But I disagree with your assessment of the security situation. First, ASPs can work just fine without mobile code or agents or whatever. Consider your example of a speech-recognition ASP: It will already have the code installed on it, so there's no need for it to run untrusted code.
But does it have every single module it needs? For example, let's consider an ASP providing voicerec in Darkest Africa. Now let's say Bubba comes sauntering along through the jungle and sees a brightly colored snake. He asks his palmtop "Is that thang friendly?" The palmtop contacts the nearest ASP via wireless, indicating that it needs recognition for English, and would like dialect-specific services for Alabama. Most likely, this server does not have English(Alabama,USA), or if it does, it does not have the latest version. Therefore, it will query the local network. Let's say that Billy-Sue, angry at Bubba for not getting her new hubcaps, has compromised a node on the local network such that it appears to have the necessary software. However, her software is specifically instructed to reverse the sense of any safety-related query. Thus, when the palmtop sends the image of the snake for image-recognition, it ends up asking "Is animal (deadly redneck-eating snake) dangerous?", which returns true. Bubba therefore hears his palmtop say "Yes, it is." Thinking that the snake is friendly, he is promptly devoured.
The whole principle of ASPs, IMHO, is getting the latest code to the user just in time. If somebody compromises the delivery chain, malicious code can be inserted. (I can't wait to see the sorts of things a hacked Office.net could deliver. All you'd have to do is muck with the target's DNS resolution and point them to a malicious site. (Yes, the code might need a signature, but many users won't bother to read the resulting dialog box, will click on 'trust code', and get screwed.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised? No buffer overflows? No hidden back doors? No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
Every security model has a vulnerability, be it in the trust model, the underlying implementations, or an actual protocol flaw. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system; all there is is a system which is very hard to break into and which thus discourages most crackers. Unfortunately, given enough time, you will run into a true hacker out to cause you grief, and then your system is going down.
This, IMHO, is another reason why the "network is the computer" philosophy is bad. Removing the net connection from a computer almost always decreases vulnerability by orders of magnitude.
That's an Apple IIGS, "dood". My very first computer. If only there'd been more software written that actually took advantage of the multimedia (like some actual games), it'd have been a good machine.
Do you honestly want your development tools to be battling PublicFreeGnutapsterNet 12.0 for bandwidth? I don't think we'll ever truly have a persistent excess of carrying capacity. Software expands to consume all resources which are made available to it.
I'm personally not convinced that voice-rec is the way to go for mobile computing. If I'm on the bus or anywhere else where someone can hear me, I don't want them to know what I'm saying to my computer. OTOH, if you're actually the one driving the car, it does make sense.
More importantly, though, is this vision that most mobile machines will stream all their data to nearby big iron which will crunch the numbers and stream back finished product. Let's pretend for a bit that the bandwidth issues can be worked out. Who's going to actually be running the machines that provide all these spare cycles? Are we going to have companies which simply maintain large computers for performing standard tasks like voice recognition and Web searching on behalf of mobile users? I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
I did mobile-code research for a few years, and the resource question was always coming up. There were some papers written by a grad student with a background in economics, and some modeling was done, but it was never quite proven that this could work. (One can't really model all the various kinds of automated maliciousness that could occur.)
Finally, I'll add the standard gripe that I think ASPs are a step in the wrong direction. I don't want to be continually dependent on a manufacturer for access to an application. Let someone arbitrarily deny me word-processing services because they don't like what I write? Be forced to use a new version of software which adds features I hate and removes the ones I love? No thank you. If I want to take my laptop to Mars and do my word-processing there, I want to do so without interplanetary network lag.
Of course, if played right, this could be a big win for Linux and other free-software projects. I believe that once users get bitten by the ASP model, they will want to get away from it. Obviously, the big companies won't let them. If, however, they can just switch to a purely-local free-software office suite, we might see a large jump in the use of free systems.
The network is not the computer, the computer is not the network, and as far as this user is concerned, there are times when I'd like the network to fuck off and leave me alone with a completely functional machine.
I believe it's nothing as severe as multipolar to bipolar/unipolar, but yes, the basic mechanism is believed to be a rearrangement of cellular projections. Neurons can also modulate synaptic weights by messing with the balance of channel proteins, vesicle docking proteins, and other key pathway components. To the best of my knowledge, neurons tend not to apoptose once the brain reaches maturity, although there are massive die-offs early in life as the pathways get themselves sorted out and unnecessary cells get pruned. There are some exceptions (I know that some cells of the olfactory pathway are regularly dying and regenerating, and I believe taste cells do the same thing), but for the most part neurons are pretty long-lived beasts. Since they're nonmitotic and the stem cells tend not to produce more, it's to the organism's advantage to conserve neurons.
Specific papers probably aren't the best way to get an good overview. My personal textbooks are _Cognitive Psychology_ by Medin and Ross and _Neuroscience_ by Bear, Connors, and Paradiso. However, these are not ones I specifically chose; they're the textbooks chosen by my professors. You may have better luck just searching for popular stuff at Amazon. Note that the different encodings thing is not proven; it merely makes sense, since cells in different brain areas often have significant phenotypic variation.
To your question about forgetting... current theory says it's more of your second hypothesis. In this regard, the brain appears to act like a neural net --- if you train it to do something, but then start training a different task and never provide the stimuli for the first task as reinforcement, it'll drift away from its intial conditioning.
Current theory also views memory sort of like a hash table: the entire state of the system is the input, and something comes out based on associations. This leads to an effect called "state-dependent learning": if you learn all your facts sitting in one desk of a classroom, you'll do better on the test if you take it at that same desk. As you age, your sensory inputs change, which means it's harder to construct a world-state capable of accessing a given piece of information. This has been suggested as the reason why most people can't remember their childhoods well --- our growth has changed the way the world looks to the point that we just can't construct an activating signal for anything but the strongest memories.
Connections are definitely not permanent. There is basically nothing permanent about the brain beyond the gross organization of areas and layers. The absent-minded professor effect, IMHO, is more a matter of changes in significance. You remember the things you think are important. As you get to concentrating more and more on proving P=NP, little details like when you last ate just aren't relevant enough to be encoded. (For most people, memory seems to have some sort of finite bandwidth, such that only the most significant aspects of the current state are likely to be encoded.)
When did your friend visit? I was at Penn in December of 1998 interviewing for a graduate program, and the system I saw didn't require a whole bunch of switch-flipping; it was just a bunch of standard DIPs interconnected on a breadboard and hooked to an apparently standard video camera. The result did appear to model what I know of the initial visual processing system.
Of course, any smoothly functioning technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, but I doubt they'd go to the trouble of setting up a flashy-but-fake demo to impress a prospective grad student. I'm just not important enough to lie to.
The short answer is "We don't entirely know yet." The longer answer is way too complicated for me to get into in a Slashdot comment; I strongly suggest that you read an intro-level neuroscience or cognitive psychology textbook, or at least a single chapter therein. The basic theory is that as you learn things, your neurons physically change shape and alter their connections, and information is encoded in these connections.
Also, be very careful of things like that bicycle accident memory. Vivid images like that are called "flashbulb memories", and studies have shown that they tend to be inaccurate as hell. In fact, the more details you think you remember about a single instantaneous event, the more likely you seem to be to be wrong.
There are many different types of memory, and they appear to be stored in different brain locations with different encodings. These mechanisms are under heavy study, but are not well-understood. Trying to talk about the "storage capacity" in terms of megabytes is essentially futile at this point in time.
I've read the original paper in Nature. (I'd post a link, but I only have access via my university's account, and I have no interest in getting that revoked.) This is not exactly a neural network in the classic sense, although it is similar. The standard neural network is specifically designated an artificial network --- it implements a computational model of neurons. These guys are actually attempting to simulate the known electrical behavior of neurons, in the theory that a network composed of elements that truly mimic neurons will be more brain-like.
Now. "Digital and analog." This is not a new discovery. It has long been known that neurons have a specific threshold WRT to incoming signal; if the incoming signal does not meet the threshold, the neuron will not fire. If signal is above threshold, the neuron fires. If signal is really above threshold, the neuron fires repeatedly, encoding the strength of the stimulus as the frequency of the train of pulses. (AFAIK, the circuits described here didn't implement that last behavior.) This is a digital response. The output, however, is a continuous voltage at a particular frequency: an analog signal. (Whoever called this "a digital response to analog criteria" is correct.)
The important thing is that connections between neurons have different weights, and there's often a lot of local feedback. In practice, these feedback loops tend to be tuned so that a given cell will respond only to a fairly specific stimulus (the right light intensity in the right part of your visual field, or facing a certain direction relative to known landmarks, or hearing a sound from a certain direction, for example). These guys have implemented a circuit on silicon that shows the same filtering behavior and also captures the idea that neurons can be "on" or "off".
Yes, this is kind of neat. Yes, it could eventually lead to advances in AI; at the very least, it could provide useful signal filtering for robotic applications. No, it has nothing to do with plugging your Pentium into your parietal lobe or your Mac into your medulla, at least not until our circuit-design ability is so good that we can entirely mimic the black-box behavior of brain areas. (Hint: we don't even entirely understand that behavior for most regions.)
I'm also kind of surprised that this made Nature; there are guys at UPenn who've had working neuromorphic circuits for years now. Then again, it's only in the Letters section, and these new guys worked out some mathematical models for the gain of a neural circuit rather than just trying to copy existing ones.
Well, CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc - Read Only Memory. You can't write to a CD-ROM at all. CD-R stands for Compact Disc - Recordable. You can write to a CD-R one more time than a CD-ROM.
But does a CD-R not become a CD-ROM once it's been written to (given that it is now a read-only device)? Similarly, one presumes that a CD-ROM began its life in a recordable state. Therefore, as far as I can tell, burned CD-R == CD-ROM.
I spent two years working for these guys building the Scheme component of their agent system, so I had a chance to learn something about the general theory of the field. Every agent system I've seen has a notion of a sandbox that agents are limited to. In the case of our particular system, agents were also to be signed by their "master", who might then be responsible for any damage caused. Agent data transmitted across the network could be encrypted; agents themselves had to be packaged and signed when in transit between machines, unless they came from a "trusted" machine. Inter-agent communication was not direct; it went through the agent server daemon on each host machine, so that untrusted agents wouldn't need to have the ability to open sockets or files. We were slowly putting together a system for resource allocation, such that each agent would only be allowed to use a certain percentage of each system resource --- that can help prevent a DDoSing agent. (There were interesting attempts to work out a micropayment-like system for purchasing resource access; I don't think it ever got finalized.)
In short, if Sandia has remotely competent people, these agents are going to have strict limitations on their capabilities. Are they completely immune to attack? No. As Bruce Schneier has taught us, this only reduces risk. Still, if you add a requirement for agents to monitor each other, a human would have to be damn good to compromise a sufficient agent population. (Of course, this means that we may be headed for a future of eternal agent war. Might be cool. Want to prove open source? Make Tux2.0 the agent that can kick the crap out of any other agent.)
This will bite them eventually.
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 2
I recently replaced my machine. I let them put Win98 on it for convenience's sake, but asked my friend with the Red Hat CD to burn me a copy. Sadly, said CD is still sitting on my desk because I haven't had the two to three free days I desire to install and fine-tune the OS. (Hopefully, my local LUG will do an install-fest sometime this summer.) Had I waited a month more to purchase, I could have gotten that same version of RH pre-installed and not have to put up with the occasional bluescreen.
I can guarantee you my next machine will be pre-installed Linux (or maybe BSD --- they might be offering that by the time I can afford a new computer). It's getting easier and easier to obtain a working and vaguely secure Linux box. As enough people feel the pain of the Recovery CD, they may notice that their OEM will now sell them a different OS. Few people are willing to monkey with it on their own, but if those nice young men will sell it all set up and running, they might take the chance.
How much will publishing this information really harm the bus company? Most people don't have the equipment to encode a new mag card. I suppose large-scale criminal operations might, but is there really profit in this for them? Bus passes, AFAIK, are cheap enough that there's not much room to undercut the market --- not enough reward/risk ratio for the people who'd have to sell the forgeries.
You could always ask the company itself, although they'll probably say no and immediately start looking for a way to sue you. That may mean you don't want to publish it, since now your reward/risk is diminishing. (You're also likely to be sued by the company that makes the encoder/reader system.)
There's also the question of what good exactly is done by publishing this. Who will be helped? The encoding method may well be patented, in which case nobody else could use it for a commercial product. (On the other hand, it may simply be kept as a nice trade secret.) Is there any amazing piece of art here which people designing magcard systems need to know? If so, why not just publish that part?
From the tone of your question, it sounds like the main reason you want to publish is to show people how clever you are. (I must admit that this is something I probably couldn't do.) Well, now all of Slashdot knows that you did it. Will actually releasing the spec give you that much more fame?
Basically, unless you can see some important thing that needs the data, why run risks by publishing? You can just state on your home page that you know the system, and can provide details on request. That'll make the data available to future developers without putting you at immediate risk.
From what I've seen (which is primarily academic, not industry), in order to understand good software design you must first do poor software design. Our CS department had a required freshman software engineering class; our team of 7 put together a text editor in a few weeks. We tried to use modular design, but that didn't teach any of us how to build a well-designed system on our own. (Modularity comes a lot more naturally when doing team coding, since you have to break things up into tasks.)
For another year, I still wrote lousy code by cut-and-paste. Slowly, I began to recognize the places where I could use objects and abstraction to clean up the code and make maintenance/revision easier. By the time I got to doing my thesis, I was able to make a reasonably well-built program. (It'd have been even better if the STL worked on the machine I was using.)
Reading the key books will certainly help. However, your code also needs to mesh well with your thought patterns, so that you can work with it easily. Therefore, the majority of becoming a good software engineer is sitting down and integrating the theory with your own style and getting used to thinking for a while before you type. By making mistakes and suffering for them, you will eventually develop an instinctual understanding of good style.
I can't stand the current state of web-based discussion. The only way I can manage to follow a thread on Slashdot is by watching the Replies: counters on my user page. The constant need to click back and forth and wait for each new page to be fetched, rendered, and displayed is agonizing, especially when you're (as I am) stuck with a school that mostly does 28.8 dialups.
Reading over the Peacefire page, I notice something odd about the correspondence they've got posted. They show the complete chain of email used to get their "bait" sites blocked, but nothing about their follow-up requests to block the sources of the bait quotes.
That strikes me as odd. Anybody know the reason? I'm inclined to think that after a company took the bait, they got email from the main Peacefire account saying "Ha ha! Fooled you! Gonna block Dr. Laura now?" IMHO, it'd have been better to send in the request to block the powerful sites from the same fake Hotmail accounts.
OTOH, this is still a very satisfying bit of news. Yay, Peacefire.
To hell with individual replies. I'm consolidating.
1) Yes, I know "Paki" is a racial slur. Notice that that whole paragraph was highly tongue-in-cheek.
2) If it's going to small towns and not the actual villages, then I retract my statement that it's not useful. When I hear "village", I think of things that are still on a low-tech agrarian model.
3) Would someone explain why they think even simple sanitation is more expensive than a country-wide network? Sanitation only needs to work on a local scale, last I checked.
4) What good is it turning everybody into coders and engineers if you don't have the rest of the infrastructure for a society?
Sure, this will help some people. Maybe it'll even be a magic bullet for everyone, but I doubt it. For all the talk about how the New Economy or the Digital Revolution is changing things, society still seems to be on the same path it was 10 years ago, just with more reactionary elements.
Honestly? Yes. Do you honestly think an Internet infrastructure is inexpensive to run? Do you think maintaining a network the size of a country through a single agency is going to be easy, given how often routers can fail? Do you realize that any kind of sanitation, even "the toilet flushes it into the river" is better than the current situation of "wherever you can find a place to squat down"?
The fiber (or coax, or whatever) is in place. This is good. However, a network is much more than fiber, just as a sanitation system is more than just pipes. It needs admins. It needs security. It needs content that's relevant to the people using it. It needs a protocol for what to do when the train station's resident snake decides to make the kiosk's innards its new nest. (Yes, this can happen. My grandmother lives in Mumbai, and until she moved to a well-elevated condominum she still used to get the occasional cobra coiled around the water pumps. It's a lot worse out in the country.)
Keeping the network up so we can flame at each other costs a whole pile o' cash.
Rural India is primarily agrarian. Historically, urban grain merchants knew current market prices, rural farmers did not. The internet could give farmers a more equal bargaining position, hopefully raising rural incomes and alleviating rural poverty.
OK. I'll agree that this is a use for the Internet. However, it's not something that needs the Internet. One could have the phone lady place a call to the nearest city and ask. Alternatively, one could send a single guy from the village in on the train to the city every so often. (They probably do this already in order to obtain city luxury items.) A train ticket every month or week is probably a lot cheaper than running a web kiosk, and is something which a villager can use immediately in many ways.
Now weigh those figures against how much it would cost to utilise existing cabling to bring internet service to the Indian countryside. A few big routers and some local kiosks, and you're done.
Now factor in cost of keeping the damn things operational. And teaching the locals how to use them. And upgrading the equipment. And powering all of it. And providing useful content (because the Web as it stands now doesn't seem very useful when I put myself in a poor farmer's shoes-he'd-have-if-he-could-afford-them).
Admittedly, a sanitation infrastructure takes work too, as would clinics. On the other hand, I think those things are going to have a much better return in terms of improved productivity, health, etc. than the Net at the present time. This is great for a feel-good solution, and it's certainly a good PR opportunity for whoever wants to donate their shiny new Internet appliances (AOL? You listening?), but I don't see that it's likely to seriously help.
Oddly enough, I don't use the web to pirate MP3's. The stuff I buy on the web is not at my local store (nor, I imagine, is it trucked through India by itinerant peddlers). And I do use it to participate in discussions with people who just don't think things through (present company excepted, of course:).
One notices that you didn't deny porn.:-)
You have to admit, though, that most of the bandwidth these days is going to entertainment and commerce (at least as far as I can tell), not educational purposes.
kiosks will be in businesses, railway stations or private homes, where they're much harder to steal.
Fair point.
And doctors are more expensive than you seem to think. I'd bet (some number much less than 10,000) doctors would probably cost more than using the Internet to get basic health and contraception information to all the "internet ladies" in India.
Hey. I'm a med student. Don't you go telling me how much I cost. (Just for that, I'm telling the Secret Medical Conspiracy to aim the Carpal Tunnel Ray at you.)
In all seriousness, though, they don't need full MDs. The major improvements in public health come through sanitation, vaccination, and nutrition. Practically speaking, that sort of thing can be handled by a competent nurse (maybe nurse-practitioner). True, it won't be as good as having a doctor in every village, but it'll be a lot better than nothing. Given the current trend towards volunteerism in aspiring health professionals, one barely even needs to pay them; you just send your volunteers through on a monthly or weekly basis, or have them staff a reasonably distributed clinic system. People will volunteer for anything these days; it's just a matter of funding the program. (Hell, you can probably get Bill Gates to buy the actual supplies; he's already donated large sums to vaccination programs.)
I have decided that anyone stupid enough to ask this question doesn't deserve Internet access.
Meaning, as far as I can see, that you can't answer the question. I existed before I got my connection. (I didn't have as much fun, but this isn't being billed as an entertainment thing.) The Internet is not a necessity of life. It is not a necessity of civilization or of education. It is a combination of toy and tool, and for many modern users leans more towards toy. It's a wonderful thing, but if I have to choose, I'll take plumbing.
The most striking thing about india is that many of the poorest people seem to have a lot of free time. If they could be in school learning, they would. If there were jobs available for them, they would be working. With so much time available to them, I would love to see it channeled into learning about the internet and linux and all the other benefits a little knowledge brings. But that can't happen until the internet gets out to kiosks in railway stations in their area.
C'mon. What do most people do with this powerful learning tool? They pirate MP3s, buy stuff, and download gigabytes of porn. People are people. They want pleasures. I know that most of my Internet use could not be construed as educational; it's social interaction at best.
Not to mention that if bandits are willing to swipe the phone lines, they're probably willing to swipe a Web kiosk...
Maslow's Hierarchy isn't completely relevant here. People who have lived without plumbing don't absolutely require it before starting other projects to improve their lives. As their lives improve, then they will fill in the missing parts. But that doesn't exclude using the internet until there are enough doctors in india to meet everyone's needs.
This is true. However, there is a finite amount of government money to spend. I maintain that there is more social benefit to be reaped from fixing health problems than from handing out Internet connections. The Internet is a really sweet toy, but in the end it still serves most people as nothing more than a toy.
Hey, we listened to that Sigmund guy for years, and nobody ever bothered to validate his theories. Even stranger, some people are actually helped by psychoanalysis. If it works, it works...
People tend to skip severeal layers at once, ignore some layers, etc.
I don't think that invalidates the model, though. As I understand it, the degree of each need is individualized; if you don't have much need for a given layer, you'll probably just pop right up to the next.
I'd be interested in some pointers to those studies that invalidate it; post here or use my email, I don't care. They're still teaching the Hierarchy to psych majors, so I'd like to see if there's a gaping flaw in my education.
. Let's face it: how many families owned Encyclopaedia Britannica last year, and how many own a PC and access to britannica.com today? Internet is *necessary* and relative cheap way to to improve education to the poor
But use of britannica.com assumes a whole lot of skill sets. The biggest one I can think of offhand is that you've got to be able to read and type English. A rural village in India is not like a bumblefuck Midwest town (to use a stereotype) where people are a bit set in their ways but still cognizant of basic civilized skills. A rural village in India contains people who cannot read Indian dialects, let alone English. In many cases, there is nothing even resembling a school. These days, the kids are likely to have been vaccinated thanks to the WHO, but that's about it. Before they can make use of the Internet, they've got to get a whole lot of knowledge about what a computer is and how to use one.
These aren't the poor we're used to. I've been to India a few times to visit my family there, and I've seen their poor. It is, quite literally, a whole 'nother country. Technology does not yet truly exist out in the Indian countryside. In another decade, it may, but I still think they'd be better served with clean water and health care than a T1. If you ask them what they'd like, I suspect you'll get much the same answer. (Yes, they do see education as a way to assure a future. However, in order to get a good education, one must be in decent health.)
Slashdot Mirror
But I disagree with your assessment of the security situation. First, ASPs can work just fine without mobile code or agents or whatever. Consider your example of a speech-recognition ASP: It will already have the code installed on it, so there's no need for it to run untrusted code.
But does it have every single module it needs? For example, let's consider an ASP providing voicerec in Darkest Africa. Now let's say Bubba comes sauntering along through the jungle and sees a brightly colored snake. He asks his palmtop "Is that thang friendly?" The palmtop contacts the nearest ASP via wireless, indicating that it needs recognition for English, and would like dialect-specific services for Alabama. Most likely, this server does not have English(Alabama,USA), or if it does, it does not have the latest version. Therefore, it will query the local network. Let's say that Billy-Sue, angry at Bubba for not getting her new hubcaps, has compromised a node on the local network such that it appears to have the necessary software. However, her software is specifically instructed to reverse the sense of any safety-related query. Thus, when the palmtop sends the image of the snake for image-recognition, it ends up asking "Is animal (deadly redneck-eating snake) dangerous?", which returns true. Bubba therefore hears his palmtop say "Yes, it is." Thinking that the snake is friendly, he is promptly devoured.
The whole principle of ASPs, IMHO, is getting the latest code to the user just in time. If somebody compromises the delivery chain, malicious code can be inserted. (I can't wait to see the sorts of things a hacked Office.net could deliver. All you'd have to do is muck with the target's DNS resolution and point them to a malicious site. (Yes, the code might need a signature, but many users won't bother to read the resulting dialog box, will click on 'trust code', and get screwed.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised? No buffer overflows? No hidden back doors? No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
Every security model has a vulnerability, be it in the trust model, the underlying implementations, or an actual protocol flaw. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system; all there is is a system which is very hard to break into and which thus discourages most crackers. Unfortunately, given enough time, you will run into a true hacker out to cause you grief, and then your system is going down.
This, IMHO, is another reason why the "network is the computer" philosophy is bad. Removing the net connection from a computer almost always decreases vulnerability by orders of magnitude.
That's an Apple IIGS, "dood". My very first computer. If only there'd been more software written that actually took advantage of the multimedia (like some actual games), it'd have been a good machine.
Do you honestly want your development tools to be battling PublicFreeGnutapsterNet 12.0 for bandwidth? I don't think we'll ever truly have a persistent excess of carrying capacity. Software expands to consume all resources which are made available to it.
I'm personally not convinced that voice-rec is the way to go for mobile computing. If I'm on the bus or anywhere else where someone can hear me, I don't want them to know what I'm saying to my computer. OTOH, if you're actually the one driving the car, it does make sense.
More importantly, though, is this vision that most mobile machines will stream all their data to nearby big iron which will crunch the numbers and stream back finished product. Let's pretend for a bit that the bandwidth issues can be worked out. Who's going to actually be running the machines that provide all these spare cycles? Are we going to have companies which simply maintain large computers for performing standard tasks like voice recognition and Web searching on behalf of mobile users? I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
I did mobile-code research for a few years, and the resource question was always coming up. There were some papers written by a grad student with a background in economics, and some modeling was done, but it was never quite proven that this could work. (One can't really model all the various kinds of automated maliciousness that could occur.)
Finally, I'll add the standard gripe that I think ASPs are a step in the wrong direction. I don't want to be continually dependent on a manufacturer for access to an application. Let someone arbitrarily deny me word-processing services because they don't like what I write? Be forced to use a new version of software which adds features I hate and removes the ones I love? No thank you. If I want to take my laptop to Mars and do my word-processing there, I want to do so without interplanetary network lag.
Of course, if played right, this could be a big win for Linux and other free-software projects. I believe that once users get bitten by the ASP model, they will want to get away from it. Obviously, the big companies won't let them. If, however, they can just switch to a purely-local free-software office suite, we might see a large jump in the use of free systems.
The network is not the computer, the computer is not the network, and as far as this user is concerned, there are times when I'd like the network to fuck off and leave me alone with a completely functional machine.
I believe it's nothing as severe as multipolar to bipolar/unipolar, but yes, the basic mechanism is believed to be a rearrangement of cellular projections. Neurons can also modulate synaptic weights by messing with the balance of channel proteins, vesicle docking proteins, and other key pathway components. To the best of my knowledge, neurons tend not to apoptose once the brain reaches maturity, although there are massive die-offs early in life as the pathways get themselves sorted out and unnecessary cells get pruned. There are some exceptions (I know that some cells of the olfactory pathway are regularly dying and regenerating, and I believe taste cells do the same thing), but for the most part neurons are pretty long-lived beasts. Since they're nonmitotic and the stem cells tend not to produce more, it's to the organism's advantage to conserve neurons.
Specific papers probably aren't the best way to get an good overview. My personal textbooks are _Cognitive Psychology_ by Medin and Ross and _Neuroscience_ by Bear, Connors, and Paradiso. However, these are not ones I specifically chose; they're the textbooks chosen by my professors. You may have better luck just searching for popular stuff at Amazon.
Note that the different encodings thing is not proven; it merely makes sense, since cells in different brain areas often have significant phenotypic variation.
To your question about forgetting... current theory says it's more of your second hypothesis. In this regard, the brain appears to act like a neural net --- if you train it to do something, but then start training a different task and never provide the stimuli for the first task as reinforcement, it'll drift away from its intial conditioning.
Current theory also views memory sort of like a hash table: the entire state of the system is the input, and something comes out based on associations. This leads to an effect called "state-dependent learning": if you learn all your facts sitting in one desk of a classroom, you'll do better on the test if you take it at that same desk. As you age, your sensory inputs change, which means it's harder to construct a world-state capable of accessing a given piece of information. This has been suggested as the reason why most people can't remember their childhoods well --- our growth has changed the way the world looks to the point that we just can't construct an activating signal for anything but the strongest memories.
Connections are definitely not permanent. There is basically nothing permanent about the brain beyond the gross organization of areas and layers. The absent-minded professor effect, IMHO, is more a matter of changes in significance. You remember the things you think are important. As you get to concentrating more and more on proving P=NP, little details like when you last ate just aren't relevant enough to be encoded. (For most people, memory seems to have some sort of finite bandwidth, such that only the most significant aspects of the current state are likely to be encoded.)
When did your friend visit? I was at Penn in December of 1998 interviewing for a graduate program, and the system I saw didn't require a whole bunch of switch-flipping; it was just a bunch of standard DIPs interconnected on a breadboard and hooked to an apparently standard video camera. The result did appear to model what I know of the initial visual processing system.
Of course, any smoothly functioning technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, but I doubt they'd go to the trouble of setting up a flashy-but-fake demo to impress a prospective grad student. I'm just not important enough to lie to.
The short answer is "We don't entirely know yet." The longer answer is way too complicated for me to get into in a Slashdot comment; I strongly suggest that you read an intro-level neuroscience or cognitive psychology textbook, or at least a single chapter therein. The basic theory is that as you learn things, your neurons physically change shape and alter their connections, and information is encoded in these connections.
Also, be very careful of things like that bicycle accident memory. Vivid images like that are called "flashbulb memories", and studies have shown that they tend to be inaccurate as hell. In fact, the more details you think you remember about a single instantaneous event, the more likely you seem to be to be wrong.
There are many different types of memory, and they appear to be stored in different brain locations with different encodings. These mechanisms are under heavy study, but are not well-understood. Trying to talk about the "storage capacity" in terms of megabytes is essentially futile at this point in time.
I've read the original paper in Nature. (I'd post a link, but I only have access via my university's account, and I have no interest in getting that revoked.) This is not exactly a neural network in the classic sense, although it is similar. The standard neural network is specifically designated an artificial network --- it implements a computational model of neurons. These guys are actually attempting to simulate the known electrical behavior of neurons, in the theory that a network composed of elements that truly mimic neurons will be more brain-like.
Now. "Digital and analog." This is not a new discovery. It has long been known that neurons have a specific threshold WRT to incoming signal; if the incoming signal does not meet the threshold, the neuron will not fire. If signal is above threshold, the neuron fires. If signal is really above threshold, the neuron fires repeatedly, encoding the strength of the stimulus as the frequency of the train of pulses. (AFAIK, the circuits described here didn't implement that last behavior.) This is a digital response. The output, however, is a continuous voltage at a particular frequency: an analog signal. (Whoever called this "a digital response to analog criteria" is correct.)
The important thing is that connections between neurons have different weights, and there's often a lot of local feedback. In practice, these feedback loops tend to be tuned so that a given cell will respond only to a fairly specific stimulus (the right light intensity in the right part of your visual field, or facing a certain direction relative to known landmarks, or hearing a sound from a certain direction, for example). These guys have implemented a circuit on silicon that shows the same filtering behavior and also captures the idea that neurons can be "on" or "off".
Yes, this is kind of neat. Yes, it could eventually lead to advances in AI; at the very least, it could provide useful signal filtering for robotic applications. No, it has nothing to do with plugging your Pentium into your parietal lobe or your Mac into your medulla, at least not until our circuit-design ability is so good that we can entirely mimic the black-box behavior of brain areas. (Hint: we don't even entirely understand that behavior for most regions.)
I'm also kind of surprised that this made Nature; there are guys at UPenn who've had working neuromorphic circuits for years now. Then again, it's only in the Letters section, and these new guys worked out some mathematical models for the gain of a neural circuit rather than just trying to copy existing ones.
Well, CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc - Read Only Memory. You can't write to a CD-ROM at all.
CD-R stands for Compact Disc - Recordable. You can write to a CD-R one more time than a CD-ROM.
But does a CD-R not become a CD-ROM once it's been written to (given that it is now a read-only device)? Similarly, one presumes that a CD-ROM began its life in a recordable state. Therefore, as far as I can tell, burned CD-R == CD-ROM.
I spent two years working for these guys building the Scheme component of their agent system, so I had a chance to learn something about the general theory of the field. Every agent system I've seen has a notion of a sandbox that agents are limited to. In the case of our particular system, agents were also to be signed by their "master", who might then be responsible for any damage caused. Agent data transmitted across the network could be encrypted; agents themselves had to be packaged and signed when in transit between machines, unless they came from a "trusted" machine. Inter-agent communication was not direct; it went through the agent server daemon on each host machine, so that untrusted agents wouldn't need to have the ability to open sockets or files. We were slowly putting together a system for resource allocation, such that each agent would only be allowed to use a certain percentage of each system resource --- that can help prevent a DDoSing agent. (There were interesting attempts to work out a micropayment-like system for purchasing resource access; I don't think it ever got finalized.)
In short, if Sandia has remotely competent people, these agents are going to have strict limitations on their capabilities. Are they completely immune to attack? No. As Bruce Schneier has taught us, this only reduces risk. Still, if you add a requirement for agents to monitor each other, a human would have to be damn good to compromise a sufficient agent population. (Of course, this means that we may be headed for a future of eternal agent war. Might be cool. Want to prove open source? Make Tux2.0 the agent that can kick the crap out of any other agent.)
I recently replaced my machine. I let them put Win98 on it for convenience's sake, but asked my friend with the Red Hat CD to burn me a copy. Sadly, said CD is still sitting on my desk because I haven't had the two to three free days I desire to install and fine-tune the OS. (Hopefully, my local LUG will do an install-fest sometime this summer.) Had I waited a month more to purchase, I could have gotten that same version of RH pre-installed and not have to put up with the occasional bluescreen.
I can guarantee you my next machine will be pre-installed Linux (or maybe BSD --- they might be offering that by the time I can afford a new computer). It's getting easier and easier to obtain a working and vaguely secure Linux box. As enough people feel the pain of the Recovery CD, they may notice that their OEM will now sell them a different OS. Few people are willing to monkey with it on their own, but if those nice young men will sell it all set up and running, they might take the chance.
How much will publishing this information really harm the bus company? Most people don't have the equipment to encode a new mag card. I suppose large-scale criminal operations might, but is there really profit in this for them? Bus passes, AFAIK, are cheap enough that there's not much room to undercut the market --- not enough reward/risk ratio for the people who'd have to sell the forgeries.
You could always ask the company itself, although they'll probably say no and immediately start looking for a way to sue you. That may mean you don't want to publish it, since now your reward/risk is diminishing. (You're also likely to be sued by the company that makes the encoder/reader system.)
There's also the question of what good exactly is done by publishing this. Who will be helped? The encoding method may well be patented, in which case nobody else could use it for a commercial product. (On the other hand, it may simply be kept as a nice trade secret.) Is there any amazing piece of art here which people designing magcard systems need to know? If so, why not just publish that part?
From the tone of your question, it sounds like the main reason you want to publish is to show people how clever you are. (I must admit that this is something I probably couldn't do.) Well, now all of Slashdot knows that you did it. Will actually releasing the spec give you that much more fame?
Basically, unless you can see some important thing that needs the data, why run risks by publishing? You can just state on your home page that you know the system, and can provide details on request. That'll make the data available to future developers without putting you at immediate risk.
From what I've seen (which is primarily academic, not industry), in order to understand good software design you must first do poor software design. Our CS department had a required freshman software engineering class; our team of 7 put together a text editor in a few weeks. We tried to use modular design, but that didn't teach any of us how to build a well-designed system on our own. (Modularity comes a lot more naturally when doing team coding, since you have to break things up into tasks.)
For another year, I still wrote lousy code by cut-and-paste. Slowly, I began to recognize the places where I could use objects and abstraction to clean up the code and make maintenance/revision easier. By the time I got to doing my thesis, I was able to make a reasonably well-built program. (It'd have been even better if the STL worked on the machine I was using.)
Reading the key books will certainly help. However, your code also needs to mesh well with your thought patterns, so that you can work with it easily. Therefore, the majority of becoming a good software engineer is sitting down and integrating the theory with your own style and getting used to thinking for a while before you type. By making mistakes and suffering for them, you will eventually develop an instinctual understanding of good style.
Amen, brother!
I can't stand the current state of web-based discussion. The only way I can manage to follow a thread on Slashdot is by watching the Replies: counters on my user page. The constant need to click back and forth and wait for each new page to be fetched, rendered, and displayed is agonizing, especially when you're (as I am) stuck with a school that mostly does 28.8 dialups.
Reading over the Peacefire page, I notice something odd about the correspondence they've got posted. They show the complete chain of email used to get their "bait" sites blocked, but nothing about their follow-up requests to block the sources of the bait quotes.
That strikes me as odd. Anybody know the reason? I'm inclined to think that after a company took the bait, they got email from the main Peacefire account saying "Ha ha! Fooled you! Gonna block Dr. Laura now?" IMHO, it'd have been better to send in the request to block the powerful sites from the same fake Hotmail accounts.
OTOH, this is still a very satisfying bit of news. Yay, Peacefire.
To hell with individual replies. I'm consolidating.
1) Yes, I know "Paki" is a racial slur. Notice that that whole paragraph was highly tongue-in-cheek.
2) If it's going to small towns and not the actual villages, then I retract my statement that it's not useful. When I hear "village", I think of things that are still on a low-tech agrarian model.
3) Would someone explain why they think even simple sanitation is more expensive than a country-wide network? Sanitation only needs to work on a local scale, last I checked.
4) What good is it turning everybody into coders and engineers if you don't have the rest of the infrastructure for a society?
Sure, this will help some people. Maybe it'll even be a magic bullet for everyone, but I doubt it. For all the talk about how the New Economy or the Digital Revolution is changing things, society still seems to be on the same path it was 10 years ago, just with more reactionary elements.
Honestly? Yes. Do you honestly think an Internet infrastructure is inexpensive to run? Do you think maintaining a network the size of a country through a single agency is going to be easy, given how often routers can fail? Do you realize that any kind of sanitation, even "the toilet flushes it into the river" is better than the current situation of "wherever you can find a place to squat down"?
The fiber (or coax, or whatever) is in place. This is good. However, a network is much more than fiber, just as a sanitation system is more than just pipes. It needs admins. It needs security. It needs content that's relevant to the people using it. It needs a protocol for what to do when the train station's resident snake decides to make the kiosk's innards its new nest. (Yes, this can happen. My grandmother lives in Mumbai, and until she moved to a well-elevated condominum she still used to get the occasional cobra coiled around the water pumps. It's a lot worse out in the country.)
Keeping the network up so we can flame at each other costs a whole pile o' cash.
Rural India is primarily agrarian. Historically, urban grain merchants knew current market prices, rural farmers did not. The internet could give farmers a more equal bargaining position, hopefully raising rural incomes and alleviating rural poverty.
OK. I'll agree that this is a use for the Internet. However, it's not something that needs the Internet. One could have the phone lady place a call to the nearest city and ask. Alternatively, one could send a single guy from the village in on the train to the city every so often. (They probably do this already in order to obtain city luxury items.) A train ticket every month or week is probably a lot cheaper than running a web kiosk, and is something which a villager can use immediately in many ways.
Now weigh those figures against how much it would cost to utilise existing cabling to bring internet service to the Indian countryside. A few big routers and some local kiosks, and you're done.
Now factor in cost of keeping the damn things operational. And teaching the locals how to use them. And upgrading the equipment. And powering all of it. And providing useful content (because the Web as it stands now doesn't seem very useful when I put myself in a poor farmer's shoes-he'd-have-if-he-could-afford-them).
Admittedly, a sanitation infrastructure takes work too, as would clinics. On the other hand, I think those things are going to have a much better return in terms of improved productivity, health, etc. than the Net at the present time. This is great for a feel-good solution, and it's certainly a good PR opportunity for whoever wants to donate their shiny new Internet appliances (AOL? You listening?), but I don't see that it's likely to seriously help.
Oddly enough, I don't use the web to pirate MP3's. The stuff I buy on the web is not at my local store (nor, I imagine, is it trucked through India by itinerant peddlers). And I do use it to participate in discussions with people who just don't think things through (present company excepted, of course :).
:-)
One notices that you didn't deny porn.
You have to admit, though, that most of the bandwidth these days is going to entertainment and commerce (at least as far as I can tell), not educational purposes.
kiosks will be in businesses, railway stations or private homes, where they're much harder to steal.
Fair point.
And doctors are more expensive than you seem to think. I'd bet (some number much less than 10,000) doctors would probably cost more than using the Internet to get basic health and contraception information to all the "internet ladies" in India.
Hey. I'm a med student. Don't you go telling me how much I cost. (Just for that, I'm telling the Secret Medical Conspiracy to aim the Carpal Tunnel Ray at you.)
In all seriousness, though, they don't need full MDs. The major improvements in public health come through sanitation, vaccination, and nutrition. Practically speaking, that sort of thing can be handled by a competent nurse (maybe nurse-practitioner). True, it won't be as good as having a doctor in every village, but it'll be a lot better than nothing. Given the current trend towards volunteerism in aspiring health professionals, one barely even needs to pay them; you just send your volunteers through on a monthly or weekly basis, or have them staff a reasonably distributed clinic system. People will volunteer for anything these days; it's just a matter of funding the program. (Hell, you can probably get Bill Gates to buy the actual supplies; he's already donated large sums to vaccination programs.)
I have decided that anyone stupid enough to ask
this question doesn't deserve Internet access.
Meaning, as far as I can see, that you can't answer the question. I existed before I got my connection. (I didn't have as much fun, but this isn't being billed as an entertainment thing.) The Internet is not a necessity of life. It is not a necessity of civilization or of education. It is a combination of toy and tool, and for many modern users leans more towards toy. It's a wonderful thing, but if I have to choose, I'll take plumbing.
The most striking thing about india is that many of the poorest people seem to have a lot of free time. If they could be in school learning, they would. If there were jobs available for them, they would be working. With so much time available to them, I would love to see it channeled into learning about the internet and linux and all the other benefits a little knowledge brings. But that can't happen until the internet gets out to kiosks in railway stations in their area.
C'mon. What do most people do with this powerful learning tool? They pirate MP3s, buy stuff, and download gigabytes of porn. People are people. They want pleasures. I know that most of my Internet use could not be construed as educational; it's social interaction at best.
Not to mention that if bandits are willing to swipe the phone lines, they're probably willing to swipe a Web kiosk...
Maslow's Hierarchy isn't completely relevant here. People who have lived without plumbing don't absolutely require it before starting other projects to improve their lives. As their lives improve, then they will fill in the missing parts. But that doesn't exclude using the internet until there are enough doctors in india to meet everyone's needs.
This is true. However, there is a finite amount of government money to spend. I maintain that there is more social benefit to be reaped from fixing health problems than from handing out Internet connections. The Internet is a really sweet toy, but in the end it still serves most people as nothing more than a toy.
Hey, we listened to that Sigmund guy for years, and nobody ever bothered to validate his theories. Even stranger, some people are actually helped by psychoanalysis. If it works, it works...
People tend to skip severeal layers at once, ignore some layers, etc.
I don't think that invalidates the model, though. As I understand it, the degree of each need is individualized; if you don't have much need for a given layer, you'll probably just pop right up to the next.
I'd be interested in some pointers to those studies that invalidate it; post here or use my email, I don't care. They're still teaching the Hierarchy to psych majors, so I'd like to see if there's a gaping flaw in my education.
. Let's face it: how many families owned Encyclopaedia Britannica last year, and how many own a PC and access to britannica.com today?
Internet is *necessary* and relative cheap way to to improve education to the poor
But use of britannica.com assumes a whole lot of skill sets. The biggest one I can think of offhand is that you've got to be able to read and type English. A rural village in India is not like a bumblefuck Midwest town (to use a stereotype) where people are a bit set in their ways but still cognizant of basic civilized skills. A rural village in India contains people who cannot read Indian dialects, let alone English. In many cases, there is nothing even resembling a school. These days, the kids are likely to have been vaccinated thanks to the WHO, but that's about it. Before they can make use of the Internet, they've got to get a whole lot of knowledge about what a computer is and how to use one.
These aren't the poor we're used to. I've been to India a few times to visit my family there, and I've seen their poor. It is, quite literally, a whole 'nother country. Technology does not yet truly exist out in the Indian countryside. In another decade, it may, but I still think they'd be better served with clean water and health care than a T1. If you ask them what they'd like, I suspect you'll get much the same answer. (Yes, they do see education as a way to assure a future. However, in order to get a good education, one must be in decent health.)