I don't have the energy to read at -1. +1 is plenty, and I don't read all articles and all comments. I do browse the "other content" stories (options:stories:other content), which I think is handy (i'm not sure how this is different from firehose).

If there's one gripe I have about the mod system it's that it often happens when I read comments about an article, they are mostly snarky meta-discussion about a peripheral aspect of the topic rather than about the topic itself. Sarcastic chat may be entertaining and/or interesting, but I wish I could filter based on relevance to the actual story topic. In the mod system, off-topic is a -1 point ding. I wish there was a way to tag a comment as off-topic or meta-discussion but not ding it down. Comments that are funny or interesting could remain, but I could still sift them out if I want to read about the actual topic of the post.

Orbitz/ITA

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml

Good-night, salty prince.

A few months ago, Google planned to tie employee bonuses to their social networking strategy:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401282

Do you think they meant the Google+ identity service?

it should have been pretty easy to find, after all, a diamond that large should be all sparkly.

Someone asked for a use case (implying that there were none), I provided some suggestions. I don't think anyone is saying that this stuff is a broad-spectrum replacement for paper. But in cases where paper is used for short-term storage, it might be handy. Re soup-du-jour sign, not only a sign, but the daily specials that are inserted into a restaurant menu and then tossed at the end of the day. Or any list that needs to be reprinted daily.

> what is the use case for these paper signs you want to print off, and yet change all the time????

visitor badges, entry tickets, soup-du-jour sign, etc.

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about--a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.

Turgid? Tumescent? Priapism? Viagra? Engorgement? Sorry. You lose the right to call BS on anyone else.

I don't mean to be flippant, but I think we'll know that Hurd is growing up when http://gnu.org/ runs on it.

Check your manufacturer, most of the reputable ones offer multi-year replacement guarantees on the bulbs. Although if you buy good ones originally you generally won't need to use those guarantees.

Unlike old style bulbs, CFLs are complex enough that quality matters. The ultra-cheap ones are really crap.

Check my manufacturer? Reputable ones? Replacement guarantees? Complex ones?

Disposal guidelines? Mercury? Ballast? Warm-up? Flicker?

We are talking about light bulbs. I understand that CFLs are more energy-efficient than incandescents of comparable lumens. But they are a poor replacement in every other way. We are asking the world to waste more personal energy using CFLs than they waste on electrical energy using incandescents.

Fred Grampp was definitely there then, but I didn't know him either. I think he and Reeds were sometimes "partners in crime" (research colleagues). I think I remember him from the semi-annual BTL UNIX meetings (which were sort of like USENIX but internal). I had a handful of friends at Murray Hill, just not the ones hacking crypto. It might have been Peter Honeyman, who was either still there at the time or else he knew who was best to call. I don't remember who directed me to Reeds.

(At this time, salts & rainbow files were in the experimental stage).

UNIX /etc/passwd had salt before 1986, but early UNIX had passwords that were truncated at 8 characters and I think the salts were two plaintext bytes/12 bits (4096 combinations). The password file (included the encrypted salted password) was world-readable. I think systems use the same ideas these days, but with non-world-readable encrypted passwords, and bigger passwords and salts.

I worked with Bob Morris (rhm) at Bell Labs back around 1980. We were on a Bell Labs Navy contract, and Bob was on loan to the project from his usual research hacking. We were doing signal processing stuff, decoding sonar data. Anyway, I was a UNIX hacker kid (I was about 20 at the time) and he was a really sharp gadfly/rascal BTL CS research guy. We were colleagues and there was some friendly sniping back and forth between us.

Everyone at Bell Labs was sharp, but he was a an especially talented special expert on loan. Anyway, I was doing random UNIX hacking and I was also the sysadm for a couple of PDP-11s that we all timeshared for our UNIX hacking. This is a story that I've kept secret for 30 years.

This all was before the days of viruses, and the ARPANET existed, but not at Bell Labs. Occasionally hackers would break into other people's systems, usually just for fun.

We made heavy use of modems to send data all around (uucp, usenet, remote login, etc), so there was some concern about system intrusion, and as I said, this was a Navy contract (with Secret and Top Secret elements). We had lots of security in the buildings and labs (big locks, guards, rs232 wires in secured tubes, etc.). We had some secret/secured UNIX systems and some not.

On a whim, I had decided to install a little security hack on a couple of my non-secure UNIX systems - a nightly cron job that did a "find / -perm 04000 -uid 0 -ls" or whatever it was, to find all the suid root programs on the system, and write the list to a log file, and to diff yesterday's and today's, and make sure nothing changed. One Saturday morning, I logged into my system from home (as a sysadm, I had a "foreign exchange" phone in my bedroom that acted like the extension that was sitting in my office at work). I see an email from cron that said that /bin/login had changed overnight!

I was shocked, I called my boss and I started looking around the system to see what I could find (I was the admin and had root access). I found some suspicious files in Bob Morris's $HOME. He had some files encrypted with UNIX crypt, and one was exactly the size of the login.c source, and one was a bit bigger. I knew that UNIX crypt encoded files on a byte-for-byte basis, so this was very strange, but I didn't know how to crack crypt.

I had friends in BTL research, and I called one and they said to call Jim Reeds (I think) because he was a main BTL crypto guy, so I did. BTL was pretty big (at least 30k engineers) and the pure research folks (like Reeds, and Morris for that matter) were in an ivory tower, and didn't necessarily listen whenever Bell Labs development folks called them, especially 20-year-old kids like me. So I call Reeds and I tell him my story. I'm in this BTL department, we're doing a contract with the Navy, it looks like someone hacked my /bin/login, I have some encrypted files. He didn't sound too interested. I told him the files were in Bob Morris's $HOME. He said, "send the files right over here."

In a few hours, he'd decoded the files. I guess if you already have a crypt-cracker, it would be especially easy if you knew that one file was an existing login.c and the other was probably a small hack to it. So Bob had hacked /bin/login to save usernames and passwords in a file somewhere, I think xored with -1 or something. Nothing fancy. There were also uucp logs of his sending either the login.c or his password booty to some another Bell Labs research system (allegra, I think, for those who remember).

Bell Labs had many layers of management, and occasionally funny business would occur and the supervisors, department heads, directors, vps, etc would get together to pow-wow about what to do, and I think this was one of those cases. In the end, it resolved pretty quietly, and I don't know what the upshot was, but Bob stayed on our project and I think it was "no harm, no foul." I don't think I ever asked him "what the hell were you thinking?"

When I heard a few years later that rtm (Bob's son) was in hot water for the famous Morris worm, I thought to myself, like father, like son. I don't mean to imply anything negative about either guy, I thought they were both just hacking for fun and without destructive intent. I just wanted to share this story, and I look back very fondly to my days at Bell Labs and working with Bob, who was a legendary hacker, really smart, and quite a rascal.

we have so much duh science because we have so many duh scientists. if you are curious about this, perhaps you should do some research to investigate it.

I think the Apple lawsuit is frivolous. But there are many large American companies with generic-sounding names. For example, there is an aftermarket car air conditioning company called Factory Air, an electric utility called National Grid, and a bedding company called The Company Store. How does the law deal with these cases of companies claiming common phrases as corporate identities?