You are right. I was arguing against unregulated, as I believe the original article did. Regulation can certainly help, but the unlicensed bands like 2.4ISM are still a take-your-chances sort of thing.
Current radio regulation is far from efficient, but removing the regulation entirely is foolish, and ignoring frequency sharing won't work. There are engineering realities that the writers and lawyers don't understand that limit this.
While bandwidth is an oversimplistic way of either looking at things, or regulating them, it is a fact that any communications system can be analyzed (roughly) in terms of bandwidth. And this means that any communications system can interfere with any other communications system if they share frequencies in any sense.
For a real world example of why you can't ignore bandwidth, try running WiFi in a house where you have some 2.4GHz phones. It may work. But sometimes it doesn't - the reason - radio frequency interference. They share the same bandwidth.
Ah, you say... so they don't use good enough systems... or aren't broad-band enough... or something! Not true... there are hard physical limits that no amount of scheming will get around. The rest of this post discusses that in more technical detail.
All signaling systems (INCLUDING Time-Modulated Ultra-Wide-Band)require a separation of signal from noise. Noise is either natural (thermal, atmospheric, solar, etc), incidental (power line leakage, etc) or other radio systems. Regardless of what kind of signaling system is used, it has a limit as to the amount and kind of noise that can be tolerated in any given situation. The other limits described below affect the amount of noise reduction/signal enhancement that is possible.
Limits to processing gain. WiFi and other modern technologies (CDMA cell phones) use spread spectrum to reduce the effects of interference. Unfortunately, this does not eliminate interference. In engineering terms, it is the equivalent of adding gain to the desired signal. The gain is roughly the bandwidth occupied by the transmitted signal divided by the bandwidth required to send the signal without modulation (the baseband bandwidth). This value is measured in decibels, and is typically 20-30 dB, although it can increase. But the higherhe data rate, the lower the processing gain!
The effect of distance - radio signal energy decreases by an inverse square law. This means that a nearby interference source can have a much stronger signal, proportionally, than the desired signal from a farther source. Some numerical examples:
A receiver at room temperature will have an inherent noise level of -174dBm (10E-20.4 Watts). This means that if you want to send a 1HZ signal, you must generate more than -174dBm in the receiver. This sounds like a tiny number, BUT...
A hand-held cell phone operates up to about 600mW which is +27dBm.
Now, let's transmit that signal a few miles. The antenna has roughly no gain on the handset. The receiver antenna might have a capture are of 1/4 meter. At 3 miles, the 600mW is distributed across the surface of a 3 mi radius sphere, giving a signal strength of 6.5*E-10 Watts at the receiver (-62dBm).
The baseband signal of this cell phone is about 2KHZ. This means that the -174dBm requirement is upped by a factor of 2000 to -140dBm. But we also need a signal to noise ratio of, say, 15dB to receive that signal well, so now we are at -135dBm. So - we have a roughly 43 dB margin.
Now add 40 dB of path loss from buildings in the way and you have a 3dB margin... your signal barely makes it adequately.
Let us fire up another cell phone on the same frequency band (I am assuming we are using spread spectrum). Let us assume a reasonable spreading gain of 1000 (30dB). Put that cell phone 100 yards away, and guess what: It gives you an effective signal of.6/1000/125000/4 = 1.2x10E6 milliwatts or -59dBm. Our desired signal is at -62dBm, so it is wiped out!
This illustrates that a signalling system, by itself, will not prevent interference - defeating the main argument. Specific factors are:
Imperfections in equipment. Real equipment will not reach theoretical levels of performace.
Limited dynamic range. If you have a 100,000 watt transmitter 3 feet from your receiver, there is a good chance that no matter what its technology, it will not be able to pull out the desired signal. In digital terms, this is the equivalent of running out of bits in your integer! If a number is too big, you either overflow your math, or you scale it down, losing the little bitty number you wanted.
Limited bandwidth - there is a limited amount of bandwidth, useful for a given purpose, at any place and time. This bandwidth, for many purposes, is between 1GHz and 25GHz (although for ionospheric radio, it is only 30 MHz). This means that if someone is generating a strong signal in the bandwidth you are using, there may be no other bandwidth you can jump to.
Intermodulation. Any nonlinearity in the system, including incidental nonlinearities such as a nearby rusty pipe, will cause all the RF signals impinging on them to be mixed, and the mixing products re-radiated. Receivers have inherent nonlinearity, which unfortunately gets worse as the power used by the receiver is reduced.
Leakage. You may have a great receiver, but an interfering transmitter that is close enough may leak through its plastic case and get into an intermediate stage of your receiver.
etc.
Without regulation, some other system must arise to arbitrate needs for radio spectrum, or chaos will result
My Kyocera 6035 "smartphone" Palm functionality works just fine with the phone turned off. For palm users, this is a very nice compromise convergence device. I replaces, in my pocket, a cell phone and a PalmV with something smaller than the combined weight/form factor of those two.
And if necessary, that is what the US must be. We have tried "love" and it didn't stop September 11. Now we are working on fear. It will work much better.
It is, however, rather amusing to see the outrage in this discussion. Do they really imagine that internet access will *stay* away from Somalia? Another non-terrorist company will move in and buy the assets. The only thing that will stop this is if the Somali government is still in league with the terrorists, in which case the loss of internet is the least of worries people should have for the Somalis.
Engineering is the practice of designing things based on underlying science. An engineer in theory deeply understands (or at least at one time understood) the principles upon which his work is based. A technician, by contrast, knows how to do specific tasks and knows specific information, but does not have the background to understand those techniques. An engineer can create by understanding... a technician by tinkering.
I shudder to imagine a certification process of software engineers. It would either be so broad that you would need a post-doc education to get through it, or it would be too narrow to apply to the whole field. The past certification practices have really been technician certification, not engineer certification. An "MCSE" is an oxymoronic title - it should be a "Microsoft Certified Software technician!"
In software, we do not have an underlying science. Instead, we have an eclectic mixture of abstract math, techniques, fads, management techniques, language design, artificial intelligence, etc. We don't have a cohesive definition or understanding of computer engineering.
In many ways, I think computer science is more like a biological "engineering" area - such as pharmaceutical development. In both cases, there are pieces of the underlying mechanisms that are well understood, but there are large missing pieces in areas important to the task of reaching a solution.
Furthermore, computer systems design is such a broad area that it could not become a single discipline. Designing business applications software is vastly different than designing neural net pattern recognizers (although the latter are actually used in the former). Not only are the techniques almost unrelated - so are the educational requirements.
Smallpox is more dangerous than these because it is more contagious. While you have to be sick to spread it, you have to be REALLY BADLY SICK to spread marburg. Plague and tularemia can be treated with antibiotics.
The Soviet systems were designed to be dispersed in an area immediately following an anti-city nuclear attack, when the infrastructure for dealing with disease would be wiped out, and when radiation induced low immunity would exist.
The nanotech attack has already happened. It isn't a matter of when - it is a matter of history!
Culturing, preparing and releasing Anthrax was a nanotech attack!
Future nanotech is more likely to be successful starting with biological systems than with bottom-up silicon engineering, and as such is just a logical extension of biological engineering.
Back in 1968, I used to "borrow" Stanford Universities IBM 1620. At the time, I wasn't a student - in fact I was an active duty Navy flyer at nearby Moffett Field. But I wanted to hack and the base had a book on 1620 machine language.
My approach was to go late at night, find a janitor, and tell him I lost my key. It worked every time - no ID required. I would then have the computer to myself for hours. One time, about 3 AM, a researcher (I assume:-) came in, saw me, apologized, and said he would come back when the machine was not in use. Being a nice guy, I told him I was done and let him have it.
During that same year, I also used the Stanford IBM 360/67 (an OS with a VMM while Bill Gates was in grade school) to do a bunch of personal programming. There, an ID from an out-of-town for the year gard student did th job.
Meanwhile, my friends at the University of Kansas (which had a rare GE-625), wanted source of the OS to improve their attacks on the OS. One of them found out the tape numbers by looking at printouts in a public place. He then ran jobs when times were busy to copy those tapes to his own... every once in a while so as to not draw suspicion. Then, he later printed out the whole thing, again in little bits. Thus when I later went there, we had source of the whole OS. We used that to find a number of holse, although GECOS-III was surprisingly well designed for security. In fact, the CIA used it for that reason, and it was chosen for the World Wide Military Command and Control System (WMMCS). As a result of our hacking, one of us later got a call, out of the blue, from a CIA recruiter who knew of the exploits and was looking to hire him for a white-hat hacking job. This was in 1970.
Social engineering works!
I have worked in a couple of secure defense facilities, and it worked there. In one case, I was awaiting a higher level clearance to come through - a clearance required for access to the building without an escort. But (these were the good old days) I frequently needed to go to the computer shop to submit a job or pick up output. ONE TIME I went without an escort, and subsequently found myself in a security office because of an alert employee.
The key to security in places like this (other than perimeter guard checking) is badges which clearly show one's access privileges. Of course, today it is a bit easier to fake a badge:-(
So it can work - but only in places where security is high on peoples' minds.
When you create a government, you automatically create an entity with the power to restrict your freedoms - you give it the power to use deadly force. You then must trust the government to not do so in an unreasonable manner (unless you plan on an armed revolt). That is the nature of government - it really does involve giving up some freedoms in return for some security (please don't quote Ben Franklin again). In order to have a government you can (more or less) trust, you need not only written documents such as a Constitution and laws, but also a culture that encourages individuals in government to play by the rules.
If you don't trust them in general to play by the rules, you are screwed - with or without this law. So get used to it!
For those on slashdot who are so scared of this bill, I would just suggest that they read a bit of history. In past wars, civil liberties were much more restricted than they are by this. In fact, in general an American has more civil liberties, with this bill in place, than citizens had just a few decades ago and certainly more than they had in the previous history of the country! IMHO this bill doesn't go far enough - it still affords too many protections to non-citizens.
We face a danger serious enough that serious technogeeks, not just politicians, have expressed great worry (Bill Joy, Steven Hawkings). That danger is the use of mass casualty weapons by individuals operating within our society. If the government can reduce that risk by increasing its surveillance capabilities, then it has a duty to do so.
In other words, stop whining! Good grief, most on this board have never even had to face the risk of being drafted into the service. Most never experienced a true loss of liberty, but some of us volunteered for it (military service) so that all of us can have what liberties we do have.
Most on this board have not had to face any serious risk of any sort, for that matter. Well - times have changed. The danger (always there) has now become apparent.
There really are people out there with the intent and the means to kill lots of innocent people - especially Americans. Would you rather the FBI have more surveillance abilities, or have yourself drafted into the large military it will take to crunch the rest of the world so they can't do this to us anymore. In WW-II we fielded an army of 30,000,000 people. We might have to do it again. I hope you are ready!
Your precious civil liberties (including many you take for granted that never were guaranteed to you) were obtained by people willing to give up their own liberties to get them for you. Grow up! Better yet, stop whining and enlist!
When government officials, cops or otherwise, follow your every move on the internet without a warrant it's considered acceptable. But if they follow you around and watch your every move offline without a warrant, it's considered harrassment.
Nonsense. They can do it any time they want. The reason they don't is it isn't worth their time.
Harrassment would be if the did it in a manner that impeded or threatened you. Cover surveillance would not be harrassment.
However, if people voluntarily refrain from the use of strong cryptography where not required, it makes it easier for the government to focus on the truly dangerous.
There are still places where one must use relatively strong cryptography, such as financial transactions.
One need not "believe" in evil. Evil is clearly visible element in the world.
There are people who are clearly evil. Should we argue that Hitler was not evil? That it is just a matter of perspective?
How about a highly sociopathic individual - someone who literally believes that all other human beings exist solely for that person's use? There are many of these people in every society, and they are evil.
Whether you want to attribute evil to "possessed by Satan" as one of the sillier responders alluded, or to having a particular psychopathology, the results are the same. Evil.
If you are familiar with Charles Manson, then you are familiar with evil. I went to a lecture by a specialist on serial murder. This fellow had been a detective in LA, and had been involved with many serial and mass murderers. As a rookie policeman, he had been undercover in Charles Manson's gang (but was pulled out too soon). I agree with his assertions that some of these murderers, including Manson, were clearly evil; others were clearly sick. It is a distinction you can make based on the essence of that person.
I would also argue that certain values are innate in human beings, and thus absolute. For example, human beings in general (not every individual, of course) have tendencies towards altruism. These tendencies are seen as good in all but the most evil and transient societies. Tell me a society that does not honor those who selflessly give of themselves to help others? Likewise, tell me a society that does not punish murder (definition and justification vary somewhat)? It is a universal evil to take the lives of other humans without justification. This is so strong that those who wish to do so always invent justifications - typically they dehumanize them. So while it is not a universal human value that killing is bad, it is a universal human value that killing without justification is evil.
Whether these people felt that they were righteous or not, they were clearly in the wrong. Would you argue that they were not morally wrong in this attack?
BTW... all organized religions agree on most of what is absolutely good and absolutely evil. Furthermore, so do all civilized people. And we aren't talking about sex here - we are talking about killing.
I really don't care if some people have a different opinion that justifies actions like the WTC/Pentagon attack. The fact that they have those opinions does not make the morality of the issue at question. The actions were wrong. Anyone who cannot see that is possessed of wrong moral values.
You can quibble all you want about the details, and few would argue absolutism about specifics. For example, is PGP evil? Was Phil Zimmerman evil? Clearly not. Was Phil Zimmerman wrong? Perhaps.
But wanton killing of innocents is wrong. If you think that is a matter of relativism... if it could be okay, depending on your point of view...
well... *you* are wrong. Absolutely.
It has become popular to deconstruct everything in western culture, and thus to deligitimatize the culture and the judgements that it makes. Too many people have absorbed this, whether understanding it or not. Too often, out of a rebellion against organized religion, which at the least is misguided, since more than religion is at the basis of these judgements.
What you say is not really true. It depends on how much damage you are willing to inflict on the structures in the city. Also, the US forces are very well trained for urban warfare.
I think the main reason for not going to Baghdad is that we promised Saudi Arabia that we wouldn't do so. But the reason we stopped before destroying the Republican Guard was that Colin Powell, acting on inadequate intelligence and TV coverage of the road north of Kuwait City, recommended ending the conflict. It turns out that few people were killed on that road, as the Iraqi's, who were basically fleeing with loot, just ran into the desert when the attacks began, and were mostly not struck in the airstrikes.
So I guess we deserved to have 6000 civilians killed? There are always those who blame the free nations for the atrocities of the brutal dictators that we must put up with. I guess that since our foreign policy isn't to install the governments you approve of, it's okay to have our civilians slaughtered!
To make any sort of moral equivalence between what we have done in our foreign power and what was done to us is beyond ignorant... it is disgusting.
Oh, BTW...
Can you say hipocrisy? Yeah, and I can spell it too: hypocrisy
I don't think we should use nukes either, but the argument about losing our moral authority on anti-proliferation efforts is nonsense.
Antiproliferation can only possibly work through coercion, since "moral authority" means absolutely nothing to immoral regimes such as Iraq and North Korea! The whole silly idea that we can talk our way into a non-violent world has just been thrown on to the ash-heap of history.
Obviously you are not responding to my post, even though you think you are.
And the people of Afghanistan are not the target. But they are hardly similar to the Jews in Germany - the Jews had a civilized, freedom-loving culture. The Afghans are still tribal and primitive.
The point I was trying to make is that when a major attack is made against a great nation (twice the casualties of Pearl Harbor, many times the civilian casualties), if that nation does not respond strongly, firmly and violently, it will continue to be a target.
I am not worried about creating new terrorists with our retaliation. The other side has done a fine job of that already. And as they have demonstrated, if they could take out a million in LA, they would have done so. We didn't worry about pissing off the Japanese in WW-II, as we bombed them an nuked them, but they haven't hurt us since! We didn't worry about pissing off the Germans in WW-II, and *they* haven't hurt us either. I am not advocating that kind of violence against the Afghans, but I would consider it justified if it was the only way to stop these horrors. Fortunately, it won't be necessary (except, perhaps, against Iraw).
Colin Powell was in Vietnam, and learned a thing or two, and remembers. Bush of course was not, but he seems (so far) to have the sense to listen to his betters.
What most people seem to forget is that while Bush didn't see combat, he was trained in it. And he risked his life as a military fighter pilot. He has at least an understanding of military issues.
And before folks drag out the pampered national guard nonsense, let me bring out a few points from my personal experience:
My best friend was a national guard fighter pilot at the same time as Bush. He gave his life in a training accident and is just as dead as anyone who died in Vietnam.
I was a reservist during the Vietnam war, and as a result I went to Vietnam. Not every college kid of the era was a peacenik.
Finally, combat experience does not equate to wisdom. It certainly means one has some understanding of the horrors of war, on a personal scale. But it doesn't provide the insights needed to make strategic policy. Colin Powell is an impressive man, but he blew it in Iraq-I - his humanitarian impulse to stop the war when he saw the "slaughter" on the road has resulted in a continued, vicious oppression in Iraq, and support of terror and international stabilization by that regime. Powell should be heard, but so should those with different viewponts.
Afghanistan is nothing compared to what we had to deal with in WW-II. It is a small festering boil on the ass of the world. It has a primitive culture with the people oppressed by a vicious minority - many of whom are foreigners (arabs).
When a nation has been hit with a massive attack such as we took, the rules change dramatically. A massive attack reques an equally powerful reaction. Retaliation, in a situation like this, is not vengeance and is not done for satisfaction, although it may provide that. It is deterrence. It is to make it too painful for our enemies to use these tactics again. A nation must unsheath "a terrible, swift sword" after this kind of attack, or forever lose the trust and respect of its citizens and its enemies.
It was no accident that The Battle Hymn of the Republic was plaid at the first memorial service. That song is symbolic of America wreaking vengeance in the name of freedom. And we shall do so again.
Given the modern world of asymmetric warfare, it doesn't mean we go out and bomb their civilians the way we did in WW-II. We have moved beyond that, thank goodness. But it does mean we take a lot of action. We kill or capture a lot of people. We destroy a number of hostile governments, or we allow them to castrate themselves if they wish to survive.
Few are alive today who previously experienced a situation of this magnitude, and thus few have come within an order of magnitude of appreciating the situation. For example, compare Afghanistan to our first major military action of WW-II (our = US): Guadalcanal. Read up on that horrible fight, and realize it was just one relatively small part of just the US part of that war. And there, we were fighting a much better armed, much larger and at least equally suicidal enemy. And we lost thousands - on that one little island. And we kept going and did it again and again. (I say we, but really my parents generation).
And our allies did the same sort of thing. Churchill had to sacrifice the civilians of Coventry to protect one cryptographic secret.
The citizens of London suffered through the blitz, which killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Today we are used to thinking of war as little police actions like Kosovo, or constrained theatre operations like the Gulf War I, or at worst cold war proxy fights like Korea, Vietnam or (for the USSR) Afghanistan-I. Today, there is no cold war which allies nuclear powers with our enemies. Today, we have been struck as badly as with weapons of mass destruction, and will probably avoid using nuclear weapons only because we don't need to But if they were needed to win this war, I have no doubt they would be used, and should be. This is some serious stuff.
What has been done to us (and all free nations of the world), unprovoked, gives us a motive far different than what we had in Vietnam or Korea or Iraq. It is more like what the British had in World War II: war leading to unconditional surrender or destruction of organized enemies of ours who were responsible for this or who have provided sanction either to those who did this or those who could have done it.
This means that if, for example, Syria doesn't allow us to take out, by air AND ground, the terrorist bases they support, the current Syrian government will be replaced - at whatever the cost! This is just one example. War is hell, and we have just experienced a taste of it. Now we must give it to those despots and psychopaths who have been preying on innocent civilians for too long.
Another thing war means: if the press discovers a military or intelligence secret, they keep it a damned secret. If they don't, at the least the citizens should be outraged enough to make the reporter and organization very sorry.
It also means that acts of domestic terrorist such as those carried out by Earth First! or McVeigh be treated as acts of sabotage in war, with appropriate penalties.
Give up a few freedoms? We don't have a choice. We just had them taken from us by a bunch of vicious thugs supported by evil despots who oppress their own populace, spread hate against us and what we stand for, and support those whose goal is to take innocent human life. We just lost the freedom to travel freely. We just lost the freedom to feel secure in our country. We just lost the first battle of World War III.
And even with all of this, I suspect that most Americans, no matter how much they whine about it, will lose far fewer freedoms than were lost in WW-II. Most Americans will not be drafted, but in WW-II, 30,000,000 of the men of the US were in the armed services. Think about that! That is the sort of sacrifice that had to be made then, and the sort of power we could generate today. Thank goodness most of us won't have to. And thank goodness there are still a few among our number who volunteer to put their lives at risk to keep this from happening again, and to punish those responsible.
never even used encryption simply because it ran the possibility of sticking out like a sore thumb
Which is exactly why people shouldn't use encryption just for the heck of it. If terrorists' use of encryption causes them to be visible, then they won't use it, which deprives them of a valuable tool.
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You are right. I was arguing against unregulated, as I believe the original article did. Regulation can certainly help, but the unlicensed bands like 2.4ISM are still a take-your-chances sort of thing.
John
While bandwidth is an oversimplistic way of either looking at things, or regulating them, it is a fact that any communications system can be analyzed (roughly) in terms of bandwidth. And this means that any communications system can interfere with any other communications system if they share frequencies in any sense.
For a real world example of why you can't ignore bandwidth, try running WiFi in a house where you have some 2.4GHz phones. It may work. But sometimes it doesn't - the reason - radio frequency interference. They share the same bandwidth.
Ah, you say... so they don't use good enough systems... or aren't broad-band enough... or something! Not true... there are hard physical limits that no amount of scheming will get around. The rest of this post discusses that in more technical detail.
All signaling systems (INCLUDING Time-Modulated Ultra-Wide-Band)require a separation of signal from noise. Noise is either natural (thermal, atmospheric, solar, etc), incidental (power line leakage, etc) or other radio systems. Regardless of what kind of signaling system is used, it has a limit as to the amount and kind of noise that can be tolerated in any given situation. The other limits described below affect the amount of noise reduction/signal enhancement that is possible.
Limits to processing gain. WiFi and other modern technologies (CDMA cell phones) use spread spectrum to reduce the effects of interference. Unfortunately, this does not eliminate interference. In engineering terms, it is the equivalent of adding gain to the desired signal. The gain is roughly the bandwidth occupied by the transmitted signal divided by the bandwidth required to send the signal without modulation (the baseband bandwidth). This value is measured in decibels, and is typically 20-30 dB, although it can increase. But the higherhe data rate, the lower the processing gain!
The effect of distance - radio signal energy decreases by an inverse square law. This means that a nearby interference source can have a much stronger signal, proportionally, than the desired signal from a farther source. Some numerical examples:
This illustrates that a signalling system, by itself, will not prevent interference - defeating the main argument. Specific factors are:
Imperfections in equipment. Real equipment will not reach theoretical levels of performace.
Limited dynamic range. If you have a 100,000 watt transmitter 3 feet from your receiver, there is a good chance that no matter what its technology, it will not be able to pull out the desired signal. In digital terms, this is the equivalent of running out of bits in your integer! If a number is too big, you either overflow your math, or you scale it down, losing the little bitty number you wanted.
Limited bandwidth - there is a limited amount of bandwidth, useful for a given purpose, at any place and time. This bandwidth, for many purposes, is between 1GHz and 25GHz (although for ionospheric radio, it is only 30 MHz). This means that if someone is generating a strong signal in the bandwidth you are using, there may be no other bandwidth you can jump to.
Intermodulation. Any nonlinearity in the system, including incidental nonlinearities such as a nearby rusty pipe, will cause all the RF signals impinging on them to be mixed, and the mixing products re-radiated. Receivers have inherent nonlinearity, which unfortunately gets worse as the power used by the receiver is reduced.
Leakage. You may have a great receiver, but an interfering transmitter that is close enough may leak through its plastic case and get into an intermediate stage of your receiver.
etc.
Without regulation, some other system must arise to arbitrate needs for radio spectrum, or chaos will result
My Kyocera 6035 "smartphone" Palm functionality works just fine with the phone turned off. For palm users, this is a very nice compromise convergence device. I replaces, in my pocket, a cell phone and a PalmV with something smaller than the combined weight/form factor of those two.
"It is better to be feared than loved."
Machiavelli
And if necessary, that is what the US must be. We have tried "love" and it didn't stop September 11. Now we are working on fear. It will work much better.
It is, however, rather amusing to see the outrage in this discussion. Do they really imagine that internet access will *stay* away from Somalia? Another non-terrorist company will move in and buy the assets. The only thing that will stop this is if the Somali government is still in league with the terrorists, in which case the loss of internet is the least of worries people should have for the Somalis.
Engineering is the practice of designing things based on underlying science. An engineer in theory deeply understands (or at least at one time understood) the principles upon which his work is based. A technician, by contrast, knows how to do specific tasks and knows specific information, but does not have the background to understand those techniques. An engineer can create by understanding... a technician by tinkering.
I shudder to imagine a certification process of software engineers. It would either be so broad that you would need a post-doc education to get through it, or it would be too narrow to apply to the whole field. The past certification practices have really been technician certification, not engineer certification. An "MCSE" is an oxymoronic title - it should be a "Microsoft Certified Software technician!"
In software, we do not have an underlying science. Instead, we have an eclectic mixture of abstract math, techniques, fads, management techniques, language design, artificial intelligence, etc. We don't have a cohesive definition or understanding of computer engineering.
In many ways, I think computer science is more like a biological "engineering" area - such as pharmaceutical development. In both cases, there are pieces of the underlying mechanisms that are well understood, but there are large missing pieces in areas important to the task of reaching a solution.
Furthermore, computer systems design is such a broad area that it could not become a single discipline. Designing business applications software is vastly different than designing neural net pattern recognizers (although the latter are actually used in the former). Not only are the techniques almost unrelated - so are the educational requirements.
The Soviet systems were designed to be dispersed in an area immediately following an anti-city nuclear attack, when the infrastructure for dealing with disease would be wiped out, and when radiation induced low immunity would exist.
The nanotech attack has already happened. It isn't a matter of when - it is a matter of history!
Culturing, preparing and releasing Anthrax was a nanotech attack!
Future nanotech is more likely to be successful starting with biological systems than with bottom-up silicon engineering, and as such is just a logical extension of biological engineering.
My approach was to go late at night, find a janitor, and tell him I lost my key. It worked every time - no ID required. I would then have the computer to myself for hours. One time, about 3 AM, a researcher (I assume
During that same year, I also used the Stanford IBM 360/67 (an OS with a VMM while Bill Gates was in grade school) to do a bunch of personal programming. There, an ID from an out-of-town for the year gard student did th job.
Meanwhile, my friends at the University of Kansas (which had a rare GE-625), wanted source of the OS to improve their attacks on the OS. One of them found out the tape numbers by looking at printouts in a public place. He then ran jobs when times were busy to copy those tapes to his own... every once in a while so as to not draw suspicion. Then, he later printed out the whole thing, again in little bits. Thus when I later went there, we had source of the whole OS. We used that to find a number of holse, although GECOS-III was surprisingly well designed for security. In fact, the CIA used it for that reason, and it was chosen for the World Wide Military Command and Control System (WMMCS). As a result of our hacking, one of us later got a call, out of the blue, from a CIA recruiter who knew of the exploits and was looking to hire him for a white-hat hacking job. This was in 1970.
Social engineering works!
The key to security in places like this (other than perimeter guard checking) is badges which clearly show one's access privileges. Of course, today it is a bit easier to fake a badge
So it can work - but only in places where security is high on peoples' minds.
If you don't trust them in general to play by the rules, you are screwed - with or without this law. So get used to it!
For those on slashdot who are so scared of this bill, I would just suggest that they read a bit of history. In past wars, civil liberties were much more restricted than they are by this. In fact, in general an American has more civil liberties, with this bill in place, than citizens had just a few decades ago and certainly more than they had in the previous history of the country! IMHO this bill doesn't go far enough - it still affords too many protections to non-citizens.
We face a danger serious enough that serious technogeeks, not just politicians, have expressed great worry (Bill Joy, Steven Hawkings). That danger is the use of mass casualty weapons by individuals operating within our society. If the government can reduce that risk by increasing its surveillance capabilities, then it has a duty to do so.
In other words, stop whining! Good grief, most on this board have never even had to face the risk of being drafted into the service. Most never experienced a true loss of liberty, but some of us volunteered for it (military service) so that all of us can have what liberties we do have.
Most on this board have not had to face any serious risk of any sort, for that matter. Well - times have changed. The danger (always there) has now become apparent.
There really are people out there with the intent and the means to kill lots of innocent people - especially Americans. Would you rather the FBI have more surveillance abilities, or have yourself drafted into the large military it will take to crunch the rest of the world so they can't do this to us anymore. In WW-II we fielded an army of 30,000,000 people. We might have to do it again. I hope you are ready!
Your precious civil liberties (including many you take for granted that never were guaranteed to you) were obtained by people willing to give up their own liberties to get them for you. Grow up! Better yet, stop whining and enlist!
Look at the money to be made! Maybe Symantec or McAfee can come up with a "virus" scanner for Snail Mail. Clearly its needed.
When government officials, cops or otherwise, follow your every move on the internet without a warrant it's considered acceptable. But if they follow you around and watch your every move offline without a warrant, it's considered harrassment.
Nonsense. They can do it any time they want. The reason they don't is it isn't worth their time.
Harrassment would be if the did it in a manner that impeded or threatened you. Cover surveillance would not be harrassment.
However, if people voluntarily refrain from the use of strong cryptography where not required, it makes it easier for the government to focus on the truly dangerous.
There are still places where one must use relatively strong cryptography, such as financial transactions.
One need not "believe" in evil. Evil is clearly visible element in the world.
There are people who are clearly evil. Should we argue that Hitler was not evil? That it is just a matter of perspective?
How about a highly sociopathic individual - someone who literally believes that all other human beings exist solely for that person's use? There are many of these people in every society, and they are evil.
Whether you want to attribute evil to "possessed by Satan" as one of the sillier responders alluded, or to having a particular psychopathology, the results are the same. Evil.
If you are familiar with Charles Manson, then you are familiar with evil. I went to a lecture by a specialist on serial murder. This fellow had been a detective in LA, and had been involved with many serial and mass murderers. As a rookie policeman, he had been undercover in Charles Manson's gang (but was pulled out too soon). I agree with his assertions that some of these murderers, including Manson, were clearly evil; others were clearly sick. It is a distinction you can make based on the essence of that person.
I would also argue that certain values are innate in human beings, and thus absolute. For example, human beings in general (not every individual, of course) have tendencies towards altruism. These tendencies are seen as good in all but the most evil and transient societies. Tell me a society that does not honor those who selflessly give of themselves to help others? Likewise, tell me a society that does not punish murder (definition and justification vary somewhat)? It is a universal evil to take the lives of other humans without justification. This is so strong that those who wish to do so always invent justifications - typically they dehumanize them. So while it is not a universal human value that killing is bad, it is a universal human value that killing without justification is evil.
Whether these people felt that they were righteous or not, they were clearly in the wrong. Would you argue that they were not morally wrong in this attack?
BTW... all organized religions agree on most of what is absolutely good and absolutely evil. Furthermore, so do all civilized people. And we aren't talking about sex here - we are talking about killing.
I really don't care if some people have a different opinion that justifies actions like the WTC/Pentagon attack. The fact that they have those opinions does not make the morality of the issue at question. The actions were wrong. Anyone who cannot see that is possessed of wrong moral values.
You can quibble all you want about the details, and few would argue absolutism about specifics. For example, is PGP evil? Was Phil Zimmerman evil? Clearly not. Was Phil Zimmerman wrong? Perhaps.
But wanton killing of innocents is wrong. If you think that is a matter of relativism... if it could be okay, depending on your point of view...
well... *you* are wrong. Absolutely.
It has become popular to deconstruct everything in western culture, and thus to deligitimatize the culture and the judgements that it makes. Too many people have absorbed this, whether understanding it or not. Too often, out of a rebellion against organized religion, which at the least is misguided, since more than religion is at the basis of these judgements.
Good and evil are not relative. Moral relativism is a weak and wrong idea.
There are those who are evil. They desire nothing other than to prey upon their fellow human beings.
There are those who are good. They do nothing but help fellow human beings.
What you say is not really true. It depends on how much damage you are willing to inflict on the structures in the city. Also, the US forces are very well trained for urban warfare.
I think the main reason for not going to Baghdad is that we promised Saudi Arabia that we wouldn't do so. But the reason we stopped before destroying the Republican Guard was that Colin Powell, acting on inadequate intelligence and TV coverage of the road north of Kuwait City, recommended ending the conflict. It turns out that few people were killed on that road, as the Iraqi's, who were basically fleeing with loot, just ran into the desert when the attacks began, and were mostly not struck in the airstrikes.
So I guess we deserved to have 6000 civilians killed? There are always those who blame the free nations for the atrocities of the brutal dictators that we must put up with. I guess that since our foreign policy isn't to install the governments you approve of, it's okay to have our civilians slaughtered!
To make any sort of moral equivalence between what we have done in our foreign power and what was done to us is beyond ignorant... it is disgusting.
Oh, BTW...
Can you say hipocrisy?
Yeah, and I can spell it too: hypocrisy
Antiproliferation can only possibly work through coercion, since "moral authority" means absolutely nothing to immoral regimes such as Iraq and North Korea! The whole silly idea that we can talk our way into a non-violent world has just been thrown on to the ash-heap of history.
And the people of Afghanistan are not the target. But they are hardly similar to the Jews in Germany - the Jews had a civilized, freedom-loving culture. The Afghans are still tribal and primitive.
The point I was trying to make is that when a major attack is made against a great nation (twice the casualties of Pearl Harbor, many times the civilian casualties), if that nation does not respond strongly, firmly and violently, it will continue to be a target.
I am not worried about creating new terrorists with our retaliation. The other side has done a fine job of that already. And as they have demonstrated, if they could take out a million in LA, they would have done so. We didn't worry about pissing off the Japanese in WW-II, as we bombed them an nuked them, but they haven't hurt us since! We didn't worry about pissing off the Germans in WW-II, and *they* haven't hurt us either. I am not advocating that kind of violence against the Afghans, but I would consider it justified if it was the only way to stop these horrors. Fortunately, it won't be necessary (except, perhaps, against Iraw).
What most people seem to forget is that while Bush didn't see combat, he was trained in it. And he risked his life as a military fighter pilot. He has at least an understanding of military issues.
And before folks drag out the pampered national guard nonsense, let me bring out a few points from my personal experience:
Finally, combat experience does not equate to wisdom. It certainly means one has some understanding of the horrors of war, on a personal scale. But it doesn't provide the insights needed to make strategic policy. Colin Powell is an impressive man, but he blew it in Iraq-I - his humanitarian impulse to stop the war when he saw the "slaughter" on the road has resulted in a continued, vicious oppression in Iraq, and support of terror and international stabilization by that regime. Powell should be heard, but so should those with different viewponts.
Afghanistan is nothing compared to what we had to deal with in WW-II. It is a small festering boil on the ass of the world. It has a primitive culture with the people oppressed by a vicious minority - many of whom are foreigners (arabs).
When a nation has been hit with a massive attack such as we took, the rules change dramatically. A massive attack reques an equally powerful reaction. Retaliation, in a situation like this, is not vengeance and is not done for satisfaction, although it may provide that. It is deterrence. It is to make it too painful for our enemies to use these tactics again. A nation must unsheath "a terrible, swift sword" after this kind of attack, or forever lose the trust and respect of its citizens and its enemies.
It was no accident that The Battle Hymn of the Republic was plaid at the first memorial service. That song is symbolic of America wreaking vengeance in the name of freedom. And we shall do so again.
Given the modern world of asymmetric warfare, it doesn't mean we go out and bomb their civilians the way we did in WW-II. We have moved beyond that, thank goodness. But it does mean we take a lot of action. We kill or capture a lot of people. We destroy a number of hostile governments, or we allow them to castrate themselves if they wish to survive.
Few are alive today who previously experienced a situation of this magnitude, and thus few have come within an order of magnitude of appreciating the situation. For example, compare Afghanistan to our first major military action of WW-II (our = US): Guadalcanal. Read up on that horrible fight, and realize it was just one relatively small part of just the US part of that war. And there, we were fighting a much better armed, much larger and at least equally suicidal enemy. And we lost thousands - on that one little island. And we kept going and did it again and again. (I say we, but really my parents generation).
And our allies did the same sort of thing. Churchill had to sacrifice the civilians of Coventry to protect one cryptographic secret.
The citizens of London suffered through the blitz, which killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Today we are used to thinking of war as little police actions like Kosovo, or constrained theatre operations like the Gulf War I, or at worst cold war proxy fights like Korea, Vietnam or (for the USSR) Afghanistan-I. Today, there is no cold war which allies nuclear powers with our enemies. Today, we have been struck as badly as with weapons of mass destruction, and will probably avoid using nuclear weapons only because we don't need to But if they were needed to win this war, I have no doubt they would be used, and should be. This is some serious stuff.
What has been done to us (and all free nations of the world), unprovoked, gives us a motive far different than what we had in Vietnam or Korea or Iraq. It is more like what the British had in World War II: war leading to unconditional surrender or destruction of organized enemies of ours who were responsible for this or who have provided sanction either to those who did this or those who could have done it.
This means that if, for example, Syria doesn't allow us to take out, by air AND ground, the terrorist bases they support, the current Syrian government will be replaced - at whatever the cost! This is just one example. War is hell, and we have just experienced a taste of it. Now we must give it to those despots and psychopaths who have been preying on innocent civilians for too long.
Another thing war means: if the press discovers a military or intelligence secret, they keep it a damned secret. If they don't, at the least the citizens should be outraged enough to make the reporter and organization very sorry.
It also means that acts of domestic terrorist such as those carried out by Earth First! or McVeigh be treated as acts of sabotage in war, with appropriate penalties.
Give up a few freedoms? We don't have a choice. We just had them taken from us by a bunch of vicious thugs supported by evil despots who oppress their own populace, spread hate against us and what we stand for, and support those whose goal is to take innocent human life. We just lost the freedom to travel freely. We just lost the freedom to feel secure in our country. We just lost the first battle of World War III.
And even with all of this, I suspect that most Americans, no matter how much they whine about it, will lose far fewer freedoms than were lost in WW-II. Most Americans will not be drafted, but in WW-II, 30,000,000 of the men of the US were in the armed services. Think about that! That is the sort of sacrifice that had to be made then, and the sort of power we could generate today. Thank goodness most of us won't have to. And thank goodness there are still a few among our number who volunteer to put their lives at risk to keep this from happening again, and to punish those responsible.
never even used encryption simply because it ran the possibility of sticking out like a sore thumb
Which is exactly why people shouldn't use encryption just for the heck of it. If terrorists' use of encryption causes them to be visible, then they won't use it, which deprives them of a valuable tool.
Ever spend any time in Turkey? Experience says you are wrong.
Actually, we are in a formally declared state of emergency, which has time limits. Same diff.