Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Slashback Sun Microsystems

Slashback: Regalia, Godseye, Undetection 170

Posted by timothy from the of-two-minds dept.
Slashback tonight with a round of updates and clarifications on Yahoo! v. France, William Gibson's new book(tour), lowish-tech helping to solve the Columbia mystery, searchable utra-localized information and more. Read on for the details.

How very magnanimous. Amazing Quantum Man writes "ZDNet reports that Timothy Koogle and Yahoo were acquitted of condoning war crimes by selling Nazi memorabilia. The article is rather sketchy, so that's all I have. Here are some background articles from Slashdot history."

He doesn't sign anything, just sprinkles on some invisible nanobots. shawn writes "The Penguin Group's site has a schedule of upcoming book signing events for Willam Gibson's Pattern Recognition . The new book was mentioned on Slashdot earlier."

And now Gisbon's new book has been reviewed, as well. Look out for a review of the No Maps For These Territories DVD (with extras) soon too.

Aren't you glad some people are realistic enough to be paranoid? For everyone worried about your ISP suddenly deciding to detect and crack down on everyone who's taken advantage of the currently ubiquitous, simple-to-use NAT hardware (here's the post we ran about the means to snoop behind your NAT box, which links to the Bellovin paper mentioned below), an anonymous reader writes with one way to foil detection efforts: "Good news coming from OpenBSD camp! Read CVS log message (mail archive): 'Add scrub option 'random-id', which replaces IP IDs with random values for outgoing packets that are not fragmented (after reassembly), to compensate for predictable IDs generated by some hosts, and defeat fingerprinting and NAT detection as described in the Bellovin paper.'"

Right place at the right time when the wrong thing happens. fonixmunkee writes "an 11-year-old Mac and a COTS (commercial-of-the-self) telescope may have captured a very helpful image in solving the shuttle Columbia tragedy. this article here at CNN tells the story of how some self-proclaimed 'geeks,' working on an Air Force project aimed at watching satellites & incoming missiles, whipped up a contraption with some simple parts that captured an image of the shuttle on descent that may offer some light on what happened. also interesting is how many news sources mistook the image as a capture from the high-tech cameras that the people *actually* worked on."

Just a scratch in the historical record. truthsearch writes "In response to a leaked Sun memo complaining of Sun's Java implementation on Solaris, News.com has Sun's response. Many posters doubted its authenticity (myself included due to missing dates), but 'Sun confirmed the memo's authenticity, but said that the document is two years old and that the problems it describes have been fixed.'"

GPS, free databases -- these are a few of my favorite things ... Tony Pryor writes: "In April 2001, while there at arsDigita University, I developed a web interface called the Godseye Project, designed to enable 'grassroots cartography,' allowing individuals with web access to add subjective knowledge details about their surroundings to closeup satellite images. Although I wrote Godseye over a year and a half ago, it isn't currently online- I'll spare you the gory details of the events between then and now.

I just wrote two new pieces which *are* live. The first is a script that dynamically adds geolocation pages using Movable Type, and automatically registers each of them with http://www.geourl.org. The second part is a geolocation-based search centered upon any one of these geopages. The search aggregates the results of consecutive google queries on each of the sites (or geopages) within a given radius."

Visit the still-growing Godseye Project to test out this cool geographic search capability; Tony promises that the functionality will improve with lots of visitors and suggestions.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashback: Regalia, Godseye, Undetection More

Slashback: Regalia, Godseye, Undetection

Comments Filter:

  • Sat tracking... (Score:5, Informative)

    by AmigaAvenger ( 210519 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:06PM (#5298464) Journal
    Satellite tracking itself isn't too hard, it is tracking a object that is entering the atmosphere that is tough.

    Sat Tracker [heavenscape.com] allows you to track/image sats with a LX200 chipset telescope.

  • they missed the obvious way (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sydlexic ( 563791 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:07PM (#5298471)
    For everyone worried about your ISP suddenly deciding to detect and crack down on everyone who's taken advantage of the currently ubiquitous, simple-to-use NAT hardware..., an anonymous reader writes with one way to foil detection efforts:

    The problem with this paper is that it describes an overly complicated way to detect multiple IP's behind a NAT firewall when there is a much easier, simpler and already used method: transparent proxying of HTTP and checking the browser identifier.

    Shocking, but true. Many ISP's already use this method to scan all of your outbound HTTP traffic. Figuring out if you have more than one computer (especially if their OS or browser's are different) is trivial.

    The only way to defeat this is to implement your own proxy (like squid) and have it re-write HTTP headers. Or... run all machines with the exact same configuration.

    • Re:they missed the obvious way (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ryan Amos ( 16972 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:15PM (#5298524)
      Some of us use multiple browsers. I use Safari on my Mac (for testing purposes) as well as Chimera. On my PC, I use IE and Phoenix. On my Linux box, Konq and Galeon. So that's by no means a foolproof solution. :)
      • Not to mention download managers.
      • Also anyone that uses Outlook and Mozilla will show up as using IE and Mozilla, if they open any HTML emails. When I occasionally ran Mandrake at home, I browsed some pages with Konqueror and some with Netscape.

        So what are people supposed to do, if they have 2 home PCs and want broadband? Do they have to get 2 broadband connections? I have friends that play Diablo 2 online, on 2 PCs. Is that so wrong?

    • That'll work (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hayden ( 9724 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:31PM (#5298634)
      The problem with this paper is that it describes an overly complicated way to detect multiple IP's behind a NAT firewall when there is a much easier, simpler and already used method: transparent proxying of HTTP and checking the browser identifier.
      And when somebody fires up IE because a site they are looking at doesn't work in Mozilla? Or they change their browser ID to make a site that checks the browser type before letting you access it?

      • And when somebody fires up IE because a site they are looking at doesn't work in Mozilla? Or they change their browser ID to make a site that checks the browser type before letting you access it?

        I agree, that's a point... (though Mozilla's finally gotten to the point where I can only think of one non-microsoft.com site which doesn't work with Mozilla, and that's because it doesn't like the fact that the term "MSIE" isn't in the user agent string)

        However, if I were an ISP looking for a short but sweet way of coping with massive NAT usage, I'd be collecting that list anyway, and shortlisting those users for closer inspection.

        Anyone know of any way of transparently replacing the user-agent strings at the NAT box?

        Not that I personally care, my ISP kicks ass. They offer a 1.2Mbps DSL service with the option of a static IP address for cheap. And they don't care if you run servers, truly a geek's ISP. www.dsl.ca [www.dsl.ca]

        • Anyone know of any way of transparently replacing the user-agent strings at the NAT box?

          Yes, one way is to transparently proxy to junkbuster [junkbuster.com] and have it rewrite the user agent.


          • Yes, one way is to transparently proxy to junkbuster and have it rewrite the user agent.

            Yeah... Thanks, but that's not really what I was looking for; I'm already running Junkbuster on the LAN at work.

            I'm hoping to do it at a NAT level... though, I suppose, if I make all outgoing port 80 run through a given box, it's imperceptable to the user.

            Why? I've got 600 bored secretaries here who can at least skew webmasters demographics toward developing for Linux, in the hope that one day something other than the kernel will be ready for the desktops of the masses.

            (See my previous rants, I'm currently far too drunk to be copying and pasting URLs.)

    • My solution to that would be: use Proxomitron! [proxomitron.org]. It acts as a proxy, and it can rewrite outgoing/incoming headers and HTTP content (to remove ad banners, mostly). One hack allows you to change your browser ID to what you want. Unfortunately it only runs on Windows, but I'm sure it runs fine under Wine. So all that needs to be done is get it running on your NAT firewall box, and let it modify all HTTP-browser-id headers, and while you're there, make it remove the ads, as well!

    • This is nuts. I often use at least two browsers. I use Mozilla for most browsing, but occasionally will also open IE if a page needs it. Furthermore, opening media files off the internet with that crappy Windows Media Player ALSO fetches files via HTTP but with a different browser identifier. So opening IE and MPlayer together will get you flagged by your ISP? Thats ludicrous.

      Lastly, certain types of tasks REQUIRE many browsers to be used together. Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of people who do web page development. (At least, those who actually bother to check if their page works in anything other than IE). Every responsible web page developer, while coding HTML, typically tests their page in at least two browsers.

      Personally, I think ISPs should just start selling what they're supposed to be selling, i.e. bandwidth and a (usually temporary) IP address. If they can't afford to do that at current prices under a flat pricing structure, then change the pricing structure, or offer less bandwidth. I don't see why two people doing casual, low-bandwidth-using web surfing through one NAT connection should be seen as worse than one user downloading huge files at full speed.


    • In addition, it seems that some browsers are even able to... send fake identification strings.

      Let's all use just those and rotate ID strings every 5 minutes, that should teach 'em!

    • Yeah right... it won't work

      I use one PC#1:
      Mozilla(Win32)
      Internet Explorer
      Opera(Win32)
      Phoenix(Win32)
      Mozilla(Li nux)
      Phoenix(Linux)
      Konqueror(Linux)

      On PC#2(connect shared from PC#1):
      Mozilla(Win32)
      Internet Explorer

      So tell me, how do you suppose your idea would prove that I share my connection? Especially considering the most use is on PC#1.

  • Which Gibson is it again? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Some Bitch ( 645438 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:10PM (#5298486)
    He doesn't sign anything, just sprinkles on some invisible nanobots.

    Is this William Gibson we're talking about or Steve Gibson [grc.com]?

  • Signing URL (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nix0n ( 649693 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:10PM (#5298488)
    Since Penguin's homepage is several clicks away from the actual signing schedule page, try this: Gibson Rocks [penguinputnam.com] Come on, submitters, you can do better than that.
    • Thank You! After a day at work, my eyes were tired and for the life of me couldn't find the freakin' link.
    • Of course, it's too late to help those folk in Portland, OR; his visit to Powell's City of Books was last Sunday, 9 February.

      BTW, he *does* actually sign books; I've now got first editions of The Difference Engine and Pattern Recognition, and an advance reader's copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive, signed by the author. Hee, hee, hee.
    • Funny that they don't mention that his first stop was on the Microsoft campus [umr.edu].

  • ISPs "cracking down" on NAT users (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rickthewizkid ( 536429 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:11PM (#5298495)
    I wonder what will happen if ISPs were to limit their customers' ability to use NAT devices...

    Either they will lose customers in droves due to the fact that the users can no longer use their fancy-schmancy Linksys router to connect all their computers together, or the router manufacturers will cook up an option in thier firmware to use the NAT-hiding approach mentioned above...

    Just my 192.168.1.1's worth
    --RickTheWizKid
    P.S.: FIRST INTELLIGENT POST :)

    • Re:ISPs "cracking down" on NAT users (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Target Drone ( 546651 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:36PM (#5298666)
      <rant>

      I wish ISPs would just bill like other utilities. You pay a fixed cost per month + X dollars for every GB of traffic. Instead they charge a flat rate and put all sorts of rules on what you can do such as no Servers, no NATs, etc. They should just provide Internet service to me rather then sniffing my packets to try and see if I'm running a Windows machine and XBox behind a NAT. The electric company doesn't care what appliances I hook up, they just bill me for what I use.

      </rant>

      • Re:ISPs "cracking down" on NAT users (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tokerat ( 150341 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @11:06PM (#5299318) Journal

        They are afraid of misuse. They don't want people running warez servers or spam sites. Thank you, $krypt K1ddi3z.

        It's a sad world when an ISP can be held reponsible for user misuse. It's not like the electric company is the party responsible when somebody throws a toaster in a bathtub with someone else in it...
      • It depends on the ISP. In my experience, you can choose between flat-rate ISPs, and ISPs offering cost + per MB download.

        I also know of ISPs that offer more or less restrictive conditions on what you can do with your link.

        Of course, all of the above probably depends on what country you live in (Australia in this case).

      • Gas and electric is charged based on use because those are consumable resources and the cost to you is proportional to the cost to them. 1 kW or 1 "therm" requires X amount of gas, coal, hydro capacity, etc. They don't charge for use just to keep you from using more than your "fair share."

        ISP bandwidth costs are largely flat. They pay for an OC3 whether their customers happen to use most of the available bandwidth or not. They have to buy their bandwidth based on peak capacity. If they were to charge based on use it would *only* be to discourage use and therefore reduce the need to add capacity.

        The most important part of a network connection is binary, either you have it or you don't. How many actual bits you can cram through it in a given day is far less important. The only use fees I would be cool with would be ones which specificlly charge for (and therefore discourage) the behavior which ends up costing the ISP money, disproportionate use at peak times. Monthly or daily GB limits are stupid because if I download a bunch of .isos at 3am, it isn't going to cost my ISP *anything* because there's not much other bandwidth use going on. Now if I download .isos at 8pm on a weekday, then that could lead them to needing more capacity.

        Most ISPs aren't stupid enough to care about whether you're using a NAT within your home. You don't need multiple computers in your house to use a crazy amount of bandwidth. They *do* care about you using a NAT in your home to share your connection with your neighbors, that's robbing them of a potential customer. Your electric company would also care if you were doing the same thing with an extension cord instead of Cat5 because they also have flat fees. My utlity bill has a "Minimum Monthly Charge" of $17.50. If I just used my neighbor's electricity and split the bill, we would be robbing the utility of that monthly charge from me.
      • This system would also have the added advantage of making people pay actual $ for keeping code red-infected machines online (or some other worm that scans the net in volume). Not to mention that it would helpo draw the problem to the attention of users who don't know better.

    • Already (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheOnlyCoolTim ( 264997 ) <tim.bolbrockNO@SPAMverizon.net> on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:43PM (#5298695)
      When I was looking for broadband some providers made you pay extra for the privilege of connecting more than one computer, with fines if you used a NAT and got caught.

      I think currently most providers take the sensible option of allowing it but not supporting it.

      I am told that similarly, phone companies made you pay when you hooked up another telephone to your existing line, but this was challenged in court and declared illegal.

      Tim
    • If the ISPs are smart, they won't discourage things like the routers, WAPs, etc. Those are SELLING POINTS for broadband, and the ISPs should welcome them.

      Think about it: who in their right mind is going to pay for multiple cable modems for multiple PCs, when a single broadband connection would serve the whole house just nicely? Mom and Dad aren't going to pop for extra cable modems so that Johnny and Sally can each have broadband in their rooms and broadband on the computer in the den.

      Multiple PC households are starting to become as common as multiple TV households. Heck, my brother's not a much of a computer-type and his family has THREE of them. A single broadband connection has plenty of bandwidth to serve them all at once.

  • Hah. (Score:4, Funny)

    by OverRated ( 613866 ) <overrated@@@optushome...com...au> on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:11PM (#5298500)
    an 11-year-old Mac and a COTS (commercial-of-the-self) telescope

    What, he pulled it out of his ass?

    • an 11-year-old Mac and a COTS commercial-of-the-self) telescope What, he pulled it out of his ass?
      Maybe he's the ultimate karma whore?

    • Re:Hah. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have this kind of telescope. You look into it, and you see an ad trying to sell you the telescope you're looking into.

  • Perceptive Management (Score:4, Funny)

    by theGreater ( 596196 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:12PM (#5298501) Homepage
    [snip] ...The people who work here are geeks. [/snip]

    Finally, management who understands! Now when are they going to let me start dinking around with gadgets at work when I have a good idea, instead of telling me to file more paperwork.

    -theGreater Geek.

  • Columbia Picture (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sparkhead ( 589134 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:12PM (#5298505)
    also interesting is how many news sources mistook the image as a capture from the high-tech cameras that the people *actually* worked on."

    Yes, that is interesting. Interesting in a way that might make one wonder if this story is total fabrication to conceal the existence of higher-quality images from the "professional" scopes at that site.

    Not saying I believe that's the case, but it is simply more fodder for the anti-NASA conspiracists

    • Re:Columbia Picture (Score:4, Informative)

      by RadRafe ( 632260 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:46PM (#5298714) Homepage
      Here is the relevant quote from the earlier article: "[Lt. Col. Andy] Roake said that the Air Force will transmit classified images and data to Columbia accident investigators on the condition that they not be made public."

      You see, they can't release the photos from the Starfire Optical Range until NASA's examined them, because if they did that, the uninformed public would leap to conclusions. But that doesn't mean they were trying to misinform us about the origin of the picture. I think they just made an honest mistake.

      ...more fodder for the anti-NASA conspiracists
      I didn't know there was a conspiracy against NASA. Did you mean, anti-NASA conspiracy theorists?
      • ...more fodder for the anti-NASA conspiracists

        I didn't know there was a conspiracy against NASA. Did you mean, anti-NASA conspiracy theorists?

        If you're going to flame regarding a definition, be correct.

        A conspiracist is someone who has a conspiracy theory.

        A conspirator is someone who is part of a conspiracy.

        The term as I used it is correct.

      • Re:Columbia Picture (Score:3, Informative)

        by sysadmn ( 29788 )
        You see, they can't release the photos from the Starfire Optical Range until NASA's examined them,
        More likely, they won't release the photos from the Starfire Optical Range, since that would allow other governments to figure out how good the equipment is.
    • *Everything* is more fodder for anti-NASA conspiracists. If NASA says something, it's part of a conspiracy. If NASA doesn't say anything, it's a cover-up of a conspiracy. NASA can't win.
    • also interesting is how many news sources mistook the image as a capture from the high-tech cameras that the people *actually* worked on."


      Yes, that is interesting. Interesting in a way that might make one wonder if this story is total fabrication to conceal the existence of higher-quality images from the "professional" scopes at that site.

      Well I saw the press briefing live when this photo was shown. Dittmore(sp?) said it came from that site. He did not say it was amature photos taken by employees at that site. We all know how to spell assume but to be fair the way he said it implied that fact and I think evn Dittmore thought that the photo was a Government photo as well.

    • Yes, that is interesting. Interesting in a way that might make one wonder if this story is total fabrication to conceal the existence of higher-quality images from the "professional" scopes at that site.


      Not saying I believe that's the case, but it is simply more fodder for the anti-NASA conspiracists

      Or perhaps it's a little backpedaling to cover up the failure of an over-budget, underachieving program that's yielded only very poor images.

  • Gibson chokes in Boulder, CO (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GrendelAlex ( 529853 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:14PM (#5298519)
    No really! He quite literally coughed up a lung in front of us after some water went down the wrong pipe. The Father of Cyberspace [williamgibsonbooks.com] was at the Boulder Bookstore [boulderbookstore.com] this past Tuesday night reading from pR [williamgibsonbooks.com]. A very cool guy and extremely modest in person given his fame and prestige amongst the gadget adorned attendees.

    I asked him for some pearl of wisdom. He offered: "Never eat anything bigger than your head!" [superchurch.net] Should have thought *a head* and gotten a few extra signed books for eBay... ;) - Alex

  • Dear Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)

    by falsification ( 644190 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:14PM (#5298520) Journal
    regalia != memorabilia

    • Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      regalia [reference.com] [reference.com]: The distinguishing symbols of a rank, office, order, or society.

      Seems relevant to me.

      -AC

  • Gibson reading at UW (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lucasw ( 303536 ) <lucasw@NoSPaM.icculus.org> on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:22PM (#5298577) Homepage Journal
    I saw Gibson do a reading at the University of Washington about a week ago. The lecture hall was packed- I get the feeling he isn't quite mainstream but having comparative literature courses that feature Neuromancer and occasional media references to the 'inventor of cyberspace' probably help with that.

    Gibson mentioned the book started coming together after he was sent by Wired to meet with a lot of music video directors at a festival a few years back- He even fictionalized the Bjork video with the sexy female robots into background material for one of the main characters.

  • Actually, the Columbia picture quality... (Score:3, Funny)

    by saddino ( 183491 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:26PM (#5298604)
    ...would have been much better if he hadn't also been playing Dark Castle at the time.

  • Tour dates URL (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:32PM (#5298641)
    here [williamgibsonboard.com] is a direct link to William Gibson tour dates information.
  • was awesome when he wrote neuromancer, no doubt about it. These days the tech has taken a back row seat, and character relationship dymanics are in the front. Much more techy stuff is being written by the next gen of writers (or is it the gen after the next gen?) such as Neal Stephenson, writer of Cryptonomicon, and Quicksilver, which is due for release next month.

  • Sun's JVM Woes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IanBevan ( 213109 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:41PM (#5298682) Homepage

    'Sun confirmed the memo's authenticity, but said that the document is two years old and that the problems it describes have been fixed

    The problem is that many of these issues are not fixed in the 1.3 JVM, which is still the one that most enterprise systems ship with (WebLogic for example). I've just done a six month contract performance testing a WebLogic 6.1 J2EE application on Solaris and I can tell you now that performance of their JVM is less than stellar. Memory requirements, for example, are insane.
    • Exactly...I would NOT say Solaris runs Java "like the wind" IBM's JRE is better anyhow

      • Exactly...I would NOT say Solaris runs Java "like the wind" IBM's JRE is better anyhow

        Perhaps, but the IBM engine has other troubles - in particular it does not scale across multiple processors. You get the same performance on one versus eight CPUs in the benchmarks I've seen. These are the same symptoms you typically see in heap intensive multithreaded C++ programs run in SMP. Whether or not that's the cause of the WebSphere scaling problems I don't know (unlikely I think). More likely it's just some sychronisation primitive(s) that they need to tune or remove.
        • You really like that heap stuff, don't you buddy?
        • it does not scale across multiple processors. You get the same performance on one versus eight CPUs in the benchmarks I've seen

          And these would be which benchmarks, exactly?

          SPECjbb 2002 Q1 [spec.org] and SPECjbb 2003 Q3 [spec.org]-- look at the xSeries 360 and 370 results, where it scales quite nicely as you double the number of processors.

          More likely it's just some sychronisation primitive(s) that they need to tune or remove

          Holy shit, let's all rush out and tell David Bacon [nec.com] that his locks suck :)

          • And these would be which benchmarks, exactly?

            These benchmarks would be from the theserverside.com. And as for locks, you can have the most "featherweight" lock in the world, but if it's in a 'bad' place in the code, it'll still throttle your performance.

    • Re:Sun's JVM Woes (Score:3, Informative)

      by hobbs ( 82453 )
      It may be the case that 1.3 is (too) prevalent, but you only need to spend a little time with 1.4 to see that it is far and away faster than 1.3 in a "default" setup.
    • I pity anyone who has to use 1.3.x because of all the great new stuff in 1.4.x. It is hard to live without exception chaining, for example, once you have lived with it. The biggest issue mentioned in the memo is the memory footprint of multiple JVMs. It isn't scheduled to really be addressed until Tiger [jcp.org].

      JSR 121 -- The Isolation API [jcp.org]

    • IanBevan [slashdot.org] wrote [slashdot.org]:
      The problem is that many of these issues are not fixed in the 1.3 JVM...
      Yes, that is a shame, as version 1.3.1 is the only version I feel comfortable using in a production system. The standard edition of their Java 2 runtime environment 1.4 and above have some Microsoft-esque terms in their license agreement that allows the runtime environment to automatically update itself. That's the last thing I need on a tested, configuration management approved system -- having the software decide by itself that it "needs updating".

      I haven't checked to see if the other editions of their 1.4 J2RE have the same terms. The funny thing is that in my e-mails with Sun, they see no problem with these license terms!

      • IIRC, the downloading part in the license is about Webstart. I've never heard that a conventionally installed JRE is able to update itself, although I would really like that feature.

        So don't use Webstart.

  • Yahoo v. France (Score:4, Funny)

    by (nil) ( 140773 ) on Thursday February 13, 2003 @08:50PM (#5298743)
    ZDNet reports that Timothy Koogle and Yahoo were acquitted of condoning war crimes by selling Nazi memorabilia.

    France surrenders.

    -(())

    • France surrenders.

      Again.

  • Not 'Yahoo v. France', dammit -- RTFA! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13, 2003 @09:00PM (#5298799)
    Read the freaking article. It's Jewish groups that happen to be based in France who sued, not the French government. Actually, from what I know, most French people don't even approve this pointless lawsuit.
  • That really makes me mad when news people assume everything, and don't even look into what they are talking about. I would much rather see a news person say "we don't know" then give me a bunch of garbage, that forces me to continue watching the news just to see if they have to correct themselves. Maybe it's a big scheme to make us watch the news.

    PS: this is NOt offtopic.
  • Does anyone remember a game from about 10 years ago that was a shuttle simulator?

    I remember it ran on a pc and was amazingly hard to figure out with no instructions. There were about a million knobs and buttons to play with.

    There were many screens of the shuttle interior and you could also switch to an external view.

    Anyone know what I am talking about?

    • Re:Shuttle Simulator (Score:3, Informative)

      by MrDelSarto ( 95771 )
      yeah, and here [xjehl.com] is a good site about it. You can even download it from here, i guess it is classed as abandonware.

      I remember you could play "realistic" mode where the shuttle platform moves out in real time, which is about 3 days I think. now that's realism!

      if you bought it, it came with a *huge* wall chart with all the switches. The two real life shuttle disasters look positivley pedestrian compared to some of my botched landings in that game.
    • I don't remember that one but I remember the one for regular Nintendo. It was hard as hell, then again I was like 5, but it kept me entertained for hours. You had to get arrows to line up with each other to make the shuttle do different things, like liftoff, open the cargo bay, capture a satellite, re-entry, etc. It was called "Space Shuttle Project." If anyone is interested, you can read a little more about it here [videogamereviews.vg].

  • Condoning war crimes is illegal? It seems Mr. Orwell was only out by 9 years :-(

  • I've seen passing references to Joshua Schacter's Geourl [geourl.org], and the Geocoder project Dave Egnor wrote (which won the Google programming contest)... but not much feedback here on Godseye.

    Please take a moment *look* at the Godseye Project [godseye.com], look it over, try the search feature at the bottom of one of the geopages, and then yell at me if you would.

    There's more to this project than you can see- the orthophoto polygonal clickthrough tool is already written, and I'm working on making this distributed.

    You can add geosearch functionality to your own site fairly easily with the directions provided.

  • The Media are Morons (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fall over themselves to be the first to report 'news', even if it's wrong:
    • CNN Said the shuttle was going 18 times the speed of light
    • Foxnews said the shuttle was 200,000 miles above the earth
    • CBC Newsworld had an interview with a redneck who claimed to find an 'afterburner' and a 'solenoid' from the shuttle that looked suspiciously like it was from an old dodge
    • CNN publishes crap photo as high-tech secret military photo
    Tomorrow CNN will probably report the "shuttle blown up by palestinian suicide bomber" story again.

    • Where do they even find these idiot self-proclaimed "expert" pundits?

      From the original CNN article:

      The poor quality of the photo NASA displayed last week has led some experts to suggest that better photographs of Columbia's final moments are being withheld for security reasons.

      "It may represent the worst available image that shows the relevant phenomenon," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

      Or, you might be an idiot conspiracy theorist with nothing useful to offer.

      The thing is that the quality of pundit commentary is always exactly this stupid - it's just usually not exposed. So why do they bother talking to these empty spaces? Because it's the easiest way to lend the appearance that the article writer actually talked to someone about it. By-the-numbers journalism.

      I can't decide who I'd prefer to have a late-falling piece of shuttle landing gear land on their head, the useless pundit or the useless journalist. The latter should know better to than to ask idiot questions of people unqualified to offer a useful opinion. The former should know better than to answer.

  • Regarding France vs. Yahoo! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think France's GDP is lower than Yahoo!'s revenue. In any case, I'm sure Yahoo! uses deodorant.
  • They can bitch at me for using multiple machines when they start paying my power bill and remove the upstream and downstream caps on my service!

    My current provider, Adelphia, seems to think 15KB/s is reasonable. My previous ISP, Roadrunner, was at 60KB/s. I won't depress you or myself with my previous previous ISP's stats, but here's a hint: university.

  • get the same funtionality on Linux with grsecurity (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just take a look at this wonderful kernel enhancement for Linux. [grsecurity.net]

    Moreover is has something on lines of "systrace" from Niels Provos. Basically you create ACLs for what applications may or may not do, including an autolearn-mode.

    PS: I know that PaX can be circumvented, but there is much more than PaX included in this project.

    PS2: I am aware that parts of this patch is based on SolarDesigner's OWL patches. Although you can get OWL for 2.4 kernels (finally), they lack a lot of the cool protection functions included in grsecurity.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close