Rhodes didn't discuss espionage much in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", but his follow-up, "Dark Sun", discusses it extensively. (Its subjects are the Soviet nuclear program, and the development of the hydrogen bomb, which really can't be discussed in detail without going deeply into intelligence and counter-intelligence).
It also takes a good hard look at the leadership of the Strategic Air Command, in the 1950s, which at times came close to advocating a preemptive nuclear strike...
First off, don't neglect the British --- Williams tubes (early CRT memories), index registers, and demand paging from Manchester alone; the first well documented subroutine library, first commercial use of a computer in business (Lyons LEO), and a very influential textbook from the EDSAC group at Cambridge. (It's interesting to note that the word "page" was already used at Manchester for a unit of physical memory block-transferred to backing storage --- magnetic drum --- in Alan Turing's manual for the commercialized Manchester Mk. I).
Second, emulators are available for a lot of historical systems --- Bob Supnik has his SIMH suite of emulators for most of the PDP computers, and a few other early minis from IBM, DG, and so forth. Historical Unix (v5, v6, v7) is generally available and does boot on the PDP-11 emulator. He's still working on the PDP-10, for which see also Tim Stark's ts10, also in alpha, but already booting TOPS-10; TOPS-20 and ITS are on the todo list. (The annoying thing is that working PDP-10 emulators do exist, but are not available to the public).
There's a limit to the versimilitude here --- virtual tape never kinks up, the virtual card readers never jam, and the emulators often run an order of magnitude faster than the real machines on modern hardware. But they can still help give student a feel of the environments that people had to deal with thirty and forty years ago.
Well, that is one problem with the law, and a
pretty serious one to some of us. However, on
the MPAA's reading of the law, it also gives
them what amounts to a patent on the CSS decoding
process itself --- one which allows them to
demand that you sign a license agreement with
them in order to build a DVD player
(or more precisely, their agents, currently
the DVDCCA, who are responsible for managing the
licensing), and to impose arbitrary conditions
on the licenses (region coding, no digital
output, and so forth).
There's a lot in the legislative history (not all
in the LOC comment, unfortunately) to suggest that
Congress intended an "authorized person" approach
to the access control provisions, and not the
"authorized device" interpretation pushed by the
MPAA and its avatars (DVDCCA, MPA, etc.).
I run with Netscape in "ask before setting a cookie" mode, and I've become used to rejecting DoubleClick cookies. A few weeks ago, I was getting tracking data on a package from fedex, from the usual spot, http://www.fedex.com/us/tracking, and was presented with, and rejected, a DoubleClick cookie. What surprised me about this is that there are no DoubleClick ads on the page. What's going on is that there's an IMG tag at the bottom of the page which loads a 1x1 GIF from DoubleClick; this is the only reference to DoubleClick on the page, and it seems placed at the end so that delays in loading the ad won't keep the page from rendering. (Usually, they go for the opposite effect, trying to arrange the page so that not much renders until you've seen the ad).
The tracking IMG does not seem to appear on the next page you receive, which presents tracking results, so they can't harvest your airbill tracking numbers by simply grabbing them out of the Referer headers on the requests for these GIFs. It's possible, however, that they're connecting airbills with browser cookies with the active cooperation of Fedex. The random-looking numbers in the URLs of the DoubleClick GIFs could be there to facilitate this kind of cross-referencing --- Fedex knows image http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity/3/5555/22222 was on a page they shipped to the browser with Fedex cookie X, and DoubleClick associates it with DoubleClick cookie Y, so if the URLs are unique, they can figure out that those two cookies went to the same browser, and pool the associated user profiles after the fact. But you can't spot that kind of thing by looking at the pages.
(Yes, I should probably install junkbuster, or something like, which would allow me to state rules about which cookies to present and which to reject out of hand, but I gotta get one of those round tuit things first).
Katz is right to note that a lot of the "Internet War" hype is just that --- hype. However, the existence of the Net does make small differences.
For instance, let's grant that this is a war best covered by traditonal press (if only because one side has only access to reporters, and not directly to the Net). Still, there's more than one traditional press in the world, and the Net does give access to the others. Some of the best coverage I've been reading, for instance, is in the French daily Le Monde (www.lemonde.fr) --- of course you have to read French to get the full effect.
(BTW, they've been covering some aspects of the situation which I really haven't seen in American media --- for instance, reflecting on how this situation impacts the mess in Russia, and vice versa).
Slashdot Mirror
Rhodes didn't discuss espionage much in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", but his follow-up, "Dark Sun", discusses it extensively. (Its subjects are the Soviet nuclear program, and the development of the hydrogen bomb, which really can't be discussed in detail without going deeply into intelligence and counter-intelligence).
It also takes a good hard look at the leadership of the Strategic Air Command, in the 1950s, which at times came close to advocating a preemptive nuclear strike...
First off, don't neglect the British --- Williams tubes (early CRT memories), index registers, and demand paging from Manchester alone; the first well documented subroutine library, first commercial use of a computer in business (Lyons LEO), and a very influential textbook from the EDSAC group at Cambridge. (It's interesting to note that the word "page" was already used at Manchester for a unit of physical memory block-transferred to backing storage --- magnetic drum --- in Alan Turing's manual for the commercialized Manchester Mk. I).
Second, emulators are available for a lot of historical systems --- Bob Supnik has his SIMH suite of emulators for most of the PDP computers, and a few other early minis from IBM, DG, and so forth. Historical Unix (v5, v6, v7) is generally available and does boot on the PDP-11 emulator. He's still working on the PDP-10, for which see also Tim Stark's ts10, also in alpha, but already booting TOPS-10; TOPS-20 and ITS are on the todo list. (The annoying thing is that working PDP-10 emulators do exist, but are not available to the public).
There's a limit to the versimilitude here --- virtual tape never kinks up, the virtual card readers never jam, and the emulators often run an order of magnitude faster than the real machines on modern hardware. But they can still help give student a feel of the environments that people had to deal with thirty and forty years ago.
There's a lot in the legislative history (not all in the LOC comment, unfortunately) to suggest that Congress intended an "authorized person" approach to the access control provisions, and not the "authorized device" interpretation pushed by the MPAA and its avatars (DVDCCA, MPA, etc.).
rst
I run with Netscape in "ask before setting a cookie" mode, and I've become used to rejecting DoubleClick cookies. A few weeks ago, I was getting tracking data on a package from fedex, from the usual spot, http://www.fedex.com/us/tracking, and was presented with, and rejected, a DoubleClick cookie. What surprised me about this is that there are no DoubleClick ads on the page. What's going on is that there's an IMG tag at the bottom of the page which loads a 1x1 GIF from DoubleClick; this is the only reference to DoubleClick on the page, and it seems placed at the end so that delays in loading the ad won't keep the page from rendering. (Usually, they go for the opposite effect, trying to arrange the page so that not much renders until you've seen the ad).
The tracking IMG does not seem to appear on the next page you receive, which presents tracking results, so they can't harvest your airbill tracking numbers by simply grabbing them out of the Referer headers on the requests for these GIFs. It's possible, however, that they're connecting airbills with browser cookies with the active cooperation of Fedex. The random-looking numbers in the URLs of the DoubleClick GIFs could be there to facilitate this kind of cross-referencing --- Fedex knows image http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity/3/5555/22222 was on a page they shipped to the browser with Fedex cookie X, and DoubleClick associates it with DoubleClick cookie Y, so if the URLs are unique, they can figure out that those two cookies went to the same browser, and pool the associated user profiles after the fact. But you can't spot that kind of thing by looking at the pages.
(Yes, I should probably install junkbuster, or something like, which would allow me to state rules about which cookies to present and which to reject out of hand, but I gotta get one of those round tuit things first).
Katz is right to note that a lot of the "Internet
War" hype is just that --- hype. However, the
existence of the Net does make small differences.
For instance, let's grant that this is a war best
covered by traditonal press (if only because one
side has only access to reporters, and not
directly to the Net). Still, there's more than
one traditional press in the world, and the Net
does give access to the others. Some of the best
coverage I've been reading, for instance, is in
the French daily Le Monde (www.lemonde.fr) --- of
course you have to read French to get the full
effect.
(BTW, they've been covering some aspects of
the situation which I really haven't seen in
American media --- for instance, reflecting on
how this situation impacts the mess in Russia,
and vice versa).