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Slashdot | GNU Carnivore With Perl Data Lookup
by Jim Choate 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/26/224248.shtml -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [9fans] What makes Plan 9 unique? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 20:03:13 -0500 (CDT) From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)ssz.com> Reply-To: hangar18(a)ssz.com To: hangar18(a)einstein.ssz.com Subject: Hangar 18: Re: [9fans] What makes Plan 9 unique? (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 07:56:49 -0400 From: Russ Cox <rsc(a)plan9.bell-labs.com> Reply-To: 9fans(a)cse.psu.edu To: 9fans(a)cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] What makes Plan 9 unique? http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~rsc/plan9.html Why Plan 9? Why Plan 9 indeed. Isn't Plan 9 just another Unix clone? Who cares? First, Plan 9 presents a consistent and easy to use interface. Once you've settled in, there are very few surprises here, whereas Windows still surprises me once in a while (though, to its credit, not as much as older versions did). After I switched to Linux from Windows 3.1, I noticed all manner of inconsistent behavior in Windows 3.1 that Linux did not have. Switching to Plan 9 from Linux highlighted just as much in Linux. One reason Plan 9 can do this is that the Plan 9 group has had the luxury of having an entire system, so problems can be fixed and features added where they belong, rather than where they can be. For example, there is no tty driver in the kernel. The window system handles the nuances of terminal input. If Plan 9 were just a really clean Unix clone, it might be worth using, or it might not. The neat things start happening with user-level file servers and per-process namespace. Recall that in Unix, /dev/tty refers to the current window's output device, and means different things to different processes. This is a special hack enabled by the kernel for a single file. Plan 9 provides full-blown per-process namespaces. Thus, in Plan 9 /dev/cons also refers to the current window's output device, and means different things to different processes, but the window system (or telnet daemon, or ssh daemon, or whoever) arranges this, and does the same for /dev/mouse, /dev/text (the contents of the current window), etc. Since pieces of file tree can be provided by user-level servers the kernel need not know about things like DOS's FAT file system or Linux's EXT2 file system or NFS, etc. Instead, user-level servers provide this functionality when desired. In Plan 9, even FTP is provided as a file server: you run ftpfs and the files on the server appear in /n/ftp. We need not stop at physical file systems, though. Other file servers synthesize files that represent other resources. For example, upas/fs presents your mail box as a file tree at /mail/fs/mbox. This models the recursive structure of MIME messages especially well. As another example, cdfs presents an audio or data CD as a file system, one file per track. If it's a writable CD, copying new files into the /mnt/cd/wa or /mnt/cd/wd directories creates new audio or data tracks. Want to fixate the CD as audio or data? Remove one of the directories. Finally, Plan 9 fits well with a networked environment. Since files or directory trees can be imported from other machines, and all resources are files or directory trees, it's easy to share resources. Want to use a different machine's sound card? Import its /dev/audio. Want to debug processes that run on another machine? Import its /proc. Want to use a network interface on another machine? Import its /net. And so on.

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Re: Clubbing in Fortress Amerika (fwd)
by Yeoh Yiu 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

Meyer Wolfsheim <wolf(a)priori.net> writes: > A friend of mine recently informed me that he has access to a mag-strip > reader, and scanned several drivers' licenses (as well as Safeway cards > and other random credit-card like items.) > > Most contained the information displayed on the front of the card, and/or > some seemingly random numbers (most likely, the ID numbers.) > > California DL's have nothing interesting stored in that magstrip that > isn't on the front of the card. And no, the signature isn't reflected in > the magstrip. They might store a long number and without a dictionary you don't know what it means. It's unlikely that older cards would use and XMLish annoted data. eg does 197202281800602 mean it belongs to a 180# 6'2" person born on Feb 28, 1972 ? How could you tell ? YY

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[psychohistory] A Terrorist's Nursery (fwd)
by Jim Choate 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 10:18:52 +0300 From: "[iso-8859-7] �� " <granazis(a)otenet.gr> Reply-To: psychohistory(a)yahoogroups.com To: psychohistory(a)yahoogroups.com Subject: [psychohistory] A Terrorist's Nursery Hi, The following article appeared in the INDEPENDET and, in IMO, presends well the Psychohistorical case of the 'making of terrorists'. I make some comments at the bottom of the message. [ Robert Fisk: As the refugees crowd the borders, we'll be blaming someone else 'It is palpably evident that they are not fleeing the Taliban but our bombs and missiles' 23 October 2001 Mullah Mohammed Omar's 10-year-old son is dead. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city's broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and "Emir of the Faithful", but the boy - apparently travelling in Omar's car when it was attacked by US aircraft - died of his wounds. No regrets, of course. Back in 1985, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets, of course. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizbollah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi's 10-year-old. No regrets, of course. Whether these children deserved their deaths, be sure that their fathers - in our eyes - were to blame. Live by the sword, die by the sword - and that goes for the kids too. Back in 1991, The Independent revealed that American Gulf War military targets included "secure" bunkers in which members of Saddam Hussein's family - or the families of his henchmen - were believed to be hiding. That's how the Americans managed to slaughter well over 300 people in an air raid shelter at Amariya in Baghdad. No Saddam kids, just civilians. Too bad. I wonder - now that President George Bush has given permission to the CIA to murder Osama bin Laden - if the same policy applies today? And so the casualties begin to mount. From Kandahar come ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. The Taliban - and here the Americans must breathe a collective sigh of relief - refuse to allow Western journalists to enter the country to verify these reports. So when a few television crews were able to find 18 fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad just over a week ago, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could ridicule the deaths as "ridiculous". But not, I suspect, for much longer. For if each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom have a familiar trade mark - the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of "command and control centres", radar capabilities - each has an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. In 1999, Nato claimed it was waging war to put Kosovo Albanian refugees back in their homes - even though most of the refugees were still in their homes when the war began. Our bombing of Serbia led directly to their dispossession. We bear a heavy burden of responsibility for their suffering - since the Serbs had told us what they would do if Nato opened hostilities - although the ultimate blame for their "ethnic cleansing'' clearly belonged to Slobodan Milosevic. But Nato's escape clause won't work this time round. For as the Afghan refugees turn up in their thousands at the border, it is palpably evident that they are fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The Taliban is not ethnically cleansing its own Pashtun population. The refugees speak vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fall on their cities. These people are terrified of our "war on terror'', victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre on 11 September. So where do we stop? It's an important question because, once the winter storms breeze down the mountain gorges of Afghanistan, a tragedy is likely to commence, one which no spin doctor or propaganda expert will be able to divert. We'll say that the thousands about to die or who are dying of starvation and cold are victims of the Taliban's intransigence or the Taliban's support for "terrorism" or the Taliban's propensity to steal humanitarian supplies. I have to admit - having been weaned on Israel's promiscuous use of the word "terror" every time a Palestinian throws a stone at his occupiers - that I find the very word "terrorism" increasingly mendacious as well as racist. Of course - despite the slavish use of the phrase "war on terrorism" on the BBC and CNN - it is nothing of the kind. We are not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or Eta killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish KDP guerrillas. Indeed, the US has spent a lot of time supporting terrorists in Latin America - the Contras spring to mind - not to mention the rabble we are now bombing in Afghanistan. This is, as I've said before, a war on America's enemies. Increasingly, as the date of 11 September acquires iconic status, we are retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we're not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible. The figure of 6,000 remains as awesome as it did in the days that followed. But what happens when the deaths for which we are responsible begin to approach the same figure? Refugees have been telling me on the Pakistan border that the death toll from our bombings in Afghanistan is in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds. Once the UN agencies give us details of the starving and the destitute who are dying in their flight from our bombs, it won't take long to reach 6,000. Will that be enough? Will 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they have nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? If we think we know what our aims are in this fraudulent "war against terror", have we any idea of proportion? Sure, we'll blame the Taliban for future tragedies. Just as we've been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban-drug linkage. And all we have to do to believe this is to forget the UN Drug Control Programme's announcement last week that opium production in Afghanistan has fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar's prohibition in Taliban-controlled areas. Most of Afghanistan's current opium production comes - you've guessed it - from our friends in the Northern Alliance. This particular war is, as Mr Bush said, going to be "unlike any other" - but not in quite the way he thinks. It's not going to lead to justice. Or freedom. It's likely to culminate in deaths that will diminish in magnitude even the crime against humanity on 11 September. Do we have any plans for this? Can we turn the falsity of a "war against terror" into a war against famine and starvation and death, even at the cost of postponing our day of reckoning with Osama bin Laden? ] Historicaly reprisals of a 10-fold of a 100-fold magnitude never worked in the favore of those commiting them. Making a 'little' New York every day in Afganistan, or anyware for that matter, just guarantees the creation of more willing to die terrorists. Of course 'our' governments already know this, thus an issue arrises: What's in the long term agenda, if anything? The rhetiric and the 'official' reasons given, ie. hunting down terrorists, retaliation to the patrons of the Sept 11th events, punishing the guilty have only a short term value, even without the cosideration of 'collateral damage', and will ultimately lead to the creation of more willing to die terrorists. (Due to a mechanism I call the "remaining leaven" - No matter the terrorists' death toll even a - statisticaly expected - tiny bit of terrorist "yeast" will produce the nesecary "leaven" that will fuel their future moves. So, I speculate that there might be something more in it all... Regards Christos Konstas ------------------------ Yahoo! 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RE: Where The Torture Never Stops...
by Faustine 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sandy wrote: > I've been donating books to a local women's > prison for awhile: Ayn Rand, history books, > old textbooks, etc. can go a long, long way. >>A friend of mine just got out of federal prison. I'll ask her what the >>situation is. Good--any kinds of things in particular that stick out as missing? The administrators at the place I talked to (or the people who ended up taking my call after it got passed around, at any rate) were pretty vague and apathetic. The only thing I really got a clear sense of was that there weren't too many people offering to make donations! ~F. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO9ne6/g5Tuca7bfvEQJi8gCeJcHrphKwWKcojxG9wLBBR0pP984AoLz3 /cEQQMomMtQ7wHkgugybemsj =PXQ3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Mag Card Readers
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

www.digkey.com - search for "magnetic reader"

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Re: Where The Torture Never Stops...
by Faustine 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 measl wrote: >If you want to "make a difference", why not spend those dollars at >a prison rights organization? Because my 10 bucks can either buy some bloated nonprofiteer a fraction of an expense account lunch, or it can get 20 hardcover books-worth (100 10-cent paperbacks) of information in the hands of people who are hungry for it, instantly. Actually, I've spent quite a bit of time working for various nonprofit pro-freedom "causes"-- the amount of sheer waste and fruitless blathering would make you sick too. If you can see something to do that's more direct and immediate, why not go for it when it hardly costs you anything? It's certainly not enough, but at least it's something real. ~F. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO9nXVPg5Tuca7bfvEQKAVwCbBPsokDacz4cnBqvdpOqsQ9Lcb6sAoP3O Vy1VuuGC+rCjA2Qz2e1mHf5n =lunn -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: Where The Torture Never Stops...
by Faustine 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 George wrote: On 26 Oct 2001, at 15:51, Faustine wrote: > I'll never know if I made a difference, but it's the idea that counts. > > > ~Faustine. > >That's an incredibly fucked-up thing to say, >even for you. >George Context is your friend: "I'll never know if my sending books made a difference to the people in the prison I sent books to, but the idea of doing what I can to help likeminded people is what matters to me." I'll bet no one else here lacked the rudimentary reading comprehension skills required to understand that. ~F. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO9nNxfg5Tuca7bfvEQJB9gCgnH/6wjI2DxIlSEvV9dp6mJGcNPwAoMCv jVg3KxIAKAkfr3F1kaTksdpG =SgDM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: Where The Torture Never Stops...
by Faustine 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sandy wrote: > Also, jail/prison libraries are >woefully lacking in the sort of books you REALLY need. Yep. So why not do a little something about it? I've been donating books to a local women's prison for awhile: Ayn Rand, history books, old textbooks, etc. can go a long, long way. Go to the local library sale and load up on the fifty cent hardbacks, ten cent classic paperbacks--such a small investment when you think of the good that might come of it. Magazine subscriptions are probably worth looking into, too. I was meaning to do that myself, thanks for the reminder. Of course "what you REALLY need" is in the eye of the beholder, but if more literate, concerned people at least made an effort to get what THEY would want to read into the prisons,it could only be a good thing. I'll never know if I made a difference, but it's the idea that counts. ~Faustine. *** All the resources of a superpower cannot isolate a man who hears the voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul. - --Anatoly B Shcharansky -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO9m+r/g5Tuca7bfvEQIHdgCfa7ne28nKgzEMPY/RBJZxOwXN7lwAoOtC Bk/masgLZJWSben7iIoJLQMx =iee8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Where The Torture Never Stops...
by keyser-soze＠hushmail.com 26 Oct '01

26 Oct '01

Many on this list should consider themselves candidates for free speech persecution. I plan to treat my situation as would a person facing a "three-strikes" incarceration for a petty crime and suggest you all do the same. If LEs should up for questioning I will treat them as the "security operatives" from Tim's quote of Alexander Solzhenitzyn's, "Gulag Archipelago." At 03:41 PM 10/26/2001 -0400, Matthew Gaylor wrote: At 1:36 PM -0400 10/26/01, Duncan Frissell wrote: Besides, "Prison is not punishment to the literate." DCF ---- Of course you may have to read standing up until you get used to it. Regards, Matt- Rape used as control in U.S. prisons <<http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/091401/091401l.htm> By NEVE GORDON National Catholic Reporter, September 14, 2001 Many prisoners are targeted for sexual exploitation the minute they enter a penal facility; their age, looks, sexual preference and other characteristics mark them as candidates for maltreatment. In a new groundbreaking report, Human Rights Watch documents the widespread prisoner-on-prisoner rape in U.S. men's prisons. The rights group accuses state authorities of not taking measures to prevent and punish rape and, in many cases, for allowing this cruel form of abuse to persist.

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