Hey, I haven't seen any of those yet. Maybe it's because I surf with Javascript turned off. And with 99% of the sites, I won't lose anything. The remaining 1% are "corporate" sites such as notes.net that for some odd reason think that you need javascript to implement a plain hyperlink.
> Unless there's a disclaimer on it, do we have grounds to sue for damages?
> I'll call Foul. FOUL!
I guess, that's why they released in the Czech Republic and Slovakia... Less consumer protection, consumers have less resources to fight this in courts... Same reason why the multinationals prefer to put their chemical factories into India.
Didn't you just violate their copyright yourself by publishing that notice? I'd think "all materials" means just that: all materials on the site, including the copyright notice. Now, where can I report you to the NYTimes?
> i probably shouldnt/con/con every computer in the computer lab anymore.
Does this still work with current versions of Windows? AFAIK, a patch for this has been existing for ages, and even the dumbest MCSE should have applied it by now...
> or perhaps I'm putting too much faith in our proof that it is transcendental. ?
Actually, no need to prove that pi is transcendental.
You just proved that "if pi contains itself, it must be cyclical". However, if it cyclical, there will be sequences not contained inside (even finite sequences). Just take a sequence that's longer than the cycle, and which is not cyclical itself.
Thus, no number can contain all sequences, finite and infinite
Of course it is still possible for a number to contain all finite sequences.
> This is a bullshit proof. First, you define your number not to contain any 8s, and then you say "see, it doesn't contain any 8s!"
If you did any math in your youth, you'd know that this is a perfectly valid way to do a proof. It's called "coming up with a counterexample". If somebody claimed that all prime numbers were odd, it would be perfectly valid to point out that 2 is both prime and even. Discarding the proof because "you purposefully picked 2 to show me wrong" is invalid, as this is the whole point of the proof.
Likewise, in this case DNS-and-BIND claimed that all infinitely long irrational numbers have necessary a long sequence of 8's in them. I refuted his claim by showing him a number which had no 8 at all inside. Now, what exactly is your problem with my refutation of that claim?
> But that doesn't tell us anything about wether or not there is a string of 5,646,498,765 8s in pi or any other irrational number in decimal.
You're right on that, but nobody claimed the contrary. Saying "not all irrational numbers have a long string of 8's in them" is not the same thing as "no irrational numbers have a long string of 8's in them".
It's like in real life: "not all pies are cream pies" (or expressed differently "it is a pie, so it has to be a cream pie"): indeed, there are also apple pies...
> Big deal...since Pi is an irrational number, and never ends, at some point there is a string of 5,646,498,765 8's all in a row.
Not necessarily so. If you define a (decimal) number as follows:
it starts with 1.
after the dot, each digit at a prime number position is 1, and 0 otherwise
The number would be 1.01101010001010001...
The number would have no periodicity (because prime numbers become rarer and rarer), so it woule not be a rational number.
It never ends.
But still, by construction, it would not contain a single 8, much less a series of 5,646,498,765 eights.
Thus proving that never ending irrational number does not necessarily contain all strings. Btw, irrational numbers are always never ending, or else they would be a fraction whose denominator would be a large power of ten. Think about it.
> Finding 88888888 (~8.9*10^7) at or before position 46663520 (~4.7*10^7) is clearly not unlikely. It should be around 37% probability
Indeed. Better pick something like 42424242, which not only occurs way early (at position 242424), but for which not only the search string but also the position is an interesting pattern....
Probaility of it occurring so early should be less than 1% (we would expect it below 100000000, not below 1000000), and probability of the position being a permutation of the string is...well...amazingly small.
Small note for nitpickers: I counted the 3. as digits; the search engine does not. Hence the position shown is 242422 rather than 242424.
With your username, you should know one egregious example of funny strings in Pi at funny positions:
42424242 at position 242424.
Oddly enough, according to the pi search page, the same string can be found again at position 1404114, which is also below 100000000. On a normal pi, you'd expect a single occurrance of 42424242 below 100000000, and at a completely random position...
> Hmm. The first host infects X others, and then all the children attempt to infect the exact same X? That would be known as NO growth.
It would still grow, unless the RNG had a real short cycle. True, the children would infect no new hosts, but the root worm would... until it is killed, and then the next oldest will take over. Each copy of the worm will infect the sites in a certain sequence (for example 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,...) which would be infinite (or rather 2^32). The problem would be that it would be the same sequence for each copy of the worm. I.e. Worm number two would also first start with site 2 (itself), then 3, 5, 7, etc. just as number one did. Given enough time the whole 2^32 bit space would still be probed, but only the very first worm would contribute to this. The others would only redo sites which the root already has checked.
> I read in the early reports (not sure if it has been invalidated or corrected now), that the random number generator did not reseed itself on each infection. Thus, the IPs generated where the same.
> A variant of the original worm supposedly corrected this error.
I heard about that one too, but the way I heard it was that the initial variant was so inefficient that it went by unnoticed, except by eEye.
The version that was seen spreading exponentially July 19th was already the "fixed" version.
Indeed, if each worm uses the exact same sequence, the spread is linear. Rather than fanning out, each instance would try to re-infect the exact same sites that its parent already has infected, hence linear, rather than exponential growth.
That leaves me wondering how Code Red's RNG works. Even the first time around people were reporting large numbers of hits on some servers. Is the RNG skewed to some ranges of IP addresses? If the distribution was even over the whole 32-bit IP address space, shouldn't all web servers observe similar hit rates?
... because reporters usually protect their sources. And witht the wealth of confidential documents that they're getting from Sircam, they're not going to rat on it, won't they?
Code Red gone? Errhm, not really. I got 4 hits on my webserver at home this afternoon, 2 and a school I help administrating, 1 at another school, 3 at our Linux club's computers, and 2 more at another computer of the club. Whereas we didn't get any hits on any of these sites the first time around (mid July). It's alive, and kicking! Rumors are also that www.java.sun.com's outage today might have been due to Code Red, but don't ask me how. Sun hopefully isn't running IIS, or are they? Or maybe it just knocked out one of their Cisco routers...
> I can hire twenty people a day who can recite the OSI model from their CCNA prep book.
Hey, when I was interviewed for my current position, I didn't know the OSI layers. Boy did I feel ashamed about it! But yes, I still got the position...
> Ask him something he obviously doesn't know the answer to, something he hasn't put on his resume. If he gives you a bullshit answer, kick him out the door.
Very interesting... I especially love the irony of using alt.comp.virus for this... However, from this page, it looks as if the virus itself can upload those plugins too... which would mean that the virus would actually have the private key needed for signing them. Which means that somebody could reverse engineer the virus, and then build a plugin which would disable the virus:-(
No, it has its own mail client attached. It still needs to talk to a server to get the mail delivered. Think about it.
It could however go directly to the recipient's server. However, that possibility is blockable by a firewall, which would block all port 25 traffic except from/to the company's mail server.
> Several of the companies I've worked for are trying to require users to have a.sig that automatically attaches the legal blurb to every email. I doubt they intended for it to prevent the loss of proprietary information due to viruses, but it's a nice side benefit.;-)
Moreover, the sig would not even appear on the viral mails. Sircam doesn't use any mail client to send itself to its recipients; it connects directly to port 25 of the mail server. Outlook (if installed) is only used as one among several sources of addresses. The only thing that would work is a blurb appended by the server, rather than a plain old client signature.
Probably because the people having the motivation to do so, don't necessarily have the skills... Hey, if you were good enough at Windows programming that you could do such a beast (even by piecing it together from existing parts...), would you want to rush the demise of that platform that you're so good at?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I haven't seen any of those yet. Maybe it's because I surf with Javascript turned off. And with 99% of the sites, I won't lose anything. The remaining 1% are "corporate" sites such as notes.net that for some odd reason think that you need javascript to implement a plain hyperlink.
> I'll call Foul. FOUL!
I guess, that's why they released in the Czech Republic and Slovakia... Less consumer protection, consumers have less resources to fight this in courts... Same reason why the multinationals prefer to put their chemical factories into India.
Didn't you just violate their copyright yourself by publishing that notice? I'd think "all materials" means just that: all materials on the site, including the copyright notice. Now, where can I report you to the NYTimes?
Yeah, but writing virii is doing actual damages. So you'd only confirm the Senator in his intentions.
Or are you somehow implying that writing macro virii is ok, whereas (attempting to) login into a Unix box is not?
Does this still work with current versions of Windows? AFAIK, a patch for this has been existing for ages, and even the dumbest MCSE should have applied it by now...
Actually, no need to prove that pi is transcendental.
You just proved that "if pi contains itself, it must be cyclical". However, if it cyclical, there will be sequences not contained inside (even finite sequences). Just take a sequence that's longer than the cycle, and which is not cyclical itself.
Thus, no number can contain all sequences, finite and infinite
Of course it is still possible for a number to contain all finite sequences.
Cannot be, or else it would repeat itself an infinite number of times, cyclically, which would make it a rational number.
If you did any math in your youth, you'd know that this is a perfectly valid way to do a proof. It's called "coming up with a counterexample". If somebody claimed that all prime numbers were odd, it would be perfectly valid to point out that 2 is both prime and even. Discarding the proof because "you purposefully picked 2 to show me wrong" is invalid, as this is the whole point of the proof.
Likewise, in this case DNS-and-BIND claimed that all infinitely long irrational numbers have necessary a long sequence of 8's in them. I refuted his claim by showing him a number which had no 8 at all inside. Now, what exactly is your problem with my refutation of that claim?
> But that doesn't tell us anything about wether or not there is a string of 5,646,498,765 8s in pi or any other irrational number in decimal.
You're right on that, but nobody claimed the contrary. Saying "not all irrational numbers have a long string of 8's in them" is not the same thing as "no irrational numbers have a long string of 8's in them".
It's like in real life: "not all pies are cream pies" (or expressed differently "it is a pie, so it has to be a cream pie"): indeed, there are also apple pies...
But that doesn't mean that "no pies are cream pies" (i.e. cream pies don't exist): indeed Bill Gates was hit by one in the face...
Not necessarily so. If you define a (decimal) number as follows:
- it starts with 1.
after the dot, each digit at a prime number position is 1, and 0 otherwise
The number would be 1.01101010001010001...- The number would have no periodicity (because prime numbers become rarer and rarer), so it woule not be a rational number.
- It never ends.
- But still, by construction, it would not contain a single 8, much less a series of 5,646,498,765 eights.
Thus proving that never ending irrational number does not necessarily contain all strings. Btw, irrational numbers are always never ending, or else they would be a fraction whose denominator would be a large power of ten. Think about it.Indeed. Better pick something like 42424242, which not only occurs way early (at position 242424), but for which not only the search string but also the position is an interesting pattern....
Probaility of it occurring so early should be less than 1% (we would expect it below 100000000, not below 1000000), and probability of the position being a permutation of the string is...well...amazingly small.
Small note for nitpickers: I counted the 3. as digits; the search engine does not. Hence the position shown is 242422 rather than 242424.
42424242 at position 242424.
Oddly enough, according to the pi search page, the same string can be found again at position 1404114, which is also below 100000000. On a normal pi, you'd expect a single occurrance of 42424242 below 100000000, and at a completely random position...
All finite strings.
Solution: use netscape or konqueror; it will still display the rest of the frameset, even if one frame couldn't load.
It would still grow, unless the RNG had a real short cycle. True, the children would infect no new hosts, but the root worm would... until it is killed, and then the next oldest will take over. Each copy of the worm will infect the sites in a certain sequence (for example 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, ...) which would be infinite (or rather 2^32). The problem would be that it would be the same sequence for each copy of the worm. I.e. Worm number two would also first start with site 2 (itself), then 3, 5, 7, etc. just as number one did. Given enough time the whole 2^32 bit space would still be probed, but only the very first worm would contribute to this. The others would only redo sites which the root already has checked.
A more in-depth description can be found here
> A variant of the original worm supposedly corrected this error.
I heard about that one too, but the way I heard it was that the initial variant was so inefficient that it went by unnoticed, except by eEye.
The version that was seen spreading exponentially July 19th was already the "fixed" version.
Indeed, if each worm uses the exact same sequence, the spread is linear. Rather than fanning out, each instance would try to re-infect the exact same sites that its parent already has infected, hence linear, rather than exponential growth.
Life is tough. Each time we go to our weekend house, we find a huge piece of equipment from the neighbor's cat on the doorstep...
That leaves me wondering how Code Red's RNG works. Even the first time around people were reporting large numbers of hits on some servers. Is the RNG skewed to some ranges of IP addresses? If the distribution was even over the whole 32-bit IP address space, shouldn't all web servers observe similar hit rates?
... because reporters usually protect their sources. And witht the wealth of confidential documents that they're getting from Sircam, they're not going to rat on it, won't they?
Code Red gone? Errhm, not really. I got 4 hits on my webserver at home this afternoon, 2 and a school I help administrating, 1 at another school, 3 at our Linux club's computers, and 2 more at another computer of the club. Whereas we didn't get any hits on any of these sites the first time around (mid July). It's alive, and kicking! Rumors are also that www.java.sun.com's outage today might have been due to Code Red, but don't ask me how. Sun hopefully isn't running IIS, or are they? Or maybe it just knocked out one of their Cisco routers...
Hey, when I was interviewed for my current position, I didn't know the OSI layers. Boy did I feel ashamed about it! But yes, I still got the position...
Not so fast, marketing is hiring too!
Very interesting... I especially love the irony of using alt.comp.virus for this... However, from this page, it looks as if the virus itself can upload those plugins too... which would mean that the virus would actually have the private key needed for signing them. Which means that somebody could reverse engineer the virus, and then build a plugin which would disable the virus :-(
It could however go directly to the recipient's server. However, that possibility is blockable by a firewall, which would block all port 25 traffic except from/to the company's mail server.
Moreover, the sig would not even appear on the viral mails. Sircam doesn't use any mail client to send itself to its recipients; it connects directly to port 25 of the mail server. Outlook (if installed) is only used as one among several sources of addresses. The only thing that would work is a blurb appended by the server, rather than a plain old client signature.
Probably because the people having the motivation to do so, don't necessarily have the skills... Hey, if you were good enough at Windows programming that you could do such a beast (even by piecing it together from existing parts...), would you want to rush the demise of that platform that you're so good at?