... to the USPTO, my understanding is that provided an examiner with reasonable knowledge of the field doesn't find any published prior art, then they're under an obligation to issue the patent. And on the whole it's a good thing that examiners' discretion to reject applications is limited to the claims themselves, and not (subjective) assessments of what is or is not ridiculous or useful.
Where USPTO's actions can be justifiably questioned is when decisions are made which appear to show that it does not have (enough) examiners with adequate knowledge of the field concerned, IT being, unfortunately, one of these fields. As has been commented before, the remedy is to improve the scrutiny by taking on additional knowledgable examiners, but this isn't something that can be done overnight even if the neccessary resources were approved by government and legislature: ask yourselves what it would take to persuade you to consider such a career, rather than working in the "real world".
A simple popup asking if one wants the latest XSL files with the options to decline, to be asked each time, or to grant permission to go ahead without further consultation is all that would be needed.
So alledgedly you don't get given a choice, added to which the phoning home is alledgedly also attempted when you're doing a local search, which I would guess is not what most users would expect (could I suppose be an unintentional error in the implimentation). That's where the controversy starts.
Honestly, the more I hear about XP the more relieved I am that I paid up the additional fee to have W2K on the machine I bought recently.
Isolation and Culture
on
XP, Phone Home
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The writer makes the point at the end that it's not so much what is being done that is the problem, but the fact that it's done without telling you and without giving you a choice about whether you want it to happen.
To which I'd add, it also shows a problem with the culture in the organisation that makes the stuff. It's not so much arrogance, but something more akin to carelessness: an inability to appreciate that other people - including some of your customers - may have different criteria and preferences than yours. I personally doubt whether the people who developed this even thought to ask themselves whether this behaviour would be considered reasonable, nor that it was ever considered in any formal reviews that may have taken place. And it's far from the first time that I've got that impression about MS: their use of that reserved field in the Kerboros protocol feels similar: not so much malicious as just a failure to know and appreciate the etiquette that had grown up in an area that they were entering for the first time.
"... as well as a device called EtherPeek, which manages network traffic....."
Huh?
EtherPeek is a well-known LAN traffic monitor from WildPackets. Interesting to see it mentioned in this context: I can certainly see how writing a custom module or two for it might save The Protectors Of Our Freedom a bit of work. Or is this just a case of a confusingly-chosen name?
Ian Hislop summed it up perfectly : "Oh god, he looks like a trendy vicar"
And IH has been running the "St Albion Parish News (Vicar the Revd. T Blair, Oxon.)" in the magazine he edits, Private Eye, since soon after Tony came to power, rewriting the governemtn events of the day as they would appear on a smaller scale if enacted by church-people and parish digitaries in a small country village. It's frequently a very telling commentary, and Prime Minister Blair sometimes comes across as disquietingly reminiscent of his fictitious alter-ego.
Actually, it does mention a few points. Import of MS-Word documents works provided you're dealing with straightforward stuff and avoid newest features. Some problems with importing stuff with tables in it, which sounds nasty. Ability to export.doc and.rtf: well, again, it depends how well the importing side likes what it sees. Import of Excel said to be hindered by different naming conventions in the two programs, which sounds like something that should be addressed in the import mechanism. Looks as though it's OK to pull in limited amounts of stuff from the MS-centric universe, but a seamless exchange of data it's not.
As others have commented, it's nice to see a vendor whose licence agreement gives the impression that they value their customers rather than regard them as crooks who need to be licence-audited into submission.
I think I'd like to see a more detailed review comparing it with StarOffice, say, or have the chance to try it myself for a day or so before putting down my dollars.
The Singing Bell is one of a number of short detective-genre tales that Asimov wrote around the same scientific amateur sleuth who the authorities turn to when they're at their wit's end about something. He's a shy unmarried recluse with an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything and an overwhelming dislike of air travel - a foible that Asimov apparently shared.
The other stories are worth reading, too: they're quite ingeniously worked out.
Try U235, and the gun design - primitive by modern standards, but it worked at Hiroshima.
But in any case you miss the point: the researcher seems to have been most reluctant to help other people duplicate the exact setup where the claimed effect manifested itself. The whole sorry story may not have started off as pseudo-science: perhaps it was just an observation of something unexpected, combined with wishful thinking and a paranoia about plagiarism acquired when the guy was still working in institutions in his home country, Russia. But carry on refusing to follow normal scientific research practice long enough over such an extraordinary claim and it starts smelling funny.
(Yeah, I probably shouldn't have bitten on this one, but even trolls need to eat occasionally.)
One point that belatedly struck me about this guy's claim: the apparatus that shows (alledgedly) this effect uses a spinning rotor, and spinning rotors seem to have an amazing ability to attract pseudo-science.
Maybe they somehow generate some sort of bogosity field;) Or perhaps it's just because so many people have at one time or another personally encountered the bafflingly counter-intuitive behavior of a toy gyroscope when you try to alter the axis around which it is spinning, and it tries to move off in an approximately 90-degree offset direction. There was a time when I was studying physics at university when I could write down the relevant equations and calculate what would happen, but even then I never intuitively understood the "cause" or where this unexpected force "came from". Quantum theory and relativity seemed transparently obvious in contrast.
This "research" has all the signs of pseudo-science. The results are alledgedly reproducible, but only when conditions are "exactly right" which they never seem to be when other people try to repeat the tests independently. The researcher himself won't help other people or publish more than vague information because, so he says, he's afraid of being ripped off. As a result, he's has been thrown out of the academic institution where he used to work. No plausible theoretical underpinning for the effect, and plenty of scope in the test setup outlined in what little has been published for other effects to be present which might be confused with the result that's claimed, especially by someone who - to put it charitably - may find it difficult to maintain full scientific objectivity when considering the results.
NASA must have contracted a bad dose of the "but they said Einstein was wrong" meme to even consider getting involved in this quackery.
So major corporations are having to devote significant resources to filtering (and apropos another comment, it doesn't really matter if this is done centrally or is left to individual recipients to do - it costs the business in each case)?
Good. It's already clear that in many developed countries they've got more lobbying influence than us mere voters. Let them use it for something useful for a change.
I was checking the European Dell sites last weekend to spec up a replacement for my home machine that finally croaked. Liked the flexibility of the top-end desktop-comparable laptops. Didn't like them only being advertised with XP as the OS, and finally went with a midrange model where W2K was still available as an option.
Terminal specs were pretty open; compliance of the comms software with the specs was occasionally less than 100% - hence arguments if a clone didn't work as expected. Even with the genuine vendors' equipment a line protocol analyser was a standard tool at the larger customer sites. One of the areas of computing history that I'm not nostalgic about at all.
"... I'm sure that IBM and Unisys had similar lines in their EULA's 20 years ago with mainframe systems to force companies to purchase expensive green screen terminals...."
Can't say for IBM, but I never saw anything like that when I was with Univac/ Sperry/ Unisys. IIRC there were a few manufacturers who made workalike dumb terminals before PCs became widespread; I think the reason that they didn't get more widely used was that for the typical numbers of terminal devices that were connected to mainframes at that time the terminals themselves accounted for only a small proportion of the total cost of ownership. What I can believe is that using one of the clone terminals would invite long arguments about whose fault it was if something didn't work as expected.
Terminal emulators came in as soon as PCs became cost-effective and useful enough to roll out to a significant number of desks. I don't recall either of the vendors you mention actively discouraging their use where customers were willing to tolerate the inconvenience of the keyboard mappings that were needed - more terminals of any sort meant more mainframe power was needed.
Re:The Information can be worth more than the lapt
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Laptop Anti-Theft Devices
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To make the obvious point, any company that issues laptops to its staff that may be used to store sensistive information but which don't use encryption as a matter of course needs its IT organisation's head examined.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy to achieve in a way that the average meeting-going PHB finds usable but which his 13yr daughter can't crack in 5 minutes, but reasonable levels of protection are feasible.
Of course, you have to rely on the PHB not writing down pass-phrases and leaving them plainly visible.
Old-timers among us still remember the days when mainframe consoles had lamps indicating the mode the processor was operating in. The old Univac machines used to have a green indicator for "guard mode" (unprivileged user mode) which was typically quite dimly lit but would flash into prominence when a compute-intensive task was active - or when a program was wedged in a tight loop. After you'd worked with one of these machines for a while, you got used to the behaviour of the lamps and of the rows of Blinkenlights on the maintainance panels and took notice if the patterns looked abnormal: quite often this was your first warning that something was going wrong that would need investigation later.
To return somewhat to the topic, I remember working in the late 1970's on an prototype of the first of these mainframe systems that lacked the customary indicator lamps. I was puzzled for a while by a cheap analog 'Vu' meter balanced on top of one of the cabinets, with a few components soldered to its connectors and a couple of wires trailing back inside: one was clipped to the frame, the other to one of the many wire-wrap pins on the processor back-panel. The meter didn't seem to do anything, but all became clear when I was running a compilation a day or so later: the meter reading went up to 80 percent or so for seconds at a time. Yes, an ingenious engineer had worked out how to fit a guard-mode indicator to the new range machines; sadly, it never made it to the production models and a little piece of computing history came to an end.
Of course, today I run the Windows task manager so I can tell when the braindead browser on this company-issue PC is wedged and must be killed and restarted. So much for progress.
The case is nominally about the sale of a product in the US that contravenes US law, so this argument will get laughed out of court if they're lucky or severely piss off the judge if they're not. Probably the latter, since the judge has gone away to think about it.
(I say 'nominally' because you don't have to be a Supreme Court justice to work out that the original intention of the boy wonder at Adobe who decided it would be a good idea to use the US legal system to bully Sklarov was to (a) get even with him for exposing the weakness of the anti-piracy technology they put into the eBook, and (b) send a signal to anyone else who might consider doing the same that they'd find themselves up against the wall facing a bunch of deep-pocketed SOB's who are more than ready to fight dirty - you feelin' lucky today, ya' opensource punks?)
One other thing - the lawyer acting for ElcomSoft is quoted as saying that this legal argument is "novel". In the legal profession, isn't that a code word for "pull the other one, it has bells on it"?
<snip>...Hey look IBMs corporate card has booked 4 people onto this flight... <snip>...Some guy in Redmond is booking hundreds of flights a week... <snip>
Oh, please. Do you honestly think that the people putting this together haven't already thought of these and a few tens of other "little" (read: blindingly obvious) cases that would drown out any useful information if they didn't handle them sensibly?
Clue: wishfully thinking that people you disagree with were brain dead doesn't magically make them so.
I should also have mentioned the whole cost of the 3G infrastructure needed to support the devices and the content. (Some of this cost has already been incurred to buy permission to use the relevant parts of the radio spectrum, and the interest charges on the that cost, and... so we're already paying even before the benefits (sic) are available.)
Ah well, back to fixed-line phones from home and coin/ card phone booths for travelling, perhaps. If you can find a phone booth now that the ubiquity of mobile phones is making them less uneconomic to install outside densely-populated areas.
I know you're referring to content rather than the mobile devices themselves, but it's only that simple so long as the vendors are willing to sell you only what you want. I don't need nor want to listen/ watch the latest intelligence-insulting dreck that the content vendors are peddling to people with limited attention spans, but how long will it be before the phone market splits into a "pop" segment where I pay for this even if I don't use it and a "serious" (aka "business" segment) where there's a different set of expensive added-value features.
Of course, you can also make a point of continuing to use your old mobile phone, and only upgrading to models a couple of years behind the curve as they drop in price....
THIS is why why I love the BBC... ahhh - that last bastion of advertisment-free television. It makes me glad that I pay my £100-odd TV license fee every year.
I'd like to think that having ad-free TV will also prevent the commercial channels from putting too many ads inbetween their programs as well - simply because they'll get compared to ad-free TV.
I beg leave to differ. The way the BBC's domestic TV channels' content has been going down-market in the last few years, a few amusing ads would be an improvement.
"And now, a choice of viewing. On BBC-2 you can watch yet another gardening program. On BBC-1, there's me telling you this."
The reason why this guys messages were decrypted through brute force wasn't because of the 40 bit encryption, it was because he didn't understand the difference between good encryption and bad encryption.
This point's been made in different words by a number of people; let me play devil's advocate against it for a moment.
If the PC was acquired before September 11, which seems plausible, then it was obtained for use in a Taliban-controlled location where most people who had access to it could be presumed to be at the worst indifferent to the tactics of the terrorists, even if they did not actually acquiesce with them. In such a situation, securing against casual snooping may have been seen as perfectly adequate when balanced against the risk - however marginal - of attracting unwanted attention of any kind by going out and acquiring "good" encryption. This is even more the case after 9/11, and once military action had started in Afganistan it was too late to correct the situation anyway. There's also the point of how long the information on the PC needed to be kept under wraps anyway: arguably if it was long enough for the guy to get into position for his one-way trip to Martyr's Heaven then that was enough.
You could even argue that using 40 bit is in keeping with the group's seeming preference for using simple easily obtainable low-tech mechanisms when they're adequate for the job in hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Where USPTO's actions can be justifiably questioned is when decisions are made which appear to show that it does not have (enough) examiners with adequate knowledge of the field concerned, IT being, unfortunately, one of these fields. As has been commented before, the remedy is to improve the scrutiny by taking on additional knowledgable examiners, but this isn't something that can be done overnight even if the neccessary resources were approved by government and legislature: ask yourselves what it would take to persuade you to consider such a career, rather than working in the "real world".
Honestly, the more I hear about XP the more relieved I am that I paid up the additional fee to have W2K on the machine I bought recently.
To which I'd add, it also shows a problem with the culture in the organisation that makes the stuff. It's not so much arrogance, but something more akin to carelessness: an inability to appreciate that other people - including some of your customers - may have different criteria and preferences than yours. I personally doubt whether the people who developed this even thought to ask themselves whether this behaviour would be considered reasonable, nor that it was ever considered in any formal reviews that may have taken place. And it's far from the first time that I've got that impression about MS: their use of that reserved field in the Kerboros protocol feels similar: not so much malicious as just a failure to know and appreciate the etiquette that had grown up in an area that they were entering for the first time.
Alas, probably not. We'll have to stick with the traditional solutions.
EtherPeek is a well-known LAN traffic monitor from WildPackets. Interesting to see it mentioned in this context: I can certainly see how writing a custom module or two for it might save The Protectors Of Our Freedom a bit of work. Or is this just a case of a confusingly-chosen name?
As others have commented, it's nice to see a vendor whose licence agreement gives the impression that they value their customers rather than regard them as crooks who need to be licence-audited into submission.
I think I'd like to see a more detailed review comparing it with StarOffice, say, or have the chance to try it myself for a day or so before putting down my dollars.
The Singing Bell is one of a number of short detective-genre tales that Asimov wrote around the same scientific amateur sleuth who the authorities turn to when they're at their wit's end about something. He's a shy unmarried recluse with an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything and an overwhelming dislike of air travel - a foible that Asimov apparently shared.
The other stories are worth reading, too: they're quite ingeniously worked out.
Try U235, and the gun design - primitive by modern standards, but it worked at Hiroshima.
But in any case you miss the point: the researcher seems to have been most reluctant to help other people duplicate the exact setup where the claimed effect manifested itself. The whole sorry story may not have started off as pseudo-science: perhaps it was just an observation of something unexpected, combined with wishful thinking and a paranoia about plagiarism acquired when the guy was still working in institutions in his home country, Russia. But carry on refusing to follow normal scientific research practice long enough over such an extraordinary claim and it starts smelling funny.
(Yeah, I probably shouldn't have bitten on this one, but even trolls need to eat occasionally.)
One point that belatedly struck me about this guy's claim: the apparatus that shows (alledgedly) this effect uses a spinning rotor, and spinning rotors seem to have an amazing ability to attract pseudo-science.
Maybe they somehow generate some sort of bogosity field;) Or perhaps it's just because so many people have at one time or another personally encountered the bafflingly counter-intuitive behavior of a toy gyroscope when you try to alter the axis around which it is spinning, and it tries to move off in an approximately 90-degree offset direction. There was a time when I was studying physics at university when I could write down the relevant equations and calculate what would happen, but even then I never intuitively understood the "cause" or where this unexpected force "came from". Quantum theory and relativity seemed transparently obvious in contrast.
This "research" has all the signs of pseudo-science. The results are alledgedly reproducible, but only when conditions are "exactly right" which they never seem to be when other people try to repeat the tests independently. The researcher himself won't help other people or publish more than vague information because, so he says, he's afraid of being ripped off. As a result, he's has been thrown out of the academic institution where he used to work. No plausible theoretical underpinning for the effect, and plenty of scope in the test setup outlined in what little has been published for other effects to be present which might be confused with the result that's claimed, especially by someone who - to put it charitably - may find it difficult to maintain full scientific objectivity when considering the results.
NASA must have contracted a bad dose of the "but they said Einstein was wrong" meme to even consider getting involved in this quackery.
So major corporations are having to devote significant resources to filtering (and apropos another comment, it doesn't really matter if this is done centrally or is left to individual recipients to do - it costs the business in each case)?
Good. It's already clear that in many developed countries they've got more lobbying influence than us mere voters. Let them use it for something useful for a change.
I was checking the European Dell sites last weekend to spec up a replacement for my home machine that finally croaked. Liked the flexibility of the top-end desktop-comparable laptops. Didn't like them only being advertised with XP as the OS, and finally went with a midrange model where W2K was still available as an option.
Terminal specs were pretty open; compliance of the comms software with the specs was occasionally less than 100% - hence arguments if a clone didn't work as expected. Even with the genuine vendors' equipment a line protocol analyser was a standard tool at the larger customer sites. One of the areas of computing history that I'm not nostalgic about at all.
Terminal emulators came in as soon as PCs became cost-effective and useful enough to roll out to a significant number of desks. I don't recall either of the vendors you mention actively discouraging their use where customers were willing to tolerate the inconvenience of the keyboard mappings that were needed - more terminals of any sort meant more mainframe power was needed.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy to achieve in a way that the average meeting-going PHB finds usable but which his 13yr daughter can't crack in 5 minutes, but reasonable levels of protection are feasible.
Of course, you have to rely on the PHB not writing down pass-phrases and leaving them plainly visible.
Old-timers among us still remember the days when mainframe consoles had lamps indicating the mode the processor was operating in. The old Univac machines used to have a green indicator for "guard mode" (unprivileged user mode) which was typically quite dimly lit but would flash into prominence when a compute-intensive task was active - or when a program was wedged in a tight loop. After you'd worked with one of these machines for a while, you got used to the behaviour of the lamps and of the rows of Blinkenlights on the maintainance panels and took notice if the patterns looked abnormal: quite often this was your first warning that something was going wrong that would need investigation later.
To return somewhat to the topic, I remember working in the late 1970's on an prototype of the first of these mainframe systems that lacked the customary indicator lamps. I was puzzled for a while by a cheap analog 'Vu' meter balanced on top of one of the cabinets, with a few components soldered to its connectors and a couple of wires trailing back inside: one was clipped to the frame, the other to one of the many wire-wrap pins on the processor back-panel. The meter didn't seem to do anything, but all became clear when I was running a compilation a day or so later: the meter reading went up to 80 percent or so for seconds at a time. Yes, an ingenious engineer had worked out how to fit a guard-mode indicator to the new range machines; sadly, it never made it to the production models and a little piece of computing history came to an end.
Of course, today I run the Windows task manager so I can tell when the braindead browser on this company-issue PC is wedged and must be killed and restarted. So much for progress.
From "The Space Child's Mother Goose" by Frederick Winsor.
Nice alteration of the last line, though.
(I say 'nominally' because you don't have to be a Supreme Court justice to work out that the original intention of the boy wonder at Adobe who decided it would be a good idea to use the US legal system to bully Sklarov was to (a) get even with him for exposing the weakness of the anti-piracy technology they put into the eBook, and (b) send a signal to anyone else who might consider doing the same that they'd find themselves up against the wall facing a bunch of deep-pocketed SOB's who are more than ready to fight dirty - you feelin' lucky today, ya' opensource punks?)
One other thing - the lawyer acting for ElcomSoft is quoted as saying that this legal argument is "novel". In the legal profession, isn't that a code word for "pull the other one, it has bells on it"?
Oh, please. Do you honestly think that the people putting this together haven't already thought of these and a few tens of other "little" (read: blindingly obvious) cases that would drown out any useful information if they didn't handle them sensibly?
Clue: wishfully thinking that people you disagree with were brain dead doesn't magically make them so.
(Rats. For "less uneconomic" read "less economic", throughout.)
OK, fair enough.
I should also have mentioned the whole cost of the 3G infrastructure needed to support the devices and the content. (Some of this cost has already been incurred to buy permission to use the relevant parts of the radio spectrum, and the interest charges on the that cost, and... so we're already paying even before the benefits (sic) are available.)
Ah well, back to fixed-line phones from home and coin/ card phone booths for travelling, perhaps. If you can find a phone booth now that the ubiquity of mobile phones is making them less uneconomic to install outside densely-populated areas.
Of course, you can also make a point of continuing to use your old mobile phone, and only upgrading to models a couple of years behind the curve as they drop in price....
I beg leave to differ. The way the BBC's domestic TV channels' content has been going down-market in the last few years, a few amusing ads would be an improvement.
"And now, a choice of viewing. On BBC-2 you can watch yet another gardening program. On BBC-1, there's me telling you this."
This point's been made in different words by a number of people; let me play devil's advocate against it for a moment.
If the PC was acquired before September 11, which seems plausible, then it was obtained for use in a Taliban-controlled location where most people who had access to it could be presumed to be at the worst indifferent to the tactics of the terrorists, even if they did not actually acquiesce with them. In such a situation, securing against casual snooping may have been seen as perfectly adequate when balanced against the risk - however marginal - of attracting unwanted attention of any kind by going out and acquiring "good" encryption. This is even more the case after 9/11, and once military action had started in Afganistan it was too late to correct the situation anyway. There's also the point of how long the information on the PC needed to be kept under wraps anyway: arguably if it was long enough for the guy to get into position for his one-way trip to Martyr's Heaven then that was enough.
You could even argue that using 40 bit is in keeping with the group's seeming preference for using simple easily obtainable low-tech mechanisms when they're adequate for the job in hand.