Not to totally dismiss Kurtz's complaint, but I think there's a bit of subtext to this as well.
I think part of PvP's beef here is that Iliad has, from their perspective, managed to accrue a major following and a nigh-steady income with scarcely a shred of style or talent, while they toil in relative obscurity. Seriously, looking at cartoons like Penny Arcade or PvP, these guys have obviously dedicated a lot of time to making their strips look good, clean and stylish, whereas User Friendly is hardly a notch above "Cathy" on the scale of artistic effort.
Personally, I read both PA and UF as often as they come out. I *don't* read PvP, probably mainly because the only time they ever come to my attention is when they're bitching about Iliad. Kurtz has a nifty and unique style, but the actual comics just don't grab me.
Of course, the *only* consistently brilliant, funny and well-drawn comic on the web is Bob the Angry Flower. If only he'd update more than twice a month.
Sounds like cause for optimism to me...
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Apocalypse Not
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I think what this illustrates, most of all, is how far out of touch the pundits and the arbiters of "conventional wisdom" really are. If the media was overhyping this problem (a debatable point -- most of the serious coverage I saw on TV asserted that the nation was prepared, and there was no cause for overreaction), then the fact that hardly anybody actually panicked is probably a sign that there's still a healthy vein of skepticism running through the populace.
Either that, or it just means that most people are complacent sheep who'll happily amble up to the slaughterhouse door without a thought for self-preservation.
It's also worth repeating that the idea of the techno-industrial infrastructure turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight was an oversimplified scenario presented only in cheesy TV ads and animated Fox sitcoms. We may yet see "real" Y2K outages cropping up as we roll into the first business week of the 2000s -- and remember, there's still February 29th to look forward to.
Was the world of Gattaca so bad?
on
Planet Gattaca
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Earth was clean, unpolluted, and disease-free. The human inhabitants were, by and large, attractive, intelligent, healthy people. There was an active space program sending manned missions as far off as Titan. The bar was raised in all fields of human endeavor.
Certainly, genetic discrimination seems unfair. But, unlike the racial, gender and class discrimination rampant today, at least there's a grain of rational basis to it. So NASA doesn't want to spend millions training an astronaut and shipping him on a year-long voyage to Saturn because there's a good chance his heart will explode on liftoff -- can you blame them? And nothing at all prevents Vincent from becoming a great architect, computer programmer, sculptor, or anything else he cares to be. Besides, we enact laws against discrimination all the time, and the burden of proof is usually on the employer.
More to the point, Vincent, despite his genetic baggage, succeeds in the end. The whole point of the film is that will and determination are, and will always be, more important than an exceptional rack of chromosomes.
Of course, what with the advances in psychopharmaceuticals, will and determination will be available in over-the-counter chewable tablets any day now...
Re:Religion is the cause of bloodshed and cruelty?
on
Planet Gattaca
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This is a debatable point. Hitler certainly was interested in occult symbolism, both Christian and pagan, and may very well have believed that objects like the Spear of Destiny existed, and had divine powers. That, to me, suggests a man who not only believes in God, but believes that either he is doing God's work, or that God can be compelled to do his.
Hitler's personal beliefs aside, certainly the vast majority of the Nazi party in Germany were church-going types, and don't forget that the Pope himself supported Mussolini.
Has religion *caused* bloodshed? I doubt it. It's certainly a popular excuse, but I don't really think that human history would be any less blood-soaked had Christianity or Islam never caught on. If religion did not exist, history's murderers would simply have found some other plausible justification for slaughtering their neighbors.
For the record I call the labour concerns irrelevant because at heart of the matter all that is important is how much stuff the workers recieve. Lowering tarriffs can only increase the total amount of goods in a country (more goods enter the nation) and while some citizens may be demoted to lesser jobs a fluid job market will guarantee everyone is still employed and hence the country has more goods in total.
I think your point is valid in a sense -- opening trade barriers tends to increase wealth for all concerned, in terms of raw goods available.
But labor concerns aren't just about goods and salaries -- they're also about healthy working conditions, the right to organize, and freedom from slavery or indentured servitude. Certainly only a fool would argue that the WTO should enforce an American-level minimum wage on third-world countries, but at present they don't even have guidelines regarding child labor!
For similar reasons, I think the two issues which are at the forefront of the protests -- the WTO's active work *against* labor rights and environmental/health protection -- are perfectly valid. Without at least some kind of recognized baseline in these two areas, the WTO is actively increasing human suffering, and overriding the rights of nations and states to hold a higher standard.
Try reading it again. You need to understand what "bug1" and "bug2" are.
Bug1 is "if I am compiling 'login', add a bug which enables Ken to login with a secret password at any time, whether or not he has an account"
Bug2 is "if I am compiling 'cc', add bug1 and bug2"
The trick is, once you've written these two bugs into cc, you compile your new cc, delete the bugs from the source code, and compile your clean source with your *hacked* cc, which silently and secretly passes those bugs along. Now, any copy of "login" built with this compiler, or built with any compiler built by this compiler, or any of its descendents down the line, will allow Ken Thompson access to your computer, and you'll never know about it because it's not in the source any more.
The '\v' stuff was just to introduce you to the notion of altering a compiler to extend its ability to understand and respond to patterns, and how once you've done it once longhand, future builds can use the shortcuts you've taught it.
Speaking of strange loops, I think a definite candidate for one of the century's most beautiful hacks is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I'd also have to give nods to Einstein's Relativity theories, and the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, both of which I only rank below Godel *as hacks* because they don't have the same marvelous seems-obvious-once-you've-done-it-ness of Godel's feat.
We succesfully argued that while "utilitarian" machine names may make sense on workstations, they're completely unhelpful on servers. We want names that are short, catchy, and easy to remember, not mouthfuls of characters & digits. Then we can alias them to more "practical" names in the DNS if necessary.
In fact, this is much handier than ordinary 'descriptive' names. For example, we're in the process of replacing our old single-CPU mail server with a new SMP box... At the moment 'mail' is aliased to the old box, 'hermes', while we prepare the new one. Once it's ready to go, we transfer the accounts & spoolfiles, adjust the DNS so 'mail' -> 'coyote' and voila -- the users don't see a blip.
I tend to prefer mythological/religious names, probably because they command a little more awe and respect than names like "Tweety" and "Goofy". Unfortunately, I'm no good at keeping it within one culture...
At the moment:
mail server: Hermes mail server-to-be: Coyote Intranet & "Knowledge Base": Thoth Webserver: StellaMaris
Oh, and at home, the outside of my firewall is named "elohim" and the inside is "metatron"... Mmm, cabalistic humor.
If I read one more gee-whiz story about some groundbreaking computer technology that's going to revolutionize everything in 3-5 years, I'm going to unplug my PC, move into the woods, and live on nothing but berries and 5.25" disks. If even half these announcements turned out to be accurate, we'd all be driving fusion-powered personal blimps and computing with superconductors and data crystals... Chances are, by the time IBM is actually bringing any of this stuff to market, some yet-to-be-invented startup company will already have rendered it obsolete.
Forget Linus Torvalds -- an excellent candidate for man of the decade, but not the century. I'd like to suggest that if we must vote for a fellow geek, that slashdotters turn out in force for the generally recognized father of the electronic computer, Alan Turing. Comments? Discussion?
Excluding extremely high-traffic servers, a PC that is connected to the internet is devoting anywhere from a tenth to a thousandth of its processing power to the task of actually generating net traffic. I would estimate that a ratio of 1 PC monitoring to every 100 actually generating traffic would be more than sufficient. I imagine you could get away with a ratio closer to 1:10000.
It seems to me, from the article, that they'll be concentrating on specific points of vulnerability. That is, data flowing from Joe's ISP to Jane's ISP down the street will probably go unmonitored, but data flowing from Jane's ISP to Chase Manhattan Bank will be tracked and catalogued. At least, that is how it would be likely to work if they were really trying to defend the vital points of our data infrastructure against attack, which is what they claim. Any evidence to the contrary would seem to me to point to definitely sinister motivations.
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. The stated aim of this system is to detect attack and intrusion attempts -- the worry is that it will be misused for surveillance and monitoring of private communications. But a system that does one should be constructed differently from a system that does the other. I'm no expert -- perhaps someone out there would care to expound on whether that statement is accurate, and what those differences are most likely to be.
It's a big issue that at least the NYC government has been working to combat. It has been shown that turnstile hoppers, and guys who run red lights often have other criminal records. In other words, if someone breaks the law, they have a tendency to really BREAK THE LAW.
I kinda feel obligated to take issue with that point -- I think it's more correct to say that "someone who stabs an old lady for her purse is not likely to think much of jumping a turnstile" than "jumping turnstiles leads to mugging."
NYC's attack on Quality of Life crimes -- arresting vandals, litterbugs and turnstile hoppers in the hope that this will prevent bank robbery and serial killing has, indeed, coincided with a drastic downturn in violent crime. But, I think it is significant that this same downturn has occured in nearly every city across the country, whether or not they had similar programs. Call me a cynic, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it really *is* the economy, stupid.
That having been said, I don't really see sneaking into R rated films as a valid agent for social change. If you must risk life, liberty and Nintendo priveleges to watch poorly animated cartoon characters swear at each other, that's just fine by me -- just don't go thinking you're Che Guevara for having done it.
I'd just like to point out something which DefCon seems to have glossed over -- he says "My web server (Redhat 5.0) has been up since Sept. 98 without a glitch. My Redhat 6.0 workstation locks up every few days..." It seems to me that what he's describing is Gnome crashing, not Linux itself. Were he running Gnome on that 5.0 box it would probably be every bit as flaky (possibly worse, considering the system & library shuffling he'd have to do.)
I think there are valid issues here -- RH has raised the price of their product, included a bunch of experimental tools and features, discarded some old standbys, and apparently pinned all their hopes on the Gnome desktop. The substitution of GnoRPM for glint is something I was unaware of, and I think bodes rather ill.
Altogether, however, I think RH's track record has been a fairly good one. RH's support of Gnome is admirable, and the fact that they decided to rely too heavily on it before it was really ready is a regrettable misstep, but one I think they'll recover from.
Of course, that's the sort of thing people have been saying about Windows NT since 3.51... We'll see how 6.1 turns out, I guess.
Sure, "hacker" has taken on a pejorative context in the mainstream. But one of the aspects of any non-mainstream culture (if you want to call it that) is a private language -- a jargon. When you use that term in public, it's a litmus test. Those who know let it pass without incident, those who don't immediately think "War Games". I use it all the time in job interviews -- if they misunderstand the term, they're probably not the sort of folks I'd want to work for.
Remember "punk"? 40 years ago it meant an inexperienced kid or a male prostitute. Now most people immediately think "orange mohawk, nose ring". The mainstream meaning of the term has clearly changed.
On the other hand, most people still think of punks as violent, immature anarchists, when in fact many of them are pacifistic, intelligent anarchists. Some of them aren't anarchists at all, but rather socialists, or even Green party. In fact, as with hackers, any attempt to describe the group as a whole must fall short. In the end, most of the population is going to accept some received, "lazy" definition and let it sit. People can only handle so much information, and the nature of "hackers" is just not a subject most people are going to feel any need to understand.
You want people to understand exactly what it is you do? Tell 'em you're a computer programmer or a sysadmin. If you want to get creative there's all sorts of good, slangy terms: "bit wrangler", "console jockey", "computer geek", etc. A friend of mine got his workplace to put "Adeptus Technicus" on his business cards. It's your work, you come up with a description. If it catches on, bully for you. Doesn't mean we have to agree on a new set of terms
I do have to agree that the term "cracker" seems awfully derivative, and prone to cause confusion. A lot of people probably will assume you're talking about po' white trash. Certainly I never use the term... I tend to use "script kiddie" most of the time because that's what 99% of them are. I'll also occasionally use the highly technical phrases "loser", "jerk" or "dumbass" -- after I've had their ISP account shut down. Someone who can actually crack systems with skill, ingenuity and knowledge is a hacker as far as I'm concerned. A bit misguided perhaps, but nobody ever said we all had to be alike.
I liked The Matrix OK. It was a big-budget, special-effects marvel, which happens to be fine by me -- I saw Independance Day and Armageddon and liked them for most of the same reasons -- great effects, cool explosions. The Matrix was easily the best-looking movie I've seen in a while, but that's about as much credit as I'll give it.
In my opinion, the mythological aspect of Matrix was just tacked-on. I find it hard to believe that there are people who are awestruck at the revelation that Neo is an anagram for One, or that there are parallels to be made with the Judaic concept of the Messiah or various mind-over-matter philosophies. The movie may never have said these things explicitly, but it might as well have put them on the screen in big block letters. And maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but to me, it seemed this papier-mache theology was just an attempt to add depth to a movie that couldn't provide it by way of, say, characterization or plotline.
For my money, the VR movie of the summer is Cronenberg's ExistenZ. It's not big budget (in the wake of Matrix, Ep.1, et al, it looks practically no-budget), but it deals with VR in a fashion that dispenses with sci-fi pseudomythic conceits and deals with the very human consequences of manufacturable reality. There are touches any hardcore gamer will love, like characters that loop their dialogue until somebody says the right thing to them. More importantly, there are characters who are complex enigmas, not cardboard cutouts, there are conflicts which are complex and multifaceted, not cartoonish good guys vs. bad, and the emphasis is on what the actors say and do, not what they wear. And, for all Matrix's dizzying camera angles and CG tricks, one of the most effective effects I've seen this year was ExistenZ's seamless pan-and-dissolve when the characters move from reality to the game world.
Having said all that, I might as well confess that actually, my favorite movie of the summer so far has been The Mummy. Campy horror movie, big scary bugs -- that and a bag of popcorn and I'm happy for hours.
Last night, on CNBC, they were having a panel discussion on the shootings, during which a team of child psychologists, criminologists and law enforcement officials bandied about their opinions on what makes kids shoot up their schools.
These so-called experts blamed the Internet, violent video games, "put-down culture" (whatever that means), and even the "Serial Killer trading cards" that were published some time ago.
At no time did anyone make the seemingly obvious observation that it never would have occured to these kids to do this if it weren't for the television coverage of the last couple dozen times this happened...
I mean, the internet is a great repository of information, and a revolution in media, certainly. But nothing matches the pervasiveness of TV. Nobody ever committed an act of public foolishness or massive violence in the hopes that it would make it on to the World Wide Web...
Of course, they're blaming the Internet because they may have got bomb plans off the web -- so what? If you want to find out how to be the best possible serial killer/mass murderer you can be, and avoid the mistakes of those who have gone before, your best bet is to spend an evening watching cable, not surfing the web. Between "Forensic Detectives", "America's Most Wanted" and Bill Moyers' latest production for A&E, you can find out everything you need to know about avoiding capture, concealing evidence and copping an insanity plea if you do get caught.
But, the supreme irony was this -- the host of this show was none other than Geraldo Rivera, the man who put Charlie Manson on the air over a decade ago, and whose style of sensationalistic pseudojournalism arguably bears more responsibility for this tragic event than every neo-nazi website and ultraviolent videogame put together.
I know it's probably bad form to reply to my own posting, but, heck, it was probably bad form to submit this flamebait in the first place.
Obviously, the Dvorak/QWERTY debate won't be settled by this, or any article, study or personal opinion -- like choice of window manager, text editor or automobile transmission, it's simply up to the unique preferences, prejudices and experiences of the individual.
But, a number of people have politely inquired whether I've ever actually tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard.
So, here is my story:
Long, long ago, I owned a "Laser" computer, which was an Apple II clone. It had a switch on the back to go between Dvorak and QWERTY. Having only recently heard about the Dvorak keyboard, from none other than sci-fi/fantasy author Piers Anthony (who mentions it in the preface or postscript to one of his Incarnations of Immortality books, which I was avidly devouring at the time), I decided to give it a whirl. I magic-markered the new characters on the keys, and got my typing speed up to a pretty respectable level after a while.
As fate would have it, this was just before I started taking typing and computer classes in school, where the keyboards were, of course, QWERTY. After a few exceedingly poor typing test scores, I gave up trying to be biclavial and went back to QWERTY for good. Before very long, my QWERTY typing speed was as good as my Dvorak had ever been, and over time greatly exceeded it.
All in all, my experience with Dvorak, however brief, did nothing whatsoever to convince me of its supposedly evident superiority. I now type with great speed and accuracy with my QWERTY keyboard, and the simple expedients of good typing habits, regular breaks and a wrist-rest have saved my fingers from RSI's so far. My preferences, prejudices and experience tell me that Dvorak is an inconvenient solution to a problem I just don't have.
Also, I now think Piers Anthony is a boring, no-talent hack. But that's a subject for a whole other flamewar.
The TalkBack article, while I won't go so far as to dismiss it as FUD, strikes me as whiny, at least... 30 posters flame poor Mr. Berst, and suddenly the Linux community is a bunch of immature brats. Heck, if a news agency can't get 30 flames out of an article, it's not doing its job.
The security problem that this article refers to (http://lewismettler.software- engineering.webjump.com/) seems accurate, but obvious. The gist of it is, with totally open source, there's nothing stopping Bad People from rewriting the code to do Evil Things. However, this just isn't all that startling a revelation. If an intruder can't get into your system, it won't work. If it's someone who already has access, Open Source is irrelevant to the issue -- anyone with the time and know-how can patch or introduce malicious software to any OS, open or not. In short, this seems to me like a rather shallow observation. Maybe I missed something.
As to the other article, I'm not sure whether Stallman is becoming a crank in his old age, or if the media is simply overeager to paint him as such. Obviously, a breakdown of the cooperative culture of Open Source is just the sort of thing any number of journalistic doomsayers would love to see -- not to mention The Redmond Menace. On the other hand, Stallman's behavior of late bespeaks an individual with a dire need to chill out a little. I guess my perspective is, I don't care what Stallman wants to call it, I'm just happy that it works.
Can we clear up the attributions here? This *entire essay* was written by Benjamin Tucker, excerpted and submitted by Kevin Horn -- not just the first paragraph. I woulda thought the style was a dead giveaway.
It is a good argument, and I agree with most of it, but I think that the information age has thrown a curve in it. Since any electronic work is now infinitely reproducible, should, say, id games be prohibited from copyrighting their work? Who would pay for Quake II if it was available everywhere, without fear of punishment -- or if multiple vendors could resell it at their own prices?
On the other hand, certain aspects of information systems automatically punish proprietary standards. TCP/IP is the protocol of the Internet, in part, because anyone can run it or write their own implementation without paying royalties. If MS decided tomorrow that NT servers on the Internet would run *only* on, say, NetBEUI, they'd alienate a huge percentage of the world. And the Internet would collapse like a souffle' topped with bricks.
In short, I think the proper tack here is a situational, utilitarian one, not an inflexible, dogmatic one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to totally dismiss Kurtz's complaint, but I think there's a bit of subtext to this as well.
I think part of PvP's beef here is that Iliad has, from their perspective, managed to accrue a major following and a nigh-steady income with scarcely a shred of style or talent, while they toil in relative obscurity. Seriously, looking at cartoons like Penny Arcade or PvP, these guys have obviously dedicated a lot of time to making their strips look good, clean and stylish, whereas User Friendly is hardly a notch above "Cathy" on the scale of artistic effort.
Personally, I read both PA and UF as often as they come out. I *don't* read PvP, probably mainly because the only time they ever come to my attention is when they're bitching about Iliad. Kurtz has a nifty and unique style, but the actual comics just don't grab me.
Of course, the *only* consistently brilliant, funny and well-drawn comic on the web is Bob the Angry Flower. If only he'd update more than twice a month.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
I think what this illustrates, most of all, is how far out of touch the pundits and the arbiters of "conventional wisdom" really are. If the media was overhyping this problem (a debatable point -- most of the serious coverage I saw on TV asserted that the nation was prepared, and there was no cause for overreaction), then the fact that hardly anybody actually panicked is probably a sign that there's still a healthy vein of skepticism running through the populace.
Either that, or it just means that most people are complacent sheep who'll happily amble up to the slaughterhouse door without a thought for self-preservation.
It's also worth repeating that the idea of the techno-industrial infrastructure turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight was an oversimplified scenario presented only in cheesy TV ads and animated Fox sitcoms. We may yet see "real" Y2K outages cropping up as we roll into the first business week of the 2000s -- and remember, there's still February 29th to look forward to.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Earth was clean, unpolluted, and disease-free. The human inhabitants were, by and large, attractive, intelligent, healthy people. There was an active space program sending manned missions as far off as Titan. The bar was raised in all fields of human endeavor.
Certainly, genetic discrimination seems unfair. But, unlike the racial, gender and class discrimination rampant today, at least there's a grain of rational basis to it. So NASA doesn't want to spend millions training an astronaut and shipping him on a year-long voyage to Saturn because there's a good chance his heart will explode on liftoff -- can you blame them? And nothing at all prevents Vincent from becoming a great architect, computer programmer, sculptor, or anything else he cares to be. Besides, we enact laws against discrimination all the time, and the burden of proof is usually on the employer.
More to the point, Vincent, despite his genetic baggage, succeeds in the end. The whole point of the film is that will and determination are, and will always be, more important than an exceptional rack of chromosomes.
Of course, what with the advances in psychopharmaceuticals, will and determination will be available in over-the-counter chewable tablets any day now...
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
This is a debatable point. Hitler certainly was interested in occult symbolism, both Christian and pagan, and may very well have believed that objects like the Spear of Destiny existed, and had divine powers. That, to me, suggests a man who not only believes in God, but believes that either he is doing God's work, or that God can be compelled to do his.
Hitler's personal beliefs aside, certainly the vast majority of the Nazi party in Germany were church-going types, and don't forget that the Pope himself supported Mussolini.
Has religion *caused* bloodshed? I doubt it. It's certainly a popular excuse, but I don't really think that human history would be any less blood-soaked had Christianity or Islam never caught on. If religion did not exist, history's murderers would simply have found some other plausible justification for slaughtering their neighbors.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
For the record I call the labour concerns irrelevant because at heart of the matter all that is important is how much stuff the workers recieve. Lowering tarriffs can only increase the total amount of goods in a country (more goods enter the nation) and while some citizens may be demoted to lesser jobs a fluid job market will guarantee everyone is still employed and hence the country has more goods in total.
I think your point is valid in a sense -- opening trade barriers tends to increase wealth for all concerned, in terms of raw goods available.
But labor concerns aren't just about goods and salaries -- they're also about healthy working conditions, the right to organize, and freedom from slavery or indentured servitude. Certainly only a fool would argue that the WTO should enforce an American-level minimum wage on third-world countries, but at present they don't even have guidelines regarding child labor!
For similar reasons, I think the two issues which are at the forefront of the protests -- the WTO's active work *against* labor rights and environmental/health protection -- are perfectly valid. Without at least some kind of recognized baseline in these two areas, the WTO is actively increasing human suffering, and overriding the rights of nations and states to hold a higher standard.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Try reading it again. You need to understand what "bug1" and "bug2" are.
Bug1 is "if I am compiling 'login', add a bug which enables Ken to login with a secret password at any time, whether or not he has an account"
Bug2 is "if I am compiling 'cc', add bug1 and bug2"
The trick is, once you've written these two bugs into cc, you compile your new cc, delete the bugs from the source code, and compile your clean source with your *hacked* cc, which silently and secretly passes those bugs along. Now, any copy of "login" built with this compiler, or built with any compiler built by this compiler, or any of its descendents down the line, will allow Ken Thompson access to your computer, and you'll never know about it because it's not in the source any more.
The '\v' stuff was just to introduce you to the notion of altering a compiler to extend its ability to understand and respond to patterns, and how once you've done it once longhand, future builds can use the shortcuts you've taught it.
Speaking of strange loops, I think a definite candidate for one of the century's most beautiful hacks is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I'd also have to give nods to Einstein's Relativity theories, and the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, both of which I only rank below Godel *as hacks* because they don't have the same marvelous seems-obvious-once-you've-done-it-ness of Godel's feat.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
He got his site shut-down by harassing a 17 year old girl, which shortly after being shutdown, Ken sold for a reported $125,000 to Kroll.
$125,000 sounds pretty steep for one 17 year-old girl. Who is this Kroll, anyways? Some kind of interstellar slave-trader?
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
We succesfully argued that while "utilitarian" machine names may make sense on workstations, they're completely unhelpful on servers. We want names that are short, catchy, and easy to remember, not mouthfuls of characters & digits. Then we can alias them to more "practical" names in the DNS if necessary.
In fact, this is much handier than ordinary 'descriptive' names. For example, we're in the process of replacing our old single-CPU mail server with a new SMP box... At the moment 'mail' is aliased to the old box, 'hermes', while we prepare the new one. Once it's ready to go, we transfer the accounts & spoolfiles, adjust the DNS so 'mail' -> 'coyote' and voila -- the users don't see a blip.
I tend to prefer mythological/religious names, probably because they command a little more awe and respect than names like "Tweety" and "Goofy". Unfortunately, I'm no good at keeping it within one culture...
At the moment:
mail server: Hermes
mail server-to-be: Coyote
Intranet & "Knowledge Base": Thoth
Webserver: StellaMaris
Oh, and at home, the outside of my firewall is named "elohim" and the inside is "metatron"... Mmm, cabalistic humor.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
If I read one more gee-whiz story about some groundbreaking computer technology that's going to revolutionize everything in 3-5 years, I'm going to unplug my PC, move into the woods, and live on nothing but berries and 5.25" disks. If even half these announcements turned out to be accurate, we'd all be driving fusion-powered personal blimps and computing with superconductors and data crystals...
Chances are, by the time IBM is actually bringing any of this stuff to market, some yet-to-be-invented startup company will already have rendered it obsolete.
Forget Linus Torvalds -- an excellent candidate for man of the decade, but not the century.
I'd like to suggest that if we must vote for a fellow geek, that slashdotters turn out in force for the generally recognized father of the electronic computer, Alan Turing.
Comments? Discussion?
"First they came for the slashdotters and Ilakwejrl;mph'
Excluding extremely high-traffic servers, a PC that is connected to the internet is devoting anywhere from a tenth to a thousandth of its processing power to the task of actually generating net traffic. I would estimate that a ratio of 1 PC monitoring to every 100 actually generating traffic would be more than sufficient. I imagine you could get away with a ratio closer to 1:10000.
It seems to me, from the article, that they'll be concentrating on specific points of vulnerability. That is, data flowing from Joe's ISP to Jane's ISP down the street will probably go unmonitored, but data flowing from Jane's ISP to Chase Manhattan Bank will be tracked and catalogued. At least, that is how it would be likely to work if they were really trying to defend the vital points of our data infrastructure against attack, which is what they claim. Any evidence to the contrary would seem to me to point to definitely sinister motivations.
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. The stated aim of this system is to detect attack and intrusion attempts -- the worry is that it will be misused for surveillance and monitoring of private communications. But a system that does one should be constructed differently from a system that does the other. I'm no expert -- perhaps someone out there would care to expound on whether that statement is accurate, and what those differences are most likely to be.
It's a big issue that at least the NYC government has been working to combat. It has been shown that turnstile hoppers, and guys who run red lights often have other criminal records. In other words, if someone breaks the law, they have a tendency to really BREAK THE LAW.
I kinda feel obligated to take issue with that point -- I think it's more correct to say that "someone who stabs an old lady for her purse is not likely to think much of jumping a turnstile" than "jumping turnstiles leads to mugging."
NYC's attack on Quality of Life crimes -- arresting vandals, litterbugs and turnstile hoppers in the hope that this will prevent bank robbery and serial killing has, indeed, coincided with a drastic downturn in violent crime. But, I think it is significant that this same downturn has occured in nearly every city across the country, whether or not they had similar programs. Call me a cynic, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it really *is* the economy, stupid.
That having been said, I don't really see sneaking into R rated films as a valid agent for social change. If you must risk life, liberty and Nintendo priveleges to watch poorly animated cartoon characters swear at each other, that's just fine by me -- just don't go thinking you're Che Guevara for having done it.
I think there are valid issues here -- RH has raised the price of their product, included a bunch of experimental tools and features, discarded some old standbys, and apparently pinned all their hopes on the Gnome desktop. The substitution of GnoRPM for glint is something I was unaware of, and I think bodes rather ill.
Altogether, however, I think RH's track record has been a fairly good one. RH's support of Gnome is admirable, and the fact that they decided to rely too heavily on it before it was really ready is a regrettable misstep, but one I think they'll recover from.
Of course, that's the sort of thing people have been saying about Windows NT since 3.51... We'll see how 6.1 turns out, I guess.
Sure, "hacker" has taken on a pejorative context in the mainstream. But one of the aspects of any non-mainstream culture (if you want to call it that) is a private language -- a jargon. When you use that term in public, it's a litmus test. Those who know let it pass without incident, those who don't immediately think "War Games". I use it all the time in job interviews -- if they misunderstand the term, they're probably not the sort of folks I'd want to work for.
Remember "punk"? 40 years ago it meant an inexperienced kid or a male prostitute. Now most people immediately think "orange mohawk, nose ring". The mainstream meaning of the term has clearly changed.
On the other hand, most people still think of punks as violent, immature anarchists, when in fact many of them are pacifistic, intelligent anarchists. Some of them aren't anarchists at all, but rather socialists, or even Green party. In fact, as with hackers, any attempt to describe the group as a whole must fall short. In the end, most of the population is going to accept some received, "lazy" definition and let it sit. People can only handle so much information, and the nature of "hackers" is just not a subject most people are going to feel any need to understand.
You want people to understand exactly what it is you do? Tell 'em you're a computer programmer or a sysadmin. If you want to get creative there's all sorts of good, slangy terms: "bit wrangler", "console jockey", "computer geek", etc. A friend of mine got his workplace to put "Adeptus Technicus" on his business cards. It's your work, you come up with a description. If it catches on, bully for you. Doesn't mean we have to agree on a new set of terms
I do have to agree that the term "cracker" seems awfully derivative, and prone to cause confusion. A lot of people probably will assume you're talking about po' white trash. Certainly I never use the term... I tend to use "script kiddie" most of the time because that's what 99% of them are. I'll also occasionally use the highly technical phrases "loser", "jerk" or "dumbass" -- after I've had their ISP account shut down. Someone who can actually crack systems with skill, ingenuity and knowledge is a hacker as far as I'm concerned. A bit misguided perhaps, but nobody ever said we all had to be alike.
In my opinion, the mythological aspect of Matrix was just tacked-on. I find it hard to believe that there are people who are awestruck at the revelation that Neo is an anagram for One, or that there are parallels to be made with the Judaic concept of the Messiah or various mind-over-matter philosophies. The movie may never have said these things explicitly, but it might as well have put them on the screen in big block letters. And maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but to me, it seemed this papier-mache theology was just an attempt to add depth to a movie that couldn't provide it by way of, say, characterization or plotline.
For my money, the VR movie of the summer is Cronenberg's ExistenZ. It's not big budget (in the wake of Matrix, Ep.1, et al, it looks practically no-budget), but it deals with VR in a fashion that dispenses with sci-fi pseudomythic conceits and deals with the very human consequences of manufacturable reality. There are touches any hardcore gamer will love, like characters that loop their dialogue until somebody says the right thing to them. More importantly, there are characters who are complex enigmas, not cardboard cutouts, there are conflicts which are complex and multifaceted, not cartoonish good guys vs. bad, and the emphasis is on what the actors say and do, not what they wear. And, for all Matrix's dizzying camera angles and CG tricks, one of the most effective effects I've seen this year was ExistenZ's seamless pan-and-dissolve when the characters move from reality to the game world.
Having said all that, I might as well confess that actually, my favorite movie of the summer so far has been The Mummy. Campy horror movie, big scary bugs -- that and a bag of popcorn and I'm happy for hours.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse qq{\n)-:
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Heh. I just peer-reviewed your sig. Somebody moderate me out of my misery...
These so-called experts blamed the Internet, violent video games, "put-down culture" (whatever that means), and even the "Serial Killer trading cards" that were published some time ago.
At no time did anyone make the seemingly obvious observation that it never would have occured to these kids to do this if it weren't for the television coverage of the last couple dozen times this happened...
I mean, the internet is a great repository of information, and a revolution in media, certainly. But nothing matches the pervasiveness of TV. Nobody ever committed an act of public foolishness or massive violence in the hopes that it would make it on to the World Wide Web...
Of course, they're blaming the Internet because they may have got bomb plans off the web -- so what? If you want to find out how to be the best possible serial killer/mass murderer you can be, and avoid the mistakes of those who have gone before, your best bet is to spend an evening watching cable, not surfing the web. Between "Forensic Detectives", "America's Most Wanted" and Bill Moyers' latest production for A&E, you can find out everything you need to know about avoiding capture, concealing evidence and copping an insanity plea if you do get caught.
But, the supreme irony was this -- the host of this show was none other than Geraldo Rivera, the man who put Charlie Manson on the air over a decade ago, and whose style of sensationalistic pseudojournalism arguably bears more responsibility for this tragic event than every neo-nazi website and ultraviolent videogame put together.
Obviously, the Dvorak/QWERTY debate won't be settled by this, or any article, study or personal opinion -- like choice of window manager, text editor or automobile transmission, it's simply up to the unique preferences, prejudices and experiences of the individual.
But, a number of people have politely inquired whether I've ever actually tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard.
So, here is my story:
Long, long ago, I owned a "Laser" computer, which was an Apple II clone. It had a switch on the back to go between Dvorak and QWERTY. Having only recently heard about the Dvorak keyboard, from none other than sci-fi/fantasy author Piers Anthony (who mentions it in the preface or postscript to one of his Incarnations of Immortality books, which I was avidly devouring at the time), I decided to give it a whirl. I magic-markered the new characters on the keys, and got my typing speed up to a pretty respectable level after a while.
As fate would have it, this was just before I started taking typing and computer classes in school, where the keyboards were, of course, QWERTY. After a few exceedingly poor typing test scores, I gave up trying to be biclavial and went back to QWERTY for good. Before very long, my QWERTY typing speed was as good as my Dvorak had ever been, and over time greatly exceeded it.
All in all, my experience with Dvorak, however brief, did nothing whatsoever to convince me of its supposedly evident superiority. I now type with great speed and accuracy with my QWERTY keyboard, and the simple expedients of good typing habits, regular breaks and a wrist-rest have saved my fingers from RSI's so far. My preferences, prejudices and experience tell me that Dvorak is an inconvenient solution to a problem I just don't have.
Also, I now think Piers Anthony is a boring, no-talent hack. But that's a subject for a whole other flamewar.
The TalkBack article, while I won't go so far as to dismiss it as FUD, strikes me as whiny, at least... 30 posters flame poor Mr. Berst, and suddenly the Linux community is a bunch of immature brats. Heck, if a news agency can't get 30 flames out of an article, it's not doing its job.
The security problem that this article refers to (http://lewismettler.software- engineering.webjump.com/) seems accurate, but obvious. The gist of it is, with totally open source, there's nothing stopping Bad People from rewriting the code to do Evil Things. However, this just isn't all that startling a revelation. If an intruder can't get into your system, it won't work. If it's someone who already has access, Open Source is irrelevant to the issue -- anyone with the time and know-how can patch or introduce malicious software to any OS, open or not. In short, this seems to me like a rather shallow observation. Maybe I missed something.
As to the other article, I'm not sure whether Stallman is becoming a crank in his old age, or if the media is simply overeager to paint him as such. Obviously, a breakdown of the cooperative culture of Open Source is just the sort of thing any number of journalistic doomsayers would love to see -- not to mention The Redmond Menace. On the other hand, Stallman's behavior of late bespeaks an individual with a dire need to chill out a little. I guess my perspective is, I don't care what Stallman wants to call it, I'm just happy that it works.
It is a good argument, and I agree with most of it, but I think that the information age has thrown a curve in it. Since any electronic work is now infinitely reproducible, should, say, id games be prohibited from copyrighting their work? Who would pay for Quake II if it was available everywhere, without fear of punishment -- or if multiple vendors could resell it at their own prices?
On the other hand, certain aspects of information systems automatically punish proprietary standards. TCP/IP is the protocol of the Internet, in part, because anyone can run it or write their own implementation without paying royalties. If MS decided tomorrow that NT servers on the Internet would run *only* on, say, NetBEUI, they'd alienate a huge percentage of the world. And the Internet would collapse like a souffle' topped with bricks.
In short, I think the proper tack here is a situational, utilitarian one, not an inflexible, dogmatic one.