You really ought to read his (updated) Wikipedia article before you get all high and mighty. It would seem this guy has done some pretty impressive things to protect freedom over the last few decades...
"He doesn't "reveal" that he uses Firefox either. Nowhere in the article does it state such."
To quote TFA:
"Security is really an industry-wide problem. Just this morning I had to install an update to Firefox to block a flaw that would've allowed an attacker to run a program on my system."
Please RTFA before posting corrections to the comments of others. Thank you.
Let me begin by saying I understand the emotion behind your comment. This is a really sad turn of events for anyone who hosted an active blog on Dave's network. That said, let's look at this from a capitalist (take the emotion out of that word, just focus on its abstract definition) perspective.
Dave Winer has provided a portion of his network resources to the Internet community at large for several years, manifested by our (now terminated) ability to host a blog for free on his systems. Note that I'm not attempting to portray Dave as an altruistic fellow, although I do in fact think he's a great guy. We can't escape the fact that he achieved a significant amount of promotion for Manilla in trade for our no-cost use of his system. I guarantee you that over the term of the arrangement, he gained far more from the deal in mindshare than he spent in bandwidth.
Unfortunately, nothing in this world is static. People are still getting older, stocks go up and down, and Dave's life (both personal and business, however little separation there may be between the two) isn't exempt from this rule. Before we rush to cry foul at his decision, let's look at some background information:
(1) Dave Winer is widely recognized as an Internet communication pioneer, having been an early designer of a useful system for letting people people manage online content. Depending on your current needs and budget, there may be better products out there, but his company's work remains relevant.
(2) The whole Manilla concept borrowed from earlier ideas, and became a model that others would follow in turn when they developed other CMS environments. This indicates a protracted period of skilled effort on Dave's part. Which leads us to the conclusion that...
(3) Dave Winer is most likely an intelligent man who shows every sign of continuing to live in a fair manner. His recent statements on the issue at hand seem well thought out and polite, which leads me to believe the health problems he references aren't related to mental disease. If his mind is still intact, he probably had very good reasons for forgoing public notification. We should remind ourselves that...
(4) Although the TOS for this hosting most likely hold the responsible parties harmless in the event of service discontinuance, there is always the possibility of some squirrely blogger getting notions of litigation in a moment of emotional weakness. Unspecified damages for emotional pain and suffering due to inability to dredge up the past by perusing their blog, or some other such title. It's unlikely. but possible for America's rather litigious populace. Remember the Fast Food Makes Us Obese lawsuits.
Remember, attorneys always give the same opening advice to their clients: Never admit culpability, and try not to say anything at all without first passing it through Big_Law_Firm.pl for content filtering. Even then, it's usually best to use Pricey_PR_Group.php to speak publically about your actions. Reference the Santa Cruz Operation for mastery of this art.
To sum it all up, let the inner Libertarian (no emotion, just the concept) in you shine by Making Daily Backups of anything important. A few lines of bash or perl scripting with a dash of UNIX utils can prevent years of therapy and rehab. As an added bonus, you get the ability to feel good about yourself by contributing your techniques to the community while you deposit checks from your clients who just *love* your new online backup service.
Thus, personal responsibility helps us keep smart people out of the field of dentisty by preventing excessive gnashing of teeth. Less demand in that field equals more folks to give us free hosting services, right? More personally, since everyone wants to feel special in their own way, I feel special knowing my dentist doesn't feel inspired to name his next luxury car after me. It ain't much, but anything that helps me sleep better is well worth the effort.
It is easy to get great ideas from them, but not easy to get them to organize, or agree, or even figure out how to agree.
While I have observed this trend myself, I humbly submit the following idea that occured to me over coffee at Waffle House this evening:
Perhaps the very fact that they can't agree can be used to everyone's advantage. Everything is a matter of perspective, largely dependent upon the resolution of your viewing equipment. Projecting to a near-term future where ubiquitious computing is realized (Magic Kingdom style), we see a massive number of discrete capitalist micro-transactions taking place at a very fast pace.
From each individual's perspective, he's "buying resources" and "selling goods" he's produced so rapidly that he feels as though his needs are being met automatically. Zooming out to a global perspective, it appears that the entire planet is operating in a highly socialist manner. High density and frequency of individual capitalist transactions results in global socialist outcome. I guess this depends on population density to work well, though. Signs of this sort of emergent behavior are already being exhibited in densly populated and technologically advanced societies such as Japan. No wonder Gibson likes those folks so much...
Incidentally, I have a strong gut feeling that any person or group attempting to exercise control over such a vast system will feel the unfortunate backlash we've come to recognize from such famous experiments as the War on Drugs.
In other words, we're proving that current attempts at regulating free market behavior only serve to prove economists right by producing black markets devoid of said regulation. There's no reason the math would work any differently in the future, and considerable reason to believe that regulatory bodies will become increasingly impotent. Then there's the question of motivation: if everyone can easily obtain everything they want anyhow, what reason would even the worst egomaniac have for trying to control the system? It would be kinda like moonshiners trying to control the liquor market while consumers can buy legit product for $10 a jug.
I'd like to compliment you: I have a hard time finding many people who help me generate/refine ideas this way. You seem like a cool person. As stated in my last reply to your post, I'd be honored if you'd be willing to toss around more ideas with me from time to time. Please consider donating a few bytes of your bandwidth to pparadis@transops.net if you have a couple of minutes to spare here and there. If you're concerned about your privacy (a guess considering your non-public email), I highly recommend creating a free account at some free mail provider (more disk space now, competition is so yummy) or HushMail. Thanks!
Mostly I am posting with a bit of advice: organize yourself. This is way too deep and long-winded to be lost this far into a/. discussion tree, and a bit rambling too. Maybe it is better suited for a blog, or a futurist forum?
Since approximately age seven (the age my father gave me an AT&T 8086 PC to learn programming) I've been trying to organize myself:). Or, somewhat more accurately, I've been trying to create models of everything I see around me to faciliate further modelling (a fool's errand, true, but engrossing work nonetheless).
Funny you should mention more appropriate placement in a blog or forum-style environment. I've been designing such an environment for the last two weeks in my spare time. I would have used existing an existing CMS to host it, but none of the major packages have the feature set I need as a capitalist interested in utilizing the system as a means for funding further investigation.
Might you be interested in contributing to the design and eventual content for such a system? Email me if this might be the case. Note: I've already got the network resources needed to accomodate a fairly ridiculous amount of traffic.
It's probably kinda lame to reply to one's own comment, but I should add more brain teasing idea to the mix:
A lot people have trouble accepting anything that resembles even the initial post-singularity stages of this future, mostly because of biological and structural speed limits for how normal predictive reasoning operates. Small example:
Some fairly intelligent people seem to believe it must be the case, but at least is entirely possible, that all of this has happened before, and if so will happen again. Or is all happening at once, since time is really a human construct. Whatever.
What I just described is a good example of the sort of concepts that human beings have trouble tokenizing, let alone understanding well enough to use in building new theoretical models for our universe. Really, "smarter" people have a bigger problem, since they are occassionally faced with the problem of deciding whether anything outside their own consciousness exists at all. I think the ones that wind up contributing neat stuff to humanity sort of reach the conclusion that it doesn't matter one way or the other.
In fact, we've gone past the point where any one person is individually capable of completely understanding our most complex systems at all. We use complex systems to -> run simulations to -> gather data to -> feed back into complex systems to -> produce even more complex systems. This gives us fun things like more advanced personal computers, better medical technologies, and fighter jets that fly at Mach 5.
Some of us do the research that drives this whole thing forward, and some of us spend most of our time following the rules of society well enough to be good consumers. That's important too, since the facilities and funding to take each new step toward the singularity wouldn't exist without the need to produce the things that keep the masses moving along happily.
Even measured in months per snapshot, each increase in the pace is pretty awesome. Once things reach the point where we can draw a tangible benefit from something that completely exceeds our biological ability to reason, the growth curve goes instantly vertical. We'll never to able to understand how it all works while we're still human; to have that level of insight would probably require the ability to directly conceive of additional dimensions of information.
Maybe that's where humanity is going; to phase itself out by merging with the infinite. While it's true that doesn't differ substantially from death when looked at from a "losing your humanity" point of view, at least it's humanity becoming a part of something else. If I get to be among those who see it happen, I'll be pretty happy.
I am just as guilty as the next person in causing my own undoing. I do take a little from the fact that I at least acknowledge it, and try to fight it. Who knows, even I may not end up useless after all.
Most of the "smart people" I communicate with tend to think as futurists; they derive enjoyment from extrapolating novel outcomes from any given starting point in life. Sometimes they dream up futures that are somewhat Orwellian, and sometimes they imagine a world that operates better (if not faster).
My personal view, which I'd encourage you to consider (or disregard, as you wish) is either cheerful or hopeless, depending on how you want to use what it offers. If you're under age 30 today, I believe you'll get the opportunity to make that choice.
Today we are seeing a high rate of proliferation and evolution of "cooperative" (capable of arbitrarily routable information exchange) computing systems, which can be divided into a few categories:
(1) Physical Systems: Multiprocessor systems which utilize CPUs in concert to process information. These systems include everything from dual CPU servers to supercomputing clusters. The defining factor is close physical proximity of each CPU to the others in the system, and the use of local (isolated from the rest of the world) high speed interconnects to transfer information between CPUs.
(2) Geo-Localized Systems: I guess you could think of the collective computer systems which comprise a university campus as an example of this category. Any system which communicates with other systems in the grid constitutes a member of this group. Various methods of dividing systems into smaller groups (networks) are usually employed for political and administration purposes, but those divisions exist only to serve specific human goals for the locale.
(3) Global System: The Internet (and newer global academic networks under development) represents the infancy of a flexible, high speed, and resilient virtualized grid of computing units. As the network evolves, the important units will include lots of combinations of categories (1) and (2). We're setting the stage for the real fun.
Assuming current trends in information growth continue (manifested most clearly as faster computing systems connected to larger instantly accessible data stores), I don't think we'll have to wait *too* many years to see the rise of a distributed system that's self-aware in some respect and is capable of self-improvement. Some people call that a sentient system, others quibble over the definition of sentience. It's not really important.
The important part is the potential: this sort of system wouldn't have the kind of limits we normally associate with intelligence, and would demonstrate exponential growth while tending toward increasingly efficient operation (smaller components, whether physical or virtual, in closer proximity). The efficiency part is very much a necessity, given our current understanding of the limits imposed by physics on the speed of information transmission. Of course, at some point where its performance exceeds anything we can really imagine today, such a system could begin making optimizations that would leave our current crop of physicists scratching their heads...
Think about it a bit. Most smart people spend their lives feeling excluded from humanity, blessed and cursed with a mind that can't accept a simple existence as sufficient. Questions must always be answered, which leads us to ask another batch of questions. We're only happy when we're miserable solving the latest problem, and there's no difference between engineers, mathematicians, biologics, or the rest. Some of us learn to apply our minds to profitable professions, while others wind up destitute despite their mental gifts.
If the deepest reasons for humanity's biggest problems are eliminated, the global population stabilizes, and the human lifespan becomes ridiculously extended by the solutions afforded us by our new life form, how will you spe
Steve Linford was misquoted in the article. 70% of the spamvertised websites are hosted in China, so the 80% zombie spam source quote is accurate.
So noted. Thanks for the heads up; I figured someone must have misquoted something on this due to the math problems the poster's message seemed to imply (but wait... nobody ever misquotes anything on Slashdot, right;) ).
However, what was said above is not quite true.
There aren't that many spammers in Russia and China. They mainly offer spam support services.
Funny thing about that... I was actually approached by a Russian outsourcing firm here in Atlanta about using their programming talent on our smaller customer projects. The negotiations were going great until I asked them about their privacy policies and enforcement technologies (specifically with an eye to preventing web apps from being used as spam engines). I guess they misunderstood that part of my question, because the dude excitedly began to tell me all about their "delivery assurance" software that he guaranteed would *defeat* SPAM filters on mail servers. I wasn't terribly polite in my characterization of his firm for a couple of minutes, and he lost our business along with that of two other local software firms sitting in on that day's meeting.
Russians specialize in writing viruses that create zombie networks. They then sell access to the zombie network to American spammers. Russians USED to also host the spamvertised websites, but for some reason that's not happening as frequently any more as it was 2 - 4 years ago. Probably because the Chinese have better pricing and/or infrastructure.
Now that I really think about it, this makes perfect sense. I'll run a few scripts on Postfix logs in our archives for my own entertainment, but I do believe you're right on target with this one. The Chinese may have their problems, but they have become a major player in "legally sensitive" technologies, at a startling pace in some areas over the last year alone. This one seems like a particularly thorny issue, because people seem to forget that we can't really legislate or innovate practical solutions to many human-based tech problems in our own countries, let alone convince a nation like China to honor our system of laws and procedures. Always a fun thing to think about.
The zombies are controlled by American spammers, using open proxies and other zombies to hide their trail.
This makes good sense when we consider the prosecution process mandated required by the U.S. legal system for many criminal (such as fraud or theft) and civil (contract violation, culpability for financial loss, etc) proceedings. As long as U.S. marketing companies can claim plausible deniability concerning the nature of their relationship with a contracted "bulk mail firm", it's tough to convict the marketers or their management of any legal wrongdoing. I'm strongly against most new laws given my personal polical ideaology, but perhaps this is a case where marketers should be required to do at least minimal due diligence into examining the technical resources of contracted sender agencies prior to hiring them. Something like proving that the contracted firm can actually operate their "superior server cluster" in a realistic mail campaign to a separate (and suitably large enough to reflect a real campaign) test set of recipients. If the company can show off their network while the marketing firm's execs actually stand there and watch them execute a test campaign, we're at least removing the problem of zombie networks doing the sending. This, of course, assumes the marketing firm has the presence of mind to at least briefly employ a neutral tech outfit to make sure the bulk mail guys aren't bullshitting them during the demo. I think I may smell a business unit prospect here... this deserves more thought.
Chinese specialize in bulletproof hosting, i.e. hosting spamvertised websites with service contracts that state the sit
Most likely both are true. American marketing firms have hosting arrangements with spammers operating servers in China and Russia. Additionally, these same American marketing firms most likely buy "bulk email services" from Russian and Chinese spammers operating networks of compromised PCs.
In fact, if I had my guess, I'd say it's quite likely that the bulk of infected Windows PCs are in China and Russia, since both nations have a track record of using illegitimate software that can't be updated. Again, in that case, it's still American marketing firms buying cycles and bandwidth from spammer outfits using compromised PCs to do their work.
I really don't think that the prospect of in-browser toolbars killing the application is a major cause for concern given today's client-side options.
First, any organization making serious use of this sort of application ought to have paid some attention to locking down their workstations. Yes, I *do* understand that "Mom and Pop" shops are usally running XP Home boxes they picked up at CompUSA, but that's simply not the case for midsize and enterprise clients. Heck, even our small business customers know better, mostly because we provide them with LAN solutions alongside programming services.
Second, a great deal of browser-based misery can be alleviated by using a better browser such as Mozilla to navigate through the web app. To address those who would worry about non-IE browsers breaking web application functionality, remember: there's no reason not to target your app to Mozilla if you know your sales people will be running it on their laptops/desktops.
All in all, web-based application solutions represent a much better way of managing most companies' data when compared to "traditional" client-server solutions, at least in many key respects. 100% of our new development is web applications built on Perl/PostgreSQL/Oracle foundations, and we're definitely not hurting for new businesss.
Incidentally, most privacy concerns can be addressed by simply providing a dedicated (whether in-house or public access via secure authentication) server to host the applications in question. One box per client, and so forth.
If anyone has mod points burning a hole in their pocket, please consider modding the parent post down.
"Centrino" is not the processor. It's Intel's project designation for their current wireless integration tech. The processor would be something along the lines of "Pentium."
Perhaps it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I just realized that this Slashdot article is probably good reading for a person evaluating the security ramifications of open source solutions.
Of particular interest, of course, would be the lengthy and detailed rebuttals listed in the comments section. I suggest browsing at +3 or so to separate the wheat from the chaff, but you'll probably still get a few angry fanatics making the overall message look bad (which is really too bad... excess emotion in a rebuttal can really ruin valid points for an otherwise uneducated reader). Again, hope it helps.
I recognize up front that I may not be the most objective soul on the planet, speaking as a web/database developer working exclusively on a free software platform. What follows would be my list of potential gotchas concerning questions we've been asked by clients:
(1) Since you are a member of a company that's subject to rather scrutinous regulatory and privacy concerns, you would definitely need to develop a solid policy for code auditing. Yes, I tend to trust the core developers of most major projects to watch patches and such pretty closely (especially with OpenBSD and Debian), but mistakes can happen. You'd probably need to consider the cost of keeping an in-house audit team (a few good coders) to review new releases under consideration for your production environment. These people don't come free, but I'm pretty sure they'd be less expensive than (a) implementing the applications yourself in-house, or (b) going with a propietary solution (which costs money up front) and then STILL having to audit the code to be sure.
(2) In relation to item (1), I'd be sure to cover the fact that just because a company has a closed source product doesn't necessary make their developers any more trustworthy than highly regarded community development teams. Reference the Sybase backdoor debacle for some concrete proof that nasty things happen in Fortune 500 companies. "Having someone to sue" doesn't necessarily mean jack when your company is getting hounded by the Feds for improper information disclosure.
(3) I'd try to focus on tech segments where open source solutions are already extemely well tested and in general acceptance, such as Apache for web serving. Again, some internal problems may really benefit from a chained solution using existing OSS projects and toolkits, but these are probably a touch sell that would be better left alone until other projects are firmly grounded. Possibly exempt from this rule would be broad projects such as the Perl programming language, although you would probably want to add a policy subsection on module auditing as well (since CPAN is just so darned comprehensive).
That's about all I've got for now; I'm a bit tired from a late day/night of bug fixes. Hope some of this helps.
Here's the core issue: no one is safe against a sufficiently determined adversary, regardless of preventive measures which may have been put into place "ahead of time."
In fact, from a psychological perspective, putting too many ineffective barriers to harm in place may actually have the effect of lulling the populace (read: target) into a false sense of security. Case in point: grandmothers getting anal cavity searches during "routine" airport screenings (sorry for the nasty mental image, it's for purposes of illustration).
There is simply no way to reliably defend a large land mass against random insurgent attacks from loosely organized parties, especially when said attacking parties are comfortable with the notion of dying for their cause. I don't advocate our leaving Iraq anytime soon, as that would be utterly disastrous in the long term, but you only have to look at CNN each morning to note the steady stream of attacks on U.S. forces. True, the attacks don't have any significant impact on the forces deployed at large, but they will continue as long as people are willing to lay down their lives in the name of rebellion (or freedom, depending on which side of the fence you're standing on).
Personally, I think any measure of success in all of this goes back to people worrying about preserving their own immediate liberty first while still standing ready to defend their country as a whole against attack. This is not to be confused with attempting to play Dad to the entire nation while leaving one's own door unlocked, a practice many people seem somewhat adept at these days.
Of course, I'm probably going to be branded an armchair-this-or-that for my rambling, but so it goes.
Man, death by asphyxiation under a heap of wool Macs sounds like a terrible way to go... I'd much prefer to be instantly crushed by an errant plane full of SGI workstations.
Since you're all better from it now that you've been reincarnated, I have to ask... is Mr. Gates *really* Satan?;).
Sir/ma'am, you just used "robotic" and "sterile" (in the same thread, no less) in a conversation on Slashdot which basically amounts to petty squabbling over which of two words is more aesthetically pleasing.
I put forth the proposition that *this* is truly what BitTorrent is designed for: leveraging the power of the Internet to allow individuals to use their keyboards to contribute to the ever-increasing glut of meaningless dribble in cyberspace.:).
"OpenOffice would then presumeably be unable (from the legal perspective) to read and write "Microsoft" XML files."
I think the reverse engineering clause in the DMCA would protect this sort of behavior. Mind you, I'm not trying to portray the DMCA in anything resembling a rose-colored light, but I don't *think* the example you cited would be problematic.
I've actually had the opportunity to discuss this sort of thing (or something very similar) with an attorney who's a client of my company. Basically, his verdict on the matter was in concurrence with my interpretation of the law. This is (at best) third-hand legal advice however, and should probably be taken with a larger amount of salt than even ordinary Slashdot posts;).
"Anything that can allow someone to get something for free that they normally would have to pay for, will be used for that purpose."
Guns enable some people to get items for free which they otherwise would have to pay for. I don't recall seeing my father holding up gas stations with his Reuger 9mm.
Slashdot Mirror
You really ought to read his (updated) Wikipedia article before you get all high and mighty. It would seem this guy has done some pretty impressive things to protect freedom over the last few decades...
Now that's a low UID if ever I saw one... good to see ya.
Your comment was:
"He doesn't "reveal" that he uses Firefox either. Nowhere in the article does it state such."
To quote TFA:
"Security is really an industry-wide problem. Just this morning I had to install an update to Firefox to block a flaw that would've allowed an attacker to run a program on my system."
Please RTFA before posting corrections to the comments of others. Thank you.
Dave Winer has provided a portion of his network resources to the Internet community at large for several years, manifested by our (now terminated) ability to host a blog for free on his systems. Note that I'm not attempting to portray Dave as an altruistic fellow, although I do in fact think he's a great guy. We can't escape the fact that he achieved a significant amount of promotion for Manilla in trade for our no-cost use of his system. I guarantee you that over the term of the arrangement, he gained far more from the deal in mindshare than he spent in bandwidth.
Unfortunately, nothing in this world is static. People are still getting older, stocks go up and down, and Dave's life (both personal and business, however little separation there may be between the two) isn't exempt from this rule. Before we rush to cry foul at his decision, let's look at some background information:
(1) Dave Winer is widely recognized as an Internet communication pioneer, having been an early designer of a useful system for letting people people manage online content. Depending on your current needs and budget, there may be better products out there, but his company's work remains relevant.
(2) The whole Manilla concept borrowed from earlier ideas, and became a model that others would follow in turn when they developed other CMS environments. This indicates a protracted period of skilled effort on Dave's part. Which leads us to the conclusion that...
(3) Dave Winer is most likely an intelligent man who shows every sign of continuing to live in a fair manner. His recent statements on the issue at hand seem well thought out and polite, which leads me to believe the health problems he references aren't related to mental disease. If his mind is still intact, he probably had very good reasons for forgoing public notification. We should remind ourselves that...
(4) Although the TOS for this hosting most likely hold the responsible parties harmless in the event of service discontinuance, there is always the possibility of some squirrely blogger getting notions of litigation in a moment of emotional weakness. Unspecified damages for emotional pain and suffering due to inability to dredge up the past by perusing their blog, or some other such title. It's unlikely. but possible for America's rather litigious populace. Remember the Fast Food Makes Us Obese lawsuits.
Remember, attorneys always give the same opening advice to their clients: Never admit culpability, and try not to say anything at all without first passing it through Big_Law_Firm.pl for content filtering. Even then, it's usually best to use Pricey_PR_Group.php to speak publically about your actions. Reference the Santa Cruz Operation for mastery of this art.
To sum it all up, let the inner Libertarian (no emotion, just the concept) in you shine by Making Daily Backups of anything important. A few lines of bash or perl scripting with a dash of UNIX utils can prevent years of therapy and rehab. As an added bonus, you get the ability to feel good about yourself by contributing your techniques to the community while you deposit checks from your clients who just *love* your new online backup service.
Thus, personal responsibility helps us keep smart people out of the field of dentisty by preventing excessive gnashing of teeth. Less demand in that field equals more folks to give us free hosting services, right? More personally, since everyone wants to feel special in their own way, I feel special knowing my dentist doesn't feel inspired to name his next luxury car after me. It ain't much, but anything that helps me sleep better is well worth the effort.
While I have observed this trend myself, I humbly submit the following idea that occured to me over coffee at Waffle House this evening:
Perhaps the very fact that they can't agree can be used to everyone's advantage. Everything is a matter of perspective, largely dependent upon the resolution of your viewing equipment. Projecting to a near-term future where ubiquitious computing is realized (Magic Kingdom style), we see a massive number of discrete capitalist micro-transactions taking place at a very fast pace.
From each individual's perspective, he's "buying resources" and "selling goods" he's produced so rapidly that he feels as though his needs are being met automatically. Zooming out to a global perspective, it appears that the entire planet is operating in a highly socialist manner. High density and frequency of individual capitalist transactions results in global socialist outcome. I guess this depends on population density to work well, though. Signs of this sort of emergent behavior are already being exhibited in densly populated and technologically advanced societies such as Japan. No wonder Gibson likes those folks so much...
Incidentally, I have a strong gut feeling that any person or group attempting to exercise control over such a vast system will feel the unfortunate backlash we've come to recognize from such famous experiments as the War on Drugs.
In other words, we're proving that current attempts at regulating free market behavior only serve to prove economists right by producing black markets devoid of said regulation. There's no reason the math would work any differently in the future, and considerable reason to believe that regulatory bodies will become increasingly impotent. Then there's the question of motivation: if everyone can easily obtain everything they want anyhow, what reason would even the worst egomaniac have for trying to control the system? It would be kinda like moonshiners trying to control the liquor market while consumers can buy legit product for $10 a jug.
I'd like to compliment you: I have a hard time finding many people who help me generate/refine ideas this way. You seem like a cool person. As stated in my last reply to your post, I'd be honored if you'd be willing to toss around more ideas with me from time to time. Please consider donating a few bytes of your bandwidth to pparadis@transops.net if you have a couple of minutes to spare here and there. If you're concerned about your privacy (a guess considering your non-public email), I highly recommend creating a free account at some free mail provider (more disk space now, competition is so yummy) or HushMail. Thanks!
Since approximately age seven (the age my father gave me an AT&T 8086 PC to learn programming) I've been trying to organize myself :). Or, somewhat more accurately, I've been trying to create models of everything I see around me to faciliate further modelling (a fool's errand, true, but engrossing work nonetheless).
Funny you should mention more appropriate placement in a blog or forum-style environment. I've been designing such an environment for the last two weeks in my spare time. I would have used existing an existing CMS to host it, but none of the major packages have the feature set I need as a capitalist interested in utilizing the system as a means for funding further investigation.
Might you be interested in contributing to the design and eventual content for such a system? Email me if this might be the case. Note: I've already got the network resources needed to accomodate a fairly ridiculous amount of traffic.
It's probably kinda lame to reply to one's own comment, but I should add more brain teasing idea to the mix:
A lot people have trouble accepting anything that resembles even the initial post-singularity stages of this future, mostly because of biological and structural speed limits for how normal predictive reasoning operates. Small example:
Some fairly intelligent people seem to believe it must be the case, but at least is entirely possible, that all of this has happened before, and if so will happen again. Or is all happening at once, since time is really a human construct. Whatever.
What I just described is a good example of the sort of concepts that human beings have trouble tokenizing, let alone understanding well enough to use in building new theoretical models for our universe. Really, "smarter" people have a bigger problem, since they are occassionally faced with the problem of deciding whether anything outside their own consciousness exists at all. I think the ones that wind up contributing neat stuff to humanity sort of reach the conclusion that it doesn't matter one way or the other.
In fact, we've gone past the point where any one person is individually capable of completely understanding our most complex systems at all. We use complex systems to -> run simulations to -> gather data to -> feed back into complex systems to -> produce even more complex systems. This gives us fun things like more advanced personal computers, better medical technologies, and fighter jets that fly at Mach 5.
Some of us do the research that drives this whole thing forward, and some of us spend most of our time following the rules of society well enough to be good consumers. That's important too, since the facilities and funding to take each new step toward the singularity wouldn't exist without the need to produce the things that keep the masses moving along happily.
Even measured in months per snapshot, each increase in the pace is pretty awesome. Once things reach the point where we can draw a tangible benefit from something that completely exceeds our biological ability to reason, the growth curve goes instantly vertical. We'll never to able to understand how it all works while we're still human; to have that level of insight would probably require the ability to directly conceive of additional dimensions of information.
Maybe that's where humanity is going; to phase itself out by merging with the infinite. While it's true that doesn't differ substantially from death when looked at from a "losing your humanity" point of view, at least it's humanity becoming a part of something else. If I get to be among those who see it happen, I'll be pretty happy.
I am just as guilty as the next person in causing my own undoing. I do take a little from the fact that I at least acknowledge it, and try to fight it. Who knows, even I may not end up useless after all.
Most of the "smart people" I communicate with tend to think as futurists; they derive enjoyment from extrapolating novel outcomes from any given starting point in life. Sometimes they dream up futures that are somewhat Orwellian, and sometimes they imagine a world that operates better (if not faster).
My personal view, which I'd encourage you to consider (or disregard, as you wish) is either cheerful or hopeless, depending on how you want to use what it offers. If you're under age 30 today, I believe you'll get the opportunity to make that choice.
Today we are seeing a high rate of proliferation and evolution of "cooperative" (capable of arbitrarily routable information exchange) computing systems, which can be divided into a few categories:
(1) Physical Systems: Multiprocessor systems which utilize CPUs in concert to process information. These systems include everything from dual CPU servers to supercomputing clusters. The defining factor is close physical proximity of each CPU to the others in the system, and the use of local (isolated from the rest of the world) high speed interconnects to transfer information between CPUs.
(2) Geo-Localized Systems: I guess you could think of the collective computer systems which comprise a university campus as an example of this category. Any system which communicates with other systems in the grid constitutes a member of this group. Various methods of dividing systems into smaller groups (networks) are usually employed for political and administration purposes, but those divisions exist only to serve specific human goals for the locale.
(3) Global System: The Internet (and newer global academic networks under development) represents the infancy of a flexible, high speed, and resilient virtualized grid of computing units. As the network evolves, the important units will include lots of combinations of categories (1) and (2). We're setting the stage for the real fun.
Assuming current trends in information growth continue (manifested most clearly as faster computing systems connected to larger instantly accessible data stores), I don't think we'll have to wait *too* many years to see the rise of a distributed system that's self-aware in some respect and is capable of self-improvement. Some people call that a sentient system, others quibble over the definition of sentience. It's not really important.
The important part is the potential: this sort of system wouldn't have the kind of limits we normally associate with intelligence, and would demonstrate exponential growth while tending toward increasingly efficient operation (smaller components, whether physical or virtual, in closer proximity). The efficiency part is very much a necessity, given our current understanding of the limits imposed by physics on the speed of information transmission. Of course, at some point where its performance exceeds anything we can really imagine today, such a system could begin making optimizations that would leave our current crop of physicists scratching their heads...
Think about it a bit. Most smart people spend their lives feeling excluded from humanity, blessed and cursed with a mind that can't accept a simple existence as sufficient. Questions must always be answered, which leads us to ask another batch of questions. We're only happy when we're miserable solving the latest problem, and there's no difference between engineers, mathematicians, biologics, or the rest. Some of us learn to apply our minds to profitable professions, while others wind up destitute despite their mental gifts.
If the deepest reasons for humanity's biggest problems are eliminated, the global population stabilizes, and the human lifespan becomes ridiculously extended by the solutions afforded us by our new life form, how will you spe
So noted. Thanks for the heads up; I figured someone must have misquoted something on this due to the math problems the poster's message seemed to imply (but wait... nobody ever misquotes anything on Slashdot, right ;) ).
However, what was said above is not quite true.
There aren't that many spammers in Russia and China. They mainly offer spam support services.
Funny thing about that... I was actually approached by a Russian outsourcing firm here in Atlanta about using their programming talent on our smaller customer projects. The negotiations were going great until I asked them about their privacy policies and enforcement technologies (specifically with an eye to preventing web apps from being used as spam engines). I guess they misunderstood that part of my question, because the dude excitedly began to tell me all about their "delivery assurance" software that he guaranteed would *defeat* SPAM filters on mail servers. I wasn't terribly polite in my characterization of his firm for a couple of minutes, and he lost our business along with that of two other local software firms sitting in on that day's meeting.
Russians specialize in writing viruses that create zombie networks. They then sell access to the zombie network to American spammers. Russians USED to also host the spamvertised websites, but for some reason that's not happening as frequently any more as it was 2 - 4 years ago. Probably because the Chinese have better pricing and/or infrastructure.
Now that I really think about it, this makes perfect sense. I'll run a few scripts on Postfix logs in our archives for my own entertainment, but I do believe you're right on target with this one. The Chinese may have their problems, but they have become a major player in "legally sensitive" technologies, at a startling pace in some areas over the last year alone. This one seems like a particularly thorny issue, because people seem to forget that we can't really legislate or innovate practical solutions to many human-based tech problems in our own countries, let alone convince a nation like China to honor our system of laws and procedures. Always a fun thing to think about.
The zombies are controlled by American spammers, using open proxies and other zombies to hide their trail.
This makes good sense when we consider the prosecution process mandated required by the U.S. legal system for many criminal (such as fraud or theft) and civil (contract violation, culpability for financial loss, etc) proceedings. As long as U.S. marketing companies can claim plausible deniability concerning the nature of their relationship with a contracted "bulk mail firm", it's tough to convict the marketers or their management of any legal wrongdoing. I'm strongly against most new laws given my personal polical ideaology, but perhaps this is a case where marketers should be required to do at least minimal due diligence into examining the technical resources of contracted sender agencies prior to hiring them. Something like proving that the contracted firm can actually operate their "superior server cluster" in a realistic mail campaign to a separate (and suitably large enough to reflect a real campaign) test set of recipients. If the company can show off their network while the marketing firm's execs actually stand there and watch them execute a test campaign, we're at least removing the problem of zombie networks doing the sending. This, of course, assumes the marketing firm has the presence of mind to at least briefly employ a neutral tech outfit to make sure the bulk mail guys aren't bullshitting them during the demo. I think I may smell a business unit prospect here... this deserves more thought.
Chinese specialize in bulletproof hosting, i.e. hosting spamvertised websites with service contracts that state the sit
Most likely both are true. American marketing firms have hosting arrangements with spammers operating servers in China and Russia. Additionally, these same American marketing firms most likely buy "bulk email services" from Russian and Chinese spammers operating networks of compromised PCs.
In fact, if I had my guess, I'd say it's quite likely that the bulk of infected Windows PCs are in China and Russia, since both nations have a track record of using illegitimate software that can't be updated. Again, in that case, it's still American marketing firms buying cycles and bandwidth from spammer outfits using compromised PCs to do their work.
I really don't think that the prospect of in-browser toolbars killing the application is a major cause for concern given today's client-side options.
First, any organization making serious use of this sort of application ought to have paid some attention to locking down their workstations. Yes, I *do* understand that "Mom and Pop" shops are usally running XP Home boxes they picked up at CompUSA, but that's simply not the case for midsize and enterprise clients. Heck, even our small business customers know better, mostly because we provide them with LAN solutions alongside programming services.
Second, a great deal of browser-based misery can be alleviated by using a better browser such as Mozilla to navigate through the web app. To address those who would worry about non-IE browsers breaking web application functionality, remember: there's no reason not to target your app to Mozilla if you know your sales people will be running it on their laptops/desktops.
All in all, web-based application solutions represent a much better way of managing most companies' data when compared to "traditional" client-server solutions, at least in many key respects. 100% of our new development is web applications built on Perl/PostgreSQL/Oracle foundations, and we're definitely not hurting for new businesss.
Incidentally, most privacy concerns can be addressed by simply providing a dedicated (whether in-house or public access via secure authentication) server to host the applications in question. One box per client, and so forth.
If anyone has mod points burning a hole in their pocket, please consider modding the parent post down.
"Centrino" is not the processor. It's Intel's project designation for their current wireless integration tech. The processor would be something along the lines of "Pentium."
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
Perhaps it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I just realized that this Slashdot article is probably good reading for a person evaluating the security ramifications of open source solutions.
Of particular interest, of course, would be the lengthy and detailed rebuttals listed in the comments section. I suggest browsing at +3 or so to separate the wheat from the chaff, but you'll probably still get a few angry fanatics making the overall message look bad (which is really too bad... excess emotion in a rebuttal can really ruin valid points for an otherwise uneducated reader). Again, hope it helps.
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
I recognize up front that I may not be the most objective soul on the planet, speaking as a web/database developer working exclusively on a free software platform. What follows would be my list of potential gotchas concerning questions we've been asked by clients:
(1) Since you are a member of a company that's subject to rather scrutinous regulatory and privacy concerns, you would definitely need to develop a solid policy for code auditing. Yes, I tend to trust the core developers of most major projects to watch patches and such pretty closely (especially with OpenBSD and Debian), but mistakes can happen. You'd probably need to consider the cost of keeping an in-house audit team (a few good coders) to review new releases under consideration for your production environment. These people don't come free, but I'm pretty sure they'd be less expensive than (a) implementing the applications yourself in-house, or (b) going with a propietary solution (which costs money up front) and then STILL having to audit the code to be sure.
(2) In relation to item (1), I'd be sure to cover the fact that just because a company has a closed source product doesn't necessary make their developers any more trustworthy than highly regarded community development teams. Reference the Sybase backdoor debacle for some concrete proof that nasty things happen in Fortune 500 companies. "Having someone to sue" doesn't necessarily mean jack when your company is getting hounded by the Feds for improper information disclosure.
(3) I'd try to focus on tech segments where open source solutions are already extemely well tested and in general acceptance, such as Apache for web serving. Again, some internal problems may really benefit from a chained solution using existing OSS projects and toolkits, but these are probably a touch sell that would be better left alone until other projects are firmly grounded. Possibly exempt from this rule would be broad projects such as the Perl programming language, although you would probably want to add a policy subsection on module auditing as well (since CPAN is just so darned comprehensive).
That's about all I've got for now; I'm a bit tired from a late day/night of bug fixes. Hope some of this helps.
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
Here's the core issue: no one is safe against a sufficiently determined adversary, regardless of preventive measures which may have been put into place "ahead of time."
In fact, from a psychological perspective, putting too many ineffective barriers to harm in place may actually have the effect of lulling the populace (read: target) into a false sense of security. Case in point: grandmothers getting anal cavity searches during "routine" airport screenings (sorry for the nasty mental image, it's for purposes of illustration).
There is simply no way to reliably defend a large land mass against random insurgent attacks from loosely organized parties, especially when said attacking parties are comfortable with the notion of dying for their cause. I don't advocate our leaving Iraq anytime soon, as that would be utterly disastrous in the long term, but you only have to look at CNN each morning to note the steady stream of attacks on U.S. forces. True, the attacks don't have any significant impact on the forces deployed at large, but they will continue as long as people are willing to lay down their lives in the name of rebellion (or freedom, depending on which side of the fence you're standing on).
Personally, I think any measure of success in all of this goes back to people worrying about preserving their own immediate liberty first while still standing ready to defend their country as a whole against attack. This is not to be confused with attempting to play Dad to the entire nation while leaving one's own door unlocked, a practice many people seem somewhat adept at these days.
Of course, I'm probably going to be branded an armchair-this-or-that for my rambling, but so it goes.
Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
"...being a died in the wool Mac guy nowadays..."
Man, death by asphyxiation under a heap of wool Macs sounds like a terrible way to go... I'd much prefer to be instantly crushed by an errant plane full of SGI workstations.
Since you're all better from it now that you've been reincarnated, I have to ask... is Mr. Gates *really* Satan? ;).
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
Sir/ma'am, you just used "robotic" and "sterile" (in the same thread, no less) in a conversation on Slashdot which basically amounts to petty squabbling over which of two words is more aesthetically pleasing.
I put forth the proposition that *this* is truly what BitTorrent is designed for: leveraging the power of the Internet to allow individuals to use their keyboards to contribute to the ever-increasing glut of meaningless dribble in cyberspace. :).
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
"OpenOffice would then presumeably be unable (from the legal perspective) to read and write "Microsoft" XML files."
I think the reverse engineering clause in the DMCA would protect this sort of behavior. Mind you, I'm not trying to portray the DMCA in anything resembling a rose-colored light, but I don't *think* the example you cited would be problematic.
I've actually had the opportunity to discuss this sort of thing (or something very similar) with an attorney who's a client of my company. Basically, his verdict on the matter was in concurrence with my interpretation of the law. This is (at best) third-hand legal advice however, and should probably be taken with a larger amount of salt than even ordinary Slashdot posts ;).
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"Anything that can allow someone to get something for free that they normally would have to pay for, will be used for that purpose."
Guns enable some people to get items for free which they otherwise would have to pay for. I don't recall seeing my father holding up gas stations with his Reuger 9mm.
Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.