| Monday
September 18, 2000
More Short Shrift this week. Sorry.
Hi;
I was about to revive an old 486 of mine and use it
as my NAT/Firewall for my new DSL modem. We have a PIII-550 HP Pavilion
('Pavlov') and an old P133 clone running Linux ('Dobbin') already in a two
node network on a Linksys 5 port hub. This works fine. The interesting
thing is that I posted a question on a couple of lists about whether or
not I should use Linux or FreeBSD for the firewall. I got one very
interesting reply suggesting Linksys's Etherfast WAN router (about $200
for the 4 port version).
I use Cobalt Linux boxes at work, and I have looked
at the NetWinder, but it seems overkill for a small home network I run. So
I'm wondering if you've heard any feedback on this Linksys product?
John Wunderlich
I have heard nothing, but I have
used many LinkSys products with success and no failures. I am sure readers
will know more.
Hi Jerry,
When I read in your column today "I tended to
keep a dozen or more windows open, including several Internet Explorer
windows looking at websites", I thought I might suggest a program to
you. I only offer it up as I also surf with numerous windows open
simultaneously, often 12-30, and have found this to be the best tool for
the job in my case. Give NetCaptor a try, each site has it's own tab and
seems to me to use fewer resources than seperate windows of IE. It has
many other features such as the ability to block pop-up windows or open
the browser with multiple sites at once. You can find it at http://www.netcaptor.com
. I believe the author's name is Adam Stiles, it's adware, but you can
register it and kill the ads. Personally I don't find them that intrusive.
It's always been stable for me and runs on IE 5.x's engine.
I've attached a zipped screen shot of it in action,
if you scroll to the bottom you can see the tabs. You can have them scroll
horizontally, or "stack" them as I have done.
Thanks for all your writing over the years,
Jason Nielubowicz
Never heard of it, but I'll see if I
can look at it. I have to say that with Regina and 256 megs of memory I
don't notice any problems with multiple windows open. The thin 56K
pipeline is a problem, but with luck I'll have DSL or Cable Modem within 6
weeks.
And I am VERY PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE:
From: The Works of H. Beam Piper [mailto:PIPER-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM]
On Behalf Of John Carr Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 2:09 PM To:
PIPER-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM Subject: Kalvan Kingmaker Update
LAST CHANCE TO GET KALVAN KINGMAKER AT
PRE-PUBLICATION PRICE
I just sent off the working final draft of
"Kalvan Kingmaker" off to the typesetters. I'm still proofing
the final manuscript and will continue to be making minor corrections for
the next 2 weeks. Meanwhile, the typesetter will be 'creating' the book
design. We are definitely on schedule for the December publication date,
I'm happy to say. In fact, I'm hoping to pre-view the book at LosCon on
Thanksgiving weekend!
On Thursday I heard from artist Alan
Gutierrez. He had just finished some preliminary sketches, based on my
ideas, and come up with some good ones of his own. If the dust jacket
cover art comes out half as good as he makes it sound, it's going to be a
dynamite cover! Since this book will not be sold in bookstores -- but only
direct from the publisher via the Internet and from mail order -- I have
kept the dust jacket cover text to a bare minimum -- i.e., only the book
title and my name on the front cover and spine. I don't have any plans for
text on the back cover at this time. I really want to emphasize the
artwork, since this will be a wrap-around dust jacket. I don't want to use
any blurbs or 'Quotes' by big names, which will leave the back cover free
for displaying the artwork.
"Kalvan Kingmaker" has changed
significantly from the working draft. I've added a new minor sub-plot,
removed some unnecessary plot elements and beefed up the climactic battle
scenes. I've also re-formatted the entire book; instead of 25 long
chapters, it now runs 44 chapters of about the same length as those in
"Great King's War," which contained 31 chapters. "Kalvan
Kingmaker" is about 40,000 words longer, which accounts for the
additional chapters.
When I finish and send off the final
copyedited manuscript -- in 2 to 3 weeks, then I'll send all the "Kalvan
Kingmaker" sponsors a photocopy of the working draft, which will
allow them to see the 'earlier' version, so they can compare it with the
final published book. I think they'll find the differences very
interesting...
At this point, I'm very proud of "Kalvan
Kingmaker." I believe I was able to both write a good adventure novel
and do it in the spirit and (hopefully) style of "Lord Kalvan of
Otherwhen," as well as successfully continue the Kalvan story we all
love. "Kalvan Kingmaker" gives us a closer look at Kalvan and
Rylla and the problems they face, than either LKOW or GKW did.
Also, I've been able to explore Hostigos at
peace (well, in-between wars!) in more detail than in previous books. This
book also delves much deeper into Home Time Line politics and culture.
Plus, we finally get a Piper-esque villain of the same "stature"
as Andray Dunnan of "Space Viking." Not Archpriest Roxthar --
he's a 'special case' being more a Savonarola, than a villain; he actually
believes -- like most religious fanatics -- that he's doing 'his god's'
work. And that's very scary...but in a different way.
In the interim between finishing the working
draft of "Kalvan Kingmaker" and finding a cover artist, I was
able to write the first five chapters of the sequel. At this point, I'm
not sure of the title. I was going to call it "Gunpowder God"
(I'd planned for the cover of GG to feature a great representation of
Styphon's golden statue); however, since the fall of Tarr-Hostigos, is the
primary focus of the book, I thought it would be more fitting to have the
under-siege Tarr-Hostigos as the primary element of the cover, with
several of Styphon's Temple Guard, aka Red Hand, in the foreground. So,
ironically, I may save my favorite title for an upcoming book and call the
next one "Siege At Tarr-Hostigos."
Of course, the sequel depends upon "Kalvan
Kingmaker" selling enough copies so that I can payback the loan I
took out to publish it , as well as pay most of the costs of the next
book. Which means, I need to sell about half the print run -- or 500
copies. To that end, anyone who wants to purchase a copy at the
pre-publication price of $35.00 should order it now. I will continue to
take pre-orders until October. Send all orders to:
Pequod Press P.O. Box 280621 Northridge, CA
91328
In a manner, unlike any other series I am
familiar with, the Kalvan Saga has become a collaborative effort between
the Kalvan fans and the author. That is, my contract is to write good
books and publish them; your part is to buy them, or help sell them, so
that I can afford to write and publish the next installment of the Saga.
I'm almost done my part; now, the ball is in your hands...
I look forward to your continued support.
Best,
John F. Carr ==
As you may know, John Carr was
Senior Editor and Executive Assistant at Chaos Manor for almost 20 years.
If you liked the Piper boos you should like this one.
Jerry, in the off chance your
business didn't let you come across this:
http://www.ngnews.com/news/2000/09/09132000/blackseadisc_3014.asp
It describes how Dr. Ballard has found settlements
on the old shore of the Black Sea, ca 7500 BC, when (it is proposed) that
the mediterranean sea levels rose with the dissolution of the last of the
Spanish glaciers, overcoming an earthen dam in the Bosporous, and turning
the Black Sea into a saltwater formation, rather than a large landlocked
lake.
This change in the Black Sea may be reflected in the
tales of Gilgamesh and Noah, among others in the region.
Ken Burnside
I had seen that. Thanks for the
reminder.
Hello Mr. Pournelle,
you say your machines have a worm, that it doesn't
seem to do anything, that it launches on machine startup and that it
"sent an-mail to 'China?' "
Sounds like the perfect vehicle for launching DDoS
attacks.
The e-mail could be sent to anywhere and as it
weaves through the net it could register the IP of the infected machine
with the virus owner and be passed along until it comes back as
undeliverable or is swallowed somewhere along the way. The destination
doesn't even have to be real. The mere existance of the message (and the
sender's IP address,) can inform a modified sendmail "watcher."
The "worm" sits and waits, whenever your
machine is turned on. It could be waiting for a ping from a specific
address to tell it to launch a DDoS attach at an IP address date and time
of attack tagged onto the pinger's address. It can be xor-ed or otherwise
encrypted.
I believe you have seen one of the mechanisms which
could be used to launch DDoS attacks from potentially thousands of
machines, none of which are likely to attract attention due to reasonable
resource and bandwidth demand, against single targets which would be
flooded by tens of thousands of seemingly legitimate requests.
Welcome to the info-war. You ARE the front line.
-Charles-A.
I expect so. It won't work with me,
but it sure could with some. And I have cleaned all that off.
Thanks
Dear All,
I notice that none of the major antivirus companies
mention HOW the QAZ worm gets into a system.
On Thursday I definitely did not have it. Today
(Sunday) while browsing
news.bbc.co.uk McAffee suddenly popped up a warning that notepad.exe
was infected with the QAZ worm. I had not started notepad, in fact
currently .txt files are associated with pfe32 on my pc.
I moved it to another folder and had a look around.
Sure enough I now had a c:\windows\note.com file. However the registry was
not modified. There was no wininit.ini file. I rebooted and all was clear.
As a working hypothesis I have to assume that this
worm was transmitted from a web page I had visited today. McAffee would
have scanned this file once it was created and before I could have run it
and possibly triggered the payload. However SOMETHING renamed the original
notepad.exe to note.com. Could this have been an activeX control?
I hope this helps in any ongoing investigations.
David Cefai
Hi Jerry,
A firewall does not necessarily filter out private
addresses. If you do not actively stop these addresses from going out by
configuring filters or disabling the route advertising, there is no reason
why your ISP wouldn't see them, meaning any of it's other customers as
well. However ISP's should not be advertising routes to these addresses at
their borders and hopefully not between their headend routers either. But
in the case of the @home network theoretically this means you could
potentially see an awful lot of private addresses before the packets were
dropped. And indeed with a little traceroute experimentation I find that
while the @home network is not sending these addresses past it's borders
it certainly is routing them within it's network. I can reach some RFC
1918 addresses as far as 5 or 6 router hops away.
Also on the @home network the outgoing interface
(the "cable" side) of your cable modem has a private 10/8
address while your pc receives or is configured with a "real"
address. Aside from seeing this on traceroutes, using a piece of less than
common (and rather expensive) network equipment instead of a cablemodem,
and configuring it with a 10/8 address on my cable connection, I have
noted that it gave me a rather complete view of my local cable providers
network. My own reason for doing so at the time was to solve a problem
myself rather than wait on the cable providers generally less than
competent technical support. I hope that the cable companies have
increased security since then (aprox 18 months ago) however I won't hold
my breath. Unfortunately, I believe I could do a repeat performance with a
very cheap ~$10 card, and as a "tap" rather than as a
replacement for the cable modem. I suspect the cable companies are basing
much of their "security" (they claim you can't see your
neighbors raw packets) in what is an inherently shared media network by
either configuring virtual lans or by filtering inside your cablemodem,
and of course they also seem to be counting on that most famous of all
security paradigms "obscurity" which probably isn't a good idea
since most early adopters of cable were much more competent than the cable
providers counted on, and for that matter were probably more competent on
networks than the cable providers are themselves.
John Biel
Thanks.
Jerry:
I have been using a serial mouse with windows 2000
for the past several months.
My Gateway GP-6 350 has a Intel Motherboard and
Phoenix BIOS. For some reason, this Gateway BIOS does not allow you to
activate or disable the MOUSE PS/2 port in the Bios.
For the first 11 months of use, I used a PS/2 mouse
(Logitech Marble Mouse or kensington Orbit) with no problems with win98
and DOS 6.22 (I have a small partition that I boot to and run Partition
Magic and System commander from. Win2000 and Win98 are installed into
different partitions.
Anyway after 11 months, the PS/mouse would not be
recognized in dos. The bios no longer identified a "legacy
mouse" on startup. Both win98 and win2000 recognized the PS/2 mouse
independently of BIOS.
The only way to have DOS and Windows recognize the
same mouse was to use a serial Mouse (I used the same Kensington ORBIT and
Marble Mice....)
DOS uses the Logitech or Microsoft Driver and
recognized the serial mouse.
Windows 2000 recognized the serial mouse
automatically. Same for windows 98.
JRS
Dr. Pournelle,
Here's another example of greed abolishing
traditional fair use:
Is Taping a TV Movie a God-Given Right?
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=313384
As a followup:
It looks like the FCC has given the go ahead for
requiring copy-protection technology in digital cable set-top boxes. The
announcement can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/News_Releases/2000/nrcb0022.html
If you use the command line CONVERT.EXE utility to
do the deed of making FAT32 into NTFS you get a disk with a ton of tiny
512 byte clusters. This absolutely kills disk performance - 2048 bytes is
about ideal for a cluster size on most machines, and large disks need to
use 4096. Unfortunately the /? help that comes with the convert.exe does
not show any command line switches for changing the cluster size. Unless
there is a workaround for convert.exe I suggest that you use Partition
Magic to do the deed. For more detail see:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q231/7/56.ASP?LN=EN-US&;SD=gn&;FR=0
This article suggests using format.exe to convert to
NTFS, but AFAIK that wipes the drive every time!
-------- Tom Elam
Jerry,
Tom Abbot's Aeroplane:
This icon is part of HP hardcopy network device
discovery (probably HP JetAdmin - soon to be discontinued). I suspect Mr
Abbot has installed (or has had installed) some network printing or
scanning device. The aeroplane appears periodically as an indication that
the software is searching his network for JetDirect-connected devices.
An end-user would probably not need a tool such as
Jet Admin and I suspect it was installed as part of a "full
install" of a networked printer. The best way to get rid of it would
be to uninstall the printing system software and do an "add
printer" and point Windows to the .INF file on the CD or to run a
"custom install" and make sure that JetAdmin is deselected as
part of the install.
Best wishes,
-- Howard Roberts Hewlett Packard Imaging and
Printing Consultant UK Technical Consultancy
Organisation Phone: +44 (0)1344 365736 HP Telnet: 3165736 E-mail:
howard-cco_roberts@hp.com
And
a reply from my friend Ed Hume (see
View):
Jerry, when did you go to graduate school? There was
always a third group of psychiatrists - - - those doing research on the
mental illnesses that afflict mankind. Research from the twenties through
the fifties on psychiatric epidemiology and symptoms patterns is still
very useful today.
And by the 1950's the shock treatment doctors had
moved on to medicines: Thorazine and its derivatives (our only
antipsychotics for 40 years), the monoamine oxidase inhibitors (our first
antidepressants) and sedatives, leading to Valium/Librium and their
derivatives at the end of that decade. The tricyclic antidepressants came
along about the same time as Valium and Librium. All of this in our first
decade of the brain, the 1950's.
To understand the heavy use of shock treatments and
such, one must understand that some illnesses are beyond the capacity of a
human to tolerate. There are people who are beyond the reach of all
therapy, including Dianetic auditing. We're talking brain disorders here.
Today shock treatments are still used, but no longer
is insulin used, nor long strings of fifty or so. As barbarous as it
sounds, it works, and it is safe. A comprehensive bibliography was
prepared by a family friend, the late Edward Hutchinson, an engineer who
had occasion to exhaustively research the scientific literature on shock
treatments. He found no research that indicated any harmful longterm
effects, and much research that indicates that it is safe (except for the
anesthesia, of course). Research quoted to the contrary was either badly
done, quoted out of context or misrepresented. The techniques used to
administer shock treatments have advanced greatly since the 1950's, and a
new form of electromagnetic stimulation is now being tested and shows some
promise. But at bottom, there are some illnesses that respond only to
shock treatments. And there are people come in to outpatient surgery
centers to get maintenance shock treatments to keep their illnesses away.
Since the introduction of Wellbutrin and Prozac in
1987-1988, we have seen a breathtaking series of new medicines released:
antidepressants that have few side effects and which are not fatal in
overdose; antipsychotic medicines that cause few side effects;
nonaddictive antianxiety medicines; mood stabilizers for the previously
unsuspected unstable-mood bipolar disorder type 2. In fact, although
managed care companies believe they are responsible for the enormous
reduction in the number of psychiatric admissions in the past ten years, I
believe that it is the use of medications like Prozac in the hands of
family doctors who have prevented many cases of depression from getting
bad enough to need hospitalization. We hardly ever see nongeriatric adults
admitted for depression anymore.
Breathtaking as it all is, however, we shrinks today
are the inheritors of the practitioners you deride in your View for
2000/09/18. I agree with you that psychoanalysis is mostly hokum, yet the
discipline of carefully listening to patients allowed other psychiatrists
to develop the successful methods of treating war-induced trauma used
during WW2 (and forgotten for Vietnam). I also think that the psychiatric
profession's suppression of Dianetics prevented a valuable therapeutic
method from reaching the public. It is too bad, though, that your
professors in your psychology grad school did not pay closer attention to
what was really happening in psychiatry. You might have carried a
different perspective from your education.
Want a taste? Look at let There Be Light, a
documentary made just after WW2 by, I think, John Huston. Or watch the
MASH episodes involving the psychiatrist Sidney Friedman, especially the
finale. He was a shrink from the old school. I hope someday to be half the
shrink he was - - - and he was just an actor on a TV show. And he
represented what the shrinks of the day were doing.
Some time I'll give you a perspective from the
psychiatric trenches of today. It's all about injured children growing up,
ordinary people under extraordinary stress, and biological vulnerabilities
(perhaps from infections). The purported "worried well" hardly
figure in.
Ed Edward S. Hume, M.D. ehume@pshrink.com
I was at the University of Iowa in
the mid-fifties and the University of Washington later, and in both places
the professors of medicine in psychiatry fell into one of the two
categories I mentioned: Freudian hokum based on made up cases and the
rewards of being able to treat patients who never got cured and paid a lot
for the sessions; and the butchers who thought shock therapy was the
answer to just about anything. I was also able to watch the suppression of
Dianetics as dangerous by those quacks, when it was pretty clear that the
Dianetics people were no worse than the psychoanalysts and they sure
charged less. This I suspect was the point. They charged less. And they
carefully listened. It was pretty well all they did. (I recall one of my
psychotherapy counselors saying he wasn't sure that a good bartender
didn't do about as much good as most 'counselors' although the alcohol
might be harmful.)
In the 50's at least in the Midwest
and West things were not as you seem to think, or not around me.
Since that time science, real live
data-respecting science, seems to have crept into psychiatry and witch
doctoring, while still around in places -- Ilsa Bick was trained as a
psycho-analyst before concluding that she could either continue to pay her
analyst or buy a house and a house was more useful -- is on the way out.
How that happened I don't know: I got out of all that in the late 50's to
go into engineering psychology and operations research where the data were
important; next time I looked at psychiatry things had definitely changed
although I note that some of the government regulator types seem to have
the same aristocratic 'we are enlightened and mere citizens are benighted'
attitudes that were universal in the 50's, at least in the circles
available to me. And I read the journals then, so it wasn't just the small
circle around me who were sure they knew all and that only incremental
improvements in their craft were expected. And those would not come from
laymen or scientists.
I was fortunate enough to be steeped
in scientific method by the Thomists of my youth -- there can be no real
conflict between science and religion, and if there appears to be we have
misunderstood one or the other -- and to have that attitude most of my
life. Look for mechanisms: where does this "collective
unconscious" reside? Given Lashley's work, just where is the
"id" or for that matter the "reactive mind"? And so
forth. But asking that kind of question and questioning the value of
"therapy" as taught in those times was a sure way to bad marks.
And in political science studies we
studied case after case, particularly in England, in which a police
constable, a psychiatrist, and the governor of a mental institution (which
would be paid for commitments and not paid if there were no commitment)
could lock a man up for a very long time in a mental ward. In one case a
man was questioning the way the National Health outfit gave benefits to
his wife. He was a troublemaker, for certain, and kept writing his Member
of Parliament until one night a constable and a police psychiatrist burst
into his house and took him for a 'hearing' before the governor of a
madhouse. The report said he was abusive and disrespectful! And on the
basis of his cursing them for dragging him off in handcuffs for the crime
of writing letters to his Member of Parliament he was locked away. No
judge and jury involved: "he was sick and you should not subject sick
people to the ordeals of the courts." I wish I were making that up.
There were many such cases, which
was one reason we were concerned that people be PUNISHED FOR CRIMES, not
"treated" "for their own good". Punishment ends
eventually. Treatment doesn't have to particularly if someone will lose
money when the treatment ends.
Yes that's unfair to people like
you. But it took a LONG time for the psychiatrists themselves to start
policing their own profession. Many may have disagreed with what was
happening and the continuing expansion of power to put people in storage
for year after year for no crime, but since they had untreatable diseases
they received no treatment either, but few spoke up. One man got a life
sentence for getting drunk and urinating on a wall: he pleaded guilty to
indecent exposure, was sentenced to 30 days, but then it was a 'sex crime'
and he was held to be an incurable sex offender; when Professor Cole heard
about the case he had been in Atascadero for nine years for urinating on a
wall. And he had never been accused of a 'sex crime' other than
indecent exposure. Of course he had about IQ 70 but he had been an
employed janitor prior to all that. Incidentally he was a
"trustee" at Atascadero and employed as a janitor there. Not
paid, of course. But it was for his own good that he never got a hearing
on whether he ought to be kept in there as incurable.
When we tried to get some of those
laws changed so that people didn't get locked up without a judge and jury,
you should have heard the psychiatrists yell. It was not a pretty thing.
We were accused of being indifferent to these suffering sick people. This
was early 60's. So it may have changed now, Ed, and you may have
helped change it, but I can't blame people for residual resentment of a
profession that did well by 'doing good' to others for so very long, and
resisted even elementary safeguards on their god-like powers -- some still
do.
And that is probably enough on the
subject.
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