| Friday,
March 31, 2000 It's column time and I
lost nearly a week being sick. It's also fiction time. So it is SHORT
SHRIFT time on mail for a few days...
I suppose we ought to begin with this:
Jerry, Check out http://apachepda.apacheservices.com/
for a laugh. Check date at bottom of page.
Kit Case
Then there is this. I have not looked into it at
all:
Well, if what you suspect is true, these folks are
breaking the law big time and I don't suppose it'll be long before they
end up busted.
Robert Bruce Thompson http://www.ttgnet.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Farquhar
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 1:35 AM
To: jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
Cc: thompson@ttgnet.com
Subject: A commercial enterprise that seems to be
profiting off Windows'security flaws
Jerry and Bob,
I found something tonight that I really, really wish
I hadn't. I was searching for good information on Linux security for the
O'Reilly book I'm writing when I found a reference to something called
scour.net in a text file that talks about setting up and securing Linux
servers.
Now, I don't know if this is as big as the Aureate
thing or not. It may be. I'm just not quite sure what to do with it. My
first inclination is to post it to my Web site immediately. But probably
someone with more than just a single O'Reilly book to his credit ought to
look at it before the whistle gets blown. This is, after all, WAY outside
of my realm of specialty, and frankly, I find most whistle-blowers
annoying.
So, keeping that in mind, here's what I wrote for
posting:
A site that needs to be shut down. NOW. Wanna know
who's stealing images and MP3s off your hard drive? www.scour.net, that's
who. Here's a link that'll give you a smoking gun: http://scour.net/Search/Search.phtml?query=aimee+mann&;index=audio&;protocol=all&;start=31
.
Click "Download with SMA." Those files are
stored on someone's Windows SMB shares!
Now... I dig around and I find this link: http://scour.net/General/Misc/Add_Or_Remove_Site.phtml
from which you can opt out--scroll down to "Remove my SMB server from
Scour." Resist the temptation to click that link--I just opted out by
clicking on that link. We'll see if I really opted in. Fortuntely, I've
got a firewall that tracks this junk in addition to denying. We'll see if
I in actuality opted in to something. (You'd better believe my Linux
gateway has no logical connection to the rest of my LAN now! No, world,
you can't have my Leonard Cohen MP3s!)
I found at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~dranch/LINUX/TrinityOS.wri
an accusation (find it by clicking the link, then search for scour.net
with your browser's search function) that scour.net may not be exclusively
an opt-in type site. They may go looking for you.
This has to be the most pathetic excuse for a
commercial enterprise that I've seen yet. We're gonna go find every open
Port 137, 138 and 139, hunt down their MP3s and their dirty pictures, then
link to them, and profit from using their bandwidth.
-30-
Do you two share my opinion that this could be a
major, major problem? Remember, any college student who plugs a Windows
box into a LAN and turns on file sharing is wide open to this--and many
people set up passwordless accounts. It's legal for me to encode my CD
collection, but if I inadvertently share it with the world because these
bozos found my unsecured PC, am I liable? Tough question.
Now, even if scour.net isn't hunting people down,
they're encouraging people to open their computers up to the world and
advertise that fact, which is very, very bad.
Care to comment?
Thanks.
Dave Farquhar www.access2k1.net/users/farquhar
I will try to look into this after breakfast. Meanwhile, there it is...
Dear Dr. Pournelle;
Congratulations on providing yet another shaft of the cool light of
American reason for us here in England by providing your SSX concept in a
medium I've finally been able to easily access and read. Hurrah! I haven't
read much of your "speculative fact-tion" (As I could call it)
for years, but the first time I did it was from a book of yours called
"A Step Farther Out", that featured a similar piece on Delta-V
calculations to that of some of the stuff in the SSX document. It goes a
little further than that as I can say with all confidence that it's a good
worked example like the SSX document that is responsible for "Getting
Me Back Into Math", after years of high-school instilled disgust with
the subject. Thanks for providing something that is a good context for us
novices to be able to read through!
One good turn deserves another however, so I'm sure
you won't mind yet another load of useless stuff to look through like the
"Nightmares In Dating" page and the "Overclocked +200MHz
486SX in the freezer" page.
First up I've found an interesting NASA side project
(In house, it seems...) in the form of the Pulse Tube Cryogenic Cooling
system at NASA Ames: http://ranier.oact.hq.nasa.gov/Sensors_page/Cryo/CryoPT/CryoPTHist.html
This system seems to be even better than a
conventional Stirling Cycle unit as it apparently has no moving parts at
all. The reciprocating piston and cylinder compressors are apparently the
first thing that would be replaced in a scaled-up version (Presumably with
some kind of jet-engine with bypass-fan APU) as one of the key functions
of the "Regenerator" unit that having emailed an expert, is that
it contains a mesh-matrix for smoothing out the vibrations in the gas
caused by the reciprocating action, that seems to be perfect for
space-applications as it has no moving parts other than the engine and in
itself is completely vibration free.
Another website is PATProjects inc. (www.patprojects.org)
who are an aerospace historian's group who have constructed a sensational
history of the testing of dynamic lifting bodies at Edwards AFB in the
60's-70's, that I'm sure your readers will love as it includes the history
and status of the only Pontiac Hot Rod ever built with NASA money.
A final one is a page whose address I've lost I'm
afraid, but was absolutely superb as it detailed a Liquid Ethylene fuelled
rocket idea, which I thought you could dobutless perhaps add into the
"Public roadmap of investigated routes into Low Earth Orbit",
that this industry needs to attract private investors. Ethylene according
to this text has a theoretical Isp of some 366.9 seconds which according
to something else I'd read you can convert into a Km/Second exhaust
velocity by multiplying the Isp by 0.0098, coverting that in turn into
about 11796 feet per second. (I'm using your inculcated maths skills here!
See, the air crackles with raw intellectual power!)
It didn't seem all that impressive until you start
thinking about your ideas for operating "Spaceplanes", in the
sense of them running just like "Airplanes." Hydrogen is
powerful but awkward as everyone points out, and the small bit that I've
read of Bob Zubrin's book "The Case For Mars" talks of using
Methane as it is the most easy to create, cheapest to store fuel for at
least the possibility of economic spaceplanes.
This does seem like a more viable idea, but this
ethylene-page pointed out how owing to it's higher cryogenic density and a
lower surplus-requirement of oxygen, the entire Ethylene rocket could be
built smaller and more compactly for an equivalent level of operational
capability. Also it's cryogenic storage temperatures are lower, all
contributing to the money saved even without the use of a Pulse-Tube
Refrigerator!
Just a thought. - Could it merit an article? I'm
studying English at university by the way, you can see how with my mind
stuck in the rambling nonsense of 19th century Realists, Dom DeLillo and
Postmodernism that it does good to plant your feet firmly back on the
ground and look up into space every now and then...
Yours Faithfully
Andrew Mooney, Heathrow, West London
P.S. British Airways here at Heathrow is
disappearing into OBLIVION in on a scale and speed not seen since the
disintegration of Pan American under General William Seawell, SAC-Nuclear
Command, Retired due to wanting to continue to work for SAC, a clear mark
of insanity. - This is what us airline economists call getting the
government in to do businessmen's work.
Methane/LOX is likely to be the rocket fuel of
choice for either single stage to orbit or a kind of two-stage to orbit
system. Two stages (both recoverable) has merit, but operational
complexity. The ideal rocket flies to space, drops payload in orbit, and
flies home, refuels, and does it again: with small ground crew.
Jerry:
I'm still trying to understand decision on Gamma Ray
observatory.
* One of 3 gyros failed in December.
* NASA decides in March that its unsafe based on
knowledge that they can control with 2 left but if another fails, they
can't. Bird is 4 years past planned life so failure of a moving part is a
reasonable assumption.
* NASA decides to drop it May 31.
Lets see...
* They should have known before launch that they
couldn't control on just one and had it in procedures that if one failed,
bring it down now before another fails if they are so worried. What made
it any safer or more dangerous between December when they had problem,
March when they announced or end of May when they begin to start dropping?
They seem to be able to use it on two and are thus are taking risk of
another failure for a few months to get all the data they can before
dropping it. Either its dangerous or it isn't.
* Report I saw said if second gyro fails, they lose
control and it will eventually fall in TEN YEARS or so. This means NASA is
admitting they can't count on having anything online within 10 years to
capture it or destroy it safely. Nice to know they think they can build a
big space station but can't clean up the trash within 10 years. A more
cost-effective system would give them a lot more options.
* The Air Force could probably shoot the thing down
before then but that might leave more small pieces in orbit and offend
people. The Russians continue to find money to sink into Mir as their
space station efforts lag. Who knows what they will decide to do?
Meanwhile folks in Florida and Washington seem more
concerned about a 6-year-old Cuban boy....
--Jim
Jerry:
You are correct in the amount of people required for
one SR71 to operate if it was maintained by the Air force. I remember
reading in the book "Skunk Works" (by Ben Rich, Kelly Johnson's
successor) that Lockheed subcontracted several Blackbird operations and
got by with 9 people. If I remember rightly, a certain Air force General
was mighty upset every time Ben Rich mentioned it. It cost less to do it
that way, maintenance problems were fewer and it provided a healthy profit
for Lockheed. My point being, are we SURE that Iridium wasn't run by the
Government? Sheesh. What a waste.
Also, I noticed a link to another "Manor"
Page. I particularly like this format and find it more helpful than most
newsgroups (since you act as a filter and keep out the crud.) Perhaps a
web ring or a links page to other "Manor" type sites that would
contain info and interaction on the specialty of the "Gentleman of
the Manor." Like Moshe Bar does.
Keep up the good work and write some more fiction, I
buy it.... Dance faster!
Marlin Roberts
mroberts@clearwater-research.com
Actually, the Blackbird's 48 people included
technical analysts and payload specialists who kept up the electronic and
optical surveillance equipment. We can almost certainly operate spacecraft
with about 50 people per ship. DC/X had 11 including maintenance technicians
and mechanics.
Jerry,
Please recommend a replacement Windows 95 file
manager for my trusty Norton Navigator, which the pointy-heads at my
office require that I give up as a condition of getting a new Pentium III.
My office file manager needs are simple - just to
synchronize word-processing files daily from my office PC and the network
hard drive which is backed up. I want only files in a single folder, with
all its subfolders, which have changed to be moved from my computer to the
network, with new folders being created as necessary.
I don't want to log a whole disk and move it. I just
want to sychronize one folder and its subfolders on my local hard drive to
a comparable folder/subfolders on a network drive.
The replacement file manager program must be
commercially available here in the US and be Y2K compliant.
My oldest has fallen in love with my dog-eared
copies of _A Step Farther Out_. We did a tour of Pacific Northwest
colleges last August and he took along everything I have by you to read
during our two-week road trip. I gave him a copy of your article on
writing when we got back. Now he wants to write for a career, preferably
military history, science and science-fiction (you and John Barnes being
major influences on him in the latter). He could do it too - his verbal
SAT was 760. Joe and his identical twin brother Leo are far better writers
than I was at their age.
What I found interesting, though, was how _A Step
Farther Out_ absolutely ignited Joe's imagination. He is really, really
interested in understanding how technology will affect life in the future.
We had a great time discussing the possibility of his grandchildren
becoming immortal during vacation.
It's fun observing the effect old friends have on my
children.
Thomas Holsinger <tomholsinger@hotmail.com>
Drag'n'file from Canyon
will do what you want, I think. I use Norton Windows Commander still,
but it doesn't understand some right-click stuff in the new windows for
launching files. I think Canyon has what you need.
I keep hoping to get Step Farther Our back in
print.
You have a terrific site!
Thanks for all the thought provoking discourse, and the helpful tips and
advice you give. I have to have my "fix" of your site about the
same as my "Rush" fix.
I read the very interesting article about the new
germ theory. On the surface it made a lot of sense. The problem that I had
with it is that it assumes that Darwin was right. "As far as Ewald is
concerned, Darwin's legacy is the most interesting thing on the planet.
The appeal of evolutionary theory is that it is a grand unifying
principle, linking all organisms, from protozoa to Presidents, and yet its
essence is simple and transparent. "Darwin only had a couple of basic
tenets," Ewald observed recently in his office. "You have
heritable variation, and you've got differences in survival and
reproduction among the variants. "That's the beauty of it. It has to
be true -- it's like arithmetic." It makes assumptions and great
leaps of faith without any real proof of evolution. The next paragraph
talks about "These Darwinian laws ...". I guess I missed the
article about Darwin's theory being proved and upgraded to a Law.
Regards Leroy Ortiz
I suppose it is flattering to be compared to the
very popular Rush, but I am not sure what he says lately. I only listen to
him when I am in a car in the mornings and that is not very often. Anyway,
thanks.
Regarding evolution, there seems to be little to
no question about micro-evolution, which is what Cochran assumes. Macro
evolution or the Origin of Species is a bit more controversial, at least
in its extreme form as pretty well asserted by The Blind Watchmaker. There
are some mathematical problems with macro-evolution:
some species to get from one to another must have passed through
intermediate forms that do not seem very viable. In any event one may
postulate that conditions were just right for those intermediate forms to
have thrived for the time it took to get from one (surviving or found in
fossil form) form to another, then those intermediates vanished along with
the conditions that made them viable.
This is certainly plausible, but it is as much an
Act of Faith as any religions statement that says there must have been
Divine Intervention in the process. After all, the Divine Intervention
people have some science on their side too: Schlieman and Schwann, omnia
cellula e cellula, etc. Every farmer can tell you about micro evolution,
and it is not hard to postulate "survival of the fittest" which
is what Cochran is counting on.
Note that I don't say macro evolution is
impossible, or has been proven right or wrong, or whether or not I
"believe" in it; nor do I find it incompatible with revealed
religion. St. Augustine himself speculated that God might have created the
universe in "germinal causes" and allowed things to work out
from there; religion only requires that you believe God does intervene in
the affairs of nature through miracles, not that He does so in the
ordinary course of events. A miracle is by definition NOT part of
the natural order but in direct contravention of it. Miracles are also
rare, and again by definition beyond the scope of science, which looks for
repeatable experiments.
I don't find it takes any leap of faith at all to
accept micro evolution. And see below.
Note: Sir Fred Hoyle has
several works on the statistical probabilities of macro evolution. Of
course my friend Adrian Berry says "Sir Fred is off his head, don't
you agree?" I don't have to say: I have not myself been satisfied
that all of Hoyle's questions have been answered.
TOP
|
Virus Warning
