The only problem with the example is that many people realize that the date given is a deadline for a decision / the data to be available and is not necessarily the time that the information will be published. I would imagine this to be true of students in particular as, at least in my experience, schools often will publish information as it is available but publish a deadline they know they can meet.
from the you-never-know-it-might-actually-be-mostly-true dept.
Guess you never really know... ya right...
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
I saw it Friday w/ my girl friend
on
15 Minutes
·
· Score: 2
We both liked it, more so myself than her.
It was at times slightly distubing, very graphic and sensatonalistic (on purpose).
I liked it because it told a good story covered a lot of ground and does talk about something ignored in media: media themselves. I disagree that the movie was very dumb. Sure it had its problems, the last 1/3 was very unbalanced and keep bouncing all over the place, however the use of comedy throught the film made it accessable to my girl friend who otherwise would have found it too intense.
All in all I'd say it was a decent movie, definitely worth a rental, but if your board or love movies go for the theater.
Also, make sure you stay for an extra minute or so as the credits start to get a little extra closure.
The difference: Price and tax. Sometimes CD-R Audio when used in those cd copiers (the music only ones) will set a flag that will prevent a copy from being made of a copy. Only in the audio-copiers though.
For computer users they are they same but cost more:-)
Heh, I'm using mine for NAT/Firewall for the home network. My dad brought home the computer for my sister (way back when), and when she got a new one, I saved it from the garbage. I've had about three fans die on it, but it sits in my chilly basement and acts as heater in the winter.
Bonus: Current uptime on it 95 days, running OpenBSD:-)
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 00 16:43:41 CST From: "Douglas W. Jones" Subject: Thoughts on computers in voting
It's election day, and as chair of the Iowa State Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, it seems like a fair time to pause and think about the state of the art.
Over the past several years, an important trend has been evident in the voting machines that have come before our board for approval in Iowa. This is the replacement of custom-built software with off-the shelf commodity software, usually some variant of Windows and largely dependent on Microsoft Office.
Computers in voting machines are old technology at this point, whether they're used for central count systems based on punched cards or mark sense readers, or whether they're precinct count systems based on mark sense or direct recording electronic voting machines. There are still lever machines in use, of course, but those haven't been changed in years and therefore, we don't see them coming up for examination.
Under the current Federal Election Commission guidelines for electronic voting systems, all custom-built software is subject to examination by an independent third party. On the other hand, "industry standard components" are acceptable, as is. The FEC has no enforcement power, but the FEC guidelines have been enacted into the voting law of numerous states.
The reason this concerns me is that we see a larger and larger fraction of the software inside the voting system becoming proprietary product of a third party and exempt from the requirement that it be available for a source code inspection. Furthermore, the size of commercial operating systems is immense, so an effective inspection is very hard to imagine!
What threat does this present?
If I wanted to fix an election, not this year, but 4 years from now, what I might do is quit my job at the University of Iowa and go to work for Microsoft, seeking to insinuate myself into the group that maintains the central elements of the window manager. It sounds like it might be fun, even if the job I'd need would largely involve maintenance of code that's been stable for years. My goal:
I want to modify the code that instantiates a "radio button widget" in a window on the screen. The specific function I want to add is: If the date is the first tuesday after the first monday in a year divisible by 4, and if the window contains text containing the string "straight party", and if the radio buttons contain, at least, the strings "democrat" and "republican", one time in 10, at random, switch the button label containing the substring "democrat" with any of the other labels, at random.
Of course, I would make every effort to obfuscate my code. Obfuscated coding is a highly developed art! Having done so, what I'd have accomplished is a version of windows that would swing 10 percent of the straight party votes from the Democratic party to the other other parties, selected at random. This would be very hard to detect in the election results, it would be unlikely to be detected during testing, and yet, it could swing many elections!
This is just one example attack! There may be similar vulnerabilities, for example, in the off-the-shelf database packages being used for ballot storage and counting.
I don't mean to this example to reflect any ill feelings toward Microsoft, but it is true that their software is used in the vast majority of new voting systems I've seen. This threat does not require any cooperation from the vendor of the window manager or other third party component exempt from source code inspection. All it requires is a mole, working their way into the vendor and producing code which is not detected by the company's internal testing and inspection. Obfuscation is easy, and the art of the "easter egg" in commercial software makes it very clear that huge numbers of unofficial features are being routinely included in commercially released software without the cooperation of the software vendors. (OK, I know that some easter eggs are officially approved.)
Having said this, it is worth noting that Microsoft has indicated a preference about the outcome of today's presidential election, and there are excellent reasons to treat proprietary software produced by a partisan agency with great suspicion when it is included in a voting system!
My conclusion? The time has come for computer professionals to press for a change to the guidelines for voting machines, asking that all software included in such machines be either open source, available for public inspection, or at least open to inspection by a third party independent testing authority. There are no technical obstacles to this! Linux, Free BSD and several other fully functional operating systems are available and will run on the hardware currently being incorporated into modern voting machines!
But, this is not the end of the problem! How do you prove, after the fact, that the software in the voting machine is the software that was approved by the board of examiners and tested by the independent testing authority? No modern machine I'm aware of makes any real effort to allow this proof, although several vendors do promise to put a copy of their source code in the hands of an excrow agency in case a question arises.
Doug Jones http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
[Note: Doug, Rebecca Mercuri is just putting the finishing touches on her PhD thesis on the subject of electronic voting, at the University of Pennsylvania. I highly recommend you contact her for a copy, which should be available very soon. For everyone else, we will announce it here when the thesis is ready. Also, my book *Computer-Related Risks* has lots of background on risks in electronic elections and what to do about them. Rebecca has carried the analysis much further than I did. Her thesis will be a very valuable contribution that significantly raises the bar as to what should be demanded, not just hoped for, plus an analysis of the residual risks that would still remain. PGN]
By agreeing to their terms (for good or bad) you get access to extra shots and images that you may not have had access to if you weren't a "partner"
I'm not saying that this is a good/bad thing, just something. The question I have is do you have to sign away the copyright to the parody to get access to the extra footage?
Author tag line: Ryan C. Gordon has a reputation for his unwavering ethics in journalistic circles around the world. He can be reached at icculus@lokigames.com
And this... That's my "Halloween document" for 2000. Nothing to worry about. And for crying out loud, don't leak this memo this year. We all remember what happened to Vinod, right?
And this.. Officially, Microsoft has always kept at a safe distance with Linux. We leave the actually muddying to others, like Mindcraft.
There is a plugin called PGP For ICQ that will allow you to encrypt ICQ messages, and I think that PGP 7.0 has this built in. The linked plug-in has source code also (as of now source for 0.5 only, the current release is 0.9)
The problem is when a company already has people that their job is to keep out an eye on employees. If they are told to watch for stuff coming out of e-mail then the boss, who doesn't know how to, could tell them to also watch for freemail services. Most (all?) employees need to go through a company server to get on the net, and because the freemail services only encrypt log-ins (exceptions apply) they smart network admin guy can the set-up filters to record mail being sent to/from hotmail, yahoo etc.
The lesson however is encrypt the connection from the start all the way to the log-off. If Yahoo or Hotmail does this, there will be a jump in the number of other freemail services who offer the always encrypt option.
Sure there is the frames thing, wanna know why? Check out this (you can see it from the main page if you look carefully...), oh yea and they use the (noframes) tags....
Just in the wrong way...
PS: www.HackSDMI.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.3.3 OpenSSL/0.9.3a on Linux
The problem is similar to quake being open sourced. There were cheaters before but more afterwards. DNet would suffer a lot of abuse if the networking code was open sourced, but they probally do face a lot of abuse right now anyway.
As they mention on the page; it is easy to fake packets and they know that, but how do you build a system that can verify information sent without checking over everything again. If people had the code to generate packets and people abused it; it could ruin years of many people's CPU cycles.
However, I'm sure if there was a secure way to deal with the problem, that could be open sourced they'd do it in a flash.
Fahrenheit 451 is about a time when books are banned in order to preserve the status-quo. Its author is Ray Bradbury. In the book fireman are the people who burn books for a living. People refer (not jokingly mind you) to their televisions as the "family". I throughly enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who has an opinion about censorship, people who enjoy stories that force you to stop and think about the world. The book is good for a number of reasons. The book achieves it's goal fully, it's written in a very pleasant way and it let's the reader do most of the thinking.
The main goal of the author is to educate and to intice people to think about what books mean. Books have for a long time played an important role in society. Books allow people to imagine whole new worlds, books tell their stories, and teach people countless things. Fahrenheit 451 displays a world where the value of books has been lost. Only a few people still value books, they memorize books and then burn them to prevent themselves from being killed. The world portrayed by Fahrenheit 451 is a dismal place, people run over people while driving 100 MPH just for fun. The picture painted by Ray Bradbury lets people sit back and think about the value of books, therefore achieving its goal in the fullest sense.
One of the best ways to fail as an entertainer is to draw out the work needlessly. No one enjoys the part of the movie where nothing important is happening, the plot isn't thickening and people rant on and on about nothing; the same thing is true with books. Fahrenheit 451 never shoots itself in the foot by boring people, everything is important in one way or another. The books keeps the plot flowing and never has to backtrack just to clarify details. The book maintains a consistent connection and does not break the flow without a very good reason. The only place where more detail would have been nice is the ending, I would have liked to see a much more detailed portrait of the events. However, if Fahrenheit 451 were to draw itself out needlessly and continually force distraction from the normal flow it wouldn't have been as good a book.
Fahrenheit 451 lets the reader do most of the thinking, it doesn't distract from the train of thought and it doesn't explicitly tell the reader to think anything. By allowing the reader to think for themselves the book can achieve its goal more fully. The book only presents an underlying tone, but it doesn't shout out its message directly. The book's bias is obvious but it does provide a good counter argument for all of the points that it raises. The counter argument causes the reader to agree with one side more then the other, therefor sympathizing with certain characters more then others. Letting the reader think creates a whole new dimension in this book, it can change a happy ending into a sad, the "good guys" can become the "bad guys" just in how the reader choose to interpret the message.
Fahrenheit 451 achieves its primary goal very well, by not being overly complex, not dragging on forever and forcing the reader to make choices and gather their own opinions. When I finished I knew I would be reminded of images from the book. The book is very well written and provides a consistent path, letting the reader sit back and enjoy. No major mistakes were made, combining for a great read. To finish with a short quote from the book "The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are".
Aaron "PooF" Matthews E-mail: aaron@fish.pathcom.com To mail me remove "fish." ICQ: 11391152 Quote: "Success is the greatest revenge"
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem with the example is that many people realize that the date given is a deadline for a decision / the data to be available and is not necessarily the time that the information will be published. I would imagine this to be true of students in particular as, at least in my experience, schools often will publish information as it is available but publish a deadline they know they can meet.
Just a thought.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
We both liked it, more so myself than her.
It was at times slightly distubing, very graphic and sensatonalistic (on purpose).
I liked it because it told a good story covered a lot of ground and does talk about something ignored in media: media themselves. I disagree that the movie was very dumb. Sure it had its problems, the last 1/3 was very unbalanced and keep bouncing all over the place, however the use of comedy throught the film made it accessable to my girl friend who otherwise would have found it too intense.
All in all I'd say it was a decent movie, definitely worth a rental, but if your board or love movies go for the theater.
Also, make sure you stay for an extra minute or so as the credits start to get a little extra closure.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
"Those that can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or saftey" BF
That is the original quote, however many people change it to read "Those that can give up liberty to obtain safety deserve neither."
The is a large difference between those two statements.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
The difference: Price and tax. Sometimes CD-R Audio when used in those cd copiers (the music only ones) will set a flag that will prevent a copy from being made of a copy. Only in the audio-copiers though.
For computer users they are they same but cost more :-)
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Heh, I'm using mine for NAT/Firewall for the home network. My dad brought home the computer for my sister (way back when), and when she got a new one, I saved it from the garbage. I've had about three fans die on it, but it sits in my chilly basement and acts as heater in the winter.
Bonus: Current uptime on it 95 days, running OpenBSD :-)
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Yea they canned my account, oh well I made a new account at 50megs.com...
I present Slashdot Mirror.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
I verified all the images and they all look the same. Get it here. Note that I only mirror the english, not the Japanese.
Or get the whole thing zipped here.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Mirror of the mirror is going up at geocities
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
From the Risks digest
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 00 16:43:41 CST From: "Douglas W. Jones" Subject: Thoughts on computers in voting
It's election day, and as chair of the Iowa State Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, it seems like a fair time to pause and think about the state of the art.
Over the past several years, an important trend has been evident in the voting machines that have come before our board for approval in Iowa. This is the replacement of custom-built software with off-the shelf commodity software, usually some variant of Windows and largely dependent on Microsoft Office.
Computers in voting machines are old technology at this point, whether they're used for central count systems based on punched cards or mark sense readers, or whether they're precinct count systems based on mark sense or direct recording electronic voting machines. There are still lever machines in use, of course, but those haven't been changed in years and therefore, we don't see them coming up for examination.
Under the current Federal Election Commission guidelines for electronic voting systems, all custom-built software is subject to examination by an independent third party. On the other hand, "industry standard components" are acceptable, as is. The FEC has no enforcement power, but the FEC guidelines have been enacted into the voting law of numerous states.
The reason this concerns me is that we see a larger and larger fraction of the software inside the voting system becoming proprietary product of a third party and exempt from the requirement that it be available for a source code inspection. Furthermore, the size of commercial operating systems is immense, so an effective inspection is very hard to imagine!
What threat does this present?
If I wanted to fix an election, not this year, but 4 years from now, what I might do is quit my job at the University of Iowa and go to work for Microsoft, seeking to insinuate myself into the group that maintains the central elements of the window manager. It sounds like it might be fun, even if the job I'd need would largely involve maintenance of code that's been stable for years. My goal:
I want to modify the code that instantiates a "radio button widget" in a window on the screen. The specific function I want to add is: If the date is the first tuesday after the first monday in a year divisible by 4, and if the window contains text containing the string "straight party", and if the radio buttons contain, at least, the strings "democrat" and "republican", one time in 10, at random, switch the button label containing the substring "democrat" with any of the other labels, at random.
Of course, I would make every effort to obfuscate my code. Obfuscated coding is a highly developed art! Having done so, what I'd have accomplished is a version of windows that would swing 10 percent of the straight party votes from the Democratic party to the other other parties, selected at random. This would be very hard to detect in the election results, it would be unlikely to be detected during testing, and yet, it could swing many elections!
This is just one example attack! There may be similar vulnerabilities, for example, in the off-the-shelf database packages being used for ballot storage and counting.
I don't mean to this example to reflect any ill feelings toward Microsoft, but it is true that their software is used in the vast majority of new voting systems I've seen. This threat does not require any cooperation from the vendor of the window manager or other third party component exempt from source code inspection. All it requires is a mole, working their way into the vendor and producing code which is not detected by the company's internal testing and inspection. Obfuscation is easy, and the art of the "easter egg" in commercial software makes it very clear that huge numbers of unofficial features are being routinely included in commercially released software without the cooperation of the software vendors. (OK, I know that some easter eggs are officially approved.)
Having said this, it is worth noting that Microsoft has indicated a preference about the outcome of today's presidential election, and there are excellent reasons to treat proprietary software produced by a partisan agency with great suspicion when it is included in a voting system!
My conclusion? The time has come for computer professionals to press for a change to the guidelines for voting machines, asking that all software included in such machines be either open source, available for public inspection, or at least open to inspection by a third party independent testing authority. There are no technical obstacles to this! Linux, Free BSD and several other fully functional operating systems are available and will run on the hardware currently being incorporated into modern voting machines!
But, this is not the end of the problem! How do you prove, after the fact, that the software in the voting machine is the software that was approved by the board of examiners and tested by the independent testing authority? No modern machine I'm aware of makes any real effort to allow this proof, although several vendors do promise to put a copy of their source code in the hands of an excrow agency in case a question arises.
Doug Jones http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
[Note: Doug, Rebecca Mercuri is just putting the finishing touches on her PhD thesis on the subject of electronic voting, at the University of Pennsylvania. I highly recommend you contact her for a copy, which should be available very soon. For everyone else, we will announce it here when the thesis is ready. Also, my book *Computer-Related Risks* has lots of background on risks in electronic elections and what to do about them. Rebecca has carried the analysis much further than I did. Her thesis will be a very valuable contribution that significantly raises the bar as to what should be demanded, not just hoped for, plus an analysis of the residual risks that would still remain. PGN]
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
By agreeing to their terms (for good or bad) you get access to extra shots and images that you may not have had access to if you weren't a "partner"
I'm not saying that this is a good/bad thing, just something. The question I have is do you have to sign away the copyright to the parody to get access to the extra footage?
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Thanks for the quick bio. I agree with you, but many people on /. seem(ed) to think it's real (maybe they didn't read it? :-)
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Quit points
I'd say it's a fake...
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
The original (blurry) image is here
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
There is a plugin called PGP For ICQ that will allow you to encrypt ICQ messages, and I think that PGP 7.0 has this built in. The linked plug-in has source code also (as of now source for 0.5 only, the current release is 0.9)
Correct me if I'm wrong...
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
The problem is when a company already has people that their job is to keep out an eye on employees. If they are told to watch for stuff coming out of e-mail then the boss, who doesn't know how to, could tell them to also watch for freemail services. Most (all?) employees need to go through a company server to get on the net, and because the freemail services only encrypt log-ins (exceptions apply) they smart network admin guy can the set-up filters to record mail being sent to/from hotmail, yahoo etc.
The lesson however is encrypt the connection from the start all the way to the log-off. If Yahoo or Hotmail does this, there will be a jump in the number of other freemail services who offer the always encrypt option.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
Check out the site...
Sure there is the frames thing, wanna know why? Check out this (you can see it from the main page if you look carefully...), oh yea and they use the (noframes) tags....
Just in the wrong way...
PS: www.HackSDMI.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.3.3 OpenSSL/0.9.3a on Linux
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
PGP For ICQ on Windows is available here it works as an ICQ plug-in.
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
The problem is similar to quake being open sourced. There were cheaters before but more afterwards. DNet would suffer a lot of abuse if the networking code was open sourced, but they probally do face a lot of abuse right now anyway.
As they mention on the page; it is easy to fake packets and they know that, but how do you build a system that can verify information sent without checking over everything again. If people had the code to generate packets and people abused it; it could ruin years of many people's CPU cycles.
However, I'm sure if there was a secure way to deal with the problem, that could be open sourced they'd do it in a flash.
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
All of those sites have lots of MP3's traded on them. They just shut them down once discovered.
It doesn't help the real problem of preventing users from doing this.
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
They made their little add thingie and had it printed on about 50 "pages" of mouse pad like material, had it bound
If one layer got dirty/trashed (they were almost as good as the el cheapo brand pads) then tyou'd just rip it off and have a fresh pad.
Cool 'eh? Mouse pad art in a different way
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
I just read it for grade 11 english: My review
Fahrenheit 451 is about a time when books are banned in order to preserve the status-quo. Its author is Ray Bradbury. In the book fireman are the people who burn books for a living. People refer (not jokingly mind you) to their televisions as the "family". I throughly enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who has an opinion about censorship, people who enjoy stories that force you to stop and think about the world. The book is good for a number of reasons. The book achieves it's goal fully, it's written in a very pleasant way and it let's the reader do most of the thinking.
The main goal of the author is to educate and to intice people to think about what books mean. Books have for a long time played an important role in society. Books allow people to imagine whole new worlds, books tell their stories, and teach people countless things. Fahrenheit 451 displays a world where the value of books has been lost. Only a few people still value books, they memorize books and then burn them to prevent themselves from being killed. The world portrayed by Fahrenheit 451 is a dismal place, people run over people while driving 100 MPH just for fun. The picture painted by Ray Bradbury lets people sit back and think about the value of books, therefore achieving its goal in the fullest sense.
One of the best ways to fail as an entertainer is to draw out the work needlessly. No one enjoys the part of the movie where nothing important is happening, the plot isn't thickening and people rant on and on about nothing; the same thing is true with books. Fahrenheit 451 never shoots itself in the foot by boring people, everything is important in one way or another. The books keeps the plot flowing and never has to backtrack just to clarify details. The book maintains a consistent connection and does not break the flow without a very good reason. The only place where more detail would have been nice is the ending, I would have liked to see a much more detailed portrait of the events. However, if Fahrenheit 451 were to draw itself out needlessly and continually force distraction from the normal flow it wouldn't have been as good a book.
Fahrenheit 451 lets the reader do most of the thinking, it doesn't distract from the train of thought and it doesn't explicitly tell the reader to think anything. By allowing the reader to think for themselves the book can achieve its goal more fully. The book only presents an underlying tone, but it doesn't shout out its message directly. The book's bias is obvious but it does provide a good counter argument for all of the points that it raises. The counter argument causes the reader to agree with one side more then the other, therefor sympathizing with certain characters more then others. Letting the reader think creates a whole new dimension in this book, it can change a happy ending into a sad, the "good guys" can become the "bad guys" just in how the reader choose to interpret the message.
Fahrenheit 451 achieves its primary goal very well, by not being overly complex, not dragging on forever and forcing the reader to make choices and gather their own opinions. When I finished I knew I would be reminded of images from the book. The book is very well written and provides a consistent path, letting the reader sit back and enjoy. No major mistakes were made, combining for a great read. To finish with a short quote from the book "The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are".
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
E-mail: aaron@fish.pathcom.com
To mail me remove "fish."
ICQ: 11391152
Quote: "Success is the greatest revenge"
Just a little note all archived stories don't let you access one comment it's all or nothing.
But thanks for the inital tip!
Aaron "PooF" Matthews
E-mail: aaron@fish.pathcom.com
To mail me remove "fish."
ICQ: 11391152
Quote: "Success is the greatest revenge"