Author Archive: m1bxd

dump the name server cache to the file

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The ndc dumpdb command or the SIGINT signal causes named to dump the name
server cache to the file /var/tmp/named_dump.db. The following example
uses the signal:

# kill -INT ‘cat /etc/named.pid’
The process ID of named can be obtained from /etc/named.pid, as in the
example above, because named writes its process ID in that file during
startup.[152″>

[152″>On our Linux system the process ID is written to /var/run/named.pid.

Once named writes its cache to the file, we can examine the file to see if
the names and addresses servers are correct. The named_dump.db file is
composed of three sections: the zone table section, the Cache & Data
section, and the Hints section.

http://kore.hack.se/oreilly-networking/tcp/ch13_06.htm

What was Bretton Woods? & why the third world get poorer

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THE Breton Woods institutions; the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, so-called since they came into being as a result of the UN (being referred to as a UN conference at a time when the UN had not yet come into being was indicative of the fact that the UN was already a course chosen for the future and that international reconstruction would function under it Monetary and Financial Conference held at Breton Woods, New Hampshire in July 1944. It is interesting to note that this conference essentially focused on the international effort necessary towards the reconstruction of post-war Europe, while the war had not yet ended. The IMF was assigned the more difficult task of ensuring global economic stability.

http://www.timespk.com/2003/august/25/guest2.htm

An Interview with Bernard Lietaer – The State of Money for the Sovereign Individual

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What is money? And how well does it work to solve society’s ills? Bernard Lietaer, author of the upcoming book Access to Human Wealth: Money beyond Greed and Scarcity (Access Books, 2003), has made a life’s work of exploring these questions. Lietaer has been involved in the world of money systems for more than 25 years, and his experience in monetary matters ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro), and served as president of the Electronic Payment System in his native Belgium. He also co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency funds.

..
Even Alan Greenspan, the governor of the Federal Reserve and the official guardian of the conventional money system, says, “We will see a return of private currencies in the 21st century.”
..

Your money’s value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the “real” economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. […”> Unless some precautions are taken soon, there is at least a 50-50 chance that the next five to ten years will see a global money meltdown, the only plausible way for a global depression.

..
And Lietaers adds in the interview:

There is practically no way today for a developing country to have a reasonable monetary policy within the current rules of the game. […”> Whether you fix your currency to the dollar or let it float, you end up with an unmanageable monetary problem, like Brazil, Russia or Argentina have experienced. Eighty-seven countries have gone through a major currency crisis in the last 25 years. Their fiscal policies are imposed by an International Monetary Fund (IMF). I am afraid that if the United States had to live by the rules that are imposed on, say, Brazil, the United States of America would become a developing country in one generation.

This system is based in scarcity, as Lietaer says in another interview:

We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

http://www.nexuspub.com/articles/2003/july2003/interview.htm

Also see http://www.transaction.net/Continue reading →

core this looks like a laugh!

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BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced play including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, stock splits, additional share issues, market and player bonds.

http://www.blogshares.com/

Freedom of Speech in Software – Patents

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Freedom of Speech in Software
Posted by michael on Saturday August 30, @06:06AM http://www.slashdot.org/
from the if-only dept.

akpoff writes ” I’ve been struggling with the question ‘what’s wrong with software patents’ but haven’t been able to find the right words. I was over at John Gilmore’s website and found a link to John Salin’s ‘Freedom of Speech in Software’ letter to the USPTO back in 1991! This is one of the best explanations I’ve seen. He reminds us that computer programs are essentially like literature or music — they are expressions of ideas. Just because they run on a computer doesn’t make them uniquely different from other creative mediums. We should think player piano (patentable) vs the music (copyrightable but not patentable) it plays.

Europeans — put this letter into the hands of your MEPs!”

http://philsalin.com/patents.html

Akamai.com

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July 2, 2003 Dow Jones WebReprint Service®

Dot-Com Hope: Akamai, Others Discover New Life
By William M. Bulkeley

Cambridge, Mass. — IT IS THE BUSINESS equivalent of a medical miracle.

Less than a year ago, Akamai Technologies Inc. looked destined to become another bit of dot-com road kill. The provider of Internet speedup services was burning through cash, revenue was dropping and its stock was delisted by the Nasdaq Stock Market after it fell below $1.

But now, Akamai seems to be in the midst of a surprising comeback. Big customers such as the Sony Ericsson cellphone venture, the U.S. Army and BMW are buying more of its services, its executives are blithely predicting positive cash flow by year’s end, and its stock is above $4.

http://www.akamai.com/

Muscat

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http://www.aprsmartlogik.com/
http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/S2000/MUSCAT_note.pdf

http://xapian.org/

[snip start”>
Nearly related to probabilistic stuff is Xapian, a.k.a. Omseek, a.k.a.
Omsee, a.k.a. Open Muscat, an open-source project intended as a
probabilistic search-engine framework. Initially financed by Brightstation,
was some time ago left to its own. Now lives in Sourceforge.

More in the research field, there’s libbow/rainbow by Andrew McCallum et al.
from CMU, including bayesian classifiers, vector-space algorithms, and other
nice artifacts.

Here at gtd, we’re experimenting internally with some new vector-space based
search and classification algorithms. What we have does look quite
promising, but AFAIK it’s not to be open-sourced — by now.

—
Quim
_____________________________________________
htdig-dev mailing list
[snip end”>

http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/8825/2001/10/0/6847424/

Security Risks: A Look into the Future

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By xL
Fri Aug 8th, 2003 at 11:10:28 PM EST

Last month, a crazed call from a customer I was about to reel in with a hosting deal gave me another glance into the woeful state of internet security. A debian machine, acting as a proxy for some of his most important customer websites, had gone haywire. It refused to deliver mail and there was trouble getting in through ftp. A quick look over SSH confirmed a nasty suspicion: The machine had been compromised and run over by a rootkit. Although the break-in and installation of the rootkit had been done clumsily, the potential of deception that the software had, were it installed by an able person instead of a script kiddy, was chilling.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/8/83254/78171

Power from blood could lead to ‘human batteries’

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SMH August 04, 2003 A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into “human batteries”. Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food. The team at electronics giant Panasonic’s Nanotechnology Research Laboratory near Kyoto has so far only managed to produce very low power levels.

http://nanotech-now.com/current-months-news.htm

Rush – Vapour Trails by Rip Rowan

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I’m a big Rush fan.

Yeah, I know. Me and 50 million other drummers.

I’ve been listening to this band since they showed up on my radar in the late 1970s, and have always followed their tours and new albums. I admit that I fall into the camp of wistful fans who yearn for a return to the art-rock glory days of the band (which pretty much makes me an old burnout) but I still like to hear the new stuff and see what these dudes are up to. And, Rush’s return to a more guitar-oriented (and acoustic-drum-oriented) sound has reignited some of my interest in their performances. Rock music is all about the guitar, and few people are as interesting to listen to as Alex Lifeson. And don’t even get me started about Neil Peart.

CD too loud?

PUNCH ‘PRINT’ FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT

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By David Pescovitz
Small Times Columnist

July 25, 2003 – Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you’re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the “buy” button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors – literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours…

…”liquid gold” consists of gold nanocrystals…

http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=6413

Why only fools and children use portals by Paul Carr

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Monday July 28, 2003

Once upon a time, when Tony Blair was popular, Barry Sheen was alive and jeans didn’t come with those strange yellow fake dust stains on them, there lived three kings. These kings, called AOL, Lycos and Yahoo!, shared control of the kingdom of Internetia.

For many years the kings ruled with an iron hand; it was almost impossible to work, rest or play in Internetia without the permission of at least one of them. Internetia had vast natural deposits of news, information and shopping but the three kings were greedy, hiding these valuable resources away from ordinary citizens behind a wall of top stories, featured partners and stock quotes….

by Paul Carr
The Guardian – link here

A Manifesto for a future and do we have any choice?

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The Truth Machine by James Halpern 1996 and the Matrix

It’s a book I bought to read because of the security books I buy on Amazon. It popped up as one of those ones – if you read X others read Y and you might like it.

I recommend these to anyone:

Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
by Simson Garfinkel

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier

Please read on for my take on the book and a closed Matrix world
[b”>(1500 words – my LONGEST BLOG!)[/b”>
Continue reading →