Slashback: Errata, Futurity, Portality 193
Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.
He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.
AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.
Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.
All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."
You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."
Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.
So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."
The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."
Another S1G bug (Score:5, Informative)
genetic engineering the brain (Score:5, Informative)
There are many kinds of GE.
One kind splices genes from other species into a species. This has problems with inaccurate gene-snips and potential allergies to foreign genetic matter.
Another kind of GE is simply eugenics, which many farmers have used for centuries; selecting the best representatives of a species to breed together, or hybridization. Eugenics presents political problems in humans.
Another kind of GE is the turning on of inoperative genes through hormonal treatments or other chemicals. Cancer genes (oncogenes) are turned on through sun damage and other carcinogenic interactions, for instance. This type of GE may be dangerous but it is noninvasive and can be done through conventional current gene therapy methods. I support this kind of work.
Now onto the spurious ethical questions.
There is no a-priori model of the human. Humans have been evolving for thousands of years, and our lifestyles and diets have a big part to play in that. The conscious manipulation of this process has the opportunity, actually, to be more ethical than the unconscious genetic engineering we have done.
The americans imported people from Africa in the slave trade and created "hybrid races" of humans, for instance. This has led to changes in frequency of various positive and negative genetic traits in the US population. Although slavery itself is reprehensible, I don't think anybody would consider treatments for sickle-cell anemia (which occurs primarily in Africans and African-Americans) immoral genetic engineering, for instance.
Conscious manipulation of human intelligence is a scientific technology question and is morally neutral. Methods and political superstructures surrounding the issue are not.
Vulture Hawking Articles (Score:3, Informative)
If not, check them out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21414.html
Stephen Hawking predicts cyborg ascendancy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21488.html
Cyborg metaphysics
AT&T Port 80 restriction. (Score:3, Informative)
I also know of a few others that also never lost Port 80 access to their AT&T@home home ran servers.
Although all of us run apache on linux, so it might have been a ban for only Microsoft products
my suspicion is that it was only in selected areas.
Re:Port 80 blocking (Score:3, Informative)
What I did to counter this was to make a very quick and dirty patch to my kernel, which accepted these malformed packets as normal SYN requests. The result? Web services were back to normal and Apache is chugging away as we speak. I've been doing this since the ban and have had no problems at all.
Might be something to try...
-all dead homiez