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Most fiendishly clever security hack of all time:
Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.
From the folks who created the amazing Wikipedia site comes the new Wikinews:
[A] free content news source. We started in November 2004, and have currently written 121 articles. Our mission is to create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events.I'm not sure this can work, but it will be interesting to see. A wiki, of course, is a site where *anyone* can add or edit *any* entry. Seems like a recipe for disaster, but it has worked surprisingly well at Wikipedia. The problem here, I would guess, is that news (and especially political news) is so much more contentious than most encyclopedia entries. It's hard to see how different political factions won't just endless rewrite each other's articles. But it's always easy to see the downside. I'm glad they are trying. And perhaps it's just so crazy it might work.
Playing around with the page design. Feedback welcome. It is supposed to look something like:
Lots of talk about spam around here lately. It is a really interesting topic. Spam is so annoying, yet at the same time it is crucial not to overreact because spam is a byproduct of the free internet. The only way to really stop it is to do something like only allowing registered and trackable devices to connect to the internet. So I've always seen anti-spam tactics as the most likely route for someone to use who wanted to control the internet - who could argue they don't want to stop spam? It's not like terrorism or k.p. which are just abstractly bad things; spam is an actual everyday bad thing for almost everyone on the internet.
I think we just have to live with it. It's the noise in the system.
Anyway, here's a funny look at how inventive these horrible people can be:
Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across....Now that takes me back to the BBS days.
I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months....
Umm, this doesn't sound good:
Former CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday called for new security measures to guard against attacks on the United States that use the Internet, which he called "a potential Achilles' heel."Who's he working for now?
"I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he told an information-technology security conference in Washington, "but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
I understand the frustration, but this isn't the right solution:
Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" campaign was intended as a way for users to fight back against the avalanche of junk mail messages coming their way.It is kind of funny though. Apparently it worked a bit better than expected and brought a few servers to their knees:
Participants were encouraged to download the Lycos screensaver which, when their PC was idle, would then send lots of data traffic to websites that peddle the goods and services mentioned in spam messages.
Lycos said the idea was to get the spam sites running at 95% capacity and generate big bandwidth bills for the spammers behind the sites.
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.
The downing of the sites could dent Lycos claims that what it is doing does not amount to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). In such attacks thousands of computers bombard sites with data in an attempt to overwhelm them.
The Broadband Daily is a brand new group weblog featuring a bunch of bloggers I read already plus some new ones all opining on, you guessed it, broadband. Looks very nice.
On distinguishing humans from robots, which is something we've been dealing with around here lately.
Microsoft launches MSN Spaces:
With MSN Spaces, you can easily create and manage your blog from your computer or your mobile phone. It's a great way to share information and photos with your friends and family. And best of all, it's free!You know, Bill Gates is right, Microsoft is all about innovation. A blog service? At the very end of 2004? Who would have thought?
I thought I remembered posting about this before, but I can't find any reference to it. Liquid lenses for camera phones:
The company was founded two years ago to exploit two core technology patents covering lenses based on the principles of electro-wetting. This is the tendency of liquid to spread on a substrate, Paillard explains. "It means we can tune the shape of the drop to create a lens. Think about a tunable lens, like in the human eye," he suggests....Better lenses are crucial, especially in light of the first round of 1 megapixel cameraphones that are exhibiting lackluster image quality. Sheer megapixels are only part of the issue, and improvements there without corresponding improvements in the lenses and other sub systems are not going to do it. Here's to hoping their time frame isn't overly optimistic.
The company has a non-exclusive licensing deal with a subsidiary of Samsung to develop the lenses for use in its camera phones. Paillard expects products will be on the shelves by Q1 2006 at the latest, and maybe even in time for Christmas next year.