HUAC didn't melt away - go read Wikipedia HUAC article. They were still around harassing the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protest organizations. Some of their most famous targets in later years were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, but a friend of mine got interviewed by them (or their staff; it's been a long time and I don't remember details) about his involvement in SDS.
I'd assumed he was talking about the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration, the most shameful Presidency we've had since Jefferson Davis's administration. They've been far more opposed to and dismissive of the Constitution than anything done by either Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson (who was seriously bad news) or probably even Lincoln.
And Warren Harding doesn't even fit on that scale; he was just the traditional corrupt politician trading favors for money and other favors, and supposedly losing the White House china set in a poker game.
Back when I had a security clearance in the 80s, they also asked if you had any family members who were part of organizations advocating the overthrow of the U.S. One guy had marked "yes" - his explanation was that his great-grandfather had fought for the Confederacy during the War Between The States. They let him in anyway...
"Romeo and Juliet" laws don't mean that the age of consent is under 18; they mean that even if one of the partners is under the age of consent, it's not statutory rape if the other partner is within N years of the same age. In New Jersey, the age of consent was something like 15 or 16, and N=3 when they passed the law in the (?80s?).
While some states have an age of consent that's 18, in many others it's lower. When I was growing up in Delaware, the age was 12, because if you were old enough to get pregnant, you were old enough to make your own decisions about sex (or if you prefer a non-feminist explanation, old enough to be a farmer's wife because why would girls need a secondary education?) They've since raised it to something like 14. But it was still strange to encounter the term "jailbait" when I went off to college in another state; the idea that the government would meddle in something like that was appalling, and the age limit of 18 seemed to be totally out of touch with reality.
Somebody was busted within the last year for having a dozen of them in her car trunk. (She ran a business selling them.) (Might have been Alabama instead of TX.) Even if they can't outlaw sodomy, they can outlaw obscene devices, because those things are Not Politically Correct.
Calling Quakers complete Luddites doesn't make sense; they've got no problems with technology as long as you don't let it distract you from living an authentic life. Amish generally think post-1700s technology gets in the way. But they're both "Historic Peace Churches", along with the Mennonites, and both traditionally wore plain clothes and big hats back in the 1700s. In the case of the Quakers, the hats were because England had a beastly climate, and then many of them moved to North America; I suspect it was pretty much the same with the Amish moving from the Germanies.
On the other hand, Quakers never did adopt the American technology called televangelism. A TV show with a bunch of people sitting around quietly for an hour just doesn't haul in cash, even if there is the exciting part at the end where the shake hands and then the clerk reads the announcements for the week, and maybe there's a potluck lunch or some coffee. It can be deeply meaningful if you're there, but you've got to be there...
Yeah, some hardback books retail for $27.95, but many are less than that, and if the book sells enough copies to get to paperback, or starts out as trade or regular paperback, that's a lot _cheaper_ to Amazon than the ebook. On the other hand, the dead trees actually cost the publisher about 1/3 more on an amortized basis, because most hardback books don't sell out their print runs, except for the best sellers, and the publisher eats the cost of the returns.
This is just a plot to keep our friends from Down Under from patenting anything in the US. And that goes for their neighbors with the sheep and Kiwi fruits as well...
Yeah, it's a disk cache that's external to your system RAM, with a (hopefully) no-brainer setup. You can use whatever size SSD you want, so it can be bigger than you'll get by expanding your system RAM or replacing your motherboard with one that handles more RAM, and you can use slower RAM or flash for the SSD as opposed to blazing-fast system RAM.
The big performance win you get from systems like this is write caching on database transaction logs and file system journals, because the writes don't have to wait for rotating machinery to spin around and seek to the right part of the disk, and you can queue stuff on stable storage outside the OS so the application can go on to the next step instead of waiting around for disk interrupts.
For a really wide range of applications, what you really need is fast caching of writes to stable storage, so your database transaction logs, file system journals, and modified inodes are saved and the application can go on to its next steps while the SSD box copies itself to higher-latency cheaper rotating machinery. Read-caching is something the operating system can do for itself in RAM (though the SSD box can also do its own prediction, especially for things like track-at-a-time reads of the disk), and the SSD can often keep a bigger read cache than the OS can because it's less performance-critical than caching in system RAM.
I don't know the resolution of the X-ray backscatter technology, but the other hi-res scanners they've been talking about get referred to as millimeter-wave or terahertz. A THz is about 1/3 mm. So basically, these devices have a resolution that'll show skin wrinkles.
Actually, EFF's Deep Crack used ASICs, not FPGAs. They're custom-designed chips that only do one thing, while FPGAs let you download the design into the chips. ASICs are much denser (because they use only the transistors they need and a bit of interconnection, instead of using gate structures that let you download the gate designs into them), and are much cheaper (assuming you're making enough of them to amortize the setup costs.) A typical design cycle is to prototype your application in FPGAs, work the bugs out, and then burn it into ASICs for production. Also, Deep Crack used 1856 ASICs vs. 176 FPGAs here, so 10 times as many of them. (It would be nice if they'd announced whether they were doing anything new with the algorithms, though.)
One of the fun things about living in Silicon Valley is that the culture assumes a lot of technical knowledge. There used to be a billboard that just said "FPGA2ASIC" (on a license-plate background) with a phone number and web site, which assumed that enough people would not only understand what service they were selling, but would be looking for someone to do it for them.
It only doubles because there are attacks that can take advantage of the structure - you're basically splitting it into a 112-bit part and a 56-bit part plus storage, and while they're not currently practical, if you had the horsepower necessary to crack 112 bits you'd have enough to do the 2^56 storage as well.
It turns out that there are attacks on 3DES that mean that the effective strength is still only 112 bits, not 168, even if you're using three different keys. Since 2 keys are just as strong, it lets you use a 128-bit or 160-bit source of randomness to generate them.
The point of the original article was to discuss what tracking can be done without the IP address or cookies, and as I've said, you're creating a different unique value every time. So you're Not going to see one unique agent string coming from the same IP range over and over - you're going to see a different brand new unique agent string every page load (or at least every session), and if you've only got an IP range (e.g. because it's coming from a wireless access point at a coffee shop) you've got no way to correlate sessions.
If you've got an IP address you can track to a user, you don't need the user agent to be trackable, unless you're trying to figure out whether it belongs to the resident or to random wireless guests.
If I'm logged on to Gmail, Google News doesn't show me sports, and shows me more international news - yay! If I'm not logged on, I get vanilla news.
If I'm reading BBC News on line, the front page is much terser, so I haven't bothered finding out if they let you customize. If there's a headline that makes entirely no sense and I just can't parse it, 90% of the time it's about cricket.
It should make you more unique - but if it's actually different every time, you should be less trackable, because each time the web server sees a User Agent that it's never seen before, so you look like a different stranger every time.
You don't have to disable Javascript everywhere; you can use NoScript to enable it for sites you trust (or don't trust but want to get full functionality anyway). And most of the tracking seems to happen on tracker-company sites that the content-provider sites use, so you can use NoScript to block the ones that Adblock doesn't already block.
However, I recently installed Ghostery, and even with NoScript blocking popular trackers, there's apparently still a bunch of Javascript dreck on many popular web sites, especially blogger services and news sites, so I'm now using that to block more stuff.
I checked with Mozilla 3.6, Mozilla with Noscript blocking Javascript, and IE. There are now 44000 users.
Blocking Javascript blocked my fonts and plugins, so I had only 8 bits of uniqueness,
but my fonts were enough to make me unique on unblocked Mozilla and IE (technically not unique, but there were only two instances, which would be my Mozilla and my IE)
my plugins were unique on unblocked Mozilla and 1/12000 on IE, and
My User Agent string was unique on IE (claiming to be Mozilla).
The tricky bit was that my fonts include the corporate-logo font for $DAYJOB, and I guess none of my coworkers have tried the system or have an earlier edition of the corporate-IT-installed vanilla fonts. (My laptop trashed itself last week, so it's running a vanilla image as of Monday, and I'll have to go reinstall those cool programmer-oriented monospaced fonts and Elvish and such.)
Are there any privacy extensions or options to Mozilla to tell it to only advertise boring fonts, or advertise your favorite choices of fonts so web pages display things the way you want?
1.1.1.1 isn't non-routable the way 127.0.0.3 or 254.0.0.1 are - it's just part of a block of addresses that weren't currently assigned by IANA or the RIRs and therefore aren't advertised to the public by ISPs. If you're using them inside your own network, you can theoretically do anything you want with them except advertise them to the outside world, the same way you can with RFC1918 addresses - it's just a Bad Idea now that 1/8 has been allocated.
The 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x addresses are all private-space addresses, so there's no way for me to tell where they are, but if the 212.74 addresses are part of your own network, there's nothing that indicates that this traffic ever hit the public Internet - maybe they're showing up because you're using registered addresses internally, which is fine, or maybe you've got a box that's got a 212.74 address on the public side and RFC1918 on the private side and it's picking the external one to include in traceroute packets; either way is fine.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're misreading what I was referring to with "And if it did" (which I'll admit may not be entirely clear even with context, much less without.) The "if it did" refers to "if Congress did cancel the US's debt", not "if the phrase in the Constitution meant _x_". Congress has not yet canceled the US's debts, and if it did, they'd have serious trouble borrowing more.
Are you contending that the US government and the Southern States had the legal obligation to pay back Confederate debts?
I'm told, by sources that are usually authoritative enough that I'm going to be lazy and not go find the original references (:-), that APNIC has in fact done the right thing and reserved several commonly-misused subnets of 1/8 and 27/8. Slashdot won't let me quote the actual table because it has too many "'junk' characters", but they did 1.0.0.0/24, 1.1.1.0/24, 1.2.3.0/24, 1.50.0.0/22, 1.255.0.0/16.
Slashdot Mirror
HUAC didn't melt away - go read Wikipedia HUAC article. They were still around harassing the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protest organizations. Some of their most famous targets in later years were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, but a friend of mine got interviewed by them (or their staff; it's been a long time and I don't remember details) about his involvement in SDS.
I'd assumed he was talking about the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration, the most shameful Presidency we've had since Jefferson Davis's administration. They've been far more opposed to and dismissive of the Constitution than anything done by either Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson (who was seriously bad news) or probably even Lincoln.
And Warren Harding doesn't even fit on that scale; he was just the traditional corrupt politician trading favors for money and other favors, and supposedly losing the White House china set in a poker game.
Back when I had a security clearance in the 80s, they also asked if you had any family members who were part of organizations advocating the overthrow of the U.S. One guy had marked "yes" - his explanation was that his great-grandfather had fought for the Confederacy during the War Between The States. They let him in anyway...
"Romeo and Juliet" laws don't mean that the age of consent is under 18; they mean that even if one of the partners is under the age of consent, it's not statutory rape if the other partner is within N years of the same age. In New Jersey, the age of consent was something like 15 or 16, and N=3 when they passed the law in the (?80s?).
While some states have an age of consent that's 18, in many others it's lower. When I was growing up in Delaware, the age was 12, because if you were old enough to get pregnant, you were old enough to make your own decisions about sex (or if you prefer a non-feminist explanation, old enough to be a farmer's wife because why would girls need a secondary education?) They've since raised it to something like 14. But it was still strange to encounter the term "jailbait" when I went off to college in another state; the idea that the government would meddle in something like that was appalling, and the age limit of 18 seemed to be totally out of touch with reality.
Somebody was busted within the last year for having a dozen of them in her car trunk. (She ran a business selling them.) (Might have been Alabama instead of TX.) Even if they can't outlaw sodomy, they can outlaw obscene devices, because those things are Not Politically Correct.
Calling Quakers complete Luddites doesn't make sense; they've got no problems with technology as long as you don't let it distract you from living an authentic life. Amish generally think post-1700s technology gets in the way. But they're both "Historic Peace Churches", along with the Mennonites, and both traditionally wore plain clothes and big hats back in the 1700s. In the case of the Quakers, the hats were because England had a beastly climate, and then many of them moved to North America; I suspect it was pretty much the same with the Amish moving from the Germanies.
On the other hand, Quakers never did adopt the American technology called televangelism. A TV show with a bunch of people sitting around quietly for an hour just doesn't haul in cash, even if there is the exciting part at the end where the shake hands and then the clerk reads the announcements for the week, and maybe there's a potluck lunch or some coffee. It can be deeply meaningful if you're there, but you've got to be there...
It was just spelled "4chan"....
Yeah, some hardback books retail for $27.95, but many are less than that, and if the book sells enough copies to get to paperback, or starts out as trade or regular paperback, that's a lot _cheaper_ to Amazon than the ebook. On the other hand, the dead trees actually cost the publisher about 1/3 more on an amortized basis, because most hardback books don't sell out their print runs, except for the best sellers, and the publisher eats the cost of the returns.
This is just a plot to keep our friends from Down Under from patenting anything in the US. And that goes for their neighbors with the sheep and Kiwi fruits as well...
Yeah, it's a disk cache that's external to your system RAM, with a (hopefully) no-brainer setup. You can use whatever size SSD you want, so it can be bigger than you'll get by expanding your system RAM or replacing your motherboard with one that handles more RAM, and you can use slower RAM or flash for the SSD as opposed to blazing-fast system RAM.
The big performance win you get from systems like this is write caching on database transaction logs and file system journals, because the writes don't have to wait for rotating machinery to spin around and seek to the right part of the disk, and you can queue stuff on stable storage outside the OS so the application can go on to the next step instead of waiting around for disk interrupts.
For a really wide range of applications, what you really need is fast caching of writes to stable storage, so your database transaction logs, file system journals, and modified inodes are saved and the application can go on to its next steps while the SSD box copies itself to higher-latency cheaper rotating machinery. Read-caching is something the operating system can do for itself in RAM (though the SSD box can also do its own prediction, especially for things like track-at-a-time reads of the disk), and the SSD can often keep a bigger read cache than the OS can because it's less performance-critical than caching in system RAM.
I don't know the resolution of the X-ray backscatter technology, but the other hi-res scanners they've been talking about get referred to as millimeter-wave or terahertz. A THz is about 1/3 mm. So basically, these devices have a resolution that'll show skin wrinkles.
Actually, EFF's Deep Crack used ASICs, not FPGAs. They're custom-designed chips that only do one thing, while FPGAs let you download the design into the chips. ASICs are much denser (because they use only the transistors they need and a bit of interconnection, instead of using gate structures that let you download the gate designs into them), and are much cheaper (assuming you're making enough of them to amortize the setup costs.) A typical design cycle is to prototype your application in FPGAs, work the bugs out, and then burn it into ASICs for production. Also, Deep Crack used 1856 ASICs vs. 176 FPGAs here, so 10 times as many of them. (It would be nice if they'd announced whether they were doing anything new with the algorithms, though.)
One of the fun things about living in Silicon Valley is that the culture assumes a lot of technical knowledge. There used to be a billboard that just said "FPGA2ASIC" (on a license-plate background) with a phone number and web site, which assumed that enough people would not only understand what service they were selling, but would be looking for someone to do it for them.
It only doubles because there are attacks that can take advantage of the structure - you're basically splitting it into a 112-bit part and a 56-bit part plus storage, and while they're not currently practical, if you had the horsepower necessary to crack 112 bits you'd have enough to do the 2^56 storage as well.
It turns out that there are attacks on 3DES that mean that the effective strength is still only 112 bits, not 168, even if you're using three different keys. Since 2 keys are just as strong, it lets you use a 128-bit or 160-bit source of randomness to generate them.
The point of the original article was to discuss what tracking can be done without the IP address or cookies, and as I've said, you're creating a different unique value every time. So you're Not going to see one unique agent string coming from the same IP range over and over - you're going to see a different brand new unique agent string every page load (or at least every session), and if you've only got an IP range (e.g. because it's coming from a wireless access point at a coffee shop) you've got no way to correlate sessions.
If you've got an IP address you can track to a user, you don't need the user agent to be trackable, unless you're trying to figure out whether it belongs to the resident or to random wireless guests.
If I'm logged on to Gmail, Google News doesn't show me sports, and shows me more international news - yay! If I'm not logged on, I get vanilla news.
If I'm reading BBC News on line, the front page is much terser, so I haven't bothered finding out if they let you customize. If there's a headline that makes entirely no sense and I just can't parse it, 90% of the time it's about cricket.
It should make you more unique - but if it's actually different every time, you should be less trackable, because each time the web server sees a User Agent that it's never seen before, so you look like a different stranger every time.
You don't have to disable Javascript everywhere; you can use NoScript to enable it for sites you trust (or don't trust but want to get full functionality anyway). And most of the tracking seems to happen on tracker-company sites that the content-provider sites use, so you can use NoScript to block the ones that Adblock doesn't already block.
However, I recently installed Ghostery, and even with NoScript blocking popular trackers, there's apparently still a bunch of Javascript dreck on many popular web sites, especially blogger services and news sites, so I'm now using that to block more stuff.
I checked with Mozilla 3.6, Mozilla with Noscript blocking Javascript, and IE. There are now 44000 users.
The tricky bit was that my fonts include the corporate-logo font for $DAYJOB, and I guess none of my coworkers have tried the system or have an earlier edition of the corporate-IT-installed vanilla fonts. (My laptop trashed itself last week, so it's running a vanilla image as of Monday, and I'll have to go reinstall those cool programmer-oriented monospaced fonts and Elvish and such.)
Are there any privacy extensions or options to Mozilla to tell it to only advertise boring fonts, or advertise your favorite choices of fonts so web pages display things the way you want?
It's definitely a different kind of market.
1.1.1.1 isn't non-routable the way 127.0.0.3 or 254.0.0.1 are - it's just part of a block of addresses that weren't currently assigned by IANA or the RIRs and therefore aren't advertised to the public by ISPs. If you're using them inside your own network, you can theoretically do anything you want with them except advertise them to the outside world, the same way you can with RFC1918 addresses - it's just a Bad Idea now that 1/8 has been allocated.
The 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x addresses are all private-space addresses, so there's no way for me to tell where they are, but if the 212.74 addresses are part of your own network, there's nothing that indicates that this traffic ever hit the public Internet - maybe they're showing up because you're using registered addresses internally, which is fine, or maybe you've got a box that's got a 212.74 address on the public side and RFC1918 on the private side and it's picking the external one to include in traceroute packets; either way is fine.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're misreading what I was referring to with "And if it did" (which I'll admit may not be entirely clear even with context, much less without.) The "if it did" refers to "if Congress did cancel the US's debt", not "if the phrase in the Constitution meant _x_". Congress has not yet canceled the US's debts, and if it did, they'd have serious trouble borrowing more.
Are you contending that the US government and the Southern States had the legal obligation to pay back Confederate debts?
Benny! We're all Doomed!
Of course, 2012 is when the IPv4 addresses run out and the intertubes slow down to a trickle.
I'm told, by sources that are usually authoritative enough that I'm going to be lazy and not go find the original references (:-), that APNIC has in fact done the right thing and reserved several commonly-misused subnets of 1/8 and 27/8. Slashdot won't let me quote the actual table because it has too many "'junk' characters", but they did 1.0.0.0/24, 1.1.1.0/24, 1.2.3.0/24, 1.50.0.0/22, 1.255.0.0/16.