December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Word Processors and GUIs (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii(a)invweb.net> > Date: Tue, 30 Dec 97 03:40:31 -0600 > Subject: Re: Word Processors and GUIs > While some standardization is good it is not the be all to end all. While > standardization of cut, paste, open, close, print makes perfect sense most > commands do not fall into this catagory. Perhaps not, but 90% of what people *do* does fall into those operations. Ever hear of macro's? Ever use a Sun where the menu pull-down pops up under the pointer when you click a button? Both of these will increase the use of a GUI to way more than a straight CLI interface (and I type at nearly 80 words a minute with a slightly crippled L. hand). I suggest you get a GUI macro utility and something like PopUpMenu on the Amiga that makes the menu's appear both at the command bar *and* under the mouse. Using this technique I can execute a file save via GUI in about 1/3 the time I can in the CLI. > The inherent benefit of this > standardization decrease the more specialized an application becomes. With > a program like Autocad or MathCad or even Lotus 1-2-3 where one has a > steep learning curve of specialized commands the benefits of standardized > basic commands boarders on insignificant. You are confusing learning the commands with learning the 'model' that the program impliments. The learning curve comes from the user learning the model the programmer(s) had in their head(s) while writing the program and learning to solve problems with the black box functions the programmer/developer uses to solve those problems. > Once we get past the standardization issue to the one of textmode vs GUI > (which was the topic of my original post) I doubt that one can make the > case that a draftsman running a graphics program under a textmode OS is > less efficient as his counterpart who is saddled with a bloated GUI OS. In I use both POVRay as well as LightWave, one text and one GUI. The GUI program is *much* easier to develop 3d renderings in because things like boundary violations, control path anomolies, and such are *much* easier to see and deal with in the GUI interface. I also use Scientific Notebook, I can't imagine doing the same sort of things I do with that GUI text-processor with say a textual Postscript or Tex program. Just try making a nice nifty graphical output using Postscript (say) using a GUI and a editor working in Postscript directly. > fact if both are operating on the same hardware I would venture a guess > that the textmode user will be more efficient by the simple fact that his > resources are not being consumed by the GUI. This assumption is *very* dependant upon the model of the software. It depends upon whether the process takes the command sequence and executes it in parallel or in series with the command entry sequence. In other words, if the program renders while you are entering new commands will obviously be much slower than a program that takes the sequence of commands in toto and *then* executes them. The efficiency to a large part depends upon the model of the software, not the particular command and control interface. If you expect to execute processes in parallel (ie edit & execute in parallel) then a GUI is much quicker (not taking into account the added overhead of the GUI, which in and of itself is not a condemnation of the GUI but rather the poor processors we have to run them on) because you can see you errors as they occur and it keeps them from propogating through the design or use process. If sequential is your goal then it really doesn't matter because in both cases (ie GUI v CLI) becuase while it's executing your commands you can't do anything anyway. Of course, these models *only* apply if we are single-tasking programs. If we allow multi-tasking then GUI wins hands down because graphical information content is *much* higher than CLI in every case. This allows us to display more information on a GUI than a CLI. Personaly, this is a non-argument from the technical perspective. It is more indicative of the mental flexibility of the holders of the various positions. I wouldn't use an OS that wouldn't let me do both at the same time (and I don't) and use them as I need them. > The same case can be made for the accounting staff using spreadsheets or > the secretaries typing letters. I'll take an accounting department using > Lotus 1-2-3 3.x up against a similar group running MS Office and Win95/NT > any day of the week. I'll get the same work done faster and *cheaper*. Excuse me but the user interface of your example, 123, *has* GUI elements even in a text mode display. > This brings up another issue of decreased performance with the GUI's. It > is the notion that every document must be type-set. I can't even start to > imagine the millions of man hours wasted in the office because every > insignificant memo, report, and letter has to be formatted "just right" This is a condemnation of human nature, not GUI's. I use a plain old text editor when I'm making simple edits. A perfect example is from work where we recently have taken on a group of office 'helpers' to take care of the more mundane office needs. They discovered they could add graphics and attachments to their email and ever since we have suffered from the abuse, emails with a dozen attachments of pretty pictures that I have to specificaly work through. Considering I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 emails a day that can be a real time sink (thank god for procmail!). But whattcha gonna do, shoot 'em? > Another contention I have with the GUI's is the use of icons. One of the > most misused and time wasting "features" of the GUI's. It makes absolutely > no sense for someone who is working on the keyboard to stop what they are > doing, go over to the mouse, and then point and click to execute a > command. Then quit using the mouse on the wrong damn side of the keyboard. If you're right handed the mouse goes on the left, not the right. That way you don't have to quit typing to deal with the GUI. It takes a couple of days to over come the 'handedness' that is built into our brain, but the long term benefit is that your wrist load goes *way* down on the right *and* your left hand fine motor control improves significantly. If you happen to be left handed then you need a reversed keyboard with the return key and such on the L. and the mouse on the right. Try it for 3 days - you'll like it. > Well I guess I will rap this up with a final note. With the GUI OS's (and > the applications that run on them) as size and complexity increases > performance and reliability decreases. Without a doubt I can get more work > done on cheaper hardware running *nix or os/2 using only text mode > applications than I can running a GUI with it's associated bloated > applications. That's interesting, I use Linux (x86 & PPC) , WinNT, AmigaDos, AIX, & Solaris at home on my personal machines (11 of them not counting the TI explorer, , Atari 800, SX-64 and C-128) and don't find a significant difference in reliability. They all stay up for weeks and weeks. OS/2 is a sucky os, it's unstable and calling it reliable is a joke. It's user interface is inconsistent, it's task swapper is weird and stalls at strange times for no apparent reason, etc., etc. Note that this is a personal opinion and not a function of my working for IBM and being required to use OS/2 everyday (I don't like that requirement either). It is a function of my using OS/2 since the 1.0 days. It's interesting to note that IBM is moving OS/2 from the general OS area to specialized applications... ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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You are all a bunch of cypherpunks (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 03:39:05 -0500 > From: David Miller <dm0(a)avana.net> > Subject: You are all a bunch of cypherpunks > 2) I want to know anyone who knows anything about full-duplex soundcard > programming under Linux. Internet Telephony is fast opon us, do you > want > to subscribe or design? This is duplex Nautilus II. Get in gear. O'Reilly has a new book out for Linux relating to writing device drivers. You also want a copy of their Linux multimedia book. I don't have the device driver book (it hasn't come in yet), but: Linux Multimedia Guide Jeff Tranter ISBN 1-56592-219-0 $32.95 You might also want to peruse: Beginning Linux Programming N. Matthew & R. Stones ISBN 1-874416-68-0 $36.95 Inside Linux Randolph Bentson ISBN 0-916151-89-1 (mine was $22.00, no price shown) Linux Programming P. Volkerding, E. Foster-Johnson, K. Reichard ISBN 1-55828-507-5 $39.95 Linux Kernel Internals M. Beck, H. Bohme, M. Dziadzka, U. Kunitz, R. Magnus, D. Verworner ISBN 0-201-87741-4 (mine was $40.75, no price shown, it's an import from Germany) Also: The Design of the Unix Operating System M.J. Bach ISBN 0-13-201799-7 (no price on book, this is the book Linus used to design the kernel) and finaly: Interprocess Communications in Unix: The nooks & crannies J.S. Gray ISBN 0-13-186891-8 (no price on book, $40?) Hope that helps. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Strange Way To Leak Inofrmation: Contents Of Discovery Channel Show On Non-Lethals (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From stugreen(a)bga.com Tue Dec 30 02:12:37 1997 Sender: root(a)coney.lsd-labs.com Message-ID: <34A8A83D.FBFEDD2F(a)bga.com> Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 01:52:29 -0600 From: Stu Green <stugreen(a)bga.com> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.33 i586) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: ravage(a)ssz.com Subject: Strange Way To Leak Inofrmation: Contents Of Discovery Channel Show On Non-Lethals Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jim, I left the tube on Discovery while testing some software tonight. In the background I heard something about attacking computers so I started paying attention and to my warped mind the Fed was trying to leak some dis-information (or advertise some dirty tricks already pulled). In the hype there were some interesting things mentions that folks ought be aware of. They gave a 'man in the middle' scenario played out in full on the screen between a "computer security expert" and a group of transactions between a bank in acountry "plagued with drug production and cartels" and a bank in Switzerland. The third world bank and the Swiss bank were using PGP for encryption. The narrator dumped an aside - the government was supplying the "computer security expert" with "data gathered over time", which consisted of intercepts of the initial text messages passing the PGP keys back and forth (PGP 2.4 flashed on one of the screens, so we ain't talking about yesterday here). This amounts to an acknowledgement that one of the three-letter groups is playing man-in-the -middle already and on a grand scale (not that this is new news, but its nice having the speculation authenticated, even if in a manner that leaves the conclusion to the viewer's deductive processes). The last computer related portion involved the FBI planting trojan horses through anti-virus software. they flash a couple of screens - one was definately Norton Anit-virus for 95 and the other recognizible one was M$AV. I think the one I couldn't pin is Dr. Solomon's, but it could easily be McAfee. Doesn't matter - if one is popped, they all are. Back in June I built a K6 for David that had some real pecularities - the sound card went into outer space and set it's interupt to 14 and wouldn't let go. When I started to try to figure out what was going on I figured that something wrote to the bios, cause the symptoms were so werid. So I hacked a little thing up to go in and rewrite the bios'sNVRAM. It worked witht the motherboard's jumpers set to allow bios flashing and failed when the pins were set to block flashing. But when I use debug in a very dirty program I was able to jack with the wrteable ram, even with flashing diaabled, matter of fact it was so damned simple I wrote the motherboard manufacturer to show how it was broken. If ASUS is prone to this kind of dumb attack, then I figure other boards are probably more vulnerable and the government's got a pile of exploits to dick with any machine (running windows, MacOS or NT) with their trojan horses and bios-level attacks. I could have sworn that the stuff I saw on David's motherboard came strait from Bulgaria. It looked like one of the best hacks I ever saw - everytime I changed values in the bios and rebooted into 95, those values were reset to the original values right after post ran memory checking. But if I booted into Linux it did not effect anything (it's nice having all the system specific onformation in /proc, without having to write a program to extract it from kmem). So, from what I can conclude, there maybe reason to look over the shoulder a little more diligently cause somebody's out there fucking around. In that vain, I bagged some fool trying to start a mail flood from a system he broke into ( a customer of mine that knew he had been hacked). It kind of blew my mind, here this guy spent hours cracking around, found his way into the mail server (which was an NT machine) just to blast dumb & lame porno all over the place. (Happened to me in March - I left SATAN running at work over a weekend and as soon as I got on the windows box in my office a flood of shit started going out to the last person I mailed, which luckily was Jep, it was the samething lame porn and a ton of it, but I left my ass wide opened by leaving SATAN's fat neon sign on and not isolating the work station I was running SATAN on from my other machine, at least I isolated myself from the rest of Arrowsmith's network (which was the worst setup I've ever seen - but that's another story)). Hope Reef didn't get too traumatized by the Federales. Maybe you could sue the government for the stress induction as Reef's guardian?? Catch you soon and if not before - Happy New Years Regards, Stu

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China clamps down on Internet [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > CHINA CLAMPS NEW CONTROLS ON INTERNET > > Web posted at: 3:13 a.m. EST (0813 GMT) > > BEIJING (Reuters) -- China clamped sweeping new controls on the > Internet on Tuesday, warning that the network was being used to leak > state secrets and to spread "harmful information." > > Regulations unveiled by Zhu Entao, Assistant Minister for Public > Security, cover a wide range of crimes, including leaking state > secrets, political subversion and spreading pornography and > violence. > > The rules are also designed to protect against computer hacking, > viruses and other computer-related crime. > > They call for unspecified "criminal punishments" and fines of up to > 15,000 yuan ($1,800) for Internet providers and users who violate > the rules -- both individuals and business organisations. [text deleted] > The regulations explicitly cover information circulating from Hong > Kong, Macau and Taiwan. [text deleted]

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The Anonymizer and IRC
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Anonymizer does in fact only provide restricted access by http and NO IRC. For instance, the Anonymizer blocks Dejanews, Hotmail and mailto.cgi forms. I could understand that they block sites that explicitly request to be blocked to prevent abuse. But what if I want to make a mailto.cgi or IRC script available by http. Should people be disallowed from accessing this through The Anonymizer even if I do not request it? It should at least be possible to allow access to such scripts for The paid accounts. If they keep logs in case of a U. S. law violation, I see no problem of liability arosing from such access. They have also restricted their shell access for which you pay US $ 7 per moth to IRC. Does that sound more reasonable than blocking the nntp port? Does anyone know other ISPs who provide privacy and do not block abitrarily without _prior request_ from the site in question? A private interest can do anything, but anyway. * * *===================================================================* For subscription info see http://www.efga.org/about/maillist.html

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RSA with 5.x
by amp＠pobox.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know where there is a copy of pgp5x available for ftp that can generate RSA keys? === E-mail: amp(a)pobox.com Date: 12/30/97 Time: 08:56:33 Visit me at http://www.pobox.com/~amp -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) Have you seen http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum ===

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Vulis again
by Information Security 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I tried sending an anonymous test article to comp.org.cauce via the CRACKER > remailer. Sure enough, the Gypsie Jew Zorch forged a cancel for my article: Vulis, you are the only Gypsie Jew around here. Half Romanian Gypsie, half Hungarian Jew. ---guy

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by eureka＠eureka.abc-web.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Congressional pensions increase... [CNN] (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From ravage(a)ssz.com Tue Dec 30 11:23:04 1997 From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)ssz.com> Message-Id: <199712301723.LAA06373(a)einstein.ssz.com> Subject: Congressional pensions increase... [CNN] To: users(a)ssz.com (SSZ User Mail List) Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 11:23:03 -0600 (CST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2267 Forwarded message: > Congressional Pensions Can Be Hefty > > By ANICK JESDANUN > Associated Press Writer > > WASHINGTON (AP) A healthy pension plan that members of Congress > created for themselves will let some retiring lawmakers collect > roughly $100,000 a year for life. > > Although most members are enrolled in the same retirement plans as > other federal employees, lawmakers accrue benefits at a faster rate. > Plus, congressional pensions are adjusted each year for inflation, > setting them apart from most retirement plans in the private sector. > > "It's one of the most outrageous perks congressmen have," said David > Keating, vice president for National Taxpayers Union, a conservative > group that advocates less government spending. > > According to the taxpayers' group, which calculated congressional > pension estimates for retiring lawmakers at the request of The > Associated Press, some lawmakers will be going home with pensions of > about five times the national average. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Govt. employees get pay raise... [CNN] (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From ravage(a)ssz.com Tue Dec 30 11:21:57 1997 From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)ssz.com> Message-Id: <199712301721.LAA06351(a)einstein.ssz.com> Subject: Govt. employees get pay raise... [CNN] To: users(a)ssz.com (SSZ User Mail List) Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 11:21:54 -0600 (CST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2003 Forwarded message: > Federal Workers Ring In New Year With Pay Raise > > [INLINE] > > WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Dec. 30 -- Government workers will enjoy on > average a 2.8 percent increase in their pay checks starting New Year's > day as President Bill Clinton Monday issued an executive order > authorizing the federal pay raise. > > The order grants members of the military a straight 2.8 percent raise. > > > Civilian employees get 2.3 percent, plus a "locality" adjustment that > varies depending on geographic location. White House spokesman Joe > Lockhart said this adjustment averages at 0.5 percent. > > The vice president, federal judges and members of Congress will also > get a 2.3 percent increase in salary, but with no adjustment. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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