No, it's free as in beer. The source code is not public, and the centralization of account management leaves it open to some fascinating man-in-the-middle monitoring.
"Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me."
Seriously, while a theory of 'real behaviorism' is fine, you need to watch how it's used in the real world. Most airport security staff are not that well trained. We're talking about a few weeks of seminars, not a 3 year course in criminal psychology. And as for LAPD. And in particular, in this case, we're talking about the LAPD members who form a core to the armed members of airport staff, cooperating with the civilian authorities. And LAPD has a terrible, terrible and well-justified reputation for racist violence.
Adding those together, you have a breeding ground for racial harassment, and hassling innocent people on spurious grounds. Go ahead: go spend an hour at an international airport some time, waiting near the customs inspections, and watch the 'behaviorism' select the poor and the innocent time after time after time. And watch how the 'random' searches end up targeted against racial and ethnic stereotypes.
What is 'real behaviorism'? Many police departments, including ones near me, have had training in such techniques. Many of them, especially in poor, black neighborhoods or these days in Muslim and other immigrant neighborhoods, have been caught and successfully sued because it was actually used as a poorly disguised excuse for 'racial profiling'.
Try living in, or next to, a poor neighborhood. And try watching a group of technical people out on an equipment shopping trip, or at a conference, and watch the reaction of police and hotel staff to the black or these days to middle-eastern people. A theory of such observation is fine, but go watch the security themselves for what their 'real behavior' reveals.
And if you believe that, I've got some white women I want you to protect with 'behaviorism'. Far too much of such 'behaviorism' translates directly to racial profiling. The same thing occurs in college admissiions and job applications, where an administrator is forbidden from asking specific questions about race but may consciously or unconsciously use small indicators to alter their reactions to people.
The result is, far too often, an indirect form of racism.
Thank you for the correction! I was reading several articles about LAPD, and misread one of them as mentioning his testimony in LAPD corruption cases where they actually only mentioned him as another whistleblower.
But a large and corrupt police department is, effectively, a criminal gang. Ask LA residents in poor areas, look at the behavior of the Chicago police department under Mayor Daley, and residents of Zimbabwe and Nigeria right now. I may overstate the LAPD corruption somewhat, but they have a long history of officers taking bribes and murdering innocent people.
Except that 'behavior observation' is usually a deniable code phrase for 'arrest the colored folk'. My technical acquaintances with heavy beards and Middle Eastern features do suffer extra searches and observation by security, along with far more "random searches", than white women. It's particularly amusing for my Israli acquaintances to be profiled as potential Muslim terrorists by amateurishly trained Americans, and compare it to Israeli airport security practices.
LAPD is notorious for violent and abusive behavior. For those of us old enough to remember, officer Frank Serpico (of movie fame) exposed their corruption in the 70's and was gunned down by officers for it. They actually had officers convicted of being hitman, such as Richord Ford and Robert von Villas, although that was in the 80's. In the 1990's, we have this variety of killings by and and convictions of LAPD members: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/scandal/cron.html.
I don't see how randomizing their patrols will help such a historically corrupt department much, unless it helps prevent them from taking bribes from smugglers with regular routes. *THAT* might actually be a benefit of such a scheme, although it's not difficult to beat if you learn to understand the 'randomization' system.
This is frequently, though not always, true for RedHat. Some of their clustering systems are closed source, and available on RHEL and not Fedora. But it's generally true.
There are companies that use the 'closed first, GPL later' approach: Xensource did with Xen virtualization softwre, and Citrix is allegedly doing the same now that they bought Xen. AFPL does this with Ghostscript, and at last look Zmanda was doing this with Amanda.
I tend to use Webmin for administering MySQL. It may not be feature complete, but I find it very robust and effective for doing small repairs and setups.
I'm afraid the Rusion was not only badly dubbed in Russian, but was extremely buggy. It was amusing as a proof of concept, but unplayable on a lot of hardware. (I did see a Russian programmer trying to play it, and did laugh at his difficulties on his overclocked, and otherwise oddly assembled machine.)
There was the theft and publication of the Half-Life 2 source code a few years ago. That included the creation of an illicit version of the game, in Russia.
The electrical plug is not a 'standard'. There are at least 5 such standards in the USA, alone. Matched blades for 120 Volt, polarized plug, and polarized grounded for wall plugs, that funky little figure 8 on laptop power supplies and some home electronics, the 3-prong small connector used for computers and televisions and dual voltage devices, and then there are the 220 Volt connectors.
Add in Japanese, European, and English, and you have a nightmare. I _wish_ we could easily get rid of most of them, and switch to one standard. Fortunately, adapters are easy to make or to wire in, but it's not a good exmaple of a standard.
They don't have to sue. They merely need to cast Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt over companies interested in developing products without cooperating with their patent-encumbered license agreement, especially the parts that restrict the addition of new features. Companies that might produce superior and competing products will be unable to safely follow the licensing agreements.
This is why SPF has not found its way directly into Sendmail: Microsoft's patent encumbered extensions to SPF prevent companies like Sendmail from being able to include it under their open source license, and few are willing to throw out Microsoft's exensions and put serious manpower into the older, simpler, and more stable implementation since Microsoft started violating the older specification in their software.
This seems sadly true. It's easy for a group that believes in an ethical standard to be misled by people who pretend to it publicly: it's like a spouse with an abusive partner. They hope for the best, and want the partner to improve and hope that they will, but their support of the partner actually prolongs the abusive relationship.
ISO needs to go to a family shelter, change their address, get a restraining order, and make sure that Microsoft's visitation rights with the children are supervised for safety.
It's called the 'Peter Principle', to quote from Wikipedia: "in a hierarchy members are promoted so long as they work competently." When you reach your level of incompetence, you stop there.
The principle is also known in more colorful terms as "shit floats". Gifted managers find ways to keep staff at their level of *competence*, but it can get very difficult when managers no longer actually know their staff or become involved in turf wars rather than trying to accomplish the work. And it applies to managers, so in a big organization you can get a long, long line of incompetent staff between the actual workers and the people who really make the big decisions.
And I've got to disagree with both of you. Finding another job that leaves weekends free for your hobbies, or has good medical insurance for my friends who need CPAP machines to sleep well, or that are one block from their house they just paid for, or don't involve a 3-hour daily commute that drains your will and creativity, or where you've mastered the intricacies of the company's proprietary software build system, or where you've built a community of friends that you support and who appreciate your work, all matter, or where you really think the company is saving lives, can all be quite difficult.
Not every job has all or even most of those factors. But they can affect your willingness to put up with dross in the workplace.
For your external mail servers, put SPF and blacklist filtering *first*. Both are very lightweight filtering and easy to use, and tremendously reduce the load of spam that needs to be checked by other means.
Unfortunately, the Gmail spam recently passes both of those, because it's going through Gmail's legitimate servers with falsely registered, but registered nonetheless accounts. So such IP based filtering does not help. And I'm afraid they need to really rethink their CAPTCHA approach.
Politicking occurs, of course. It's human nature. It's when the internal, invisible to "unauthorized" personnel politiciking takes over that it bothers me so much. It's much worse with the merely "open source" rather than "free source" movements, because open source licening doen't necessarily permit forks.
You have noticed that Wikipedia is 'open', but not 'free', right? There have been numerous leaks, especially over at wikileaks.org, about the cabal of Wikileaks editors who fairly arbitrarily censor and edit content? It's been written about repeatedly, such as the article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/.
This sort of thing is why I prefer 'free source' to 'open source'. We encounter internal politic and lobbying poisoning the well for developers and authors with different visions, and we find it occurring in secret by the managers of the 'open source' projects.
HP hasn't done it very well. Their customizations are quite limited, and their capabilities for a 2U or 5U box lag well behind Dell for the same price range, and tend to lack capabilities.
I'll be very curious about coupling the "Mesh" capability of the OLPC laptops to it. It could leapfrog a generation of poorer children to the 21st century of content and network access, all on Linux.
A couple of bucks per RFID tag really, really adds up fast. Do you want to accept some losses, or do you want to jack up the cost of a $2 subway ride by $1 to pay for a better RFID tag on the card, and the readers to go with it?
Re:RFID Limited Range? Ha, Ha, Ha!
on
NXP RFID Cracked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You have to power the thing from the RFID reader to get a synchronized and readable signal. If you're going to design an RFID reader powerful enough to charge up an RFID tag from hundreds of kilometers, can I get you to run it past the designers of the hadron supercollider to make sure you're not generating micro black holes that will devour the Earth?
More seriously, if you trigger one RFID tag at that range, you're going to trigger every other tag in the beam of your reader. Sorting out that noise isn't going to work well at dozens of kilometers range, even if the power involved doesn't cook any birds flying overhead.
Re:Security implications?
on
NXP RFID Cracked
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As I understand the technology, building a reader with massively longer range is not a simple task. You start running into signal-noise ratios, and signals from multiple local devices, pretty quickly. There have been public demonstrations of RFID technologies that can detect multiple RFID tags inside a single crate successfully, but that doesn't mean they can be detected reliably from the next room.
It seems to me that the big deal is that, once read or once the algorithms are decoded, they can be easily programmed into another tag. This problem has already been well demonstrated with the tags on US passports. With the tags popular for some kinds of public transit systems, they're begging to be forged.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's free as in beer. The source code is not public, and the centralization of account management leaves it open to some fascinating man-in-the-middle monitoring.
Goodness, I've met people who'd pay extra to fly this way.
"Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me." Seriously, while a theory of 'real behaviorism' is fine, you need to watch how it's used in the real world. Most airport security staff are not that well trained. We're talking about a few weeks of seminars, not a 3 year course in criminal psychology. And as for LAPD. And in particular, in this case, we're talking about the LAPD members who form a core to the armed members of airport staff, cooperating with the civilian authorities. And LAPD has a terrible, terrible and well-justified reputation for racist violence. Adding those together, you have a breeding ground for racial harassment, and hassling innocent people on spurious grounds. Go ahead: go spend an hour at an international airport some time, waiting near the customs inspections, and watch the 'behaviorism' select the poor and the innocent time after time after time. And watch how the 'random' searches end up targeted against racial and ethnic stereotypes.
What is 'real behaviorism'? Many police departments, including ones near me, have had training in such techniques. Many of them, especially in poor, black neighborhoods or these days in Muslim and other immigrant neighborhoods, have been caught and successfully sued because it was actually used as a poorly disguised excuse for 'racial profiling'.
Try living in, or next to, a poor neighborhood. And try watching a group of technical people out on an equipment shopping trip, or at a conference, and watch the reaction of police and hotel staff to the black or these days to middle-eastern people. A theory of such observation is fine, but go watch the security themselves for what their 'real behavior' reveals.
And if you believe that, I've got some white women I want you to protect with 'behaviorism'. Far too much of such 'behaviorism' translates directly to racial profiling. The same thing occurs in college admissiions and job applications, where an administrator is forbidden from asking specific questions about race but may consciously or unconsciously use small indicators to alter their reactions to people.
The result is, far too often, an indirect form of racism.
Thank you for the correction! I was reading several articles about LAPD, and misread one of them as mentioning his testimony in LAPD corruption cases where they actually only mentioned him as another whistleblower.
But a large and corrupt police department is, effectively, a criminal gang. Ask LA residents in poor areas, look at the behavior of the Chicago police department under Mayor Daley, and residents of Zimbabwe and Nigeria right now. I may overstate the LAPD corruption somewhat, but they have a long history of officers taking bribes and murdering innocent people.
Except that 'behavior observation' is usually a deniable code phrase for 'arrest the colored folk'. My technical acquaintances with heavy beards and Middle Eastern features do suffer extra searches and observation by security, along with far more "random searches", than white women. It's particularly amusing for my Israli acquaintances to be profiled as potential Muslim terrorists by amateurishly trained Americans, and compare it to Israeli airport security practices.
LAPD is notorious for violent and abusive behavior. For those of us old enough to remember, officer Frank Serpico (of movie fame) exposed their corruption in the 70's and was gunned down by officers for it. They actually had officers convicted of being hitman, such as Richord Ford and Robert von Villas, although that was in the 80's. In the 1990's, we have this variety of killings by and and convictions of LAPD members: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/scandal/cron.html.
I don't see how randomizing their patrols will help such a historically corrupt department much, unless it helps prevent them from taking bribes from smugglers with regular routes. *THAT* might actually be a benefit of such a scheme, although it's not difficult to beat if you learn to understand the 'randomization' system.
This is frequently, though not always, true for RedHat. Some of their clustering systems are closed source, and available on RHEL and not Fedora. But it's generally true.
There are companies that use the 'closed first, GPL later' approach: Xensource did with Xen virtualization softwre, and Citrix is allegedly doing the same now that they bought Xen. AFPL does this with Ghostscript, and at last look Zmanda was doing this with Amanda.
I tend to use Webmin for administering MySQL. It may not be feature complete, but I find it very robust and effective for doing small repairs and setups.
I'm afraid the Rusion was not only badly dubbed in Russian, but was extremely buggy. It was amusing as a proof of concept, but unplayable on a lot of hardware. (I did see a Russian programmer trying to play it, and did laugh at his difficulties on his overclocked, and otherwise oddly assembled machine.)
There was the theft and publication of the Half-Life 2 source code a few years ago. That included the creation of an illicit version of the game, in Russia.
The electrical plug is not a 'standard'. There are at least 5 such standards in the USA, alone. Matched blades for 120 Volt, polarized plug, and polarized grounded for wall plugs, that funky little figure 8 on laptop power supplies and some home electronics, the 3-prong small connector used for computers and televisions and dual voltage devices, and then there are the 220 Volt connectors.
Add in Japanese, European, and English, and you have a nightmare. I _wish_ we could easily get rid of most of them, and switch to one standard. Fortunately, adapters are easy to make or to wire in, but it's not a good exmaple of a standard.
They don't have to sue. They merely need to cast Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt over companies interested in developing products without cooperating with their patent-encumbered license agreement, especially the parts that restrict the addition of new features. Companies that might produce superior and competing products will be unable to safely follow the licensing agreements.
This is why SPF has not found its way directly into Sendmail: Microsoft's patent encumbered extensions to SPF prevent companies like Sendmail from being able to include it under their open source license, and few are willing to throw out Microsoft's exensions and put serious manpower into the older, simpler, and more stable implementation since Microsoft started violating the older specification in their software.
This seems sadly true. It's easy for a group that believes in an ethical standard to be misled by people who pretend to it publicly: it's like a spouse with an abusive partner. They hope for the best, and want the partner to improve and hope that they will, but their support of the partner actually prolongs the abusive relationship.
ISO needs to go to a family shelter, change their address, get a restraining order, and make sure that Microsoft's visitation rights with the children are supervised for safety.
It's called the 'Peter Principle', to quote from Wikipedia: "in a hierarchy members are promoted so long as they work competently." When you reach your level of incompetence, you stop there.
The principle is also known in more colorful terms as "shit floats". Gifted managers find ways to keep staff at their level of *competence*, but it can get very difficult when managers no longer actually know their staff or become involved in turf wars rather than trying to accomplish the work. And it applies to managers, so in a big organization you can get a long, long line of incompetent staff between the actual workers and the people who really make the big decisions.
And I've got to disagree with both of you. Finding another job that leaves weekends free for your hobbies, or has good medical insurance for my friends who need CPAP machines to sleep well, or that are one block from their house they just paid for, or don't involve a 3-hour daily commute that drains your will and creativity, or where you've mastered the intricacies of the company's proprietary software build system, or where you've built a community of friends that you support and who appreciate your work, all matter, or where you really think the company is saving lives, can all be quite difficult.
Not every job has all or even most of those factors. But they can affect your willingness to put up with dross in the workplace.
For your external mail servers, put SPF and blacklist filtering *first*. Both are very lightweight filtering and easy to use, and tremendously reduce the load of spam that needs to be checked by other means.
Unfortunately, the Gmail spam recently passes both of those, because it's going through Gmail's legitimate servers with falsely registered, but registered nonetheless accounts. So such IP based filtering does not help. And I'm afraid they need to really rethink their CAPTCHA approach.
Politicking occurs, of course. It's human nature. It's when the internal, invisible to "unauthorized" personnel politiciking takes over that it bothers me so much. It's much worse with the merely "open source" rather than "free source" movements, because open source licening doen't necessarily permit forks.
You have noticed that Wikipedia is 'open', but not 'free', right? There have been numerous leaks, especially over at wikileaks.org, about the cabal of Wikileaks editors who fairly arbitrarily censor and edit content? It's been written about repeatedly, such as the article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/.
This sort of thing is why I prefer 'free source' to 'open source'. We encounter internal politic and lobbying poisoning the well for developers and authors with different visions, and we find it occurring in secret by the managers of the 'open source' projects.
HP hasn't done it very well. Their customizations are quite limited, and their capabilities for a 2U or 5U box lag well behind Dell for the same price range, and tend to lack capabilities.
I'll be very curious about coupling the "Mesh" capability of the OLPC laptops to it. It could leapfrog a generation of poorer children to the 21st century of content and network access, all on Linux.
A couple of bucks per RFID tag really, really adds up fast. Do you want to accept some losses, or do you want to jack up the cost of a $2 subway ride by $1 to pay for a better RFID tag on the card, and the readers to go with it?
You have to power the thing from the RFID reader to get a synchronized and readable signal. If you're going to design an RFID reader powerful enough to charge up an RFID tag from hundreds of kilometers, can I get you to run it past the designers of the hadron supercollider to make sure you're not generating micro black holes that will devour the Earth?
More seriously, if you trigger one RFID tag at that range, you're going to trigger every other tag in the beam of your reader. Sorting out that noise isn't going to work well at dozens of kilometers range, even if the power involved doesn't cook any birds flying overhead.
As I understand the technology, building a reader with massively longer range is not a simple task. You start running into signal-noise ratios, and signals from multiple local devices, pretty quickly. There have been public demonstrations of RFID technologies that can detect multiple RFID tags inside a single crate successfully, but that doesn't mean they can be detected reliably from the next room.
It seems to me that the big deal is that, once read or once the algorithms are decoded, they can be easily programmed into another tag. This problem has already been well demonstrated with the tags on US passports. With the tags popular for some kinds of public transit systems, they're begging to be forged.