This year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad prose:
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
And with good reason.
This Ross Burton fellow also seems to be a cool Linux developer. I like his quick hack to add a nice usability feature to the GNOME file list. He saw something neat in Vista (the operating system formerly known as “Longhorn”) and copied it over into GNOME quite easily. Nice.
. . . According to ZDNet, via Slashdot.
The funny thing is that whatever vulnerability the researcher published, it will now spread into the world even faster because Cisco decided to sue. I assume there’s a good legal reason why they’re suing — maybe they need this suit to prove that they’re vigorously defending their intellectual property — but it seems completely counterproductive: a lawsuit is probably the last way to keep this sort of thing secret.
At the same time, this proves the uselessness of security-through-obscurity (Cisco routers are supposed to be more secure because no one sees the source), and the value of open-source software. If Cisco’s router software were open-sourced, this dispute would never have happened.
P.S.: Cisco writes:
It is especially regretful, and indefensible, that the Black Hat Conference organizers have given Mr. Lynn a platform to publicly disseminate the information he illegally obtained.
I’m curious how clear-cut the law on this is. Shouldn’t it be legal to reverse-engineer software (as Mr. Lynn apparently did) in the course of legitimate research into software vulnerabilities? We can argue over the legality or desirability of publishing this sort of research, but simply obtaining the information in this way doesn’t seem as though it should be illegal, trade-secret or patent law notwithstanding.
P.P.S.: The paper that Lynn was supposed to publish was entitled “The Holy Grail: Cisco IOS Shellcode and Remote Execution.” It was apparently 30 pages long. Bonus points to the first person who can find me a copy of the paper.
P.P.P.S.: The presentation is online, and I’ve cached it.
(Via Bruce Schneier)
ADJECTIVE: Slang Having a bisexual orientation.
ETYMOLOGY: From the likening of a bisexual person to an appliance that works on either alternating or direct current.
I don’t know why I find this so funny. I think it may be related to the same gene that caused me and my roommates in college to find the definition of fuckup funny:
NOUN: Vulgar Slang 1. One who acts carelessly or foolishly; a bungler. 2. A blunder; a bungle.
We’d call each other “bunglers” and chuckle at it for no good reason. It was awesome.
So opines Gordon Edes. He seems puzzled why Sox fans give Manny a “free pass.”
Confidential to Mr. Edes: it may have something to do with the fact that Manny has produced 92 out of the Sox’s 552 RBIs this season. Manny is first in the majors in RBIs, with David Ortiz right behind at 87.
If Manny gets a “free pass,” I’d like to be the first to suggest that he deserves it.
It’s interesting how pro forma the separation of powers is when the minority party has to plead with the White House to provide information about a Supreme Court nominee:
The White House has denied requests from Senate Democrats and interest groups for files from another period in Roberts’s career, when he served as deputy solicitor general in the George H. W. Bush administration. The White House maintains that sharing such internal memos would discourage future lawyers from freely debating legal issues.
While Senate Democrats denounced the decision to withhold the later files yesterday, reporters and Senate aides began poring through the boxes of the earlier documents, looking for clues about Roberts’s views on controversial social issues.
In the middle of reading Ken Deffeyes’ book Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak last night, I came upon this bit:
At sea, the strategy is the same but the equipment is different. Explosives have been replaced by air guns that release high-pressure compressed air through quick-acting valves to form an underwater bubble. Strings of sound detectors are towed on long parallel streamers behind the ship. Everything moves along, twenty-four hours a day, at two or three miles per hour. For a while, even the computer processing was done aboard the ship. Around 1998, the third-largest computer cluster in the world was on a seismic-prospecting ship. Eventually, it became more economical to send the data to computer centers on land . . .
which is followed by a footnote. Following the footnote, one gets this:
John Sherman and Murray Roth, “Linux Arrives in Upstream Computing,” The American Oil & Gas Reporter, November 2001 (my cache).
(hyperlink mine, obviously)
Such an odd place to find Linux mentioned. I’ll check out the article and see if it’s interesting at all.
P.S.: From the article:
Network Appliance, an early adopter of Linux for network-attached data access and content management solutions, recently announced that it is contributing to a multivendor effort at the University of Michigan to develop Network File System (NFS) version 4 interoperability for the Linux operating system. NFS is widely used in upstream oil and gas.
I wonder if this is the same NFS that is such a canonical part of Linux now. I’m looking over the changelog for the Debian nfs-common package, which suggests that it’s been in development since at least 1999. Maybe they “industrialized” NFS somehow?
“Freud’s Androids” by Clark Glymour. Mentioned in Cosma Shalizi’s notebook about Freud, and happily spotted on the web.
The argument thus far seems to be summarized by this neat little phrase:
A big part of contemporary cognitive science is pretty much what you would expect to get if Sigmund Freud had had a computer.
Last season I groaned every time Mike Myers took the mound for the Sox. I expected that he would blow our lead in any close game, or seal an existing deficit. This season, though, he’s actually . . . good? He just confidently took care of five Tampa Bay batters in a row, inducing all of them into ground-ball outs. Good for him, and for the Sox.
Wow. Matt Clement just took an incredibly fast line drive from Tampa Bay’s Carl Crawford directly to his head. Clement barely moved after getting knocked to the ground, and he was eventually taken off the field on a stretcher with all kinds of blocks and braces around his head and neck. I really hope he’s okay. That was horrifying to watch; everyone in the stadium was looking on with their hands over the mouths.
Subjects to read about, and/or specific books to read, in forthcoming months:
Christian anarchism, specifically Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You
Apopathic theology (or “negative theology”)
The Bhagavad-Gita
Christian Science — specifically Science and Health with Key to the Scripture (thanks to an anonymous commenter and the Wikipedia for the citation)
The Protestant Reformation
Liberation theology
Buddhism
That is the next word that needs to go into the language graveyard. Why can’t anyone just “help” anyone anymore? Call any phone-help line, and you have to wait a while because someone is “assisting other customers.” I like being helped. I wish people would stop assisting me.
The word makes sense sometimes: my grandmother lived in an “assisted-living facility” in the last days of her life, if we’re going to stick to that general sphere of terms: she wasn’t living in a “help-with-living” facility or a “helped-living” facility. There are cases, ‘notherwords, when they’re not synonyms. Most of the time, though, “assist” is just two useless extra letters and an extra syllable, which sprung from the same hell whence sprang “persons” instead of “people,” “utilize” for “use,” and “physician” for “doctor.”
This message brought to you by the William Zinsser For President in 2008 campaign. Zinsser: He Will Assist You In Your Attempts To Incentivize Productization.
Paul Krugman nails the problem with health-care financing in the United States (my cache). I’ve been looking for a way to summarize the same idea for a while; Krugman does it much more convincingly, and with a very real example to back it up. Nice.
I have to confess that every time I see a new type of price discrimination, with a corresponding new way to avoid arbitrage opportunities, I grin — not normally because I’m happy about it, but because there are always clever hacks to get around arbitrage.
The idea is pretty simple, and the case of airline tickets exemplifies it pretty well: the canonical explanation for why airlines require you to present ID when you buy a ticket is not that they need the ID for security, but that they want to prevent you from reselling the ticket. Since they can prevent you from reselling, they can charge ridiculous prices for tickets bought close to the departure date, and low prices for tickets bought early. If you were allowed to resell, customers who bought tickets earlier would have an incentive to sell to those buying at the last minute, and the market price would quickly converge to . . . well, I’m not sure what it would converge to, but to a low price in any case. And the airlines wouldn’t be able to charge different prices at different times.
Now Disney is engaging in price discrimination by fingerprinting their customers:
Recently it was reported that Disney World is fingerprinting its customers. This raised obvious privacy concerns. People wondered why Disney would need that information, and what they were going to do with it. As Eric Rescorla noted, the answer is almost surely price discrimination. Disney sells multi-day tickets at a discount. They don’t want people to buy (say) a ten-day ticket, use it for two days, and then resell the ticket to somebody else. Disney makes about $200 more by selling five separate two-day tickets than by selling a single ten-day ticket. To stop this, they fingerprint the users of such tickets and verify that the fingerprint associated with a ticket doesn’t change from day to day.
Regardless of what you think of the policy, I think you have to admit that this is very clever engineering.
Seems like progress. One of the more annoying bits about going from one Linux flavor to another — I can really only speak to the Debian-to-Mandrake jump, which I assume means Debian-to-Red Hat — is having to learn all the details about which config files go where. E.g., various bits in Red Hat go into /etc/sysconfig/network, if memory serves, whereas in Debian they go in a number of files under /etc itself — files like /etc/hostname. It’s just irritating. It would be nice to carry a script from one machine to another with absolutely no modifications, but you can’t do that if you’re switching from Debian to Red Hat. Which is kind of silly: the two distributions are in large part the same.
UNIX (which, by the way, is trademarked) has had related problems for a while, which I think would fall under the category of “forking” (maybe “generalized forking”): everyone comes up with his own variant of UNIX which is incompatible with everyone else’s. Linux is kind of in the same boat now, though it seems different: every distribution you get is going to come with the standard coterie of end-user applications, web servers and so forth. So at some level, there already is a “standard Linux.” And projects like freedesktop.org, if I understand correctly, aim to make coding against graphical Linux desktops easy, whether you’re using KDE, GNOME, or something else.
Still, more standardization is better. If companies oppose lock-in as strongly as Adam Rosi-Kessel suggests they do, then perhaps over time it will be in companies’ (particularly Red Hat’s) interest to standardize on common locations for common configurations.
P.S.: So there’s the Linux Standard Base, which seems like a good thing. What’s left for specific distros, like Debian, after we’ve standardized a large part of the system?
I’ve been using Craigslist recently for some preliminary apartment-hunting in Roslindale. Craigslist just does everything right, and it’s become basically canonical for all the right reasons. I just noticed that their apartment listings allow you to search for places that allow pets. They’ve had RSS feeds attached to every one of their search-results pages for a while, so that I can for instance have my newsreader check back every 30 minutes for apartments in Roslindale between $400 and $700 that allow cats. (I’ve missed having cats, and I hope to get one when I move.)
The only suggestion I might make — and I’ll be emailing them in a moment — is that they should allow you to search for gender-specific apartments: some people don’t want male roommates, for instance, and I should be able to filter those out.
Craigslist has learned Google’s lesson: do one thing, do it well, and don’t layer a bunch of portal crappity-crap on top. (Yes, I realize that Google is testing out a personalized version, but it’s optional and the tried-and-true Google is still the default.)
P.S.: Adam Rosi-Kessel (124 links and counting) pointed me to an interview with Craig “‘s List” Newmark which is really good and makes me smile. Actually, the interview itself isn’t all that great (“So c’mon . . . just how much of a millionaire aren’t you?”), but Newmark seems to be awesome.
P.P.S.: Likewise, it seems as though the Craigslist apartments database should include a field for “date when apartment is available” and one for “date when apartment stops being available.”
Boston likes very much to parade its history, but it seems more reluctant to trot out its uglier history — such as this:
That’s from a very unfortunate, but very real part of Boston history centered around busing in the ‘70’s. The gentleman being attacked is Ted Landsmark, who at the time was executive director of the Boston Contractors Association. The gentleman with the flag is Joseph Rakes. The event took place in 1976, and I believe what we’re looking at above is Faneuil Hall.
This stuff is very important, and nowadays it’s hard to remember that cities burned over race relations. If I understand correctly, race relations in the 60’s and 70’s explain a large part of why Detroit is a husk of its former self. (Though I invite others to correct me.)
We need to get this kind of historical tour — not just Paul Revere’s ride, but what happened 200 years after that. History’s not dead, but it’s the unfortunate habit of American history courses to treat it as though it were.
If you didn’t realize it, the TiVo runs Linux inside. More and more devices of that sort are Linuxy. Well now, one dude dug in and explored the structure of the TiVo hard drive. Neat. And if you’ve not gotten your fix of dd — the world’s most powerful little two-letter command — for the day, you will. Bonus.
(Via Del.icio.us’s popular links, though I think it was Slashdotted.)