This may well be speculative crap, but at least based on the anecdotal incidents I keep hearing about, this sounds like an ECM problem.
I, too, believe this to be so. Why? Because Toyota already tried once to distract the public from the real problem by proposing a silly 50-cent solution involving a clip to hold back the floor mat. Only problem was that this turned out not to be the problem. And so now, a 50-cent shim is the magic bullet?
In 1988, I had a GM Grand Am that stalled in the middle of the road. Towed the car home, pulled off the intake (it was a throttle-body injection system [TBI]), and tried to recreate the problem. After about the 10th try, the injectors fired, 100% duty cycle, and flooded the throttle body with fuel. The engine stalled. I traced the problem back to a broken circuit trace on the PCM that would open and close when the board was stressed.
I suspect, too, that Toyota is very hesitant to proclaim a multi-hundred dollar ECM problem on several million vehicles. Condensation on the accelerator assembly? Give me a break. If this was the case, it should be a simple matter of reaching your foot under the pedal and popping it free.
It will be very interesting to see what happens in the next few months...
...or has ICANN managed to weasel its way into IP allocations?
The major address blocks 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8, are chosen accordance with a decision by ICANN to assign the least-desirable remaining IP address ranges to the largest regional registries first
I thought IANA was responsible for IP allocations. Don't tell me ICANN has IANA in its evil grasp as well!
Be careful...Jeroen runs SixXS with an iron fist, and actually monitors the content you host. This, to me, is unacceptable. And don't get on Jeroen's bad side: You'll be shut down in a heartbeat if you dare question (publicly or privately) any part of the SixXS infrastructure in a critical way.
My suggestion: Run from SixXS as fast as you can. HE is great to work with, and they have no interest in what you host via their IPv6 service.
...such as the Therac-25 malfunction that is the textbook case of how poorly-designed UIs can have catastrophic repercussions. The Nancy Leveson article cited is a fascinating read. It is required reading for my advanced computer science students.
I wish there were more studies about how some people (such as myself) simply cannot deduce the meaning of icons without a lot of effort. Some of the "meaningful" icons presented in the article still don't mean anything to me. I'm constantly hovering over the same icons to get the "tooltip" to tell me what I'm looking for. CLI? No problem...the command I need is instantly in my grasp. GUI? I'm forever having to stop, pause, and process icons to figure out what the hell they actually mean. GUI menus with words instead of icons are the best for me in the GUI world: Instant recognition, no extra processing steps required.
So instead of a random password your are advocating a non-random password and calling it a passphrase.
I usually don't reply to ACs, but this warranted a response.
I advocated no such thing, and you obviously haven't RTFA. While I'd rather not disclose the random number generator I use for passphrase generation, I can assure you that the passphrase generated is certainly not "non-random." There's no need to spread FUD about passphrases...this is the very reason we're in the quagmire we are when it comes to password security.
I don't know if anyone bothered to read the full report, but I found this recommendation tucked in at the end of the report: ast character in the password. (pg. 3)
Allow and encourage passphrases instead of passwords. (pg. 5)
And I say amen, amen to that. I've done quite a bit of personal research in this area, and have found passphrase systems to be far superior in terms of security and ease of use/recall over random combinations of characters. For years I've used the list provided at Diceware to generate my passphrases, and I have no problem still recalling little-used 5- or 6-phrase passphrases years later.
The idea that random sequences of characters is somehow superior to a passphrase of equal entropy is a myth borne of ignorance and a resistance to change. So long as companies that know better keep forcing their minions to adhere to a strict range of letter/number combinations, we'll continue to be saddled with the problem presented by the Rockyou.com crack.
A huge portion of newspaper articles (though not as large as the portion of television news segments) are fluff, not worth reading. If you can get all the information you need from the headline, maybe the article wasn't much worth writing anyways.
[Citation needed]
As for the last part of what you wrote: Ever consider that the decline in human attention span and the commoditization of news media might account for what you wryly observe as "get[ting] all the information you need from the headline"? And you would suggest that this is a good thing?
In an insightful column by Froma Harrop, she points out that
Google includes links to the whole article, but not before including "snippets" that will suffice as news for many time-pressed readers. Here's an example of the words that Google News recently ripped from the Associated Press: "President Barack Obama on Wednesday promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort to help the people of Haiti overcome a 'cruel and incomprehensible' tragedy, the ruinous earthquake that ravaged the..." Note that the AP, not Google, had paid someone in Haiti to write it.
Google says that those few lines involve "fair use" of the copyrighted material. Its critics, most famously media mogul Rupert Murdoch, call that activity "stealing content."
It's tough to argue with that logic. As much as I am an advocate for the "information wants to be free" camp, someone is paying to generate the news, and Google isn't helping matters by acting as a wholesale purveyor of content (and profiting off their actions as well).
Thus in England laws are arranged so the truth is no defense against slander, and in America individual freedom is so valued that gun rights are protected, with often deadly resultsagainst those who might do harm to others.
There, fixed that for ya. Cites are as close as your Google search textfield.
...speak of these galaxies as if they currently exist? If these galaxies are 11-13 billion light years away, haven't they since morphed into mature galaxies (or even moved even further away from us)?
In any event, all of this is rather fascinating to a non-astronomer. It's truly mind-boggling to be looking at images of an event that happened many billions of years ago...
Another Best Buy story: After finally throwing in the towel on Mythbuntu (mythv has actually gotten more and more unstable as the version numbers have gone up), on impulse I went to Best Buy to purchase a TiVo HD unit. Carried it to the register, where the friendly cashier asked me for my phone number. I gave her the usual random answer, whereupon she asked me for my name and address.
Me: "What do you need that for?" Her: "I don't know, the screen says I need to ask you for this, and it won't let me out of it." Me: "Well, I just want to buy this, I don't need Best Buy to register it for me." Her: "Well, I don't know what to do." Me: "My suggestion would be to just take my money and help the next customer."
Obviously, a poor suggestion. After calling over a sales rep who was just as clueless, I finally offered up "John Smith." He told me he knew my name wasn't John Smith (!), and that if I didn't provide my real info, he couldn't sell me the unit.
Since I was going to pay with CC, it was somewhat pointless to give a fake name. I could have called for a manager, but decided it wasn't worth my time to stick around and told them I'd just go buy it elsewhere.
I ended up discovering there is some sort of marketing agreement between Best Buy and TiVo, so they no doubt wanted my information to further pester me. In the end, I just spent my money on a Moxi DVR. Fuck Best Buy, and fuck TiVo.
This system is a modern day trail by fire and would offically put Texas back to the dark ages when it comes to the rights of the accused.
The newspapers in Texas routinely publish photos and articles of people who have been charged with crimes, but have yet to see the walls of a courtroom. This has been going on for years. The reason they can get away with it is that police arrest reports are public records in Texas. It certainly makes one think twice before doing anything that might land them in the Metro section of the Dallas Morning News...
...that I can't afford to be the legal test case for running a Tor exit node or a Wikileaks server, much as I believe in both of these projects. And I would imagine there are many who, while they possess the desire and the technical know-how to engage in such activities, simply cannot be expected to do so without some form of legal immunity (or at least a guarantee of unlimited legal representation). Until that time comes, I simply don't see many people stepping forward with offers of hosting assistance.
Perhaps an effort should be made to secure guaranteed legal representation from the EFF, FSF, and other groups for those who volunteer to run exit nodes, servers, etc.
Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble.
[citation needed]
"Most teachers"? "Most kids"? Do you have facts to support these assertions? No, I didn't think so. (So typical of those who try to paint all teachers as technophobic curmudgeons.)
There are many school districts in the US, forward-thinking school districts that are equipping every student with a laptop, and the technical support to go with it. Some examples:
...of course, what else could be expected from Slashdot?
No, I doubt this is a "threat to free software." Author and Slashdot editor highly overestimate the impact of smartphone software on the vast universe of computing platforms for which F/OSS software is written. Given the trivial aspect of most smartphone software, I seriously doubt the trends as mentioned by the author will even have a ripple effect on the larger picture.
I long for the days for real geek news on Slashdot, not the random rantings of a nobody who somehow sneak conjecture and fallacy by the editors on a daily basis.
...in South Dakota. The cool thing is that the tours are small (6-8 people), and are led by folks who were actually in the bunkers when they were active. Fascinating stuff...like how the escape hatch actually led to a spot under the parking lot asphalt.
...you won't be gaining any valuable insights. Keep your higher-paying day job, keep your grades up, and don't sell yourself out to the lowest bidder. In this economy, internships are no longer a guarantee of continued employment after graduation.
...and the Google fanboys who routinely moderate down any comments that disparage Google are strangely silent.
As I've stated in the past: Google is dangerous. Make no mistake about it. Having a monopoly on data (as well as controlling how the data is accessed, and in what ways the data is aggregated) is the death knell for anything resembling personal privacy. Google is a for-profit organization, and they certainly aren't gathering data for altruistic purposes.
...but wasn't this a joint DARPA/MIT project? And an MIT won the challenge? How does this apparent conflict of interest satisfy the "rich with scientific intrigue" tag? This is a non-starter, and I'm disappointed that DARPA would even have wasted their time with this.
As a teacher, my level of concern continues to rise with what passes for "science" these days, especially from institutions that should know better. This wasn't a science experiment. It was an advertising gimmick. Shame on DARPA, and shame on MIT. (No shame on/., because after 12 years, I've come to expect this type of editorial slackness.)
Did you read any of the comments before you posted? They have a privacy policy explicitly stating they delete personally-identifiable records after 24 hours.
Yes, but in that 24 hours' worth of time, you can bet Google has extracted every last possible drop of information from your queries. And we all know that data aggregration has the scary property of synthesizing "expunged" information from supposedly anonymous data.
From an EFF report on the dangers of data aggregation:
Although the most dangerous use of data aggregation is that of the government, data
aggregation by private companies is also cause for concern. This is because companies
can sell to the government information that it could not legally obtain on its own. Even
companies that refuse to do business with the government can be subpoenaed. For these
reasons, data aggregation by private companies poses the same risks that data aggregation
by the government poses.
Slashdot Mirror
This may well be speculative crap, but at least based on the anecdotal incidents I keep hearing about, this sounds like an ECM problem.
I, too, believe this to be so. Why? Because Toyota already tried once to distract the public from the real problem by proposing a silly 50-cent solution involving a clip to hold back the floor mat. Only problem was that this turned out not to be the problem. And so now, a 50-cent shim is the magic bullet?
In 1988, I had a GM Grand Am that stalled in the middle of the road. Towed the car home, pulled off the intake (it was a throttle-body injection system [TBI]), and tried to recreate the problem. After about the 10th try, the injectors fired, 100% duty cycle, and flooded the throttle body with fuel. The engine stalled. I traced the problem back to a broken circuit trace on the PCM that would open and close when the board was stressed.
I suspect, too, that Toyota is very hesitant to proclaim a multi-hundred dollar ECM problem on several million vehicles. Condensation on the accelerator assembly? Give me a break. If this was the case, it should be a simple matter of reaching your foot under the pedal and popping it free.
It will be very interesting to see what happens in the next few months...
Or do a Google search for "jeroen sixxs". You'll hit the motherlode, including these gems (among many):
http://en.linuxreviews.org/SixXS
http://www.koopman.me/2008/04/stay-away-from-sixxs-run-by-a-couple-kids/
https://rejo.zenger.nl/misc/1221048210.php
...or has ICANN managed to weasel its way into IP allocations?
The major address blocks 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8, are chosen accordance with a decision by ICANN to assign the least-desirable remaining IP address ranges to the largest regional registries first
I thought IANA was responsible for IP allocations. Don't tell me ICANN has IANA in its evil grasp as well!
I use SIXXS, it's been working great.
Be careful...Jeroen runs SixXS with an iron fist, and actually monitors the content you host. This, to me, is unacceptable. And don't get on Jeroen's bad side: You'll be shut down in a heartbeat if you dare question (publicly or privately) any part of the SixXS infrastructure in a critical way.
My suggestion: Run from SixXS as fast as you can. HE is great to work with, and they have no interest in what you host via their IPv6 service.
...such as the Therac-25 malfunction that is the textbook case of how poorly-designed UIs can have catastrophic repercussions. The Nancy Leveson article cited is a fascinating read. It is required reading for my advanced computer science students.
I wish there were more studies about how some people (such as myself) simply cannot deduce the meaning of icons without a lot of effort. Some of the "meaningful" icons presented in the article still don't mean anything to me. I'm constantly hovering over the same icons to get the "tooltip" to tell me what I'm looking for. CLI? No problem...the command I need is instantly in my grasp. GUI? I'm forever having to stop, pause, and process icons to figure out what the hell they actually mean. GUI menus with words instead of icons are the best for me in the GUI world: Instant recognition, no extra processing steps required.
Am I the only icon-impaired person out there?
So instead of a random password your are advocating a non-random password and calling it a passphrase.
I usually don't reply to ACs, but this warranted a response.
I advocated no such thing, and you obviously haven't RTFA. While I'd rather not disclose the random number generator I use for passphrase generation, I can assure you that the passphrase generated is certainly not "non-random." There's no need to spread FUD about passphrases...this is the very reason we're in the quagmire we are when it comes to password security.
I don't know if anyone bothered to read the full report, but I found this recommendation tucked in at the end of the report:
ast character in the password. (pg. 3)
Allow and encourage passphrases instead of passwords. (pg. 5)
And I say amen, amen to that. I've done quite a bit of personal research in this area, and have found passphrase systems to be far superior in terms of security and ease of use/recall over random combinations of characters. For years I've used the list provided at Diceware to generate my passphrases, and I have no problem still recalling little-used 5- or 6-phrase passphrases years later.
The idea that random sequences of characters is somehow superior to a passphrase of equal entropy is a myth borne of ignorance and a resistance to change. So long as companies that know better keep forcing their minions to adhere to a strict range of letter/number combinations, we'll continue to be saddled with the problem presented by the Rockyou.com crack.
A huge portion of newspaper articles (though not as large as the portion of television news segments) are fluff, not worth reading. If you can get all the information you need from the headline, maybe the article wasn't much worth writing anyways.
[Citation needed]
As for the last part of what you wrote: Ever consider that the decline in human attention span and the commoditization of news media might account for what you wryly observe as "get[ting] all the information you need from the headline"? And you would suggest that this is a good thing?
In an insightful column by Froma Harrop, she points out that
Google includes links to the whole article, but not before including "snippets" that will suffice as news for many time-pressed readers. Here's an example of the words that Google News recently ripped from the Associated Press: "President Barack Obama on Wednesday promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort to help the people of Haiti overcome a 'cruel and incomprehensible' tragedy, the ruinous earthquake that ravaged the ..." Note that the AP, not Google, had paid someone in Haiti to write it.
Google says that those few lines involve "fair use" of the copyrighted material. Its critics, most famously media mogul Rupert Murdoch, call that activity "stealing content."
It's tough to argue with that logic. As much as I am an advocate for the "information wants to be free" camp, someone is paying to generate the news, and Google isn't helping matters by acting as a wholesale purveyor of content (and profiting off their actions as well).
Interesting aside to PP: The movie Irreversible used low-frequency sounds in its soundtrack to induce nausea in the viewer.
Thus in England laws are arranged so the truth is no defense against slander, and in America individual freedom is so valued that gun rights are protected, with often deadly results against those who might do harm to others.
There, fixed that for ya. Cites are as close as your Google search textfield.
...speak of these galaxies as if they currently exist? If these galaxies are 11-13 billion light years away, haven't they since morphed into mature galaxies (or even moved even further away from us)?
In any event, all of this is rather fascinating to a non-astronomer. It's truly mind-boggling to be looking at images of an event that happened many billions of years ago...
Another Best Buy story: After finally throwing in the towel on Mythbuntu (mythv has actually gotten more and more unstable as the version numbers have gone up), on impulse I went to Best Buy to purchase a TiVo HD unit. Carried it to the register, where the friendly cashier asked me for my phone number. I gave her the usual random answer, whereupon she asked me for my name and address.
Me: "What do you need that for?"
Her: "I don't know, the screen says I need to ask you for this, and it won't let me out of it."
Me: "Well, I just want to buy this, I don't need Best Buy to register it for me."
Her: "Well, I don't know what to do."
Me: "My suggestion would be to just take my money and help the next customer."
Obviously, a poor suggestion. After calling over a sales rep who was just as clueless, I finally offered up "John Smith." He told me he knew my name wasn't John Smith (!), and that if I didn't provide my real info, he couldn't sell me the unit.
Since I was going to pay with CC, it was somewhat pointless to give a fake name. I could have called for a manager, but decided it wasn't worth my time to stick around and told them I'd just go buy it elsewhere.
I ended up discovering there is some sort of marketing agreement between Best Buy and TiVo, so they no doubt wanted my information to further pester me. In the end, I just spent my money on a Moxi DVR. Fuck Best Buy, and fuck TiVo.
M-x viper-mode
That's the only emacs command string you ever need to know.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to do vim. For instance, C-v (for block edit mode) fails miserably.
This system is a modern day trail by fire and would offically put Texas back to the dark ages when it comes to the rights of the accused.
The newspapers in Texas routinely publish photos and articles of people who have been charged with crimes, but have yet to see the walls of a courtroom. This has been going on for years. The reason they can get away with it is that police arrest reports are public records in Texas. It certainly makes one think twice before doing anything that might land them in the Metro section of the Dallas Morning News...
...that I can't afford to be the legal test case for running a Tor exit node or a Wikileaks server, much as I believe in both of these projects. And I would imagine there are many who, while they possess the desire and the technical know-how to engage in such activities, simply cannot be expected to do so without some form of legal immunity (or at least a guarantee of unlimited legal representation). Until that time comes, I simply don't see many people stepping forward with offers of hosting assistance.
Perhaps an effort should be made to secure guaranteed legal representation from the EFF, FSF, and other groups for those who volunteer to run exit nodes, servers, etc.
Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble.
[citation needed]
"Most teachers"? "Most kids"? Do you have facts to support these assertions? No, I didn't think so. (So typical
of those who try to paint all teachers as technophobic curmudgeons.)
There are many school districts in the US, forward-thinking school districts that are equipping every student with a laptop, and the technical support to go with it. Some examples:
http://www.irvingisd.net/one2one/main.htm (Irving ISD, Texas)
http://etc.usf.edu/L4L/A-Review.html (Student laptop initiatives, mostly in Florida and California)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/092009dnmetnetbooks.388a677.html (More Texas school districts)
Technology in education is alive and well.
...of course, what else could be expected from Slashdot?
No, I doubt this is a "threat to free software." Author and Slashdot editor highly overestimate the impact of smartphone software on the vast universe of computing platforms for which F/OSS software is written. Given the trivial aspect of most smartphone software, I seriously doubt the trends as mentioned by the author will even have a ripple effect on the larger picture.
I long for the days for real geek news on Slashdot, not the random rantings of a nobody who somehow sneak conjecture and fallacy by the editors on a daily basis.
...in South Dakota. The cool thing is that the tours are small (6-8 people), and are led by folks who were actually in the bunkers when they were active. Fascinating stuff...like how the escape hatch actually led to a spot under the parking lot asphalt.
...you won't be gaining any valuable insights. Keep your higher-paying day job, keep your grades up, and don't sell yourself out to the lowest bidder. In this economy, internships are no longer a guarantee of continued employment after graduation.
...and the Google fanboys who routinely moderate down any comments that disparage Google are strangely silent.
As I've stated in the past: Google is dangerous. Make no mistake about it. Having a monopoly on data (as well as controlling how the data is accessed, and in what ways the data is aggregated) is the death knell for anything resembling personal privacy. Google is a for-profit organization, and they certainly aren't gathering data for altruistic purposes.
s/an MIT/an MIT team
...but wasn't this a joint DARPA/MIT project? And an MIT won the challenge? How does this apparent conflict of interest satisfy the "rich with scientific intrigue" tag? This is a non-starter, and I'm disappointed that DARPA would even have wasted their time with this.
As a teacher, my level of concern continues to rise with what passes for "science" these days, especially from institutions that should know better. This wasn't a science experiment. It was an advertising gimmick. Shame on DARPA, and shame on MIT. (No shame on /., because after 12 years, I've come to expect this type of editorial slackness.)
Yes, but in that 24 hours' worth of time, you can bet Google has extracted every last possible drop of information from your queries. And we all know that data aggregration has the scary property of synthesizing "expunged" information from supposedly anonymous data.
From an EFF report on the dangers of data aggregation:
Although the most dangerous use of data aggregation is that of the government, data aggregation by private companies is also cause for concern. This is because companies can sell to the government information that it could not legally obtain on its own. Even companies that refuse to do business with the government can be subpoenaed. For these reasons, data aggregation by private companies poses the same risks that data aggregation by the government poses.