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RE: Jewish wholy words..
by Major Variola (ret) 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

Just remember this [C]Hanu[k]ka[h] that the Macabbees were terrorists from the POV of the dominant hegemony... Oh, but the [solstice-coopted 'holiday'] is about someone topping off oil, not about rebellion against domination. Ooops. Nope, no parallels here.

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Got Chips?
by Major Variola (ret) 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

At 10:59 AM 12/1/04 -0800, John Young wrote: >Lying about having an implant is kidnapping and mutilation >protection. If they even think you have a tracking chip, you'll be boxed up in a Faraday cage faster than you can say Jimmy Walker-Lindh. Clothing optional, baby. Got 121.5 Mhz?

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Hawala != Halal
by Major Variola (ret) 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

At 09:07 AM 12/1/04 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote: >On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 21:36, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > >> Halal was deemed a terrorist weapon, and contrary to the treasury's >> policies, game over. > >Hawala Yep, sorry, I've got templegrandin.com on the brain. Only PETA thinks Halal is a terrorist, or at least carnivorous, weapon.

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O'Reilly is a terrorist
by Major Variola (ret) 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

At 09:17 AM 12/1/04 -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: > Appearing on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" Monday night My favorite irony-pegging experience of the week was Bill O accusing an Al-Jazeera spokesman of not being fair and balanced. Lets bomb those mofos and blame it on an out-of-date Yugo map.

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RE: Jewish wholy words..
by Tim Benham 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

On Thursday 02 December 2004 10:46, "Tyler Durden" wroye <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> > Subject: RE: Jewish wholy words.. > > No. > > Technically speaking, only the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible, > written by Moses) are technically "scripture"...everything else is > commentary. Doesn't the commentary have equal if not superior status? Sanhedrin 59a I took the trouble to look up. In fact it says that a non-Jew who studies the Torah deserves death. It also says he is a "High Priest" and rounds off with a discussion of which animals one may cut living parts from and eat. Whether googling the rabbinical Law qualifies me for the death penalty is unclear. cheers, Tim

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Straighten Up and Fly Right
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110194850394688792,00.html> The Wall Street Journal December 2, 2004 COMMENTARY Straighten Up and Fly Right By HEATHER MAC DONALD December 2, 2004; Page A12 One of the highest priorities for whoever succeeds Tom Ridge at Homeland Security should be to take political correctness and a fear of litigation out of national security decisions. From immigration enforcement to intelligence gathering, government officials continue to compromise safety in order to avoid accusations of "racial profiling" -- and in order to avoid publicly acknowledging what the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the enemy is "Islamist terrorism." This blind antidiscrimination reflex is all the more worrying since radical Islam continues to seek adherents and plan attacks in the U.S. The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Since the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation. Transportation's action against American Airlines was typical. In the last four months of 2001, American carried 23 million passengers and asked 10 of them not to board because they raised security concerns that could not be resolved in time for departure. For those 10 interventions (and an 11th in 2002), DOT declared American Airlines a civil-rights pariah, whose discriminatory conduct would "result in irreparable harm to the public" if not stopped. On its face, the government's charge that American engaged in discriminatory conduct was absurd, given how few passenger removals occurred. But the racism allegation looks all the more unreasonable when put in the context of the government's own actions. Three times between 9/11 and the end of 2001, public officials warned of an imminent terror attack. Transportation officials urged the airlines to be especially vigilant. In such an environment, pilots would have been derelict not to resolve security questions in favor of caution. Somehow, DOT lawyers failed to include in their complaint one further passenger whom American asked not to board in 2001. On Dec. 22, airline personnel in Paris kept Richard Reid off a flight to Miami. The next day, French authorities insisted that he be cleared to board. During the flight, Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, but a stewardess and passengers foiled him. Had he been kept from flying on both days, he too might have ended up on the government's roster of discrimination victims. Jehad Alshrafi is typical of those who were included in the suit against American. On Nov. 3, 2001, this Jordanian-American was scheduled to fly out of Boston's Logan Airport (from which two of the hijacked planes -- including American Flight 11 -- departed on 9/11). A federal air marshal told the pilot that Alshrafi's name resembled one on a terror-watch list -- and that he had been acting suspiciously, had created a disturbance at the gate, and posed unresolved security issues. The pilot denied him boarding. Alshrafi was later cleared and given first-class passage on another flight. According to DOT, the only reason American initially denied Alshrafi passage was because of his "race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry." Never mind that there were at least five other passengers of Arab descent on his original flight, none of whom had been given additional screening or kept from flying. In fact, on virtually every flight on which the government claims that American acted out of racial animus, other passengers of apparent Middle Eastern ancestry flew undisturbed. If DOT believes that an air marshal's warnings about a passenger's name and suspicious behavior are insufficient grounds for keeping him off a flight, it is hard to imagine circumstances that would justify a security hold in the department's view -- short of someone's declaring his intention to blow up a plane. Given the information presented to the pilot, the only conceivable reason to have allowed Alshrafi to board would have been fear of a lawsuit. And litigation phobia is precisely the mind-set that DOT is hoping to cultivate in flight personnel: 10 days after 9/11, the department started rolling out "guidance" documents on nondiscrimination. While heavy on platitudes about protecting civil rights, they are useless in advising airlines how to avoid the government's wrath. The closest the DOT gets to providing airlines a concrete rule for avoiding litigation is a "but-for" test: "Ask yourself," advise the guidelines, "But for this person's perceived race, ethnic heritage or religious orientation, would I have subjected this individual to additional safety or security scrutiny? If the answer is 'no,' then the action may violate civil rights laws." But security decisions are never that clear. A safety officer will consider many factors in calculating someone's riskiness; any one of them could be pulled out as a "but-for" element. As American's record makes clear, it is almost never the case that someone gets additional screening based on his apparent ethnic heritage or national origin alone; behavior and no-fly-list matching are key in the assessment. (In fact, about half the complainants in the government's action were not even Middle Eastern. DOT simply assumes, without evidence, that American scrutinized the men because of the mistaken belief that they were Arabs.) A pilot trying to apply the "but-for" test to his own security judgment will inevitably reduce the test to an easier calculus: "Deny passage to someone who is or could claim to look Muslim only under the most extreme circumstances." In application, the "but-for" test reduces to a "never-ever" rule: Ethnic heritage, religion, or national origin may play no role in evaluating risk. But when the threat at issue is Islamic terrorism, it is reckless to ask officials to disregard the sole ironclad prerequisite for being an Islamic terrorist: Muslim identity or its proxies -- national origin or ethnic heritage. (Muslim identity should be at most only one factor in assessing someone's security risk.) American contested DOT's action, but fighting the government civil-rights complex is futile. In February 2004, the airline, while denying guilt, settled the action for $1.5 million, to be spent on yet more "sensitivity training." American's pilots were outraged. "Pilots felt: 'How dare they second-guess our decision?'" says Denis Breslin, a pilots' union official. Not satisfied with just one scalp, DOT lawyers brought identical suits against United, Delta and Continental. Those carriers also settled, pledging more millions for "sensitivity training" -- money much better spent on security training than on indoctrinating pilots to distrust their own security judgments. And in the government's wake, the private civil-rights bar, led by the ACLU, has brought its own airline discrimination suits. An action against Northwest is seeking government terror-watch lists, Northwest's boarding procedures, and its cabin-training manual. If these materials got loose, they would be gold to terrorists trying to figure out airline-security procedures The first George W. Bush administration tried mightily not to offend the antidiscrimination lobby. It's time to give up that game. From now on, common sense alone should determine security decisions, the only course which can protect all Americans, Muslims and non-Muslim, alike. Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor at City Journal, from whose latest issue this is adapted. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1336 iQA/AwUBQa82qsPxH8jf3ohaEQIUdACfUpskoYRtBoJFcxRyvGJBc+N/zYsAnRsv 25L4TP8GUTrcsLhaajtyYQmd =vS7t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Whatcha Gonna Do?
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 John Ross' "Unintended Consequences" is a classic of the, um, gun culture, :-) and a great read. I have no idea who Mr. Hendrix is. Cheers, RAH - -------- <http://www.john-ross.net/guest_rant.htm> ROSS IN RANGE Guest rant A Post-Election Rant I Wish I'd Written, or A Ross In Range EXTRA From Michael Hendrix By John Ross (Introduction only) and Michael Hendrix (Body of Column) Copyright 2004 by John Ross and Michel Hendrix. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given. Every once in a while someone writes something that makes me think, "Hey, I was about to do a piece like that, except I was doing something else. And he did it better than I would have, anyway." Given my last column about my cousin Jane Smiley, what follows is especially germane. Mike Hendrix's website is http://coldfury.com. It takes a while to find the page that tells you who's doing the writing, but it's there. Mike, if you ever visit St. Louis, the ammo and the avgas are on me.--JR Whatcha Gonna Do? Okay, is anybody but me sick yet of the Left's floundering and flailing about, trying to find any way they possibly can to blame somebody else for their failure to espouse a message remotely palatable to the majority of eligible American voters? Is anybody but me wishing right about now that somebody would clong them upside the head with a shovel and say, "Look, morons, here's the dealB ."? Well, let's try this, then. Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that everything the Left claims to fear about the Bush admin and mainstream red-state America is true. Yep, that's right, you commie bastiches, we're coming for you. It's only a matter of time now until you hear that late-night knock on the door you've been dreading all along. Our jack-booted gendarmerie is going to be working overtime rounding up every non-white and non-rich subject of our fascist regime, and we're going to be baking every last one of you into pies that we'll then refuse to share with the poor and hungry. We'll be baking those pies in coal-fired ovens, and those ovens will be devoid of any sort of exhaust-scrubber whatever, because we want to release all the toxic gases and chemicals we can into the atmosphere. We'll be spiking the rivers with DDT, alar, thalidomide, and whatever other chemical bugaboos we can think of so as to pollute the drinking water, too. We'll cram the landfills (which will be more numerous than ever) with deadly silicone breast implants, and we're going to wipe our asses with copies of the Kyoto Treaty, after which we'll staple the soiled pages to your foreheads. Halliburton will be sending you the bill for that, too; we'll call it "cosmetic surgery" and charge a rate tied to the market price for the harvested, tanned, and cured pelts of starving homeless Americans, whose numbers will be rocketing even higher than those for the aforementioned landfills, which is where said homeless will be forced to live while we hunt them down for sport. We're going to subjugate the entire world through violence and capitalist exploitation. We'll be sending our duped, mindless killerbot soldiers to the remotest corners of the Earth to deny freedom to every little brown person currently enjoying an idyllic, bucolic existence in harmony with unspoiled nature, every racial, religious, and cultural minority who has thus far lived relatively free of the sting of our rapacious lash. We're all going to get rich from it, and we're going to make the poor noble Bob Cratchets and Tiny Tims of the world pay for our sumptuous lives of piggish, rankly self-indulgent consumerism, and then we're going to kill them when we've bled them completely dry. Yep, it's all true, every bit of it; the New Gulags, which we Nazified Tolkien geeks like to refer to as Barad Ashcroft, or just Shrubthanc, have been under construction since early 2001 and are almost ready to open for business. The ultra-right-wing corporate media establishment has known all along, and have been helping us cover it all up, and now it's too late; there's nothing you can do to stop us. You all are going to be fed into the ovens by the millions, and we're going to destroy the environment and nuke the Third World, and it's all going to be done because Jesus told us to, and that's the only reason we're ever going to need. Because hey, we're stupid. Michael Moore? Dead soon, at our hands, as punishment for daring to dissent. Karen Finley? Ditto. Hillary Clinton? She'll be crawling around our (segregated) private club on all fours in a Playboy Bunny costume, forced to beg for the privilege of bringing us drinks, dropping grapes into our mouths, and mopping the floors with her hair-just to remind any of you other strong, uppity women who might get ideas about overturning the established patriarchal order who's really in charge here. Other younger, more attractive women will be forced into sexual slavery, and abortion will absolutely not be an option for dealing with the inevitable unwanted pregnancies that will result. Rusty coathangers will be available at the door, although using them will be punishable by electrocution-electricity provided by the nuke plants that will be on every corner and completely unregulated and unsafe. But it's just as well that they are our slaves, because there ain't gonna be no welfare to help them out, and they're not going to be allowed to work at anything other than pleasing their oppressors. We'll be burning the UN HQ in New York down, of course, and we'll be locking all the delegates inside the building before we set it alight. Then we'll be invading France, just to teach 'em a lesson about how we Texas cowboys do bidness. The world's oil, of course, is ours, and we'll be boiling tons of it and pouring it over the heads of those who refuse to acknowledge our Xtian God. There'll be no stem cell research, there'll be no health care at all for the poor (whose numbers we will be increasing by every means we can think of), and if you dare to complain about life in the New Conservative Amerikkka, we're going to kill you for it. All of that: so stipulated. Now, the question for you moonbat Lefty baglappers: What the hell are you going to do about it? I mean, seriously; if you truly believe that all this is now in the process of happening right before your very eyes, doesn't it become incumbent upon you, as the most basic imaginable of moral obligations, to do something to prevent it, or overturn it? I mean, obviously, you tried peaceful means of stopping us, but that didn't work-because us right-wingnuts rigged the election and disenfranchised everybody. And you can't go to the courts because they're in the Bushitler's pocket too, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which you've been saying for four years now illegally handed him the White House after the tainted 2000 "election." So your last legal, nonviolent means of resistance has been taken away from you, and you can't even count on the media to publicize the reality of what's going on because of their right-wing slant, their fondness for the status quo, and of course the fact that they're really nothing but money-grubbing corporations themselves whose only concern is the bottom line. So what's left, Lefties? Where do you go from here? What are you gonna do about it? I'll tell you what you're going to do about it: you're not going to do one damned thing but continue with your whining, that's what, and it's not because deep down you're all cowards either. It's because deep down, you know you're full of shit. You don't even believe half the stuff you're currently crying about yourselves. Because if you did, you wouldn't be talking about it. You wouldn't be writing whiny letters to the editor; you wouldn't be fearfully mincing down to the Canadian Consulate to half-seriously inquire about moving; you wouldn't be sitting in coffee houses denouncing the moronic inhabitants of Jesusland with your fellow smug, self-satisfied pseudo-hip doofuses. You'd be gearing up and arming yourselves for the fight of your lives. And much to your surprise, you'd have a lot of us over here on the right offering to help load mags. And that's why you're going to keep right on losing elections. If even one third of what you say was true, you'd have Americans of every political stripe rushing to your side to man the barricades. But it isn't anything like true, and we all know it, and we've all known it ever since you tried to claim that proposed reductions in the annual rate of increase of various federal budget items during the Reagan years were actually heartless "slashing" of the budget by people who wanted poor people to die. We've known it ever since you railed during the Clinton years about how the welfare reform forced on him by the evil Gingrich Repubs amounted to cultural and economic genocide, and then watched as hordes of welfare cheats-who you always claimed didn't exist-were quietly expunged from the rolls and went back to work. In other words, you're all hype and no hump. Your party has become the Chicken Little Party, weeping and wailing about disaster, catastrophe, and The End Of The World As We Know It every time a new idea for running the government gets put forth by someone who isn't a card-carrying liberal. And the proof is in the pudding. Your delirious ideas don't even inspire your like-minded cohorts-those who really do believe the sky is falling-to get out and fight to save their very lives; you certainly aren't going to inspire a majority of Americans to rally to your banner if you can't even get your own true believers off their asses and into the streets. That's the problem with what you people used to like to call "false consciousness," which is exactly what you're now reduced to peddling. Your hysteria is based on plain and simple untruths, and nobody is willing to go out there and risk injury or death for something they know in their hearts is a lie. There ain't gonna be any Revolution, televised or otherwise, because too many of us know that none is really called for, and the more you try to promote an addle-pated apocalyptic vision of a theocratic MegaMurrika the more the rest of us just sit back and wonder what the hell you're talking about, as we watch life gradually improve for more and more of us despite your doomsaying. Afghanis just voted, in the first real free election they've ever had; they didn't vote in any Lefty flamethrower, and they didn't vote in any Islamist terrorist either. And this occurred only a couple of years after we all watched you people wax apoplectic about the coming disastrous "quagmire." Well, if that's a quagmire, most of us figure the world could do with a few more of 'em. It didn't come cheap, and it didn't come easy, but it came anyway, and no thanks to any of you, either. And the same thing is going to happen in Iraq soon; the ordinary people you claim to be concerned about will see how their lives have improved since Saddam's removal, and, despite all your supposed "concern" for their welfare, they're also going to remember who it was who bitched and whined about the only recent President who was willing to lift a finger and take a political risk to help make it so. And you smarmily call yourselves the "reality-based community." What a laugh that is. And that's what it all comes down to, really. Those of us who do have some adult grasp of reality are sitting back and laughing at you and your dipsomaniacal ravings. You don't inspire trust and confidence in your ability to run the world's only remaining superpower, because you can't resist the adolescent urge to hyperbolize every last little thing. Just as a small example, look at your pals in the liberal MSM [mainstream media--JR]. There are no mere "problems"; instead, we're deluged with one "crisis" after another in their newspapers and on TV. You're like little kids whose experience of the world is so limited as to define the boundaries of your intellect far too narrowly to ever be trusted with the responsibility of governing a nation. Grow up, Chicken Little. Lead, follow, or get out of the friggin' way. Or, at the very least, you can stop trying to get the rest of us to guzzle a bunch of Kool-Aid that you can't even swallow yourselves. Michael Hendrix 11/12/04 - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1336 iQA/AwUBQa7kF8PxH8jf3ohaEQImLwCeJrfwhwQuJJZSbWNZ3DXv40ezGiAAoKkT WyShuQdyzaZb9f5XBFNqlC6T =cqLW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Itanium inventor bobs to surface as chip's savior?
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Enterprise ; Servers ; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/ Itanium inventor bobs to surface as chip's savior? By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk) Published Wednesday 1st December 2004 18:22 GMT Exclusive Some start-ups are comprised of wide-eyed wheelers and dealers with little technical expertise. Others have a decent mix of business types and technology talents. Then there are start-ups like Secure64 Software Corp. that have nothing but the richest pedigree of pure, unadulterated genius running through their giddy veins. The discovery of Secure64 happened by chance. The company's CEO Peter Cranstone took exception with one of The Register's Itanium bashing articles and sent an e-mail extolling the possible virtues of the chip. This e-mail led to a brief look at Secure64's management team website at which point jaws dropped and little hamsters started turning in heads. Without slighting other members of the Secure64 team, we have to admit that one name in particular caught our attention - Bill Worley, the startup's CTO. Worley worked on a couple of minor projects during his lengthy tenure at HP. Little things like being the principal architect of the PA-RISC processor and later the principal architect of PA-WideWord - known today as Itanium. Worley, however, didn't just do the initial Itanium designs, he also led the decision, in 1993, to unite HP and Intel behind the project. High-end computing has never been the same since - for better or for worse. And few engineers have a more impressive resume. Along with Worley, Secure64 has Cranstone, who co-developed the mod_gzip data compression technology for the Apache web server. Its Chairman is Denny Georg, former CTO of various parts of HP. Its VP of Product Delivery is Joe Gersch who once managed HP's research and development organization. But, as they say late at night, that's not all. Larry Hambly, one of the first 100 employees at Sun Microsystems, also sits on Secure64's advisory board along with Rajiv Gupta - the former GM of HP's e-Speak web services unit and former head of the joint HP/Intel Itanium development team. Just an inconsequential, revolutionary OS So what unambitious project are all these brains working on? Well, just the creation of an abstracted type of operating system that could create faster, more stable, more secure servers. At present, Secure64 has declined requests for interviews with CEO Cranstone saying the company will have a formal launch early next year. This makes it a bit difficult to know exactly what the company is up to. Thankfully, Worley has applied for a couple of patents that give a decent idea of the direction Secure64 is taking. At the heart of Worley's recent work is the notion that general purpose operating systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows don't make the best use of specific features in processors - namely features in Itanium. The general purpose nature of today's server market means that systems perform well on a wide-variety of applications, but the boxes aren't tuned as well as they could be for specific tasks. In the past, any number of companies have taken a stab at this problem by creating server appliances designed to handle a small subset of applications. Most of these appliances relied on sophisticated software to make them different from the average server. Of late, other companies have been trying to tackle the general purposeness of servers with various add-ons. Products such as TCP/IP and SSL accelerators have arrived to speed up the performance of boxes in specific areas. The appliances and accelerators have largely been aimed at web edge types of workloads - things like serving up web pages, processing web services protocols and encryption. While load balancers and some security appliances have been picked up a decent rate, most of these types of products really haven't enjoyed much interest. The boys at Secure64 appear to think they've figured out a way to make a web edge system more attractive to customers. An extensible application environment for you and me Not surprisingly, the company's approach relies on making the most out of Itanium. When Itanium first hit the market, both Intel and HP spent a lot of time touting some of the features that separated Itanium from other processors. (They mention these features less often these days, focusing their marketing efforts instead on defending the chip's existence.) The four main "features" of Itanium at play here are its large register sets (128 general purpose and 128 floating point registers), the fact that it can crank through 6-8 instructions per cycle, its security compartments technology and its 4 privilege levels - again for added security. Secure64 rightly believes that none of the major OSes out there makes terribly good use of these unique features in Itanium. The chance is there for a company to build software that can scream on Itanium and do so with very high levels of security. The company seems to think that the existence of an OS that can truly make use of all Itanium has to offer will spur adoption of the processor. In its patent applications, Secure64 describes its Itanium-friendly software as a type of "extensible application environment." The good, old EAE. A customer would hypothetically load a CD with the run-time EAE into a low-end Itanium server with the EAE serving as the operating system. The Secure64 EAE would then work its magic, initializing memory and setting up the protection ID keys and compartments available with Itanium. All told, the EAE eats up a minimal set of system resources - say 2 percent - and turns over the rest of the server to the applications. The first use for such a product will likely be something in the web acceleration realm. The server would boot up with a caching engine, real-time compression (gzip64), SSL64, DDoS, routing functions and support for those third-party TCP/IP offload cards discussed above. Secure64's patent materials describe the EAE-powered boxes generally being used as web servers, secure web servers, proxy servers, secure proxy servers and application servers. Secure64 documentation obtained by The Register shows that the company believes systems running its software will show a 20x performance improvement on web workloads, while providing much improved scaling. In addition, Secure64 is looking to provide customers with a 100x reduction in the costs associated with churning through web services transactions. Secure64 is claiming that it will be virtually impossible to write worms or viruses that can attack the EAE, as it makes use of Itanium's rich security features. Third-parties can write applications to the EAE that make similar use of these security functions. The Secure64 patent application also describes the EAE as having a rich set of partitioning functions. The company has focused on making each partition very stable and secure via the means described above and has also paid attention to ways partitions can be tuned for specific applications. "The customized execution environment then has direct access and control over the system resources within its partition," Secure64 writes in one application. "That is, there are no operating system abstractions interposed between the customized execution environment and the system resources allocated to the customized execution environment. Advantageously, with the operating system abstractions out of the way, the customized execution environment may implement a computational and/or I/O structure that is simpler, is tuned for a particular application, and can take advantage of certain processor or other system resource features that are not exploited by the (general purpose OS)." Itanic revival Not knowing exactly what Secure64 will end up unveiling next year makes it tough to guess how well the technology will be accepted or what exactly it will compete against. Other companies - Sun comes most immediately to mind - have talked about attacking web edge types of workloads with a new class of multicore chips. These processors can handle numerous requests at once, and Sun has discussed similar 20x performance improvements with web services transactions. It's more difficult, however, to guess how well products from Sun and others would stack up on the security front against Secure64. In some ways, the Secure64 EAE seems like a very sophisticated version of VMware's ESX Server product aimed specifically at the 64-bit computing market. Like ESX Server, the EAE pushes the OS out of the way and provides a nice set of virtualization tools. Again, companies like Sun and HP have been doing similar things with their versions of Unix. Secure64's biggest plus would be that it has tuned its software for Itanium only and thrown out any general purpose OS nonsense that would hamper web workload performance. That certainly makes it a unique player in the market, which is exactly what you want from a start-up. With its rich ties to HP, it's not hard to imagine Secure64 quickly appearing as an option for HP's Integrity server customers. This is a big "in" since HP accounts for about 85 percent of the Itanium ecosystem. The appliance idea never seems to take off as well as start-ups hope, and we have our doubts Secure64's play. That said, it sure would be something to see the originator of Itanium bring the chip back to life using his intimate knowledge of the chip's architecture as Secure64's biggest weapon. . The present Secure64 (http://www.secure64.com/) Patent I (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2…) Patent II (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2…) The past Worley pushes for Itanium (http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/worley.html) Worley interview (http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/2worley.html) Cranstone interview (http://www.webreference.com/interviews/petercranstone.html) Related stories IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/ibm_power5_moores_law/) How MS will end the Dell - Intel love-in (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/24/microsoft_dell_amd/) Intel is killing Itanium one comment at a time (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/19/intel_itanium_mainframes/) IBM benchmark leaves server rivals breathless (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ibm_shatterrs_tpcc/) Intel nuances Itanium; Microsoft ignores it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/intel_ms_itanium_kick/) -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Jewish wholy words..
by Nomen Nescio 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

Is it true that the jews have these texts in their scriptures? #1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild animal." #2. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated." #3. Yebamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age." #4. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed." #5. Yebamoth 98a: "All gentile children are animals." #6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: "A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean." #7. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts."

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MapReduce for Decentralized Computation - zLabWiki
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

<http://zlab.commerce.net/wiki/index.php/MapReduce_for_Decentralized_Computa…> MapReduce for Decentralized Computation I was reading Dean and Ghemawat's MapReduce paper this morning. It describes a way to write large-grain parallel programs to be executed on Google's large clusters of computers in a simple functional style, in C++. It occurred to me that the system as described might be well-suited to computational cooperation between mutually untrusting entities, computation in what we at CommerceNet refer to as a "decentralized" system. [edit] Decentralized computational cooperation There are five major problems with regard to computational cooperation, by which I mean outsourcing some amount of your computation to servers run by people you don't trust completely: Cracking The server trusts the client not to break the server. Storage The client trusts the server to store the client's data safely. Correctness The client trusts the server to execute the client's code accurately and produce results quickly. Confidentiality The client trusts the server not to disclose the client's data against the client's wishes. Payment The server usually trusts the client to pay them for the service provided. Cracking can be dealt with by known methods: metered resource usage and well-known isolation techniques. Payment can be dealt with in any number of ways; it should be noted that it is not entirely separable from cracking. Storage can be dealt with by replicating or erasure-coding data across a number of administratively-independent servers. This leaves the problems of correctness and confidentiality; I think the MapReduce approach can help with correctness. [edit] Correctness The "map" function converts a record from an input file into a set of records in an intermediate file; typically, each input record is replicated in several places on the cluster, and the "map" function is deterministic. The "reduce" function converts the set of all intermediate records sharing the same key (gathered from the many map-stage output files) into a set of output records, which are written to an output file; typically the "reduce" function is also deterministic. In the usual case, where these functions are deterministic, they can be executed on two administratively-independent servers, and the results (which, in the Google case, are merely files) can be compared. If they differ, the same results can be recomputed on more administratively-independent servers to see which ones were correct. (It may be worthwhile to compare Merkle tree hashes of the output files, rather than the output files themselves, since moving the output files over the network may entail significant expense.) This prevents any single broken or dishonest machine or administrative entity from affecting the correctness of the overall computation. Higher levels of redundancy can be used to defend against stronger attackers at relatively modest cost. Some threats can be defeated by even weaker means with negligible computational cost. Computing each function for a randomly selected 1% of input or intermediate records, then comparing the results, may provide an acceptable probability of catching faults or compromises if they are expected to affect a significant proportion of the output; and it requires negligible computational cost. In the ten-billion-record performance tests mentioned in the Google paper, a corrupt "map" function would have to affect fewer than 694 of the input records to have less than a 50% chance of detection by the 1% sample (including 100 million randomly selected records). A corrupt "map" function that affected 5000 input records --- only one out of every two million --- would have only an 0.7% chance of not being caught. This probably deals adequately with machine failures and gross attacks, but a careful attack might corrupt the output for only a single input record --- and would have only a 1% chance of being caught. This may still be enough if the problem is a result of a deliberate attack and the attacker is vulnerable to sufficiently severe penalties. [edit] Confidentiality Confidentiality is a more difficult problem; computing with confidential data on hardware that belongs to someone you don't trust requires that you compute with encrypted data. In the general case, this is a very difficult problem. (Perhaps this could be written with a real example.) Article Discussion Edit History Create an account or log in Navigation ? Main Page ? Community portal ? Current events ? Recent changes ? Random page ? Help Search Toolbox ? What links here ? Related changes ? Special pages ? This page was last modified 21:20, 29 Nov 2004. ? This page has been accessed 36 times. ? About zLabWiki ? Disclaimers -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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