OK, it's nice that there are real Nigerian politicians asking you not to send money to fake corrupt Nigerian politicians and fake corrupt widows and orphans of real corrupt Nigerian politicians, but it's getting pretty close to advertising for the whole business - at least one Anti-419 site I've seen was mainly there to promote the author's book on the 419 Scam. Is leaving your address with an Anti-419 site really helpful, or is it more like sending an "unsubscribe me please" note to a spammer? Is it really going to help Honest Nigerian Politicians stamp out the corrupt ones, or is it going to help Underpaid Nigerian Politicians find the guys with money and get a piece of their action? Is it going to find the spammers and get their email access cut off? Or can you do that without trashing all of Nigeria's real email or forwarding them all the Korean Schools Relay Spam?
DDoS attacks make news more than single-machine DOS attacks for two reasons - one is that taking over a few thousand machines is a pretty impressive task for a Skriptz Kidd13 with too much time on his hands, but it's Been Done Now. But the other is that doing a non-distributed DOS attack on a server that's big enough to be interesting is pretty hard. Taking over a single average-quality-administation machine isn't hard, though it's harder than scribbling the front page of a web server, and even that makes news some times (e.g. the Central Stupidity Agency scribbles.) But taking down a big site means either attacking a bunch of heavily-administered machines hard and fast enough to outrun the administrators, or coming up with a really subtle and nasty attack, or finding a big security hole, or else just using a big bunch of zombies to do the job. Most vandals go for the latter approach.
I don't know if it's still true, but in addition to SD, the 1100 also has the I2S I/O interface, which also has closed-ness problems. It'd be interesting to see what kind of driver support comes with the chip for Linux - will you be able to get open-source information on things you want to plug in to those busses.
For my applications, I like the 1500 better - it's got two Ethernet controllers built-in, so you should be able to make a variety of little router boxes. (With the 1100, there's only one built-in Ether, but there's a PCMCIA controller and a PCI controller, so you can add things easily enough, and building a wireless gateway should be easy with any of the parts.) And there's a 1500 development board which provides all sorts of physical interfaces and the different glue controllers, like PCMCIA, so a non-hardware-person like me can put together a system to try it out. Wonder when the 1100 will get one?
It's nice to see that the fastest computer in the world, Seti@Home, is a volunteer project that's 5-10 times as fast as the biggest nuclear weapons design computer in the world. If you look at the other top500.org machines, most of the Top 100 are either run directly by governments, or else run by universities that are presumably government-funded, or government-run consortia. The biggest non-government machines (other than SETI) are
#25 - 795GFlops - Charles Schwab
#40 - 618GFlops - Real World Computing Project http://pdswww.rwcp.or.jp/ - seems to be a computer industry consortium
#46 - 648GFlops - State Farm Insurance
#47 - 546 GLops - Saudi Aramco
#49 - 536 GFlops - Rottendorf Pharma GMBH
#53 - 512 - State Farm again
#54 - 507 - Compaq
#62 - 447 - Cray
#69 - 441 - Financial Institution, Hong Kong
#71, #72 - 420 - "Service Provider"
#73 - 420 - Sun
#78 - 371 - IBM TJWatson
#95 - 315 - Silicon Graphics
#99 - 301 - Edinfor, Portugal http://www.edinfor.pt/
So other than nuke labs, governments, universities, government weather bureaus, and computer companies that make really big computers, most of the really big computers are run by financial institutions. There's the occasional petroleum company, Pharma, or car company, and some universities that are smaller and might be doing non-government research, but there basically isn't a lot of general industry until you get down to about #150 around 200 GFlops (in particular, there are a bunch of 128-processor HP machines from 150-180.)
Neutron bombs are designed to output a large blast of radiation so you can kill people quickly without turning the target into a glowing uninhabitable wasteland or creating major fallout. Specifically, they're designed for applications like nuking Russian soldiers and tanks in Germany and Poland without having to destroy Europe in order to save it.
Bunker busters are also lower yield than city busters, but that's because there are times you want to make a 100-ton or 1 kiloton hole in the ground without having to haul in a kiloton of high explosive or making a 20kiloton Hiroshima-sized hole in the ground and wiping out the city. Similarly, "Tactical nuke" is defined as "Designed for use in Germany" -- some of the nuclear cannon shells are designed for taking out Russian tank forces without wasting the country.
But yes, both of these are relatively scary, in that they lower the threshold for nuclear use to some thinkable, as opposed to Mutually Assured Destruction. This did deter the Russians, but it also made it easier for the US to step on Russian satellites so it wasn't decreasing the chance of war, just changing the terms and the probable battlegrounds.
Yes, you can use it to save lives and improve crop yields, but the military's applications for weather prediction are mainly about when to attack people under the most effective conditions. They also did a lot of really excellent work on atmospheric dispersion of particulates in the 70s-80s that was really about dispersing chemical and biological weapons.
On the other hand, sometimes they're just trying to schedule a parade or a general's golf game:-)
The comp.arch newsgroup discussed this a decade or so ago - look for "Attack of the Killer Micros" discussions about when you need a Cray vs. a bunch of PCs, and scale up all the numbers by 1000.
Some problems are easy to parallelize, like SETI - each user gets handed the radio blips from a given chunk of the sky and crunches numbers to see if there's an alien there, and then every couple of hours sends in a "No, nobody there either" message and gets another chunk of sky to look in. Other problems are harder to parallelize, like turbulent airflow over non-smooth surfaces - each processor crunches a bit about the uncoming chunks of air over its chunk of surface, figures out where they're going and how twisty they are and hands them to the next processor, which has just done the same thing and changed all the inputs on that side, and going three-dimensional makes it worse, but if each processor is only interacting with its neighbors, that's still easier than if any change in the system changes everything else in the system. Also, memory bandwidth capabilities differ substantially between Big Iron machines vs. Lots Of PCs, and some problems really need that.
ASCI White is somewhere in between the Beowulf kind of network and the Super-Mega-Cray kind of machine, with tightly-coupled clusters of processors tied together by still-pretty-fast interconnects.
As somebody else pointed out, the military couldn't really use home machines for their computing, because the information about the design and engineering of nuclear explosives would leak out, and there are some things that are better off No Source At All than Open Source... But there are many problems that could use similar technology, either rooms full of small machines, or for some less security-critical applications, they might be able to use lots of PCs on bureaucrats' desks (except that if they still do procurement the way they used to, there are a lot of machines that have probably been upgraded to Pentium66s or Pentium133s from their predecessor Z248 286s, but are otherwise Not Blazingly Fast because if they're good enough to run a browser and a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, they're really just fine for 95% of the users.)
There's been a lot of press lately about not only Antarctic ice shelf collapses but also Arctic ice melting. It's causing serious problems for seals, polar bears that eat seals, and Inuit and Siberians who hunt seals and whales, as well as for anybody sailing up there.
What's missing from the comparisons
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The comparisons pointed to in the main articles (including the PDFs one or two layers deep in) are missing a couple of things:
DEcompression speeds - yes, compression is usually the hard part, but it's helpful to know decompression speeds as well, since realistically most images will be decompressed far more than one time. Will it be fast enough for browsers to decompress in real-time on cable modems with 500MHz machines, or will it be dog-slow compared to download time even on 56kbps modems on 5GHz machines? Is it much faster or slower than existing JPEG?
Color depths beyond 8 bits - all the reviews used 8-bit color depths, which is fine for the previous generation of scanners and not too bad for monitors, but under-$200 flatbed scanners are now doing 48-bit pixels (so 16 bits/color) as well as more dots per inch. How well do the new compression algorithms support them? How much does this affect compression speed?
Conversion from JPEG, for digital cameras and scanners? Many input devices are smart enough to compress their images using JPEG, but especially for cameras, won't have the horsepower to do JPEG-2 compression. How well will the new algorithm support recompressing pictures originally compressed with JPEG?
Also, will browsers be able to do progressive decoding, so they can start by displaying rough versions of the image and gradually refining it, or will this be a compression mode nobody bothers using like it seems to be for JPEG?
Please mod Eric's article up if you're a moderator this week - he's the authoritative person to be writing about this stuff...
gps output standard format on serial link
on
GNU Radio
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· Score: 2
gps devices generally output standard data formats on a serial link. (Perhaps the manufacturers each put some proprietary data in the stream as well?) (Some GPS devices are PCMCIA cards instead of serial-port, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody does USB, which may also help with power consumption issues.) Look around for software - somebody's almost certainly done something programmatic for Linux.
What I want is software that pulls timestamps out of the data stream so it can set a PC clock - either Windoze or Linux is fine, given the limited accuracy I need. (Actually, I've found that GPS reception inside buildings, at least for older handheld and wristwatch units, is bad enough that it's probably not going to be useful unless your lab has windows.)
Overture's methods are designed to prevent attacks on their advertisers by people who do multiple hits from one site, for instance hitting a competitor N thousand times, or looking up spamming services on Overture. (They don't say their methods, but there are a variety of obvious ways to stop simple attacks.) But that doesn't stop a Slashdotting attack, where thousands of separate people all go follow a given link for which the advertiser has to pay per hit - they're "genuine" unique hits, even if they're "astroturf" rather than "grass-roots".
There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com and search for "bulk email" or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.
In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture:-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.
California, and several other jurisdictions, have laws requiring spam to include the phrase "ADV:" in the Subject line. I've probably received 3-4 spams like that in the last, umm, couple of years. The long-ago-proposed Senate Bill 1618 was much more effective - it was never passed, but for a while many spammers would put "S.1618 says this email is NOT SPAM", and my email filters could happily trash any mail saying "S.1618" in it:-)
Laws against cracking machines on the internet have more effect - remember the userfriendly.org This Is Not A Denial-Of-Service Attack? Fortunately or unfortunately, it's not legal to treat most US-based spammers appropriately:-) It may be legal in the US to treat Korean spammers appropriately, but most of the entertaining techniques violate your ISP's Acceptable Use Policies to a much larger extent than SPAM does.
So that means you're stuck playing by the rules - contacting spammers' ISPs, contacting their customers (for the commercial spammers), contacting their customers' ISPs. For US-based spammers, you may have grounds for a small-claims lawsuit. Even if it's tough to make your "$200 price for evaluating potential-spam email messages" bill get paid, you may be able to find some excuse to sue them, and Small Claims Court is inexpensive for you and may cost them travel costs, may let you do discovery to get their customer lists and the lists of vendors who sold them your address (if they didn't harvest it themselves), and enough rounds of getting thrown off ISPs and dragged into 1000 cities' local courts can really get somebody's attention.
Most of the spam you get comes from Real Spammers or from companies that hired real spammers to Get Customers Fast (either deliberately or cluelessly.) But some of it comes from real companies that publish real contact information - even Microsoft should be reachable, because you can find lots of real addresses there and send them mail saying "Please help me find the people who can turn this off" or "I'd like to talk to your supervisor"... If that means a phone call to Mr. Bill Himself, his front people should be able to get you to the right organization.
I've had fun with spammers this week - a company (ancestry.com, aka myfamily.com) that was once legitimate seems to have hired several Direct Email Marketing Companies to promote them, using companies who do the dishonest "you must have opted-in somehow" strategy but using their own servers and leaving real addresses on them. I've emailed Myfamily.com's venture capitalists, and their PR department, and at least one of the spammer companies sent me back a note about "I'm sorry, we seem to have bought a bad list of names from ____ and we're getting tons of complaints, we'll put you on our block list right away", and in fact I haven't gotten any more mail from that spamhaus. Now to beat up the next one's ISPs...
I'm sorry, I just don't get it. It's one thing to say "It won't play on a Mac or Windows PC, you'll get ugly sounds instead of music" Fine. Tacky, but Darwin will deal with bad marketing plans quickly enough. Even "We'll sends some really loud ugly sounds that might warp your speaker heads" would be credible, if rude.
But "Your Operating System won't just treat the data bits like data, it'll *crash*???" What kind of BOGUS LAME-OID OPERATING SYSTEM WOULD DO THAT? What *should* happen, if the hardware and software are designed competently, is that the read() requests should either return with some indication of fewer bytes than requested or some error code saying the read failed, like it would if you put a disk full of badly formatted random noise bits into the drive.
Has Sony tricked the CDROM into handing lots of interrupts to the IDE controller or something? Would a USB- or Firewire-connected CDROM react differently?
Appliances for home? Don't be silly! An appliance is a high-performance combination of PC, serverware, and drives that lets you feed a network, and is usually far overpriced compared to putting the disks directly in your PC - if you were going to spend that kind of money, buy a new PC and turn the old one in to an appliance - otherwise, either buy external disk drives instead, or buy removable-disk drawers and put the disks in your machine, or pick a removable-media standard like DVD and use that.
You can get removable plastic drawers for disk drives for about $25, in which you mount whatever flavor of disk you like. When you want to change disks, just pop the drawer out and pop in a new one. They're typically 5.25" outside and hold 3.5" drives, and of course $25 has gone from "trivial percentage of the disk price" to "non-trivial percentage but still $25":-) The latest price I saw for disk drives at Fry's was CD-Rs are the new floppy-disks - they cost less than $0.25 on sale, drives come included with your PC, and they're big enough for a single application but not really enough to back up your whole machine frequently. (If the drive's not included, they're cheap and fast.) DVD recording standards are still changing, and I'm not buying one for a while, but if you've got a standard that works for your PC and your TV's DVD, go for it - 4MB or so drives are big enough to be reasonably practical for backing up most systems.
External drives - they're *really* convenient for home. Firewire costs more than IDE drives, but not *too* much more, and you can get firewire boards for your PC for not too much money and impress your Mac-addict friends with your broadmindedness. USB1.x is slow (fine for MP3 jukeboxes, semi-ok for cameras, still really boring for actual disks), but USB2 rocks out and you should be able to buy USB2 shoebox disks at reasonable prices pretty soon. I've seen some Firewire-shoebox-add-your-own-IDE-drive boxes in the store, so you can buy one to start with and upgrade it as the disk-drive market continues to get bigger and cheaper.
Yes, it's the same Dorothy Denning. She was the person who did the initial "Trial Balloon" push for key escrow, and when the NSA's Clipper Chip came out, she led the whitewash study team that published the initial "Yes, Skipjack appears strong" preliminary study and never did publish the "Is The Whole Clipper System Strong, Secure, Easy/Hard to Abuse" study that they were ostensibly tasked to do. It was an intellectually dishonest charade designed to provide PR for the FBI's system by saying "See, the Front Door is made of Very Strong Material, Pay No Attention To The Back Door Flapping Open In The Breeze with the big 'Cops Only' Neon Sign Or the Lack Of Hinge Pins on the Front Door."
Slashdotted the IETF RFC Editors - Is ICANN Next?
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 1
The Infamous Slashdot Effect has been demonstrating its power against web sites around the world for several years. Today we took out the IETF RFC Editors ! (More precisely, the URLs told me they had too many ftp sessions running and weren't accepting more.) Who should we take out tomorrow? ICANN? irs.gov? Can we be stopped?
My hotmail account had some default birth year on it, like the 1997 that I got the account. When they put in the new law about protecting information for children under 13, they blocked my account until my parents gave permission for them to reactivate it, complete with documentation that those "parents" were over 13. Not wanting to give them real documentation, I decided that I could use another disposable account somewhere else instead.
So what happens if you type in "localhost" rather than a fully qualified domain name? Probably the machine you're on has "127.0.0.1 localhost" in its equivalent of a hosts file, but another alternative is that it tries to resolve localhost.subdomain.mydomain.com, then localhost.mydomain.com, then localhost.com . The last one *does* resolve, to a machine that *isn't* 127.0.0.1:-) Be careful, a Grue might eat you! I don't know what happens to email to root@localhost.com, but it probably also gets eaten by grues.
If for some reason, your browser or some other helpful software decides to resolve that to www.localhost.com , you'll get a helpful page explaining that your DNS configuration is probably not correct and pointing you to some common problems.
Gakk.. Intellectual property laws are certainly getting abused - I don't think the Constitutional provisions for granting monopolies for limited periods of time to encourage the arts and sciences were ever imagined to mean "Death Plus 75 Years" or "Not until Mickey Mouse's Copyright Stops Being Valuable" or "DMCA Monopoly Protection against Screwdrivers That Can Unscrew DVD-Player Cases".
Slashdot Mirror
Real Corruption in Nigeria - and Shell Oil
Hey, one Fake Dead Corrupt Politician is as good as the next, and no point in letting the Fake Dead Nigerians have all the fun....
DDoS attacks make news more than single-machine DOS attacks for two reasons - one is that taking over a few thousand machines is a pretty impressive task for a Skriptz Kidd13 with too much time on his hands, but it's Been Done Now. But the other is that doing a non-distributed DOS attack on a server that's big enough to be interesting is pretty hard. Taking over a single average-quality-administation machine isn't hard, though it's harder than scribbling the front page of a web server, and even that makes news some times (e.g. the Central Stupidity Agency scribbles.) But taking down a big site means either attacking a bunch of heavily-administered machines hard and fast enough to outrun the administrators, or coming up with a really subtle and nasty attack, or finding a big security hole, or else just using a big bunch of zombies to do the job. Most vandals go for the latter approach.
For my applications, I like the 1500 better - it's got two Ethernet controllers built-in, so you should be able to make a variety of little router boxes. (With the 1100, there's only one built-in Ether, but there's a PCMCIA controller and a PCI controller, so you can add things easily enough, and building a wireless gateway should be easy with any of the parts.) And there's a 1500 development board which provides all sorts of physical interfaces and the different glue controllers, like PCMCIA, so a non-hardware-person like me can put together a system to try it out. Wonder when the 1100 will get one?
So other than nuke labs, governments, universities, government weather bureaus, and computer companies that make really big computers, most of the really big computers are run by financial institutions. There's the occasional petroleum company, Pharma, or car company, and some universities that are smaller and might be doing non-government research, but there basically isn't a lot of general industry until you get down to about #150 around 200 GFlops (in particular, there are a bunch of 128-processor HP machines from 150-180.)
Bunker busters are also lower yield than city busters, but that's because there are times you want to make a 100-ton or 1 kiloton hole in the ground without having to haul in a kiloton of high explosive or making a 20kiloton Hiroshima-sized hole in the ground and wiping out the city. Similarly, "Tactical nuke" is defined as "Designed for use in Germany" -- some of the nuclear cannon shells are designed for taking out Russian tank forces without wasting the country.
But yes, both of these are relatively scary, in that they lower the threshold for nuclear use to some thinkable, as opposed to Mutually Assured Destruction. This did deter the Russians, but it also made it easier for the US to step on Russian satellites so it wasn't decreasing the chance of war, just changing the terms and the probable battlegrounds.
On the other hand, sometimes they're just trying to schedule a parade or a general's golf game :-)
Some problems are easy to parallelize, like SETI - each user gets handed the radio blips from a given chunk of the sky and crunches numbers to see if there's an alien there, and then every couple of hours sends in a "No, nobody there either" message and gets another chunk of sky to look in. Other problems are harder to parallelize, like turbulent airflow over non-smooth surfaces - each processor crunches a bit about the uncoming chunks of air over its chunk of surface, figures out where they're going and how twisty they are and hands them to the next processor, which has just done the same thing and changed all the inputs on that side, and going three-dimensional makes it worse, but if each processor is only interacting with its neighbors, that's still easier than if any change in the system changes everything else in the system. Also, memory bandwidth capabilities differ substantially between Big Iron machines vs. Lots Of PCs, and some problems really need that.
ASCI White is somewhere in between the Beowulf kind of network and the Super-Mega-Cray kind of machine, with tightly-coupled clusters of processors tied together by still-pretty-fast interconnects.
As somebody else pointed out, the military couldn't really use home machines for their computing, because the information about the design and engineering of nuclear explosives would leak out, and there are some things that are better off No Source At All than Open Source... But there are many problems that could use similar technology, either rooms full of small machines, or for some less security-critical applications, they might be able to use lots of PCs on bureaucrats' desks (except that if they still do procurement the way they used to, there are a lot of machines that have probably been upgraded to Pentium66s or Pentium133s from their predecessor Z248 286s, but are otherwise Not Blazingly Fast because if they're good enough to run a browser and a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet, they're really just fine for 95% of the users.)
There's been a lot of press lately about not only Antarctic ice shelf collapses but also Arctic ice melting. It's causing serious problems for seals, polar bears that eat seals, and Inuit and Siberians who hunt seals and whales, as well as for anybody sailing up there.
Please mod Eric's article up if you're a moderator this week - he's the authoritative person to be writing about this stuff...
What I want is software that pulls timestamps out of the data stream so it can set a PC clock - either Windoze or Linux is fine, given the limited accuracy I need. (Actually, I've found that GPS reception inside buildings, at least for older handheld and wristwatch units, is bad enough that it's probably not going to be useful unless your lab has windows.)
I'm assuming the answer is yes, because the external interfaces should still be the same, but does this hose up device drivers or anything?
Sorry about that...
There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com and search for "bulk email" or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.
In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture :-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.
Laws against cracking machines on the internet have more effect - remember the userfriendly.org This Is Not A Denial-Of-Service Attack? Fortunately or unfortunately, it's not legal to treat most US-based spammers appropriately :-) It may be legal in the US to treat Korean spammers appropriately, but most of the entertaining techniques violate your ISP's Acceptable Use Policies to a much larger extent than SPAM does.
So that means you're stuck playing by the rules - contacting spammers' ISPs, contacting their customers (for the commercial spammers), contacting their customers' ISPs. For US-based spammers, you may have grounds for a small-claims lawsuit. Even if it's tough to make your "$200 price for evaluating potential-spam email messages" bill get paid, you may be able to find some excuse to sue them, and Small Claims Court is inexpensive for you and may cost them travel costs, may let you do discovery to get their customer lists and the lists of vendors who sold them your address (if they didn't harvest it themselves), and enough rounds of getting thrown off ISPs and dragged into 1000 cities' local courts can really get somebody's attention.
I've had fun with spammers this week - a company (ancestry.com, aka myfamily.com) that was once legitimate seems to have hired several Direct Email Marketing Companies to promote them, using companies who do the dishonest "you must have opted-in somehow" strategy but using their own servers and leaving real addresses on them. I've emailed Myfamily.com's venture capitalists, and their PR department, and at least one of the spammer companies sent me back a note about "I'm sorry, we seem to have bought a bad list of names from ____ and we're getting tons of complaints, we'll put you on our block list right away", and in fact I haven't gotten any more mail from that spamhaus. Now to beat up the next one's ISPs...
But "Your Operating System won't just treat the data bits like data, it'll *crash*???" What kind of BOGUS LAME-OID OPERATING SYSTEM WOULD DO THAT? What *should* happen, if the hardware and software are designed competently, is that the read() requests should either return with some indication of fewer bytes than requested or some error code saying the read failed, like it would if you put a disk full of badly formatted random noise bits into the drive.
Has Sony tricked the CDROM into handing lots of interrupts to the IDE controller or something? Would a USB- or Firewire-connected CDROM react differently?
You can get removable plastic drawers for disk drives for about $25, in which you mount whatever flavor of disk you like. When you want to change disks, just pop the drawer out and pop in a new one. They're typically 5.25" outside and hold 3.5" drives, and of course $25 has gone from "trivial percentage of the disk price" to "non-trivial percentage but still $25" :-) The latest price I saw for disk drives at Fry's was CD-Rs are the new floppy-disks - they cost less than $0.25 on sale, drives come included with your PC, and they're big enough for a single application but not really enough to back up your whole machine frequently. (If the drive's not included, they're cheap and fast.) DVD recording standards are still changing, and I'm not buying one for a while, but if you've got a standard that works for your PC and your TV's DVD, go for it - 4MB or so drives are big enough to be reasonably practical for backing up most systems.
External drives - they're *really* convenient for home. Firewire costs more than IDE drives, but not *too* much more, and you can get firewire boards for your PC for not too much money and impress your Mac-addict friends with your broadmindedness. USB1.x is slow (fine for MP3 jukeboxes, semi-ok for cameras, still really boring for actual disks), but USB2 rocks out and you should be able to buy USB2 shoebox disks at reasonable prices pretty soon. I've seen some Firewire-shoebox-add-your-own-IDE-drive boxes in the store, so you can buy one to start with and upgrade it as the disk-drive market continues to get bigger and cheaper.
Yes, it's the same Dorothy Denning. She was the person who did the initial "Trial Balloon" push for key escrow, and when the NSA's Clipper Chip came out, she led the whitewash study team that published the initial "Yes, Skipjack appears strong" preliminary study and never did publish the "Is The Whole Clipper System Strong, Secure, Easy/Hard to Abuse" study that they were ostensibly tasked to do. It was an intellectually dishonest charade designed to provide PR for the FBI's system by saying "See, the Front Door is made of Very Strong Material, Pay No Attention To The Back Door Flapping Open In The Breeze with the big 'Cops Only' Neon Sign Or the Lack Of Hinge Pins on the Front Door."
Bwahhahahahahahah
My hotmail account had some default birth year on it, like the 1997 that I got the account. When they put in the new law about protecting information for children under 13, they blocked my account until my parents gave permission for them to reactivate it, complete with documentation that those "parents" were over 13. Not wanting to give them real documentation, I decided that I could use another disposable account somewhere else instead.
If for some reason, your browser or some other helpful software decides to resolve that to www.localhost.com , you'll get a helpful page explaining that your DNS configuration is probably not correct and pointing you to some common problems.
Gakk.. Intellectual property laws are certainly getting abused - I don't think the Constitutional provisions for granting monopolies for limited periods of time to encourage the arts and sciences were ever imagined to mean "Death Plus 75 Years" or "Not until Mickey Mouse's Copyright Stops Being Valuable" or "DMCA Monopoly Protection against Screwdrivers That Can Unscrew DVD-Player Cases".