I do loan one now and then to my neighbors. The possession of tools that are exclusively used for harming or stealing is one thing but leaving it up to the imagination of law enforcement authorities to decide what is dual use is scary. But getting in trouble for distributing or just having tools points does not seem to cover those who know how to MAKE the tools. There is another analogy the I don't see addressed in this this UK "guidance": its illegal to carry an unlicensed or concealed handgun but nobody has any way to monitor or regulate the hands and feet of a highly trained martial arts master. So if I just happen to know how to code, basically from scratch, my own packet sniffers, key loggers, root kits, binary disk file editors, sneaky event handlers buried in image file formats etc etc and I hire myself out to random customers or employers, what can the authorities do?
Before I read the comments, I didn't even know what Silverlight is. and like the article suggests, that ignorance may reflect as poorly on MS as it does on me. I am living with someone who is well up the learning curve for Flash 3 Action scripts. These prices will force the little people to look at the MS "alternative" but her employer is gung ho for a rich client-side and the money is insignificant. Besides...
is SL really a Flash alternative?
The video presentation is not even the interesting part to companies that have data [YOUR DATA] that you want formatted and readable in some custom way, or graphed just the way you like it. Can you easily make animated and interactive graphs with SL? Does it have object and event interfaces to let you create UI that can react to nearly any item the user might click on? Does it natively support [ie, know how to render] tabular and XML structured data as it is fetched from the server?
a use for my Alzheimers
Yeah, I was kinda thinking that too...and the story is 7 days old already anyway.
But, since we have already spilled so many pixels over how much of the problem is the tools and how much is the resistance of the workers to interruptions, does anyone have recommendations for better tools? or at least tools that give you options for working smarter?
Not using the "alert" feature on gmail, for instance, leaves a chunk of my bandwidth in tact.
this one?
ask a guy who might know. Vint Cerf wrote an article in IEEE Computer back on January that put forth his worries that our data comms bandwidth and our content packaging automation will outstrip human capacities to absorb and understand [I think it already has...most people don't even know how much of the flood of data has passed them by]. You may have a problem with the link [to the abstract] because Computer is a subscription journal for IEEE members. Cerf's short piece is mostly concerned with the way the explosion of ways and speeds for copy, transmit and search have and will continue to put all DRM attempts in a losing position. He also thinks the 75 years-after-death copy right is overkill.
that way there won't be any suspect mods/edits...god himself will own the server.
Why just Generators? Does someone on the FCC have a friend in the generator business? This sounds more like an opportunity to accelerate the photovoltaics market and production learning curve. and some of those cell towers are up on towers that could also support small scale wind power generation...they don't all have to be a colossus with 150 foot blades.
but ATT is ripping out the last of the pay phones...who ya gonna call if you can't call at all?
the 210k number is a moving target...coverage is still lousy in ex-urbs but getting better. By the time the 210k all have backup, the number will be 250k or something.
well, there is a program started by the DA in Phoenix AZ that puts names and mugshots of persons convicted of DUI on billboards and on a website. The whiners say "invades my privacy" and the victims [those still alive] of drunk drivers say a little shame for the bastards is the very least they deserve. I would think that such shaming public exposure of a person's tendency to behave dangerously is a public service but not an invitation to murder. In the case of the DUI miscreants it should be a warning to liqour stores and bars: "DO NOT SERVE THIS PERSON".
IN the case of tiny-brained construction workers seething with irrational fear and getting their instruction from voices in the cab of their pick-ups...lets start a database of people who listen to conservative talk radio, they are already paranoid anyway.