Actually, the standard u-lock portion of the New York Lock is suceptible to this attack. Fortunately alot of messengers ditch that part and instead use normal flat-keyed padlocks.
Regardless, the worst part of this vulnerability is that it apparently even works against a number of the higher end, $80+ Kryptonite u-lock models. So it's just not a matter of cheap locks.
I would never lock up my 1k+ bike anymore; if it is outside my house I am within arms length of it. I even use sturdy locks on my junk-built singlespeeds, after one of them got stolen.
I like the idea of fuel cells for laptops and portable devices, but the obvious problem with them is obtaining fuel. We rather take it for granted that when the laptop battery runs low we can plug it in (or drop it into the charger) and within a few hours it is ready for portable use again. With a fuel-cell based solution you have to acquire new a new cartridge. It seems like the availability of fuel will directly tie to the uptake of these devices.
Consider the typical office corridor worker, travelling to-and-fro with their tablet PC - do they really want to have to buy or refill a cartridge every day? Would it be practical to have multiple full cartridges on hand and refill them in bulk?
I can see enjoying the option of one of these long life power units if I'm on a flight or in some environment where I need that much portable power without the opportunity to recharge, but it seems doubtful that fuel cells are going to make a major impact on portable electronics until the infrastructure solution is solved. Even still, the infrastructure exists for non-rechargable batteries, yet many people prefer devices that have modern rechargables - it just makes more sense for most situations.
I believe fuel cells are an excellent technology, and a worthy replacement to traditional non-rechargeable batteries, but I find it unlikeley that they will supplant the current methods of use-and-recharge laptop, pda, and cellular batteries - it's just too convenient.
Apparently it's no longer the last place in sales, eh?
From Seattle P-I:
PlayStation 2 outsold by Xbox for first time
Microsoft Corp. said its Xbox, benefiting from a price cut at the end of March, captured 51 percent of the U.S. video-game console market for the month of April, besting Sony's PlayStation 2 in monthly sales for the first time.
The Redmond company, citing statistics from research firm NPD Funworld, said the PlayStation 2's U.S. market share was 32 percent. Redmond-based Nintendo of America had a market share of 17 percent for its GameCube. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox from $179 to $149 at the end of March, and Sony followed suit earlier this month. The GameCube sells for $99.
Let's face it, the PS2 is starting to look pretty dated. The Gamecube, sadly, never quite got the props it deserves. Hence the XBox, with it's relatively well-thought out online play and excellent horsepower-to-cost ratio, along with finally scoring several solid licenses is starting to pick up.
Now, if this is a sustainable - or even repeatable - business for Microsoft or not is a separate question.
Of course, it's no surprise. Just about every building on campus is named after fantastically wealthy people. Gates is just the newest generation, and others will come after. If all it takes to get money for facilities is to slap somebody's name on it - then I'm all for that.
Perhaps we should ditch country-inspecific TLD's entirely, particularly for retail sales. Doesn't the US have.co.us as a counterpart to.co.uk? It seems like a logical move.
Actually, using google, looks like that belongs to Colorado. Oh well...
I think I ought to call your bluff. I don't really think "the IT dept all major universities usually re-ghost... every 2 weeks?" If they did, they must be wealthier Universities than we are.
That's simply not done here at the UW. A number of the larger computer labs here on campus do have automatic re-distribution on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, particularly in the CS department. The vast majority of faculty and staff computers sit relatively untouched (and in many cases probably unpatched!) year after year. If they spectacularly fail, then they get the full reinstall treatment. Almost certainly they don't get this preventatively.
The reason for this? Look at the actual paper - 31,000 hosts monitored over 1 week in August. That means a token number of those were actually student computers in the Res. Halls, since they are mostly closed for the summer. It's primarily staff machines. Ghosting them weekly would be a ridiculous amount of work, given the small size of most IT groups here.
Consider, for the moment, the department of Psychology. They have two full-time staff that manage on the order of ~500 machines spread across six or more buildings. Most of the other departments are in a similar boat - competent IT staff are too expensive and funding for infrastructure is too low. The large computer labs, the CSE/EE department, and the hospital have IT pretty well under control. The general feel is that the rest of the folks, particularly in Arts & Sciences really ought to work together better to centralize administration. Of course no one is willing to give up local control over their systems. So it's a big mess. The actual important systems are in general locked away running on big servers, and everything else is treated as a fully untrusted system.
I'd wager that we're not too far off the mark for most other large public Universities. On the ground, the beauracracy starts mattering alot more than the tech. (Unfortunately)
If and when these become commonplace in the home, you're going to expect it to work in a similar fashion to how your current phone works. Particularly, when you dial 911, you'd like the call routed to a local, nearby 911 service dispatcher, so they can get help to you quickly.
I've built a few of these as well. My mother loves the one I got her for Christmas, even though it took her a while to understand that it was the whole computer and not just an external cd-burner, which is what she had asked for. =)
Even better yet, on the noise fron though Shuttle has finally released a new version, the Shuttle Zen, which features an external laptop-style power brick adapter. Hence, only one fan total and it has even less equipment inside to cool. Very smart! This is of course old news to folks who prefer the Mini-ITX formfactor (or the absolutely tiny Nano-ITX or other such shrinkages), where external power and no CPU fan leads to truly silent computing.
Second point: The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that. The code is probably scattered across multiple servers in Redmond, for starters, and you'd only be given access to the parts you needed to work with.
Actually, in my senior operating systems course (taught by Gary Kimura) we spent a quarter doing Win2k kernel development. The source we had wasn't anywhere on the order of magnitude of 50gb, as I recall, probably more like 6gb or so. We did plenty of grepping about for interesting things and making small tweaks in addition to our assigned projects. We certainly had enough to build a full system, but we mostly limited ourselves to the kernel, which is plenty of code in and of itself.
Of course, we signed fairly immense documents for Our Friends at Microsoft that gave them things like full and unhindered ownership of anything we created while having access to the source code. We also had to have the room with our workstations disconnected from the internet, and had to go outside to check our email.
Unfortunately, with all that access and opportunity, my group's project was to implement sparse clusters for FAT after completing the introductory assignment of logging file handles - which was harder than the same project I'd already done in Linux. It was hard to be excited about FAT hacking, but at least better than the folks who had to make modifications to the memory manager that had apparently already been made since garyk had come to the University from Microsoft.
Interesting anecdote from our adventures: when grepping the Linux source for swear words you'll find quite a plethora, and WinNT was once the same. When they submitted the source for government certification, however, they had to go through and clean it up! (We of course had assumed that the developers were all prudes.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the standard u-lock portion of the New York Lock is suceptible to this attack. Fortunately alot of messengers ditch that part and instead use normal flat-keyed padlocks.
Regardless, the worst part of this vulnerability is that it apparently even works against a number of the higher end, $80+ Kryptonite u-lock models. So it's just not a matter of cheap locks.
I would never lock up my 1k+ bike anymore; if it is outside my house I am within arms length of it. I even use sturdy locks on my junk-built singlespeeds, after one of them got stolen.
Consider the typical office corridor worker, travelling to-and-fro with their tablet PC - do they really want to have to buy or refill a cartridge every day? Would it be practical to have multiple full cartridges on hand and refill them in bulk?
I can see enjoying the option of one of these long life power units if I'm on a flight or in some environment where I need that much portable power without the opportunity to recharge, but it seems doubtful that fuel cells are going to make a major impact on portable electronics until the infrastructure solution is solved. Even still, the infrastructure exists for non-rechargable batteries, yet many people prefer devices that have modern rechargables - it just makes more sense for most situations.
I believe fuel cells are an excellent technology, and a worthy replacement to traditional non-rechargeable batteries, but I find it unlikeley that they will supplant the current methods of use-and-recharge laptop, pda, and cellular batteries - it's just too convenient.
Let's face it, the PS2 is starting to look pretty dated. The Gamecube, sadly, never quite got the props it deserves. Hence the XBox, with it's relatively well-thought out online play and excellent horsepower-to-cost ratio, along with finally scoring several solid licenses is starting to pick up.
Now, if this is a sustainable - or even repeatable - business for Microsoft or not is a separate question.
http://www.law.washington.edu/GatesHall/
Actually, that's Gates, Sr. He's not exactly a poor man at all.
On the other hand, we also have:
+Washingtoni ons/mgh.html
http://www.washington.edu/classroom/EventReservat
+Washington (in the Paul G. Allen CSE building)e s_commons.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/tour/05_gat
Of course, it's no surprise. Just about every building on campus is named after fantastically wealthy people. Gates is just the newest generation, and others will come after. If all it takes to get money for facilities is to slap somebody's name on it - then I'm all for that.
Actually, using google, looks like that belongs to Colorado. Oh well...
That's simply not done here at the UW. A number of the larger computer labs here on campus do have automatic re-distribution on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, particularly in the CS department. The vast majority of faculty and staff computers sit relatively untouched (and in many cases probably unpatched!) year after year. If they spectacularly fail, then they get the full reinstall treatment. Almost certainly they don't get this preventatively.
The reason for this? Look at the actual paper - 31,000 hosts monitored over 1 week in August. That means a token number of those were actually student computers in the Res. Halls, since they are mostly closed for the summer. It's primarily staff machines. Ghosting them weekly would be a ridiculous amount of work, given the small size of most IT groups here.
Consider, for the moment, the department of Psychology. They have two full-time staff that manage on the order of ~500 machines spread across six or more buildings. Most of the other departments are in a similar boat - competent IT staff are too expensive and funding for infrastructure is too low. The large computer labs, the CSE/EE department, and the hospital have IT pretty well under control. The general feel is that the rest of the folks, particularly in Arts & Sciences really ought to work together better to centralize administration. Of course no one is willing to give up local control over their systems. So it's a big mess. The actual important systems are in general locked away running on big servers, and everything else is treated as a fully untrusted system.
I'd wager that we're not too far off the mark for most other large public Universities. On the ground, the beauracracy starts mattering alot more than the tech. (Unfortunately)
Think less like "headphones and microphone at a pc" and more like "normal-looking phone on a desk".
If and when these become commonplace in the home, you're going to expect it to work in a similar fashion to how your current phone works. Particularly, when you dial 911, you'd like the call routed to a local, nearby 911 service dispatcher, so they can get help to you quickly.
I've built a few of these as well. My mother loves the one I got her for Christmas, even though it took her a while to understand that it was the whole computer and not just an external cd-burner, which is what she had asked for. =) Even better yet, on the noise fron though Shuttle has finally released a new version, the Shuttle Zen, which features an external laptop-style power brick adapter. Hence, only one fan total and it has even less equipment inside to cool. Very smart! This is of course old news to folks who prefer the Mini-ITX formfactor (or the absolutely tiny Nano-ITX or other such shrinkages), where external power and no CPU fan leads to truly silent computing.
Of course, we signed fairly immense documents for Our Friends at Microsoft that gave them things like full and unhindered ownership of anything we created while having access to the source code. We also had to have the room with our workstations disconnected from the internet, and had to go outside to check our email.
Unfortunately, with all that access and opportunity, my group's project was to implement sparse clusters for FAT after completing the introductory assignment of logging file handles - which was harder than the same project I'd already done in Linux. It was hard to be excited about FAT hacking, but at least better than the folks who had to make modifications to the memory manager that had apparently already been made since garyk had come to the University from Microsoft.
Interesting anecdote from our adventures: when grepping the Linux source for swear words you'll find quite a plethora, and WinNT was once the same. When they submitted the source for government certification, however, they had to go through and clean it up! (We of course had assumed that the developers were all prudes.)