The flame was a result of being irked by what I consider to be misplaced loyalty to FireFox; while it is an interesting exercise, Firebird/Interbase is serious business, has been around in one form or another for 15 years, and has only started getting architectural competition in the last few years, with Postgres' adoption of a multi-generational record architecture. The casual dismissal of one of the best databases out there (depending on task) over a vanity re-upholstering of Moz gets to me, I guess.
But you are right...there really wasn't a need for it.
Gotcha. And in resident mode, it doesn't matter. Like I said, it's more or less instantaneous. So setting aside the startup issue (which becomes less important with every passing month), what's the compelling feature?
No, jackass. Are you the author of FireWhatever? Yes, AC, my system is behind the times but faster than 2Ghz. You may have noticed that computers are getting faster over time. You may also have noticed that time is moving in a forward direction. This means we are moving TOWARDS the future. Amazing, huh?
So if computers in the future are going to be faster, and a lot of them already are, why waste engineering time that could be better spent in other areas?
I don't think very many people like the newsreader in Moz. It works for me. With XUL, someone can tune the one that's in there, or write a brand new one.
Looking at the bug lists for FF, it's got a long way to go. More power to the guy who writes it -- have at it. But "faster" doesn't cut it as a reason to move away from the Moz baseline and start over.
"Maintainability" does, though...and that's about the only reason I can see for official engineering time to be put into FF.
We had bad experiences with BDE as well, and used several mechanisms to communicate. The machines running IB just ran day in, day out for years. Never touched them.
The sweep problem wasn't something I experienced, but usage patterns differ.
For anybody who's interested, reading Jim Starkey's comments on the Firebird development lists are great fun. He is a total no-bullshit, pull-no-punches kind of guy, and right about a hell of a lot. Fun to read. Maybe not so fun to receive, especially when you've been trying damn hard to get code done. But fun for the rest of us.
Since Moz is essentially instantaneous for all operations on my system, I have trouble seeing how a browser based on the same rendering engine is going to be much faster than that.
I've downloaded and looked at two versions of Firefox. It looks like an interesting exercise that the author has engaged in, but I really don't see the point. As his feature set picks up, he'll find himself pretty much where Moz is.
I happen to like Moz's integrated news/mail/irc/composer...no reason not to have them, they work just fine, and like I said, speed/mem is simply not an issue any more; at least, not for programs in the Moz family.
I guess I'll download Firefox again and take a look. Can't say I won't come to the same conclusion, but you never know.
I've used it in several projects, over the years. In my day job, we recently added Firebird to the list of databases that we support as warehouse targets for our application. Firebird's instant installation, small footprint, and portability (a few meg) are good reasons to do this. Another good reason is that it outperforms Oracle on the same hardware, as well as several other commercial databases.
We used to deploy Interbase as part of a product at a company I worked at years back. We would install, start the system (which had multi-gigabyte databases at times), and then not look at it again for YEARS. Two years could go by without tuning, transaction log clearing, or anything else, for that matter. It doesn't have transaction logs (doesn't need them), and sweeps itself clear of most detritus automatically.
Backups could effortlessly be done on the fly. Full two-phase commit support. And when it comes to complex transactions, it's one of the best databases out there because of its generational architecture (something it shares with PostgreSQL).
There are a few rough edges on it, like the lack of a standard GUI administration tool. Java support was slow to evolve. The lack of care given by Borland hurt the product for a time. The Firebird people seem to have done a lot of hard work, and deserve praise.
And for the record, Firefox or whatever the hell it is calling itself this week is one of the stupidest excuses for a software package I've seen to date. It's Mozilla minus most of the features that make Moz useful and extensible. It doesn't run any faster than Moz in resident mode. It performs no useful function I am aware of. The adulation it receives utterly escapes me; it seems to be a prime example of building software for the past. The engineering effort would have been far better spent on Moz itself.
First, learn to spell. Second, if you haven't already realized that you get OUT of university exactly what you put into it, then you don't belong there. Is there something that is PREVENTING you from reading the great papers? Preventing you from thinking independent thoughts?
The vast majority of campus faculty are desperately hoping that in each class, there will be one or two students who are not sheep, and who wonder about boundaries, and what is beyond them.
You seem to expect the world to come to you. It won't; you're not worth it, yet. You may be at some point, and then the world may.
That being said, I have recently become aware of the curriculum for what passes as a Master's degree in information science, in this area. Suffice it to say that I am stunned.
I hear you on your three points (secret, accurate, accessible)...I did not explicitly state those goals but they're a part of my notion.
Secrecy is accomplished because the whole thing happens in a voting both. The vote, after being verified by the voter to be their intent, is folded and put in a ballot box, just like we do today in old-style elections.
Accuracy should be good -- after all, we have two nearly independent mechanisms, and they can be used to check against each other. We should be able to find errors quickly.
A well-designed touch-screen system is probably one of the most accessible systems we can devise. Large fonts, highly readable, good structure -- it can be done. It can also be done poorly.
We don't necessarily have to build these things with an operating system that isn't secure.
One of the things that needs addressing, though, is what happens when fraud or error is detected...what is the best correction strategy to use? I'm not sure -- need to think about it...the paper wins may be a little too simple.
It strikes me as incredible that the "technical" people writing these emails are engaged in such Mickey Mouse chatter, and so interested in just cranking out something, anything that will work. I just don't see how electronic voting is really all that hard to engage in...as long as you have your priorities straight.
There are two primary things we want to accomplish with EVotes -- first, we want to make the voting process easier to engage in. Second, we want to make the counting process more efficient (less costly). We would also like to reduce the error rate, to the extent that we are able.
A touch screen voting interface, big and clear and nice, is exactly what we need to help walk people through the process. We can't, though, rely on the software in these machines. One read through the memos above should convince you as to why -- these people just have no idea what they're doing. Basic? Access databases? Windows? My god.
What this says to me is that we simply cannot get away from paper. So what we want is a system that makes paper easier to use, leaves a paper trail for auditing and verification purposes, and provides ample opportunity for error checking by the voter and by election officials.
We use the touch screen to answer questions. At the end of the voting session, the system prints a "vote" and electronically tabulates the results. The voter verifies that his printed vote matches what's on the tabulation screen. The voter then folds his paper vote and deposits it with election officials in a good old fashioned ballot box.
We can then use the electronic tabulation to check quickly on the results -- this is quite efficient. We will also engage in a substantial amount of verification, by counting the paper votes by hand and verifying this against totals learned electronically. The paper always wins, in this system. We do not necessarily need to count all of the paper votes -- we can use random sampling.
It seems like a win in both directions, for me. Risks include unacceptable printout quality (printer wear), and insufficient random verification.
Good for you. You are a kung fu master of the obvious. How exactly do you put #4 in with the first three? You think they belong in the same list? I don't.
If #4 were true, every time a group of employees breaks away from a large company they'd be thrown in jail. Please go ahead a cite a law. There are pretty limited circumstances, mostly voluntary, under which you can be vulnerable.
Good quote -- the thing is, it is true that in practicality we don't have the freedoms I wish we had, and that we all truly deserve to have. There's a push and pull to this whole freedom thing, a balance to be found. We have to be a little extreme pushing things in the direction that we want, because the other guys are doing the same thing. They fall into the "just trust us" category of government, and that should scare the hell out of all of us. I'd like to think that they're just going through a moment of weakness because they're scared. Fine -- a lot of social policy comes about from fear. But we need to push against that; we need to provide the balance. That's our role in society. A grey look at what is, is not enough. You should strive for more. You know what's right. You never need to do anything else in your life other than advocate what you know is right. Yes, I am hopelessly idealistic.
Read the post, and I felt that my particular rant was necessary. Let me get this straight -- you believe that the correct response to having someone point out a flaw in a competitor's product is, say, a year or two of jail time?
You think it's a good idea to bring the DHS into a computer security matter, one that is entirely pedestrian and civilian in nature?
You think that every computer and every ISP is part of the nation's infrastructure, and is therefore deserving of federal protection and action?
as far as "fire in the theatre" goes, blah blah blah; every idiot who is against free speech trots that crap out at the first mention. OF COURSE YOU IDIOT -- WE GET IT. The problem is that this guy didn't yell in a theatre. He pointed out a problem to people who were vulnerable to that problem. He didn't point it out to bad guys who could have attacked.
Apparently in your world it is a great idea to have corporations going after individuals for stupid, nonsensical reasons. There's a term for it -- barratry. Pushing empty threats through the legal system in an attempt to bury your enemy may occur every day, but that doesn't make it right.
Here's the thing -- I think that having this guy email the client list is precisely the correct _systemic_ action to take. The clients get notified, and they can make an educated decision on whether they'd like to continue to be a client of the ISP. The federal government and the court system shouldn't be involved. What we have is federal agencies doing the bidding of a corporation that was in the middle of fucking over its customers. And by tampering with their emails, it looks like they're of the correct ethical bent to do it again.
First they'll have to hire more people like you, though.
Excuse me, but exactly WHY do you think he shouldn't have emailed the customers? We have the right in this country to say whatever the fuck we want, to whoever we want to say it to. And the point of the justice system is exactly that: Justice. It's not supposed to be about who has the most money -- it's supposed to be about who's right.
This guy didn't do anything wrong. If you're not revealing classified information you can say whatever the hell you want. What we're dealing with is a vicious, stupid, unethical prosecution, if the facts in the security focus article are accurate.
What do open borders and unlimited government programs have to do with socialism? Nothing, of course. They are policies that are in no way related to socialism itself. You're dealing with a system that's out of control, not a problem with socialism.
A socialist country can tightly control its borders, and choose a specific set of government programs that exist to benefit only citizens.
As far as I know the worker's comp system in California is pretty much busted.
Shiny jails and crumbling schools. That's what California is all about. Direct democracy == stupid tax laws == gradual decline.
And why is it that nobody goes after the employers of these illegal immigrants? If employers started going to jail, the situation might change. How friggin' hard can it be to catch these people, anyway?
Read any number of scifi novels from the 60s, and you'll find instances of characters having messages waiting for them, in their space computers, sent to them from distant space-places.
It's super damn easy to make this happen. The trick is, don't stop running SMTP. But, if you run one of the new-fangled mail protocols, you'll route your mail traffic from your SMTP receiver inot the new system. When you do that you tag the email with an "untrusted" header. _Everything_ received on that channel is untrusted, from then on.
Other entities that run a proper, verifiable mail system get to have their email pass through without the "untrusted" header.
Let Bayesian filters do the rest. Most will scramble to move their mail systems over to something that doesn't tag them as untrusted.
Amen, brother. I actually got in a pretty big fight with one of my friends over restrictions on small airplanes. I was pointing out that the logic of the regulations was completely flawed, and achieved no REAL security. All it did was inconvenience, embarrass, and in some cases finish the career of, local pilots. The end result of the conversation was her getting really upset, telling me I was "insensitive", and that "everybody knows little planes are dangerous". The ID requirement while boarding accomplishes absolutely nothing, except allowing airlines to screw with pricing.
How about those of you who do NOT live in a future police state get right on your favorite P2P application and log in with these user names? That oughta confuse things at least a little.
The problem is not unlike flow control and error correction at the TCP level. We need the spam equivalent of Nagle's algorithm. We need to be able to treat new sources of email, at the SMTP level, as untrusted, and gradually build up trust in them, over a period of weeks, if necessary. During that period, throttle back extensively on what is permitted from that host.
We also need an encrypted, trusted, peer to peer protocol, where admission into the "club" allows mail servers to collaborate on statistical filtering of email.
The reason I want to see greatly increased political attention on the spam problem is that someday, when I have kids, I want to be able to give my 14 year old an email account without having to worry about advertisements for horse porn landing in her email inbox. Would you, as a parent, give your child an email account these days? Ten years ago you could have, and not worried about it. Now you can't. The indiscriminate emailing of this crap has just got to stop. I have no problem with it going to people who want it, if you can find any.
You have responded to an oversimplification by making another, far more dangerous simplification.
Your ideal is that we classify when the benefits of information being available are less than the dangers. Who exactly makes this determination? What subject matters are subject to this?
When we deal with information that is dangerous by "hiding" it, what we really do is shift resources away from solving the underlying vulnerability. Sometimes the vulnerability isn't solvable, but much of the time it is.
With Gorman's work, he is highlighting choke points in the infrastructure. Would the rational response to this situation not be to diversify off those choke points? We should identify key weaknesses with this kind of research then solve them. We should not simply hide the information.
First principles also apply here: I find myself somewhat in agreement with one poster who indicated that we should quit "stomping" around the world creating enemies. It is far easier to defend against an enemy you do not have.
FOIA and classification are unrelated. FOIA is generally used to punch holes through government bureaucracy; to get at information that should be available to the public but is obscured by red tape. Classification contains information that should not be available to the public. Some FOIA requests come back redacted for security reasons.
It is far too easy for an administration to simply designate information as confidential. Such designations can and are used to avoid information release that would be politically senstivie. The bar is too low.
As with so many other things, it comes down to "who decides"...
The Potomac approach to National is just plain dangerous. There are some pretty severe turns that have to occur on short final (REALLY short final). What is the best recipe for an accident? Extensive maneuvering at low speed and low altitude. If I was the pilot's union I'd be up in arms about it. Sure, it's kind of cool to fly a dangerous approach, but National is ridiculous.
I commute by the airport on GW parkway and see the last turn the planes make all the time. It's right over my head.
Bottom line is, there will come a time when there's a weird-ass icing condition out there, or a microburst, or some combination of the two. The pilot will be doing this dumb-ass turn so the fucking idiots who bought property near the airport which has been there for 60 years can hear 0.2 decibels less noise, and a couple hundred people are going to die as a result.
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The flame was a result of being irked by what I consider to be misplaced loyalty to FireFox; while it is an interesting exercise, Firebird/Interbase is serious business, has been around in one form or another for 15 years, and has only started getting architectural competition in the last few years, with Postgres' adoption of a multi-generational record architecture. The casual dismissal of one of the best databases out there (depending on task) over a vanity re-upholstering of Moz gets to me, I guess.
But you are right...there really wasn't a need for it.
Gotcha. And in resident mode, it doesn't matter. Like I said, it's more or less instantaneous. So setting aside the startup issue (which becomes less important with every passing month), what's the compelling feature?
Which part is wrong?
No, jackass. Are you the author of FireWhatever? Yes, AC, my system is behind the times but faster than 2Ghz. You may have noticed that computers are getting faster over time. You may also have noticed that time is moving in a forward direction. This means we are moving TOWARDS the future. Amazing, huh?
So if computers in the future are going to be faster, and a lot of them already are, why waste engineering time that could be better spent in other areas?
I don't think very many people like the newsreader in Moz. It works for me. With XUL, someone can tune the one that's in there, or write a brand new one.
Looking at the bug lists for FF, it's got a long way to go. More power to the guy who writes it -- have at it. But "faster" doesn't cut it as a reason to move away from the Moz baseline and start over.
"Maintainability" does, though...and that's about the only reason I can see for official engineering time to be put into FF.
Jackass.
We had bad experiences with BDE as well, and used several mechanisms to communicate. The machines running IB just ran day in, day out for years. Never touched them.
The sweep problem wasn't something I experienced, but usage patterns differ.
For anybody who's interested, reading Jim Starkey's comments on the Firebird development lists are great fun. He is a total no-bullshit, pull-no-punches kind of guy, and right about a hell of a lot. Fun to read. Maybe not so fun to receive, especially when you've been trying damn hard to get code done. But fun for the rest of us.
Since Moz is essentially instantaneous for all operations on my system, I have trouble seeing how a browser based on the same rendering engine is going to be much faster than that.
I've downloaded and looked at two versions of Firefox. It looks like an interesting exercise that the author has engaged in, but I really don't see the point. As his feature set picks up, he'll find himself pretty much where Moz is.
I happen to like Moz's integrated news/mail/irc/composer...no reason not to have them, they work just fine, and like I said, speed/mem is simply not an issue any more; at least, not for programs in the Moz family.
I guess I'll download Firefox again and take a look. Can't say I won't come to the same conclusion, but you never know.
I've used it in several projects, over the years. In my day job, we recently added Firebird to the list of databases that we support as warehouse targets for our application. Firebird's instant installation, small footprint, and portability (a few meg) are good reasons to do this. Another good reason is that it outperforms Oracle on the same hardware, as well as several other commercial databases.
We used to deploy Interbase as part of a product at a company I worked at years back. We would install, start the system (which had multi-gigabyte databases at times), and then not look at it again for YEARS. Two years could go by without tuning, transaction log clearing, or anything else, for that matter. It doesn't have transaction logs (doesn't need them), and sweeps itself clear of most detritus automatically.
Backups could effortlessly be done on the fly. Full two-phase commit support. And when it comes to complex transactions, it's one of the best databases out there because of its generational architecture (something it shares with PostgreSQL).
There are a few rough edges on it, like the lack of a standard GUI administration tool. Java support was slow to evolve. The lack of care given by Borland hurt the product for a time. The Firebird people seem to have done a lot of hard work, and deserve praise.
And for the record, Firefox or whatever the hell it is calling itself this week is one of the stupidest excuses for a software package I've seen to date. It's Mozilla minus most of the features that make Moz useful and extensible. It doesn't run any faster than Moz in resident mode. It performs no useful function I am aware of. The adulation it receives utterly escapes me; it seems to be a prime example of building software for the past. The engineering effort would have been far better spent on Moz itself.
First, learn to spell. Second, if you haven't already realized that you get OUT of university exactly what you put into it, then you don't belong there. Is there something that is PREVENTING you from reading the great papers? Preventing you from thinking independent thoughts?
The vast majority of campus faculty are desperately hoping that in each class, there will be one or two students who are not sheep, and who wonder about boundaries, and what is beyond them.
You seem to expect the world to come to you. It won't; you're not worth it, yet. You may be at some point, and then the world may.
That being said, I have recently become aware of the curriculum for what passes as a Master's degree in information science, in this area. Suffice it to say that I am stunned.
I hear you on your three points (secret, accurate, accessible)...I did not explicitly state those goals but they're a part of my notion.
Secrecy is accomplished because the whole thing happens in a voting both. The vote, after being verified by the voter to be their intent, is folded and put in a ballot box, just like we do today in old-style elections.
Accuracy should be good -- after all, we have two nearly independent mechanisms, and they can be used to check against each other. We should be able to find errors quickly.
A well-designed touch-screen system is probably one of the most accessible systems we can devise. Large fonts, highly readable, good structure -- it can be done. It can also be done poorly.
We don't necessarily have to build these things with an operating system that isn't secure.
One of the things that needs addressing, though, is what happens when fraud or error is detected...what is the best correction strategy to use? I'm not sure -- need to think about it...the paper wins may be a little too simple.
It strikes me as incredible that the "technical" people writing these emails are engaged in such Mickey Mouse chatter, and so interested in just cranking out something, anything that will work. I just don't see how electronic voting is really all that hard to engage in...as long as you have your priorities straight.
There are two primary things we want to accomplish with EVotes -- first, we want to make the voting process easier to engage in. Second, we want to make the counting process more efficient (less costly). We would also like to reduce the error rate, to the extent that we are able.
A touch screen voting interface, big and clear and nice, is exactly what we need to help walk people through the process. We can't, though, rely on the software in these machines. One read through the memos above should convince you as to why -- these people just have no idea what they're doing. Basic? Access databases? Windows? My god.
What this says to me is that we simply cannot get away from paper. So what we want is a system that makes paper easier to use, leaves a paper trail for auditing and verification purposes, and provides ample opportunity for error checking by the voter and by election officials.
We use the touch screen to answer questions. At the end of the voting session, the system prints a "vote" and electronically tabulates the results. The voter verifies that his printed vote matches what's on the tabulation screen. The voter then folds his paper vote and deposits it with election officials in a good old fashioned ballot box.
We can then use the electronic tabulation to check quickly on the results -- this is quite efficient. We will also engage in a substantial amount of verification, by counting the paper votes by hand and verifying this against totals learned electronically. The paper always wins, in this system. We do not necessarily need to count all of the paper votes -- we can use random sampling.
It seems like a win in both directions, for me. Risks include unacceptable printout quality (printer wear), and insufficient random verification.
Hey, I believe you. The point is, it's not a criminal issue. It can be a civil issue, because barratry is encouraged in our current court system.
When you sit in the middle and say, "that's just the way it is", you are ensuring that it is.
Good for you. You are a kung fu master of the obvious. How exactly do you put #4 in with the first three? You think they belong in the same list? I don't.
If #4 were true, every time a group of employees breaks away from a large company they'd be thrown in jail. Please go ahead a cite a law. There are pretty limited circumstances, mostly voluntary, under which you can be vulnerable.
Good quote -- the thing is, it is true that in practicality we don't have the freedoms I wish we had, and that we all truly deserve to have. There's a push and pull to this whole freedom thing, a balance to be found. We have to be a little extreme pushing things in the direction that we want, because the other guys are doing the same thing. They fall into the "just trust us" category of government, and that should scare the hell out of all of us. I'd like to think that they're just going through a moment of weakness because they're scared. Fine -- a lot of social policy comes about from fear. But we need to push against that; we need to provide the balance. That's our role in society. A grey look at what is, is not enough. You should strive for more. You know what's right. You never need to do anything else in your life other than advocate what you know is right. Yes, I am hopelessly idealistic.
Read the post, and I felt that my particular rant was necessary. Let me get this straight -- you believe that the correct response to having someone point out a flaw in a competitor's product is, say, a year or two of jail time?
You think it's a good idea to bring the DHS into a computer security matter, one that is entirely pedestrian and civilian in nature?
You think that every computer and every ISP is part of the nation's infrastructure, and is therefore deserving of federal protection and action?
as far as "fire in the theatre" goes, blah blah blah; every idiot who is against free speech trots that crap out at the first mention. OF COURSE YOU IDIOT -- WE GET IT. The problem is that this guy didn't yell in a theatre. He pointed out a problem to people who were vulnerable to that problem. He didn't point it out to bad guys who could have attacked.
Apparently in your world it is a great idea to have corporations going after individuals for stupid, nonsensical reasons. There's a term for it -- barratry. Pushing empty threats through the legal system in an attempt to bury your enemy may occur every day, but that doesn't make it right.
Here's the thing -- I think that having this guy email the client list is precisely the correct _systemic_ action to take. The clients get notified, and they can make an educated decision on whether they'd like to continue to be a client of the ISP. The federal government and the court system shouldn't be involved. What we have is federal agencies doing the bidding of a corporation that was in the middle of fucking over its customers. And by tampering with their emails, it looks like they're of the correct ethical bent to do it again.
First they'll have to hire more people like you, though.
Excuse me, but exactly WHY do you think he shouldn't have emailed the customers? We have the right in this country to say whatever the fuck we want, to whoever we want to say it to. And the point of the justice system is exactly that: Justice. It's not supposed to be about who has the most money -- it's supposed to be about who's right.
This guy didn't do anything wrong. If you're not revealing classified information you can say whatever the hell you want. What we're dealing with is a vicious, stupid, unethical prosecution, if the facts in the security focus article are accurate.
What do open borders and unlimited government programs have to do with socialism? Nothing, of course. They are policies that are in no way related to socialism itself. You're dealing with a system that's out of control, not a problem with socialism.
A socialist country can tightly control its borders, and choose a specific set of government programs that exist to benefit only citizens.
As far as I know the worker's comp system in California is pretty much busted.
Shiny jails and crumbling schools. That's what California is all about. Direct democracy == stupid tax laws == gradual decline.
And why is it that nobody goes after the employers of these illegal immigrants? If employers started going to jail, the situation might change. How friggin' hard can it be to catch these people, anyway?
Read any number of scifi novels from the 60s, and you'll find instances of characters having messages waiting for them, in their space computers, sent to them from distant space-places.
Lots of good thinking in all of that space opera.
It's super damn easy to make this happen. The trick is, don't stop running SMTP. But, if you run one of the new-fangled mail protocols, you'll route your mail traffic from your SMTP receiver inot the new system. When you do that you tag the email with an "untrusted" header. _Everything_ received on that channel is untrusted, from then on.
Other entities that run a proper, verifiable mail system get to have their email pass through without the "untrusted" header.
Let Bayesian filters do the rest. Most will scramble to move their mail systems over to something that doesn't tag them as untrusted.
In the mean time, everything works fine.
Amen, brother. I actually got in a pretty big fight with one of my friends over restrictions on small airplanes. I was pointing out that the logic of the regulations was completely flawed, and achieved no REAL security. All it did was inconvenience, embarrass, and in some cases finish the career of, local pilots.
The end result of the conversation was her getting really upset, telling me I was "insensitive", and that "everybody knows little planes are dangerous".
The ID requirement while boarding accomplishes absolutely nothing, except allowing airlines to screw with pricing.
And all this kick-ass power is gonna help us...kill off the Iraqi airforce, which is currently buried in the desert?
Yeesh. What a giant waste of money. Maybe these things are going to be cheaper to operate. NOT!
How about those of you who do NOT live in a future police state get right on your favorite P2P application and log in with these user names? That oughta confuse things at least a little.
The problem is not unlike flow control and error correction at the TCP level. We need the spam equivalent of Nagle's algorithm. We need to be able to treat new sources of email, at the SMTP level, as untrusted, and gradually build up trust in them, over a period of weeks, if necessary. During that period, throttle back extensively on what is permitted from that host.
We also need an encrypted, trusted, peer to peer protocol, where admission into the "club" allows mail servers to collaborate on statistical filtering of email.
The reason I want to see greatly increased political attention on the spam problem is that someday, when I have kids, I want to be able to give my 14 year old an email account without having to worry about advertisements for horse porn landing in her email inbox. Would you, as a parent, give your child an email account these days? Ten years ago you could have, and not worried about it. Now you can't. The indiscriminate emailing of this crap has just got to stop. I have no problem with it going to people who want it, if you can find any.
You have responded to an oversimplification by making another, far more dangerous simplification.
Your ideal is that we classify when the benefits of information being available are less than the dangers. Who exactly makes this determination? What subject matters are subject to this?
When we deal with information that is dangerous by "hiding" it, what we really do is shift resources away from solving the underlying vulnerability. Sometimes the vulnerability isn't solvable, but much of the time it is.
With Gorman's work, he is highlighting choke points in the infrastructure. Would the rational response to this situation not be to diversify off those choke points? We should identify key weaknesses with this kind of research then solve them. We should not simply hide the information.
First principles also apply here: I find myself somewhat in agreement with one poster who indicated that we should quit "stomping" around the world creating enemies. It is far easier to defend against an enemy you do not have.
FOIA and classification are unrelated. FOIA is generally used to punch holes through government bureaucracy; to get at information that should be available to the public but is obscured by red tape. Classification contains information that should not be available to the public. Some FOIA requests come back redacted for security reasons.
It is far too easy for an administration to simply designate information as confidential. Such designations can and are used to avoid information release that would be politically senstivie. The bar is too low.
As with so many other things, it comes down to "who decides"...
The Potomac approach to National is just plain dangerous. There are some pretty severe turns that have to occur on short final (REALLY short final). What is the best recipe for an accident? Extensive maneuvering at low speed and low altitude. If I was the pilot's union I'd be up in arms about it. Sure, it's kind of cool to fly a dangerous approach, but National is ridiculous.
I commute by the airport on GW parkway and see the last turn the planes make all the time. It's right over my head.
Bottom line is, there will come a time when there's a weird-ass icing condition out there, or a microburst, or some combination of the two. The pilot will be doing this dumb-ass turn so the fucking idiots who bought property near the airport which has been there for 60 years can hear 0.2 decibels less noise, and a couple hundred people are going to die as a result.