Archive for the ‘LINKS’ Category.
December 10, 2003, 1:19 pm
ABC News Online (Australia): Electric currents to control game players’ posture:
Japanese telecom giant NTT has succeeded in controlling human posture by applying weak electric currents and is aiming to use the technology to develop realistic simulation games, an official said on Monday.
Researchers have found they can control how human beings position themselves by sticking tiny electrode patches behind the ears, said Minako Sawaki, a planning division official for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp’s Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group.
The electrodes are connected to a remote control device enabling a weak electric current to be administered to affect the part of the inner ear that controls the sense of balance.
Researchers found they could change the posture of people by manipulating the electric current, which is at an extremely low level, Minako Sawaki said.
NTT hopes to use the technology to develop more realistic games for driving and flight simulation, making players’ bodies lean as they corner or pull gravity inducing turns at the controls.
December 10, 2003, 8:00 am
The Rise of the Spammers:
The person who has coded both the client and the master server (I think that is the same person) is an intelligent person, with strong knowledge of technology, just because there are too many things involved: thread and network programming, mail server modification adding new commands, mask feature, reports, binary auto-removal, UPX compression, …, she also reads the security vulnerabilities mailing lists (bugtraq, full-disclosure, …), and somehow finds out another ones (I haven’t been able to find my vulnerability described in the Internet).
December 9, 2003, 8:25 am
December 9, 2003, 8:00 am
Figby.com: Michael Moncur’s Weblog:
The Quotations Page offers RSS feeds to syndicate daily quotes. My logs show 74,257 requests for these files on a single day last week. Most downloaded the entire file despite the fact that it changes only once every 24 hours. Based on this, the RSS feeds use 157 MB of bandwidth per day. This is negligible to me (the rest of this busy site uses almost 5 GB per day) but I’ve had to do quite a bit of tweaking over the years to keep the sheer number of RSS requests from overwhelming the server.
In my case, a large part of the problem is Ximian Evolution, an information manager for the GNOME linux desktop. My feeds are included by default in every installation, which resulted in an effective distributed DOS attack against my site until I took measures against it. Thousands of sites using this software poll my site every 5 minutes.
Nearly 65% of my RSS requests are from Evolution. I have configured Apache to return a 403 error code to these requests. I hate to make the feed useless for these clients, but I had no other choice since my bug reports to the Evolution coders have been consistently ignored, and it will cut my RSS bandwidth in half.
December 8, 2003, 11:08 am
Yahoo Proposes New Internet Anti-Spam Structure:
Yahoo said its “Domain Keys” software, which it hopes to launch in 2004, will be made available freely to the developers of the Web’s major open-source e-mail software and systems.
…
Under Yahoo’s new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would check the Internet’s Domain Name System for the public key registered to the sending domain.
December 5, 2003, 11:34 am
RIT launches computer security program:
In response to this emerging technological area, the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences is preparing a new master’s degree program in computing security and information assurance. The program will consist of a half dozen core courses dealing with technical, business, ethical and administrative aspects of security. Additionally, areas such as risk management and the cost of security will be analyzed.
While similar programs in computer security already exist at a handful of universities, the GCCIS program will differ by focusing on the complete spectrum of computing.
“Our program is unique in that it will be offered at the college level and utilize faculty from the computer science, software engineering and information technology departments,” explains Jorge Díaz-Herrera, GCCIS dean. “The cross-disciplinary nature of the program will qualify graduates for a wide range of computer security related careers in both the private and public sectors.”
To better hone the curriculum, three members of the GCCIS faculty recently took part in a month-long training session. Hans-Peter Bischof, associate professor of computer science; Stephanie Ludi, assistant professor of software engineering; and Luther Troell, associate professor of information technology, traveled to Carnegie Mellon University to present the college’s plan to a diverse group of experts. The resulting exchange of ideas offered some useful feedback.
December 4, 2003, 8:13 am
The founder of Thawte, Mark Shuttleworth, has many
thoughts on open source development and its funding,
based on his experience as the sponsor of the SchoolTool project.
So the risk is that a well-funded open source team that is NOT lead by someone with a personal interest in shipping the project will get distracted by other shiny tech toys and fail to actually ship something focused and constructive. How are we dealing with that in the current round of work on SchoolTool? First, I’m personally watching and asking the core team to focus on actual functionality. They assure me that their engine work is “done”, and that they are currently working on a usable tool that can be tested by schools. Time will tell. And second, we will shortly have a second, collaborating team, that will I hope also bring much of the engineering work into a more public forum.
Time will tell. These are expensive ways to learn, but I feel that the experiment is very much worth doing. There are lots of tools I would like to see developed in the open source world that developers have not yet done for themselves, and which I would be prepared to fund. Perhaps other philanthropists are in a similar position. We need to learn how to do this effectively, and the only way to learn is to try.
He has recently issued
bounties for work he’s like to see happen with his SchoolTool project, with Python, and with Mozilla.
December 3, 2003, 3:14 pm
December 2, 2003, 4:05 pm
December 2, 2003, 12:03 pm
