In other words, "why not have security through obscurity in addition to real security? This is what the military does. The answer is that only a very disciplined organization can do this effectively. For example, the NSA has internal teams that attack their products with full knowledge of the design. Then they get an additional safety factor by keeping the design secret. Out here in the 'real world', though, security through obscurity leads to laziness - people are generally unable to act as if the design is public when it's secret. And yet the secret design has probably been leaked. Leaving aside the fact that the parent is responsible for the kid's welfare, I don't think we can compare publishing research results to furnishing a physical object. Suppose Alice is the CEO of an overvalued company. Bob, an analyst, explains why it's overvalued and suggests that investors sell. Investors sell and the stock price plummets. Did Bob do something wrong? I don't think so.
Banks used to hide their vaults from the public. You had to be have a safe deposit box or be an employee to even see the vault. In new bank construction, the vault is usually visible to the street through the glass doors or storefront. People planning serious physical security always assume that the attacker has complete knowledge of the defense and its weaknesses. For example, I once read a book by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which specifies physical security barriers for nuclear plants. Each type of barrier (for example a 10" thick poured concrete wall) has a rating in minutes. This is the number of minutes to penetrate it with the best technique, whether that technique is explosive, gas-powered saw, cutting torch or whatever. This lets them plan security rationally and not have their plan disintegrate because some piece of info was leaked.
Well, there's gnumaniak which contains updated man pages for a lot of programs. Really, I want to smack RMS every time I get bit by an incomplete man page. It's one thing to have incomplete docs because you're lazy; it's another to do it on purpose because you're trying to herd people towards your wacky replacement for man pages.
Meanwhile most of the commercial Unix vendors are busy switching to a GNOME/Nautilus desktop very soon so it's not got long to live there either.
Just because the Window Manager doesn't use Motif doesn't mean the applications don't use Motif. I can't see much incentive for application vendors to switch toolkits. Why should they care what Window Manager their app runs under?
Type pack.x The window now has "Hello" in it, and has shrunk to fit.
Type pack.x -pady 200 The window got a lot taller - this is like cellpadding in html
Tcl/Tk is pretty portable among Unices and available for Windows as well. If run on Windows, it looks like a native application. I prefer Perl::Tk which gives you the same GUI with the power of Perl. But this is not as easily portable because not every machine has the Tk module.
They're not going to give out that info to Some Dumb Joe (tm).
Of course not. They're going to feed it to the government in real time. If you think that's unrealistic, look at the Digital Telephony Act and Carnivore. That could enable some interesting opportunities for an alert law-enforcement type (and I'm just scratching the surface):
A crime is committed at a certain address. Let's interview the ten cell phone users who were nearest at the time. We'll ask, "What were you doing on 15th street last night?" and see if they can come up with an alibi that matches their GPS trail.
Analysis of the GPS trails will yield some phone users who live in the suburbs but travel into the ghetto periodically. Obviously they're getting drugs. Let's pull them over as they're leaving the ghetto - they'll either be high or carrying drugs. Even a 10% success rate makes it very worthwhile.
When criminals are caught, their GPS trails can be used as a reference. So if it turns out that serial killers go to the library on Fridays, drive out of town on weekends, and go to Chinese restaurants on Sundays, other phone users who share these traits could be pre-emptively monitored, arrested, or searched. At least they'd be prime suspects if another serial killer starts operating.
Please note that I haven't even touched on abuse of the capabilities by a malicious cop. I've just listed some legal, sensible steps which law enforcement would take with this technology. I also haven't brushed on the commercial possibilites.
You missed something. Most speeding violations are not criminal offenses. If you are accused of a non-criminal traffic offense, you basically lose all your constitutional rights. Some traffic court judges will happily railroad you with no regard at all to due process, and there is no recourse. The Criminal courts have much more safeguards for the rights of the accused.
Re:Free DSL services will be even worse
on
Juno And Privacy
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· Score: 2
Yes, that's the true nightmare. It's offensive enough that some areas are only served by cable modem monopolists who favor Windows, ban customer servers, cap upstream bandwidth, cache web content, and of course do a terrible job adminning their own servers. A bandwidth provider that serves 90% of the market while leaving 10% angry and out in the cold could succeed and could remove the incentive for competing firms. I don't think the evil DSL provider needs to be free, though. Remember when we had broadcast TV (free, with ads) and cable ($$, no ads) ? We ended up with cable that costs money and has ads. So we could end up with a situation where *every* DSL provider does this, no matter how much they charge.
This doesn't bother me at all...
on
Juno And Privacy
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· Score: 2
...because Juno is not a monopoly. Anyone using them is trading some of his time, privacy and computing resources for internet access. I've only ever met one Juno user. He was an utter idiot (one of those 'computers are only tools' idiots) and I don't think he'd object to this policy even if he had the attention span to read it. What would really send my blood pressure up is a cable modem provider or similar bandwidth monopolist making these concessions mandatory for users. As long as Juno is not depriving people of choice, they can implant chips in their victims' skulls for all I care.
I really don't like Gnome. It looks too much like Windows. CDE may suck, but at least it has its own flavor, and it's Unixy. It seems like nobody has a good vision for the future of Unix desktops, so they'd rather copy Windows. It was cool when HP had VUE. There was a feeling of integration, of a finished product, somewhat like Macintosh. I guess every Unix workstation will be a wannabe PC. More expensive than Wintel and lacking the latest dancing puppydog, they'll watch their market share erode. They don't have the vision or boldness to promote a truly Unixy desktop. A desktop can be a kind of battle flag, as Mac users know. The Unix vendors are discarding the opportunity to define themselves visually in opposition to M$. But the workstation market is probably doomed anyway. It will be crushed between Linux and W2k.
But I'd rather have kids subjected to the whitelist you propose than to the secret, unaccountable blacklists actually being used. The whitelist is an obvious, visible restraint like putting a stone wall around the schoolyard to keep the kids in and criminals out. The blacklist is sneaky, like planting chips in the kids' arms that give them a shock if they go into the bad part of town. The biggest flaw of the blacklist is that it can be used to censor political opposition while giving the appearance of unfettered access. Your proposed plan, while much more restrictive, does not give the illusion of unfettered access and therefore preserves the clear distinction between internet access and limited, censored access.
By the way, it's really unfortunate that some moderators are moderating posts down because they disagree with them.
No. My closest contact with EQ was watching an addict play for an evening.
If you have some uber item you wish to sell, you auction it in-game and receive fair-market value...
Just to verify, by fair market value you mean 'the highest bid', right? Not some arbitrary amount set by the philosopher-kings of Sony. In that case, why don't the legitimate in-game auctions cause massive disruption? Why don't they encourage high-level characters to 'farm' lower-level artifacts?
One thing that many inexperienced Slashdotter's don't seem to know is that while BSD and GNU/Linux are great (even superior, in many cases) for small-medium Intel boxes, there is a point where you really do need the high-end hardware and industrial-strength UNIX that only IBM, Sun, HP, and others currently provide.
I currently work in an environment where most things run on commercial Unix, so here's my perspective on that. First, there are many applications which are sim ply too demanding for the hardware on which Linux will run. Typically this mean s huge Oracle databases. But there are also many instances of people architecting around the 'big iron' just because it's available, rather than seriously asking what the best platform would be. The best example is web servers, which in my opinion should be Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. That combination yields the best bang for the buck. It's much better to load balance a bunch of Intel web servers than to try to build a huge 'high-availability' Sun or HP web server.
I think the design of EQ is flawed. Since it is so easy and profitable for high -level characters to overcome these challenges meant for lower level characters, it's inevitable that they'll make an industry of it and try to monetize the fru its of their work. I think they could monetize it within the game, if they were forced to. What if the high level character (C1) gives the low-level character (C2) an item in exchange for a promise of five of that item when C2 reaches C1's level? That could be equally destructive to the game, but doesn't involve the outside economy. At some level, it seems these sword-and-sorcery worlds are naively imagined because they don't adequately include wealth and markets. In fact, looking back at the Ring Trilogy, I can't remember money ever playing a major role. Did anyone in the Ring Trilogy ever not have enough money?
Did you even read the cited article, Urban Existentialist? The article explains why 'intellectual property' is not property.
... not just abolish it because it has teething troubles.
"Teething troubles" would make sense if the patent system were new and we were working the bugs out of it. On the contrary, the system is quite old. It seemed to function OK prior to computers. Since the advent of computers, the patent system is increasingly ridiculous, unjust and disconnected from reality. It's more like an old dog that's lost control of its bladder.
Well said. To often I hear this "real world" sentiment on Slashdot. In life, you get what you settle for. When job-shopping, I always make it clear that I won't work with Windows. I also make it clear that I will admin my own workstation. These two filters seem to block all the bad jobs. A lot of linux types have a Windows desktop machine at work, not because they're forced to, but because they're too weak-willed to bring the issue to a head. Very few employers will give up a talented sysadmin over the issue of what OS he runs on his desktop. With regard to legacy crap, I suppose it can be fun 'detective work' in a way. I'm probably lucky - the company where I'm now contracting has a firm policy of ejecting legacy crap, even before a replacement is found. A while back they chucked all mainframes and VMS in favor of Unix. Occasionally a manager does not want to upgrade equipment in his department that 'works perfectly'. Eventually, we will tell him that during the next outage he will receive no support, and his refusal to upgrade will be shown as the cause of the outage. This seems to dislodge even the most stubborn legacy crap.
Access to computing -- to RPG and other forms of gaming, search engines, IM, file-sharing systems -- shapes creativity,
vocabuliary, political awareness, culture and common language, not to mention economic opportunity.
It could be done, though. If one tenth of the energy put into GUI development had been put into the development of a natural language shell, we'd have something pretty awesome. I'm thinking of a very straightforward pattern matcher, much like an adventure game. The key is to evolve the pattern vocabulary whenever user input isn't recognized. How could we do this? Have the program send unrecognized commands to a server, where they'd be looked at by volunteers who would try to write new patterns and rules. Not in real time, of course - the pioneering user would unfortunately get an error message. This approach has privacy implications, but if developed carefully over a few years it would probably handle anything Joe Sixpack would throw at it.
And yet Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering can be taught. Amazing, that. I guess there haven't been any advances in those fields, either.
EE is definitely not changing at the pace software is. Everything up to analysis of AC circuits is from the 1930's or earlier. This includes the whole conceptual framework of linear systems and signal analysis, which is much more important than the technology-linked areas of study. Electronics is from the '70s, because transistors fundamentally changed it. But Electronics is not nearly as important as circuits and signals. DSP is from the '70s. OK, there are later contributions that matter. But once you understand the math behind IIR and FIR filters, the rest is just fleshing-in. As for digital circuits, I don't know when the building blocks of digital logic were developed - probably in the vacuum tube era. Has anything happened since the '70s that matters to a college student? Remember, TTL vs CMOS is a trivial difference to someone studying digital logic. A better way to look at this is to ask what happened to the engineers educated just before inflection points. Those who learned vacuum tube electronics shortly before transistors became widespread, for example.
I don't want to hear about Howard Roark; he's a fictional character in a poorly written book...
In fact, the book was written by an unlicensed, untrained author. Hopefully in the future we'll have a licensing program to prevent such dangerous half-baked ideas from reaching the public.
If unauthorized duplication prevents the manufacturer from selling their projected units sold by undercutting the manufacturer's price (since the unauthorized duplicators have no need to pass along the fixed cost of production they are capable of pricing at or just above the incremental expense and still generating excess revenue -- profit), then their project is unprofitable for their firm and no future projects will be possible.
I'll leave out the question of whether a single unprofitable movie could sink a studio - I wish it were that easy to slay these beasts! Why should the projected demise of an IP giant cause me any concern? You say I could make them lose money by undercutting them with cheap copies of their own work. Couldn't I also make them lose money by publishing a competing work that draws away audience? Or by negatively reviewing their work? An IP company said to the market, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the market, "the fact has not aroused in me a sense of obligation."
I don't think any corporation yet has actually had the power to re-write history.
Agreed, they can't yet reach out on the net and erase the past. But totalist organizations are allergic to history as such. It doesn't have to be history that shows them in a bad light - the mere existence of an unchanging record brings about an uncomfortable feeling of accountability. Go to apache.org and try to find out the origins of Apache. I found them within two minutes. Now go to microsoft.com and try to find the origins of IIS. Maybe I just didn't look in the right places.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, "why not have security through obscurity in addition to real security? This is what the military does. The answer is that only a very disciplined organization can do this effectively. For example, the NSA has internal teams that attack their products with full knowledge of the design. Then they get an additional safety factor by keeping the design secret.
Out here in the 'real world', though, security through obscurity leads to laziness - people are generally unable to act as if the design is public when it's secret. And yet the secret design has probably been leaked.
Leaving aside the fact that the parent is responsible for the kid's welfare, I don't think we can compare publishing research results to furnishing a physical object. Suppose Alice is the CEO of an overvalued company. Bob, an analyst, explains why it's overvalued and suggests that investors sell. Investors sell and the stock price plummets. Did Bob do something wrong? I don't think so.
Banks used to hide their vaults from the public. You had to be have a safe deposit box or be an employee to even see the vault. In new bank construction, the vault is usually visible to the street through the glass doors or storefront.
People planning serious physical security always assume that the attacker has complete knowledge of the defense and its weaknesses. For example, I once read a book by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which specifies physical security barriers for nuclear plants. Each type of barrier (for example a 10" thick poured concrete wall) has a rating in minutes. This is the number of minutes to penetrate it with the best technique, whether that technique is explosive, gas-powered saw, cutting torch or whatever. This lets them plan security rationally and not have their plan disintegrate because some piece of info was leaked.
Well, there's gnumaniak which contains updated man pages for a lot of programs. Really, I want to smack RMS every time I get bit by an incomplete man page. It's one thing to have incomplete docs because you're lazy; it's another to do it on purpose because you're trying to herd people towards your wacky replacement for man pages.
Just because the Window Manager doesn't use Motif doesn't mean the applications don't use Motif. I can't see much incentive for application vendors to switch toolkits. Why should they care what Window Manager their app runs under?
Tcl/Tk is pretty portable among Unices and available for Windows as well. If run on Windows, it looks like a native application. I prefer Perl::Tk which gives you the same GUI with the power of Perl. But this is not as easily portable because not every machine has the Tk module.
Of course not. They're going to feed it to the government in real time. If you think that's unrealistic, look at the Digital Telephony Act and Carnivore. That could enable some interesting opportunities for an alert law-enforcement type (and I'm just scratching the surface):
- A crime is committed at a certain address. Let's interview the ten cell phone users who were nearest at the time. We'll ask, "What were you doing on 15th street last night?" and see if they can come up with an alibi that matches their GPS trail.
- Analysis of the GPS trails will yield some phone users who live in the suburbs but travel into the ghetto periodically. Obviously they're getting drugs. Let's pull them over as they're leaving the ghetto - they'll either be high or carrying drugs. Even a 10% success rate makes it very worthwhile.
- When criminals are caught, their GPS trails can be used as a reference. So if it turns out that serial killers go to the library on Fridays, drive out of town on weekends, and go to Chinese restaurants on Sundays, other phone users who share these traits could be pre-emptively monitored, arrested, or searched. At least they'd be prime suspects if another serial killer starts operating.
Please note that I haven't even touched on abuse of the capabilities by a malicious cop. I've just listed some legal, sensible steps which law enforcement would take with this technology. I also haven't brushed on the commercial possibilites.It is impossible for the British to become less intelligible.
You missed something. Most speeding violations are not criminal offenses. If you are accused of a non-criminal traffic offense, you basically lose all your constitutional rights. Some traffic court judges will happily railroad you with no regard at all to due process, and there is no recourse. The Criminal courts have much more safeguards for the rights of the accused.
Yes, that's the true nightmare. It's offensive enough that some areas are only served by cable modem monopolists who favor Windows, ban customer servers, cap upstream bandwidth, cache web content, and of course do a terrible job adminning their own servers. A bandwidth provider that serves 90% of the market while leaving 10% angry and out in the cold could succeed and could remove the incentive for competing firms.
I don't think the evil DSL provider needs to be free, though. Remember when we had broadcast TV (free, with ads) and cable ($$, no ads) ? We ended up with cable that costs money and has ads. So we could end up with a situation where *every* DSL provider does this, no matter how much they charge.
...because Juno is not a monopoly. Anyone using them is trading some of his time, privacy and computing resources for internet access. I've only ever met one Juno user. He was an utter idiot (one of those 'computers are only tools' idiots) and I don't think he'd object to this policy even if he had the attention span to read it.
What would really send my blood pressure up is a cable modem provider or similar bandwidth monopolist making these concessions mandatory for users. As long as Juno is not depriving people of choice, they can implant chips in their victims' skulls for all I care.
I really don't like Gnome. It looks too much like Windows. CDE may suck, but at least it has its own flavor, and it's Unixy. It seems like nobody has a good vision for the future of Unix desktops, so they'd rather copy Windows.
It was cool when HP had VUE. There was a feeling of integration, of a finished product, somewhat like Macintosh. I guess every Unix workstation will be a wannabe PC. More expensive than Wintel and lacking the latest dancing puppydog, they'll watch their market share erode. They don't have the vision or boldness to promote a truly Unixy desktop.
A desktop can be a kind of battle flag, as Mac users know. The Unix vendors are discarding the opportunity to define themselves visually in opposition to M$.
But the workstation market is probably doomed anyway. It will be crushed between Linux and W2k.
But I'd rather have kids subjected to the whitelist you propose than to the secret, unaccountable blacklists actually being used. The whitelist is an obvious, visible restraint like putting a stone wall around the schoolyard to keep the kids in and criminals out. The blacklist is sneaky, like planting chips in the kids' arms that give them a shock if they go into the bad part of town.
The biggest flaw of the blacklist is that it can be used to censor political opposition while giving the appearance of unfettered access. Your proposed plan, while much more restrictive, does not give the illusion of unfettered access and therefore preserves the clear distinction between internet access and limited, censored access.
By the way, it's really unfortunate that some moderators are moderating posts down because they disagree with them.
No. My closest contact with EQ was watching an addict play for an evening.
Just to verify, by fair market value you mean 'the highest bid', right? Not some arbitrary amount set by the philosopher-kings of Sony. In that case, why don't the legitimate in-game auctions cause massive disruption? Why don't they encourage high-level characters to 'farm' lower-level artifacts?
I currently work in an environment where most things run on commercial Unix, so here's my perspective on that. First, there are many applications which are sim ply too demanding for the hardware on which Linux will run. Typically this mean s huge Oracle databases. But there are also many instances of people architecting around the 'big iron' just because it's available, rather than seriously asking what the best platform would be. The best example is web servers, which in my opinion should be Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. That combination yields the best bang for the buck. It's much better to load balance a bunch of Intel web servers than to try to build a huge 'high-availability' Sun or HP web server.
I think the design of EQ is flawed. Since it is so easy and profitable for high -level characters to overcome these challenges meant for lower level characters, it's inevitable that they'll make an industry of it and try to monetize the fru its of their work. I think they could monetize it within the game, if they were forced to. What if the high level character (C1) gives the low-level character (C2) an item in exchange for a promise of five of that item when C2 reaches C1's level? That could be equally destructive to the game, but doesn't involve the outside economy.
At some level, it seems these sword-and-sorcery worlds are naively imagined because they don't adequately include wealth and markets. In fact, looking back at the Ring Trilogy, I can't remember money ever playing a major role. Did anyone in the Ring Trilogy ever not have enough money?
"Teething troubles" would make sense if the patent system were new and we were working the bugs out of it. On the contrary, the system is quite old. It seemed to function OK prior to computers. Since the advent of computers, the patent system is increasingly ridiculous, unjust and disconnected from reality. It's more like an old dog that's lost control of its bladder.
Well said. To often I hear this "real world" sentiment on Slashdot. In life, you get what you settle for. When job-shopping, I always make it clear that I won't work with Windows. I also make it clear that I will admin my own workstation. These two filters seem to block all the bad jobs.
A lot of linux types have a Windows desktop machine at work, not because they're forced to, but because they're too weak-willed to bring the issue to a head. Very few employers will give up a talented sysadmin over the issue of what OS he runs on his desktop.
With regard to legacy crap, I suppose it can be fun 'detective work' in a way. I'm probably lucky - the company where I'm now contracting has a firm policy of ejecting legacy crap, even before a replacement is found. A while back they chucked all mainframes and VMS in favor of Unix. Occasionally a manager does not want to upgrade equipment in his department that 'works perfectly'. Eventually, we will tell him that during the next outage he will receive no support, and his refusal to upgrade will be shown as the cause of the outage. This seems to dislodge even the most stubborn legacy crap.
Access to
Find them here.
It could be done, though. If one tenth of the energy put into GUI development had been put into the development of a natural language shell, we'd have something pretty awesome.
I'm thinking of a very straightforward pattern matcher, much like an adventure game. The key is to evolve the pattern vocabulary whenever user input isn't recognized. How could we do this? Have the program send unrecognized commands to a server, where they'd be looked at by volunteers who would try to write new patterns and rules. Not in real time, of course - the pioneering user would unfortunately get an error message.
This approach has privacy implications, but if developed carefully over a few years it would probably handle anything Joe Sixpack would throw at it.
EE is definitely not changing at the pace software is. Everything up to analysis of AC circuits is from the 1930's or earlier. This includes the whole conceptual framework of linear systems and signal analysis, which is much more important than the technology-linked areas of study.
Electronics is from the '70s, because transistors fundamentally changed it. But Electronics is not nearly as important as circuits and signals.
DSP is from the '70s. OK, there are later contributions that matter. But once you understand the math behind IIR and FIR filters, the rest is just fleshing-in.
As for digital circuits, I don't know when the building blocks of digital logic were developed - probably in the vacuum tube era. Has anything happened since the '70s that matters to a college student? Remember, TTL vs CMOS is a trivial difference to someone studying digital logic.
A better way to look at this is to ask what happened to the engineers educated just before inflection points. Those who learned vacuum tube electronics shortly before transistors became widespread, for example.
In fact, the book was written by an unlicensed, untrained author. Hopefully in the future we'll have a licensing program to prevent such dangerous half-baked ideas from reaching the public.
I'll leave out the question of whether a single unprofitable movie could sink a studio - I wish it were that easy to slay these beasts!
Why should the projected demise of an IP giant cause me any concern? You say I could make them lose money by undercutting them with cheap copies of their own work. Couldn't I also make them lose money by publishing a competing work that draws away audience? Or by negatively reviewing their work?
An IP company said to the market, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the market, "the fact has not aroused in me a sense of obligation."
If you don't buy lampshades made out of human skin, you're missing out on a lot of decoration for your apartment.
Agreed, they can't yet reach out on the net and erase the past. But totalist organizations are allergic to history as such. It doesn't have to be history that shows them in a bad light - the mere existence of an unchanging record brings about an uncomfortable feeling of accountability.
Go to apache.org and try to find out the origins of Apache. I found them within two minutes. Now go to microsoft.com and try to find the origins of IIS. Maybe I just didn't look in the right places.