Schneier on Security

Excellent article as always.
hey... isn't Sark one of the bad guys from the TV show ALIAS? Coincidence?

It took me until the phrase "Master Control Program" to get it.

Great. Heh.

Tron is alive and well! :)

But man, discussing National Security in terms of Disney characters to get the point across... feels funny, doesn't it?

Wasn't Sark the guy on Alias with no loyalties to anyone but himself? ;-)

Sweet. How many in the community are old enough to get the reference. One of the earliest "hacker" movies.

Yes I'm old. Old enough to remember when the MCP was just a chess program!

Well who is old enough to remember that MCP was an actual OS? I think it was Burroughs or one of those old ancient mainframe manufacturers

Port Security from a different angle:

"Osama, Saddam and the Ports, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports... Now comes the ports deal. ... after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts ... the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy." ... This isn't just a Middle Eastern company; it's ... part of the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan. ... [A]fter years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs.""

http://pkarchive.org/

B5000 series ran MCP. It was a great computer. Google the name, it was (is) an interesting computer.

"My User"

shouldn't it be 'My Programmer"?

-- Arik

MCP is still used on some Unisys machines, although I'm sure it's much changed from the version I used on Burroughs hardware in the '70s.

http://www.unisys.com/products/...

'"No no no," said a bit'

Obviously a misquote.

A bit would have said either "yes" or "no".

The bit was not misquoted. IIRC, the bits fed a continual stream of their current setting.

% epoch 1000222846
Wed Sep 12 01:40:46 2001

Nathan Jones:

% clock format 1000222846
Tue Sep 11 11:40:46 AM EDT 2001

What is "epoch" and why is it buggy? :-)

Funny how the whitehouse appears to be selling large US infrastructure to foreign government controlled corporations... Wasn't it just last year that CNOOC had Whitehouse support to buy Unocol? Besides selling nuclear technology to India what else is left to check the trade balance and prop the dollar? Sell NASA?

@Dossy:

"What is "epoch" and why is it buggy? :-)"

Whoops - I was forgetting about time zone differences. "epoch" is my shortcut for:

#!/opt/local/bin/perl
print scalar localtime ($ARGV[0]), "\n";

Now that I think about it, Wed Sep 12 01:40:46 2001 in Australian EST is just about right...

Bwahahahahaaaaa....

The character from Alias was indeed Julian Sark. I'm fairly sure it was a coincidental naming choice. If J.J. Abrahms wanted to make a Tron reference, he'd probably do it through Marshall.

Not like it was hard to defeat the MCP, though. If I could get inside, I could forge us a Group 6 access. The password is: reindeer flotilla.

Just a thought but perhaps you'd like to take a peek at this article I found:

http://movingdog.blogspot.com/2006/02/...