Art that focuses on communication.

Ji Lee Pleaseenjoy

In Canada there are snow festivals in the winter in which people make elaborate scupltures out of ice and snow. Nothing I recall seeing up there in the early 80s came remotely close to this. It might be that technology has improved in the past 20 years. It might be that the Chinese are simply taking this a lot more seriously. In any event, the results are simply amazing. Massive functional buildings made entirely of ice and filled with lights!

R Todd King: China Photos 2005 - Harbin Winter

Do you still think the LSB has some value?
There are still people out there who think that the LSB has any value. This just means they buy into the advertisement of the people who have monetary benefits from the existence of the specification, they don't do any research, and they generally don't understand ABI issues.

Just look at the recent LSBv3 certification process. Our management got pressured by certain parties into declaring that once again we go through the process. The v3 spec was extended significantly, some new tests were added. And of course, the tests are run against the current code base and using the machines people nowadays use. What is the result of all this: many many reported bugs.

This is nothing new, it has been the case for every test run after an update of the test suite. And the analysis of the failures is also always the same: the bugs are not in the tested code, they are in the test suite. There might be occasionally a problem in the code, I think I've seen one or two of these, but it's safe to say 90 % of the reported bugs are actually problems in the test suite. Look at the LSB bug database and all the reported problems if you doubt that.

Interesting commentary on LSB.

udrepper: Do you still think the LSB has some value?

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Open Letter to Kansas Schools

leaving to go buy hamster...

Getting started, you'll need:
- A hampster
- Tape
- A knife

Heh.

Turn Your Hamster into a Fighting Machine

L33T is the slang of a new computer-savvy generation. Breathe some life back
into your word games and test your L33T knowledge with this frickin' sweet set
of tiles. Use the L33T dictionary (provided below) to expand the
available plays, use L33T letter replacements in normal words, and score extra
points for creating words entirely out of L33T letters!

Read the FAQ for added laughs.

L33T TILES

Too much time...

Actually, he does this as his job. He also holds the world record for tallest free standing structure made of playing cards. Very cool!

Cardstacker Gallery

Top business publications refused to run our bold ad concepts because the headlines were thought too controversial. At Sun, we're the radical engineers that build "ass-whoopin" technology - we're not Miss Manners and we never want to be.

It looks like Sun is trying to change their image. I like their new ads, and the rejected ones are even better.

Sun Censored but Not Silent

These days, anybody trying to sell a one-vendor proprietary networking stack would be laughed out of the market. I am quite certain that in another decade or two, anyone trying to sell a proprietary office-document format will be too. Massachusetts is smart enough to be a little ahead of the game.

Massachusetts Switching to Open Document Standards

Dagmar wrote: It is Clue.

Argh. Why'd you have to post something so inflamitory on a day when I have movers in my apartment? I must respectfully disagree. The number one most destructive idea in computer security is that its a good thing to write quazi-utopian "everyone in the entire industry is crazy except me" essays that give clueless people the belief that they are privy to THE answer. I'm sure it works wonders for Ranum's business. However, it is neither constructive nor useful.

1. Default Permit. It depends on the context. I think that default permit is a bad idea in the email world, for example, but most people are, for some reason, far more interested in getting the odd unsolicited communique then they are in living without spam. This is, perhaps, because the whole idea of the internet is to enable people to easily communicate. Its possible that overtime people will tire of all the opennness, and if they do, no one will be happier then computer security people, but for the time being some applications are going to be default permit, and its not the computer security community that drives that.

2. Enumerating Badness. He argues in the default permit section that "It takes dedication, thought, and understanding to implement a 'Default Deny' policy" and then immediately proceeds to argue that its less expensive to implement a Default Deny policy then to enumerate badness and that most of the computer security industry is a sham!

He is, of course, wrong (why did we write NFR?!). While you might have to pay $30 to buy a product that enumerates badness, in general, that badness is the same for everyone. Your goodness is specific to you, and so you're going to have to hire someone to custom configure it for you, and they are going to charge you a hell of a lot more then $30.

His Enumerate Goodness anti-virus system sounds somewhat reasonable until you realize that decent worms and viruses disable things like that, but if you want to live in a world where you absolutely must get permission from the IT department in order to run anything, its coming, and its called palladium, and I will conceed that people are going to do it, and it will prevent some security woes. It will also prevent a lot of work from getting done, and smart people won't use it.

3. Penetrate and Patch. If people simply wrote software that didn't have vulnerabilities, there wouldn't be any need to patch things! WOW! Brilliant! The inevitable result is going to be that some hapless admin somewhere is going to need to patch a critical flaw and he'll be told by his boss's boss that he has a "penetrate and patch" mentality. Wonderful. The fact is that no one has designed a vulnerability free computer, and while we do appreciate systems that are more failure tolerant, such as OpenBSD, and wish businesses adopted them more often, until such time it is foolish to fault researchers for continuing to look fo... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security