Liudvikas Bukys

Aaron Swartz: “Imminent End of Net Predicted“, a lighthearted commentary on: Brandon Wiley: “Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design“

When the Spam Hits the Blogs: Web spammers populate referral logs. “They’re trying to jump-start a meme.”

Scientists Plan to Shake Hands Via Internet:

Pushing on the pen sends data representing forces through the Internet that can be interpreted by a phantom and therefore felt on the other end,” said Mel Slater, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL)…
UCL will conduct the experiment on Tuesday with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

File Serving:

It is convenient for students and faculty to have access to their files no matter what computer they’re using, so many universities provide some sort of network storage. Requirements for a network storage system include:

• Scalability. It must be able to handle use by all members of the university. (e.g. at MIT, it must be able to handle 15000 users.)

• Reliability and security (it has to withstand use by a large number of highly intelligent, curious computer science students with lots of time on their hands!)

• Compatibility with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh
• Low Cost. It is likely that only a free software solution will be inexpensive enough to be used on every computer on campus.

• Support. It must already be deployed at many universities, and books and other training materials must be readily available.

The building block services for a network storage system include:

• File Serving
• Authentication
• Time Synchronization
• User Directory
• Domain Name Service

Oddly enough, it seems there is currently only one choice for the File Serving service that meets all the above requirements: AFS (in the form of OpenAFS). That dictates several other choices: AFS requires Kerberos as its user authentication service, and Kerberos requires NTP as its time synchronization service. Both probably require DNS as their hostname lookup service.

Lots of useful links re AFS, Kerberos, integration with clients, help desk pages at various universities, Active Directory, evaluations/critiques of alternatives, and other related topics.

PGP poised for major comeback [SecurityFocus]

Stanford gives ‘A’ to distributed computing A group of chemists–including Stanford assistant professor Vijay Pande–said they successfully predicted the folding rate of a protein using calculations worked out on a so-called distributed computing network. Their research, conducted last year, was published this week in the science journal Nature. ZDNet Oct 23 2002 8:12AM ET [Moreover - Tech latest]

The Story: (Don’t try this at home!) A spammer’s victim hacks the spammer and reveals more than you want to know about the spammer and her techniques.

Spammers crack through Windows. (Creating popups via the Windows Messenger service) ZDNet Oct 18 2002 6:51AM ET [Moreover - Computer security news]

The New York Times on Hypocrisy of US IP Policies [Slashdot]

MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz. Wired News Oct 17 2002 5:53AM ET [Moreover - Tech latest]