July 31, 2006
Diebold: Rigged By Design
A California technology group acquired a Diebold TS vote machine and dissected it. On the motherboard of the computer they found this:
It's just a harmless little switch, right?
WRONG.
This switch allows the machine to have two completely different programs stored in it, and with just a screwdriver and a few minutes alone with the machine, it can be converted from the machine that voting officials "certified" to one that offers a completely different outcome for the election. With this capability, it's possible to rig every election run on these machines without anyone but a handful of people knowing it.
Remember when the CEO of Diebold promised to "deliver the Presidency to George Bush"?
Proof. Positive.
Posted by Steven at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
A New High
The very highest high, actually; an unbreakable record. Two weeks ago, a Eurocopter model Ecureuil/Astar AS350 B3 landed on the summit of Mt. Everest, an altitude of 8850 m (29,035 feet). And then did it again the following day just to ensure the record was repeatable (mid-May is the annual best window for summitting Everest, traditionally by climbing; it's when the weather is mildest, "mild" being a relative state six miles up). The summit is about the size of a generous living room, maybe 20 feet by 30 feet. Amazing in both the engineering and the performance. Technology marches onward.
Posted by at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
DNS Reaching Meltdown Point?
The Domain you've reached is not in service ... Business 2.0 has an article about recent DNS service outtages and the load on the entire system.
On May 7, Google (GOOG), perhaps the most indispensable online utility, went offline. Its dependents were immediately complaining in every forum they could find about their lack of access to search tools, Gmail accounts, and Google News. When Google came back online, after a mere 15 minutes, a quick investigation proved that the culprit was the domain name system, or DNS.DNS usually doesn't get much attention. One of the oldest technologies behind the Internet, DNS takes the easy-to-remember URL you type in and matches it to the nine-digit number assigned to the server hosting the site. Without DNS you couldn't look up Amazon.com or e-mail your mom on Mother's Day. It's as important to the Internet as Windows is to your PC. And like Windows, it's a decades-old technology that is getting stressed and abused by the demands of a new age.
Now Google says its outage problem was an internal glitch. (That's about the only explanation it would offer.) But these problems have been plaguing major companies with increasing regularity. A few weeks ago, Comcast (CMCSK) was the victim of a highly publicized DNS outage. Australian telecom giant Telstra experienced similar problems. And there are many large players that simply don't report these outages, often leaving their customers scratching their heads.
As one of the key components of the always-on infrastructure, DNS is also one of the most vulnerable. Over the years, the most commonly used software package, Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), has fallen behind the times. It simply wasn't designed for the rigors of an always-on world, where the threat of hackers is omnipresent. DNS is essentially a database, and that database has a limited capacity. To deal with more and more users, companies simply add more servers, an expensive way to fix the problem that also adds vulnerabilities to the system.
Posted by Steven at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)
April 21, 2005
The Other Suicidal Move in the Software Business
And no, it's not about IBM this time. Through the latter half of my career in software, "Don't piss off Microsoft" has been a truism. They will buy you, crush you, or just sue you out of existance. Not a good move, businesswise.
Well, it turns out there's another truism forming out of the void, Don't Piss Off The Open Source Community. Linus Torvalds is leading an effort to rewrite BitKeeper after the publisher revoked a license clause allowing open source developers a free copy.
A dispute between a prominent open-source developer and the maker of the software used to manage Linux kernel development has forced Linux creator Linus Torvalds to embark on a new software project of his own, in addition to the Linux kernel. The new effort, called "git," was started last week after a licensing dispute forced Torvalds to abandon the proprietary BitKeeper software he had been using to manage Linux kernel development since 2002.The conflict touches on the difference between open-source developers who view Linux's open, collaborative approach as a technically superior way to build software and free software advocates, who see the ability to access and change source code as fundamental freedom.
As a result of the dispute, Torvalds is now working with other Linux developers to create software that will be able to quickly make changes to 17,000 files that make up the Linux kernel, the central component of the Linux operating system. "Git, to some degree, was designed on the principle that everything you ever do on a daily basis should take less than a second," Torvalds said in an e-mail interview.
The Linux developers will use git to replace BitKeeper, which is developed by BitMover Inc., based in South San Francisco, California.
Though BitMover allowed Linux developers to use a free version of its software for kernel development, the company was unhappy with efforts by developer Andrew Tridgell to develop an open source version of the BitKeeper client. In February, Tridgell wrote a tool that could work with source code stored in BitKeeper, and after several months of negotiations, BitMover decided to revoke the Linux developers' right to use the current BitKeeper software for free.
I'll translate for the technically challenged.
Linus, the guy who controls the Linux operating system kernel (he wrote the early versions and it's named for him), decided in 2002 to use a commerical program to manage the source code of the kernel, which is all the information used to create the massive program. In exchange for getting a huge new market, the publisher allowed OSS developers a side-license (for free) to use the program. One of these programmers took it upon himself to reverse engineer the program and offer his own version of the "client side" -- the program end-users actually ran.
A short history lesson. Andrew Tidgwell is already famous for reverse engineering another program and offering a Linux/Unix version, quite to the horror of the program's publisher. He created a system called SAMBA which allows Linux/Unix and other OS users to access Microsoft Windows Servers. Yeah, Andrew took on Microsoft -- and won.BitMover is dead meat and doesn't even realize it.
So the publisher thinks it will get all these OSS developers to pay for the product? No chance! Within weeks, there will be a replacement program that will eventually eat their market alive, and it will cost exactly nothing to buy. The original firm will either go out of business, or (irony of ironies) turn into a support firm for the free version. This is like sacking a city and making the original rulers clean the toilets, all because a free room upgrade was denied at the city's best hotel.
Just desserts.
But Linus should learn from this too -- and never, ever choose a commercial package to manage any part of a free program, least of all, Linux itself.
Posted by Steven at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)
April 02, 2005
Wither DARPA?
I'm speaking to you through the miracle of DARPA ... The Bush Administration is gutting basic funding for research, the same research that made it possible for you to read this sentence.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."
University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency's new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.
This is suicide, as a high tech nation. Without the industry that DARPA has created through research funding, we'd be a second world nation at best. Is this more of Bush's "faith based" initiatives? Does he think God will give him alien technology to keep our economy going? What fools be these?
Posted by Steven at 11:19 AM | Comments (3)
December 22, 2004
Cringley on Sun, Microsoft and IBM
Whither Sun and Dell? This week's Cringley column talks about monumental changes in the PC industry.
What Sun needs to do is to establish itself as the de facto UNIX (not Linux) software vendor. Drop the hardware, make Solaris run beautifully on every high-end system from every manufacturer and compete with Linux by offering world-class consulting, service and support. Fortune 500 companies would sigh with relief, but Sun would also have to accept that the company will shrink in sales and headcount, though not in profit. This is the only viable strategy left for Sun, which is going to shrink dramatically anyway, possibly to nothing....
Take a long look at xBox development, the evolving PC and consumer electronics markets, and Microsoft's own need for revenue growth, and figure what that means for the xBox 3, which should appear around the end of this decade. My analysis suggests that xBox 3 will be a game system that's also a media receiver and recorder and a desktop workstation. Not that you'd use one box for all three things, but that you'd buy three essentially identical boxes and use them for all three functions. And of course you'd buy extra units for kids and spare TVs, etc. In short, xBox 3 will be Microsoft's effort to extend its dominance of the PC software industry into dominance of the PC hardware, game, and electronic entertainment industries. At that point, even mighty Dell goes down.
...
Fortunately -- and I can assure you I never thought I would ever in my life be writing this -- IBM may save the day.
By maintaining independence from Microsoft and actually making Microsoft dependent on it, IBM can have some influence on this diabolical scheme. They could foster alternate standards and, by doing so, make a good living. Let's just hope the two companies don't decide to simply share the booty and jointly enslave us, couches, potatoes, and all.
Posted by Steven at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2004
FORTRAN?!
Posted by at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2004
What's Your High Score?
Looking forward to e-voting for John Kerry?
Kudos to Brett Brooks in Markham for this link!
"Blame Canada!"
Posted by Steven at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)