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21225405 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrammaTech | GrammaTech | GrammaTech is a software-development tools vendor based in Bethesda, Maryland with a research center based in Ithaca, New York. The company was founded in 1988 as a technology spin-off of Cornell University. GrammaTech is a provider of application security testing products (static application security testing, software composition analysis) and software research services.
Products
CodeSonar is a source code and binary code static analysis tool that performs a whole-program, interprocedural analysis on C, C++, C#, Java, and binary executables. It identifies programming bugs and security vulnerabilities in software. CodeSonar is used in the Defense/Aerospace, Medical, Industrial Control, Electronic, Telecom/Datacom and Transportation industries. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological Health uses it to detect defects in fielded medical devices.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and NASA used it in its Study on Sudden Unintended Acceleration
in the electronic throttle control systems of Toyota vehicles.
CodeSentry is derived from GrammaTech’s binary code analysis research. This technology performs deep analysis of object, library and executable files without the need for source code in order to identify known software security vulnerabilities. Binary analysis is an efficient method for software composition analysis with high precision and recall results and fewer false positives.
Research
GrammaTech's research division undertakes projects for private contractors, including several U.S. government agencies, such as NASA, the NSF, and many branches of the Department of Defense. GrammaTech's research is focused on both static analysis and dynamic analysis, on both source code and binaries.
GrammaTech participated and came in 2nd place in DARPA's 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge, earning $1 million as Team TECHx. GrammaTech led Team TECHx, a collaboration with the University of Virginia, using their co-developed cyber-reasoning system called Xandra.
History
GrammaTech is a 1988 spin-off from Cornell University, where its founders had developed an early Integrated Development Environment in 1978 (the Cornell Program Synthesizer) and a system for generating language-based environments from attribute-grammar specifications in 1982 (the Synthesizer Generator). Commercial systems that have been implemented using the Synthesizer Generator include ORA's Ada verification system
(Penelope),
Terma's Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering
(Raise),
and Loral's checker of the SPC Quality and Style Guidelines for Ada.
GrammaTech co-founders Reps and Teitelbaum received the 2010
ACM SIGSOFT
Retrospective Impact Award
for their work on the Synthesizer Generator.
GrammaTech commercialized the Wisconsin Program-Slicing Tool as CodeSurfer for C and C++ in 1999. CodeSonar for C and C++, a static analysis tool, has been available since 2005. GrammaTech co-founder Reps and two other company affiliates shared in a 2011 ACM SIGSOFT
Retrospective Impact Award
for their paper describing the Wisconsin slicing research.
GrammaTech and the University of Wisconsin have been collaborating since 2001 to develop analysis, reverse-engineering, and anti-tamper tools for binary executables. Byproducts of this research are CodeSurfer/x86 (a version of CodeSurfer for the Intel x86 instruction set), CodeSonar/x86 (a bug and vulnerability finding tool for stripped executables), and an approach to creating such systems automatically from formal semantic descriptions of arbitrary instruction set architectures.
This research was later commercialized into CodeSonar for Binaries and CodeSentry, a software composition analysis tool.
In 2019, GrammaTech was acquired by Five Points Capital.
References
External links
Static program analysis tools
Software companies based in New York (state)
Software companies of the United States |
13376506 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows | AlphaWindows | AlphaWindows was a proposed industry standard from the Display Industry Association (an industry consortium in California) in the early 1990s that would allow a single CRT screen to implement multiple windows, each of which was to behave as a distinct computer terminal. Individual vendors offered products based on this in 1992 through the end of the 1990s.
These products were targeted at a low-end market.
The initial concept relied on custom (but low-cost) terminals which would support mouse interaction, (text) windowing support, and colored text. With that, plus special host software, the vendors proposed to support semi-graphical applications "transparently".
Organization
The Display Industry Association was at the same location as Cumulus Technology (the same street address in Palo Alto, CA). Cumulus was a manufacturer of displays since 1986. Cumulus was heavily involved with development of the AlphaWindows standard. The members of the association in 1993 were:
Terminal vendors
AT&T / NCR / ADDS (partnership)
Cumulus
DEC
Link / Wyse (partnership)
Microvitec
Siemens / Nixdorf (partnership)
TeleVideo
Software vendors
Cumulus
JSB
Nutec
SSSI
Only Cumulus was proposing both to develop the terminals and the host software. However, Cumulus did not survive: it went bankrupt.
Software
JSB Software Technologies produced MultiView Mascot. As noted in Unix Review:
, the product is owned by FutureSoft.
SSSI (Structured Software Solutions, Inc.) produced the FacetTerm session multiplexer.
References
See also
X terminal
Twin
Text user interface |
10632719 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library%20of%20Congress%20Classification%3AClass%20Q%20--%20Science | Library of Congress Classification:Class Q -- Science | Class Q: Science is a classification used by the Library of Congress Classification system. This article outlines the subclasses of Class Q.
Q - Science (General)
1-390.......Science (General)
1-295......General
300-390....Cybernetics
350-390...Information theory
QA - Mathematics
1-939..............Mathematics
1-43..............General
47-59.............Tables
71-90.............Instruments and machines
75-76.95.........Calculating machines
75.5-76.95......Electronic computers. Computer science
76.73.A-Z......Individual languages A-Z
76.73.A12.....ABAP
76.73.A24.....ALGOL
76.73.A27.....APL
76.73.A35.....Ada
76.73.A67.....AppleScript
76.73.A8.......Assembly languages. Assemblers
76.73.A84.....AutoLISP
76.73.A95.....AWK
76.73.B155...B
76.73.B3......BASIC
76.73.B78....BSV 753
76.73.C15.....C
76.73.C153....C++
76.73.C154....C#
76.73.C25.....COBOL
76.73.C56.....Clipper
76.73.C58.....CoffeeScript
76.73.C75.....CSP
76.73.C87.....Curl
76.73.D138...D
76.73.D14.....D*
76.73.D23.....Dart
76.73.D25.....DRL
76.73.D95.....Dylan
76.73.E27.....EasyLanguage
76.73.E38.....ELAN
76.73.E75.....ERLANG
76.73.F16.....F
76.73.F23.....FOCUS
76.73.F25.....FORTRAN
76.73.F74.....FRED
76.73.G25....GW-BASIC
76.73.G63....Go
76.73.H37.....Haskell
76.73.H6.......HP-GL/2
76.73.H96.....HyperTalk
76.73.I22.......INFORMIX-4GL
76.73.J2........J#
76.73.J38.....Java
76.73.J39.....JavaScript
76.73.J63.....Job Control Language
76.73.J7.......JR
76.73.K63.....Kodu
76.73.K67.....KornShell
76.73.L23......LISP
76.73.L62......LogiQL
76.73.L63......LOGO
76.73.L66.......LotusScript
76.73.L82.......Lua
76.73.M15......M
76.73.M29......Mathematica
76.73.M35......Maude
76.73.M39......MDX
76.73.M53.....Microsoft Visual Basic
76.73.M6.......ML
MySQL see QA76.73.S67
76.73.N39.....NCL
76.73.O115...Objective-C
76.73.O213...OpenCL
76.73.P224....PHP
76.73.P25.....PL/1
76.73.P32......packetC
76.73.P67.....PostScript
PowerShell see QA76.73.W56
76.73.P75.....Processing
76.73.P76.....Prolog
76.73.P98.....Python
76.73.R25.....RPG
76.73.R3......R
76.73.R33....Racket
76.73.R83....Ruby
76.73.S15.....S
76.73.S27.....SAS
76.73.S28.....Scala
76.73.S34.....Scheme
76.73.S345...Scratch
76.73.S35.....SDL
76.73.S59.....SPARK
76.73.S62.....SPARQL
76.73.S67.....SQL. MySQL
76.73.S95.....Swift
76.73.T44......Tcl
76.73.T97......TypeScript
76.73.U63......UPC
76.73.V27......VBScript
Visual Basic see QA76.73.M53
76.73.W56.....Windows PowerShell
76.73.W65.....Wolfram language
76.73.X16......X86 assembly language
76.73.X57......XPath
76.73.X58......XSLT
76.73.Z2.........Z
76.75-76.765...Computer software
76.75...........Periodicals. Societies. Serials
76.751........Congresses
76.752........Dictionaries
76.753........Catalogs
76.754........General works
76.755........Handbooks, tables, etc.
76.756........Addresses, essays, lectures
76.758........Software engineering
76.76.A-Z.....Special topics, A-Z
76.76.A54....AngularJS
76.76.A63....Application program interfaces
76.76.A65....Application software
76.76.A87....Assemblers
76.76.A98....Automatic differentiations
76.76.C47....Certification of software
76.76.C54....Children's software
76.76.C64....Compatibility of software
76.76.C65....Compilers
76.76.C66....Component software
76.76.C672...Computer games
76.76.C68....Computer viruses
76.76.C69....Configuration management
76.76.C73....Costs
76.76.D47....Development
76.76.D49....Device drivers
76.76.D57....Disassemblers Including decompilers
76.76.D63....Documentation of software
76.76.E93....Evaluation of software
76.76.E95....Expert systems
76.76.F34....Failures of software
76.9.F48.....File conversion software
76.76.F75....Free computer software
76.76.G46....Generators
76.76.H85....Human factors
76.76.H94....Hypertext systems Including hypertext document markup languages, e. g. HTML (Document markup language), etc.
76.76.I55....Install programs
76.76.I57....Integrated software
76.76.I58....Intelligent agents
76.76.I59....Interactive media. Hypermedia
76.76.S65....Measurement, Software
76.76.M52....Microsoft .NET
76.76.M54....Middleware Including object monitors
76.76.O63....Operating systems Including DOS, UNIX, OS/2, etc.
76.76.P37....Patterns, Software
76.76.P74....Productivity
76.76.P76....Protection of software
76.76.Q35....Quality control
76.76.R42....Refactoring of software
76.76.R44....Reliability
76.76.R47....Reusability
76.76.S27.....SAP NetWeaver Gateway
76.76.S37....Screen savers
76.76.S375...Self-adaptive software
76.76.S46....Shareware
76.76.F34....Software failures
76.76.S63....Software frameworks
76.76.S64....Software maintenance
76.76.S65....Software measurement
76.76.S66....Software support
76.76.S69....Spyware
76.76.S73....Standards for software
76.76.S95....Systems software
76.76.T45....Teleprocessing monitors
76.76.T47....Termination
76.76.T48....Testing of software
76.76.T49....Text editors
76.76.T55....Threads
76.76.T83....Translators
76.76.U84....Utilities
76.76.V47....Verification and validation of software
76.76.C68....Viruses
76.76.W56....Windows
76.76.S64....Year 2000 date conversion
76.765........Firm-ware
76.77.........Operating Systems
76.76.T48.........General works
76.774.A-Z........Individual operating systems. By system, A-Z
76.774.A53........Android
76.774.B47........Berkeley BSD
76.774.D67........DOS
76.774.F74........FreeBSD
76.774.I67........iOS
76.774.L46........Linux
76.774.M33........Mac OS
76.774.M43........Microsoft Windows 7
76.774.M434.......Microsoft Windows 8
76.774.M435.......Microsoft Windows 10
76.774.M48........Microsoft Windows Me
76.774.M53........Microsoft Windows NT
76.774.M55........Microsoft Windows server
76.774.M56........Microsoft Windows Vista
76.774.M58........Microsoft Windows XP
76.774.S65........Solaris
76.774.U28........Ubuntu
76.774.U64........UNIX
76.8.A-Z......Special computers, computer systems, and microprocessors. By name, A-Z
76.8.A54......AN/FSQ-7
101-145...........Elementary mathematics. Arithmetic
150-272.5.........Algebra
273-280...........Probabilities. Mathematical statistics
299.6-433.........Analysis
440-699...........Geometry. Trigonometry. Topology
801-939...........Analytic mechanics
QB - Astronomy
1-991..........Astronomy
1-139.........General
140-237.......Practical and spherical astronomy
275-343.......Geodesy
349-421.......Theoretical astronomy and celestial mechanics
455-456.......Astrogeology
460-466.......Astrophysics
468-480.......Non-optical methods of astronomy
495-903.......Descriptive astronomy
500.5-785....Solar System
799-903......Stars
980-991.......Cosmology
QC - Physics
1-999..............Physics
1-75..............General
81-114............Weights and measures
120-168.85........Descriptive and experimental mechanics
170-197...........Atomic physics. Constitution and properties of matter including molecular physics, relativity, quantum theory and solid state physics
221-246...........Acoustics. Sound
251-338.5.........Heat
310.15-319.......Thermodynamics
350-467...........Optics. Light
450-467..........Spectroscopy
474-496.9.........Radiation physics (General)
501-766...........Electricity and magnetism
501-721..........Electricity
669-675.8.......Electromagnetic theory
676-678.6.......Radio waves (Theory)
680.............Quantum Electrodynamics
701-715.4.......Electric discharge
717.6-718.8.....Plasma physics. Ionized gases
750-766..........Magnetism
770-798...........Nuclear and particle physics. Atomic energy. Radioactivity
793-793.5........Elementary particle physics
794.95-798.......Radioactivity and radioactive substances
801-809...........Geophysics. Cosmic physics
811-849...........Geomagnetism
851-999...........Meteorology. Climatology (including the earth's atmosphere)
974.5-976........Meteorological optics
980-999..........Climatology and weather
994.95-999......Weather forecasting
QD - Chemistry
1-999..............Chemistry
1-65..............General (including alchemy)
71-142............Analytical chemistry
146-197...........Inorganic chemistry
241-441...........Organic chemistry
415-436..........Biochemistry
450-801...........Physical and theoretical chemistry
625-655..........Radiation chemistry
701-731..........Photochemistry
901-999...........Crystallography
QE - Geology
1-996.5............Geology
1-350.62..........General (including geographical divisions)
351-399.2.........Mineralogy
420-499...........Petrology
500-639.5.........Dynamic and structural geology
521-545..........Volcanoes and earthquakes
601-613.5........Structural geology
640-699...........Stratigraphy
701-760...........Paleontology
760.8-899.2.......Paleozoology
901-996.5.........Paleobotany
QH - Natural history - Biology
1-278.5............Natural History (General)
1-199.5...........General (including nature conservation, geographical distribution)
201-278.5.........Microscopy
301-705.5..........Biology (General)
359-425...........Evolution
426-470...........Genetics
471-489...........Reproduction
501-531...........Life
540-549.5.........Ecology
573-671...........Cytology
705-705.5.........Economic biology
QK - Botany
1-989..............Botany
1-474.5...........General (including geographical distribution)
474.8-495.........Spermatophyta. Phanerogams
494-494.5........Gymnosperms
495..............Angiosperms
504-638...........Cryptogams
640-707...........Plant anatomy
710-899...........Plant physiology
900-989...........Plant ecology
QL - Zoology
1-991..............Zoology
1-355.............General (including geographical distribution)
360-599.82........Invertebrates
461-599.82.......Insects
605-739.8.........Chordates. Vertebrates
614-639.8........Fishes
640-669.3........Reptiles and amphibians
671-699..........Birds
700-739.8........Mammals
750-795...........Animal behavior
791-795..........Stories and anecdotes
799-799.5.........Morphology
801-950.9.........Anatomy
951-991...........Embryology
QM - Human anatomy
1-695..............Human anatomy
1-511.............General
531-549...........Regional anatomy
550-577.8.........Human and comparative histology
601-695...........Human embryology
QP - Physiology
1-981..............Physiology
1-345.............General (including influence of the environment)
351-495...........Neurophysiology and neuropsychology
501-801...........Animal biochemistry
901-981...........Experimental pharmacology
QR - Microbiology
1-502..............Microbiology
1-74.5............General
75-99.5...........Bacteria
99.6-99.8.........Cyanobacteria
100-130...........Microbial ecology
171...............Microorganisms in the animal body
180-198.5.........Immunology
355-502...........Virology
References
Further reading
Full schedule of all LCC Classifications
List of all LCC Classification Outlines
Q |
421422 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20security%20hacking%20incidents | List of security hacking incidents | The list of security hacking incidents covers important or noteworthy events in the history of security hacking and cracking.
1900
1903
Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology, sending insulting Morse code messages through the auditorium's projector.
1930s
1932
Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki broke the Enigma machine code.
1939
Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen worked together to develop the Bombe (on the basis of Rejewski's works on Bomba). The Enigma machine's use of a reliably small key space makes it vulnerable to brute force.
1940s
1943
René Carmille, comptroller general of the Vichy French Army, hacked the punched card system used by the Nazis to locate Jews.
1949
The theory that underlies computer viruses was first made public in 1949, when computer pioneer John von Neumann presented a paper titled "Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata". In the paper von Neumann speculated that computer programs could reproduce themselves.
1950s
1955
At MIT, "hack" first came to mean fussing with machines. The minutes of an April 1955 meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club state that "Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing."
1957
Joe "Joybubbles" Engressia, a blind seven-year-old boy with perfect pitch, discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2600 Hz) would interfere with AT&T's automated telephone systems, thereby inadvertently opening the door for phreaking.
1960s
Various phreaking boxes are used to interact with automated telephone systems.
1963
The first ever reference to malicious hacking is 'telephone hackers' in MIT's student newspaper, The Tech of hackers tying up the lines with Harvard, configuring the PDP-1 to make free calls, war dialing and accumulating large phone bills.
1965
William D. Mathews from MIT found a vulnerability in a CTSS running on an IBM 7094. The standard text editor on the system was designed to be used by one user at a time, working in one directory, and so created a temporary file with a constant name for all instantiations of the editor. The flaw was discovered when two system programmers were editing at the same time and the temporary files for the message-of-the day and the password file became swapped, causing the contents of the system CTSS password file to display to any user logging into the system.
1967
The first known incidence of network penetration hacking took place when members of a computer club at a suburban Chicago area high school were provided access to IBM's APL network. In the Fall of 1967, IBM (through Science Research Associates) approached Evanston Township High School with the offer of four 2741 Selectric teletypewriter based terminals with dial-up modem connectivity to an experimental computer system which implemented an early version of the APL programming language. The APL network system was structured in Workspaces which were assigned to various clients using the system. Working independently, the students quickly learned the language and the system. They were free to explore the system, often using existing code available in public Workspaces as models for their own creations. Eventually, curiosity drove the students to explore the system's wider context. This first informal network penetration effort was later acknowledged as helping harden the security of one of the first publicly accessible networks:
1970s
1971
John T. Draper (later nicknamed Captain Crunch), his friend Joe Engressia (also known as Joybubbles), and blue box phone phreaking hit the news with an Esquire magazine feature story.
1979
Kevin Mitnick breaks into his first major computer system, the Ark, the computer system Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software.
1980s
1980
The FBI investigates a breach of security at National CSS (NCSS). The New York Times, reporting on the incident in 1981, describes hackers as
The newspaper describes white hat activities as part of a "mischievous but perversely positive 'hacker' tradition". When a National CSS employee revealed the existence of his password cracker, which he had used on customer accounts, the company chastised him not for writing the software but for not disclosing it sooner. The letter of reprimand stated that "The Company realizes the benefit to NCSS and in fact encourages the efforts of employees to identify security weaknesses to the VP, the directory, and other sensitive software in files".
1981
Chaos Computer Club forms in Germany.
Ian Murphy aka Captain Zap, was the first cracker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday. Of course, the bargain-seekers who waited until midnight to call long distance were hit with high bills.
1983
The 414s break into 60 computer systems at institutions ranging from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The incident appeared as the cover story of Newsweek with the title "Beware: Hackers at play". As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on computer security and passed several laws.
The group KILOBAUD is formed in February, kicking off a series of other hacker groups which form soon after.
The movie WarGames introduces the wider public to the phenomenon of hacking and creates a degree of mass paranoia of hackers and their supposed abilities to bring the world to a screeching halt by launching nuclear ICBMs.
The U.S. House of Representatives begins hearings on computer security hacking.
In his Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson mentions "hacking" and describes a security exploit that he calls a "Trojan horse".
1984
Someone calling himself Lex Luthor founds the Legion of Doom. Named after a Saturday morning cartoon, the LOD had the reputation of attracting "the best of the best"—until one of the most talented members called Phiber Optik feuded with Legion of Doomer Erik Bloodaxe and got 'tossed out of the clubhouse'. Phiber's friends formed a rival group, the Masters of Deception.
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act gives the Secret Service jurisdiction over computer fraud.
Cult of the Dead Cow forms in Lubbock, Texas, and begins publishing its ezine.
The hacker magazine 2600 begins regular publication, right when TAP was putting out its final issue. The editor of 2600, "Emmanuel Goldstein" (whose real name is Eric Corley), takes his handle from the leader of the resistance in George Orwell's 1984. The publication provides tips for would-be hackers and phone phreaks, as well as commentary on the hacker issues of the day. Today, copies of 2600 are sold at most large retail bookstores.
The Chaos Communication Congress, the annual European hacker conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club, is held in Hamburg, Germany.
William Gibson's groundbreaking science fiction novel Neuromancer, about "Case", a futuristic computer hacker, is published. Considered the first major cyberpunk novel, it brought into hacker jargon such terms as "cyberspace", "the matrix", "simstim", and "ICE".
1985
KILOBAUD is re-organized into The P.H.I.R.M. and begins sysopping hundreds of BBSs throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The online 'zine Phrack is established.
The Hacker's Handbook is published in the UK.
The FBI, Secret Service, Middlesex County NJ Prosecutor's Office and various local law enforcement agencies execute seven search warrants concurrently across New Jersey on July 12, 1985, seizing equipment from BBS operators and users alike for "complicity in computer theft", under a newly passed, and yet untested criminal statute. This is famously known as the Private Sector Bust, or the 2600 BBS Seizure, and implicated the Private Sector BBS sysop, Store Manager (also a BBS sysop), Beowulf, Red Barchetta, The Vampire, the NJ Hack Shack BBS sysop, and the Treasure Chest BBS sysop.
1986
After more and more break-ins to government and corporate computers, Congress passes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to break into computer systems. The law, however, does not cover juveniles.
Robert Schifreen and Stephen Gold are convicted of accessing the Telecom Gold account belonging to the Duke of Edinburgh under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 in the United Kingdom, the first conviction for illegally accessing a computer system. On appeal, the conviction is overturned as hacking is not within the legal definition of forgery.
Arrest of a hacker who calls himself The Mentor. He published a now-famous treatise shortly after his arrest that came to be known as the Hacker Manifesto in the e-zine Phrack. This still serves as the most famous piece of hacker literature and is frequently used to illustrate the mindset of hackers.
Astronomer Clifford Stoll plays a pivotal role in tracking down hacker Markus Hess, events later covered in Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg.
1987
The Christmas Tree EXEC "worm" causes major disruption to the VNET, BITNET and EARN networks.
1988
The Morris Worm. Graduate student Robert T. Morris, Jr. of Cornell University launches a worm on the government's ARPAnet (precursor to the Internet). The worm spreads to 6,000 networked computers, clogging government and university systems. Robert Morris is dismissed from Cornell, sentenced to three years' probation, and fined $10,000.
First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of $70 million computer theft.
The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is created by DARPA to address network security.
The Father Christmas (computer worm) spreads over DECnet networks.
1989
Jude Milhon (aka St Jude) and R. U. Sirius launch MONDO 2000, a major '90s tech-lifestyle magazine, in Berkeley, California.
The politically motivated WANK worm spreads over DECnet.
Dutch magazine Hack-Tic begins.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll is published.
The detection of AIDS (Trojan horse) is the first instance of a ransomware detection.
1990s
1990
Operation Sundevil introduced. After a prolonged sting investigation, Secret Service agents swoop down on organizers and prominent members of BBSs in 14 U.S. cities including the Legion of Doom, conducting early-morning raids and arrests. The arrests involve and are aimed at cracking down on credit-card theft and telephone and wire fraud. The result is a breakdown in the hacking community, with members informing on each other in exchange for immunity. The offices of Steve Jackson Games are also raided, and the role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk is confiscated, possibly because the government fears it is a "handbook for computer crime". Legal battles arise that prompt the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including the trial of Knight Lightning.
Australian federal police tracking Realm members Phoenix, Electron and Nom are the first in the world to use a remote data intercept to gain evidence for a computer crime prosecution.
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 is passed in the United Kingdom, criminalising any unauthorised access to computer systems.
1992
Release of the movie Sneakers, in which security experts are blackmailed into stealing a universal decoder for encryption systems.
One of the first ISPs, MindVox, opens to the public.
Bulgarian virus writer Dark Avenger wrote 1260, the first known use of polymorphic code, used to circumvent the type of pattern recognition used by antivirus software, and nowadays also intrusion detection systems.
Publication of a hacking instruction manual for penetrating TRW credit reporting agency by Infinite Possibilities Society (IPS) gets Dr. Ripco, the sysop of Ripco BBS mentioned in the IPS manual, arrested by the United States Secret Service.
1993
The first DEF CON hacking conference takes place in Las Vegas. The conference is meant to be a one-time party to say good-bye to BBSs (now replaced by the Web), but the gathering was so popular it became an annual event.
AOL gives its users access to Usenet, precipitating Eternal September.
1994
Summer: Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world. Vladimir Levin, the 30-year-old ringleader, used his work laptop after hours to transfer the funds to accounts in Finland and Israel. Levin stands trial in the United States and is sentenced to three years in prison. Authorities recover all but $400,000 of the stolen money.
Hackers adapt to emergence of the World Wide Web quickly, moving all their how-to information and hacking programs from the old BBSs to new hacker web sites.
AOHell is released, a freeware application that allows a burgeoning community of unskilled script kiddies to wreak havoc on America Online. For days, hundreds of thousands of AOL users find their mailboxes flooded with multi-megabyte email bombs and their chat rooms disrupted with spam messages.
December 27: After experiencing an IP spoofing attack by Kevin Mitnick, computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura started to receive prank calls that popularized the phrase "My kung fu is stronger than yours".
1995
The movies The Net and Hackers are released.
The Canadian ISP dlcwest.com is hacked and website replaced with a graphic and the caption "You've been hacked MOFO"
February 22: The FBI raids the "Phone Masters".
1996
Hackers alter Web sites of the United States Department of Justice (August), the CIA (October), and the U.S. Air Force (December).
Canadian hacker group, Brotherhood, breaks into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Arizona hacker, John Sabo A.K.A FizzleB/Peanut, was arrested for hacking Canadian ISP dlcwest.com claiming the company was defrauding customers through over billing.
The US general accounting office reports that hackers attempted to break into Defense Department computer files some 250,000 times in 1995 alone with a success rate of about 65% and doubling annually.
Cryptovirology is born with the invention of the cryptoviral extortion protocol that would later form the basis of modern ransomware.
1997
A 16-year-old Croatian youth penetrates computers at a U.S. Air Force base in Guam.
June: Eligible Receiver 97 tests the American government's readiness against cyberattacks.
December: Information Security publishes first issue.
First high-profile attacks on Microsoft's Windows NT operating system
1998
January: Yahoo! notifies Internet users that anyone visiting its site in the past month might have downloaded a logic bomb and worm planted by hackers claiming a "logic bomb" will go off if computer hacker Kevin Mitnick is not released from prison.
February: The Internet Software Consortium proposes the use of DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to secure DNS servers.
May 19: The seven members of the hacker think tank known as L0pht testify in front of the US congressional Government Affairs committee on "Weak Computer Security in Government".
June: Information Security publishes its first annual Industry Survey, finding that nearly three-quarters of organizations suffered a security incident in the previous year.
September: Electronic Disturbance Theater, an online political performance-art group, attacks the websites of The Pentagon, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, calling it conceptual art and claiming it to be a protest against the suppression of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in southern Mexico. EDT uses the FloodNet software to bombard its opponents with access requests.
October: "U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno announces National Infrastructure Protection Center."
1999
Software security goes mainstream In the wake of Microsoft's Windows 98 release, 1999 becomes a banner year for security (and hacking). Hundreds of advisories and patches are released in response to newfound (and widely publicized) bugs in Windows and other commercial software products. A host of security software vendors release anti-hacking products for use on home computers.
U.S. President Bill Clinton announces a $1.46 billion initiative to improve government computer security. The plan would establish a network of intrusion detection monitors for certain federal agencies and encourage the private sector to do the same.
January 7: The "Legion of the Underground" (LoU) declares "war" against the governments of Iraq and the People's Republic of China. An international coalition of hackers (including Cult of the Dead Cow, 2600s staff, Phracks staff, L0pht, and the Chaos Computer Club) issued a joint statement (CRD 990107 - Hackers on planet earth against infowar) condemning the LoU's declaration of war. The LoU responded by withdrawing its declaration.
March: The Melissa worm is released and quickly becomes the most costly malware outbreak to date.
July: Cult of the Dead Cow releases Back Orifice 2000 at DEF CON.
August: Kevin Mitnick, sentenced to 5 years, of which over 4 years had already been spent pre-trial including 8 months' solitary confinement.
September: Level Seven Crew hacks the U.S. Embassy in China's website and places racist, anti-government slogans on embassy site in regards to 1998 U.S. embassy bombings.
September 16: The United States Department of Justice sentences the "Phone Masters".
October: American Express introduces the "Blue" smart card, the industry's first chip-based credit card in the US.
November 17: A hacker interviewed by Hilly Rose during the radio show Coast to Coast AM (then hosted by Art Bell) exposes a plot by al-Qaeda to derail Amtrak trains. This results in all trains being forcibly stopped over Y2K as a safety measure.
2000s
2000
May: The ILOVEYOU worm, also known as VBS/Loveletter and Love Bug worm, is a computer worm written in VBScript. It infected millions of computers worldwide within a few hours of its release. It is considered to be one of the most damaging worms ever. It originated in the Philippines; made by an AMA Computer College student Onel de Guzman for his thesis.
September: Computer hacker Jonathan James became the first juvenile to serve jail time for hacking.
2001
Microsoft becomes the prominent victim of a new type of hack that attacks the domain name server. In these denial-of-service attacks, the DNS paths that take users to Microsoft's websites are corrupted.
February: A Dutch cracker releases the Anna Kournikova virus, initiating a wave of viruses that tempts users to open the infected attachment by promising a sexy picture of the Russian tennis star.
April: FBI agents trick two Russian crackers into coming to the U.S. and revealing how they were hacking U.S. banks.
July: Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov is arrested at the annual DEF CON hacker convention. He was the first person criminally charged with violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
August: Code Red worm, infects tens of thousands of machines.
The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) is established in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
2002
January: Bill Gates decrees that Microsoft will secure its products and services, and kicks off a massive internal training and quality control campaign.
March: Gary McKinnon is arrested following unauthorized access to US military and NASA computers.
May: Klez.H, a variant of the worm discovered in November 2001, becomes the biggest malware outbreak in terms of machines infected, but causes little monetary damage.
June: The Bush administration files a bill to create the Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, will be responsible for protecting the nation's critical IT infrastructure.
August: Researcher Chris Paget publishes a paper describing "shatter attacks", detailing how Windows' unauthenticated messaging system can be used to take over a machine. The paper raises questions about how securable Windows could ever be. It is however largely derided as irrelevant as the vulnerabilities it described are caused by vulnerable applications (placing windows on the desktop with inappropriate privileges) rather than an inherent flaw within the Operating System.
October: The International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium—(ISC)²—confers its 10,000th CISSP certification.
2003
The hacktivist group Anonymous was formed.
March: Cult of the Dead Cow and Hacktivismo are given permission by the United States Department of Commerce to export software utilizing strong encryption.
2004
March: New Zealand's Government (National Party) website defaced by hacktivist group BlackMask
July: North Korea claims to have trained 500 hackers who successfully crack South Korean, Japanese, and their allies' computer systems.
October: National Cyber Security Awareness Month was launched by the National Cyber Security Alliance and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
2005
April 2: Rafael Núñez (aka RaFa), a notorious member of the hacking group World of Hell, is arrested following his arrival at Miami International Airport for breaking into the Defense Information Systems Agency computer system in June 2001.
September 13: Cameron Lacroix is sentenced to 11 months for gaining access to T-Mobile's network and exploiting Paris Hilton's Sidekick.
November 3: Jeanson James Ancheta, whom prosecutors say was a member of the "Botmaster Underground", a group of script kiddies mostly noted for their excessive use of bot attacks and propagating vast amounts of spam, was taken into custody after being lured to FBI offices in Los Angeles.
2006
January: One of the few worms to take after the old form of malware, destruction of data rather than the accumulation of zombie networks to launch attacks from, is discovered. It had various names, including Kama Sutra (used by most media reports), Black Worm, Mywife, Blackmal, Nyxem version D, Kapser, KillAV, Grew and CME-24. The worm would spread through e-mail client address books, and would search for documents and fill them with garbage, instead of deleting them to confuse the user. It would also hit a web page counter when it took control, allowing the programmer who created it as well as the world to track the progress of the worm. It would replace documents with random garbage on the third of every month. It was hyped by the media but actually affected relatively few computers, and was not a real threat for most users.
May: Jeanson James Ancheta receives a 57-month prison sentence, and is ordered to pay damages amounting to $15,000 to the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake and the Defense Information Systems Agency, for damage done due to DDoS attacks and hacking. Ancheta also had to forfeit his gains to the government, which include $60,000 in cash, a BMW, and computer equipment.
May: The largest defacement in Web History as of that time is performed by the Turkish hacker iSKORPiTX who successfully hacked 21,549 websites in one shot.
July: Robert Moore and Edwin Pena were the first people to be charged by U.S. authorities for VoIP hacking. Robert Moore served 2 years in federal prison and was given $152,000 restitution. Once Edwin Pena was caught after fleeing the country, evading authorities for almost 2 years, he was sentenced to 10 years and given $1 million restitution.
September: Viodentia releases FairUse4WM tool which would remove DRM information off Windows Media Audio (WMA) files downloaded from music services such as Yahoo! Unlimited, Napster, Rhapsody Music and Urge.
2007
May 17: Estonia recovers from massive denial-of-service attack
June 13: FBI Operation Bot Roast finds over 1 million botnet victims
June 21: A spear phishing incident at the Office of the Secretary of Defense steals sensitive U.S. defense information, leading to significant changes in identity and message-source verification at OSD.
August 11: United Nations website hacked by Indian Hacker Pankaj Kumar Singh.
November 14: Panda Burning Incense which is known by several other names, including Fujacks and Radoppan.T lead to the arrest of eight people in China. Panda Burning Incense was a parasitic virus that infected executable files on a PC. When infected, the icon of the executable file changes to an image of a panda holding three sticks of incense. The arrests were the first for virus writing in China.
2008
January 17: Project Chanology; Anonymous attacks Scientology website servers around the world. Private documents are stolen from Scientology computers and distributed over the Internet.
March 7: Around 20 Chinese hackers claim to have gained access to the world's most sensitive sites, including the Pentagon. They operated from an apartment on a Chinese Island.
March 14: Trend Micro website successfully hacked by Turkish hacker Janizary (aka Utku).
2009
April 4: Conficker worm infiltrated millions of PCs worldwide including many government-level top-security computer networks.
2010s
2010
January 12: Operation Aurora Google publicly reveals that it has been on the receiving end of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google"
June: Stuxnet The Stuxnet worm is found by VirusBlokAda. Stuxnet was unusual in that while it spread via Windows computers, its payload targeted just one specific model and type of SCADA systems. It slowly became clear that it was a cyber attack on Iran's nuclear facilities—with most experts believing that Israel was behind it—perhaps with US help.
December 3: The first Malware Conference, MALCON took place in India. Founded by Rajshekhar Murthy, malware coders are invited to showcase their skills at this annual event supported by the Government of India. An advanced malware for Symbian OS is released by hacker A0drul3z.
2011
The hacker group Lulz Security is formed.
April 9: Bank of America website got hacked by a Turkish hacker named JeOPaRDY. An estimated 85,000 credit card numbers and accounts were reported to have been stolen due to the hack. Bank officials say no personal customer bank information is available on that web-page. Investigations are being conducted by the FBI to trace down the incriminated hacker.
April 17: An "external intrusion" sends the PlayStation Network offline, and compromises personally identifying information (possibly including credit card details) of its 77 million accounts, in what is claimed to be one of the five largest data breaches ever.
Computer hacker sl1nk releases information of his penetration in the servers of the Department of Defense (DoD), Pentagon, NASA, NSA, US Military, Department of the Navy, Space and Naval Warfare System Command and other UK/US government websites.
September: Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE made a world record in defacement history by hacking 700,000 websites in a single shot.
October 16: The YouTube channel of Sesame Street was hacked, streaming pornographic content for about 22 minutes.
November 1: The main phone and Internet networks of the Palestinian territories sustained a hacker attack from multiple locations worldwide.
November 7: The forums for Valve's Steam service were hacked. Redirects for a hacking website, Fkn0wned, appeared on the Steam users' forums, offering "hacking tutorials and tools, porn, free giveaways and much more."
December 14: Five members of the Norwegian hacker group, Noria, were arrested, allegedly suspected for hacking into the email account of the militant extremist Anders Behring Breivik (who perpetrated the 2011 attacks in the country).
2012
A hacker, Big-Smoke, published over 400,000 credit cards online, and threatened Israel to release 1 million credit cards in the future. In response to that incident, an Israeli hacker published over 200 Albanian' credit cards online.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, the co-founder of Pirate Bay, was convicted in Denmark of hacking a mainframe computer, what was then Denmark's biggest hacking case.
January 7: "Team Appunity", a group of Norwegian hackers, were arrested for breaking into Norway's largest prostitution website then publishing the user database online.
February 3: Marriott was hacked by a New Age ideologist, Attila Nemeth who was resisting against the New World Order where he said that corporations are allegedly controlling the world. As a response Marriott reported him to the United States Secret Service.
February 8: Foxconn is hacked by a hacker group, "Swagg Security", releasing a massive amount of data including email and server logins, and even more alarming—bank account credentials of large companies like Apple and Microsoft. Swagg Security stages the attack just as a Foxconn protest ignites against terrible working conditions in southern China.
May 4: The websites of several Turkish representative offices of international IT-companies are defaced within the same day by F0RTYS3V3N (Turkish Hacker), including the websites of Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, PayPal.
May 24: WHMCS is hacked by UGNazi, they claim that the reason for this is because of the illegal sites that are using their software.
May 31: MyBB is hacked by newly founded hacker group, UGNazi, the website was defaced for about a day, they claim their reasoning for this was because they were upset that the forum board Hackforums.net uses their software.
June 5: The social networking website LinkedIn has been hacked and the passwords for nearly 6.5 million user accounts are stolen by cybercriminals. As a result, a United States grand jury indicted Nikulin and three unnamed co-conspirators on charges of aggravated identity theft and computer intrusion.
August 15: The most valuable company in the world Saudi Aramco is crippled by a cyber warfare attack for months by malware called Shamoon. Considered the biggest hack in history in terms of cost and destructiveness . Carried out by an Iranian attacker group called Cutting Sword of Justice. Iranian hackers retaliated against Stuxnet by releasing Shamoon. The malware destroyed over 35,000 Saudi Aramco computers, affecting business operations for months.
December 17: Computer hacker sl1nk announced that he has hacked a total of 9 countries' SCADA systems. The proof includes 6 countries: France, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the United States.
2013
The social networking website Tumblr is attacked by hackers. Consequently, 65,469,298 unique emails and passwords were leaked from Tumblr. The data breach's legitimacy is confirmed by computer security researcher Troy Hunt.
August: Yahoo! data breaches occurred. More than 1 billion users data are being leaked.
2014
February 7: The bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy after $460million was apparently stolen by hackers due to "weaknesses in [their] system" and another $27.4million went missing from its bank accounts.
October: The White House computer system was hacked. It was said that the FBI, the Secret Service, and other U.S. intelligence agencies categorized the attacks "among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems."
November 24: In response to the release of the film The Interview, the servers of Sony Pictures are hacked by a hacker group calling itself "Guardian of Peace".
November 28: The website of the Philippine telecommunications company Globe Telecom was hacked in response to the poor internet service they are distributing.
2015
June: the records of 21.5 million people, including social security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, fingerprints, and security clearance-related information, are stolen from the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Most of the victims are employees of the United States government and unsuccessful applicants to it. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post report that government sources believe the hacker is the government of China.
July: The servers of extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison were breached.
2016
February: The 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist attempted to steal US$951 million from a Bangladesh Bank, and succeeded in getting $101 million—although some of this was later recovered.
July 22: WikiLeaks published the documents from the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak.
July 29: a group suspected coming from China launched hacker attacks on the website of Vietnam Airlines.
August 13: The Shadow Brokers (TSB) started publishing several leaks containing hacking tools from the National Security Agency (NSA), including several zero-day exploits. Ongoing leaks until April 2017 (The Shadow Brokers)
September: Hacker Ardit Ferizi is sentenced to 20 years in prison after being arrested for hacking U.S. servers and passing the leaked information to members of ISIL terrorist group back in 2015.
October: The 2016 Dyn cyberattack is being conducted with a botnet consisting of IOTs infected with Mirai by the hacktivist groups SpainSquad, Anonymous, and New World Hackers, reportedly in retaliation for Ecuador's rescinding Internet access to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at their embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum.
Late 2016: Hackers steal international personal user data from the company Uber, including phone numbers, email addresses, and names, of 57 million people and 600,000 driver's license numbers of drivers for the company. Uber's GitHub account was accessed through Amazon's cloud-based service. Uber paid the hackers $100,000 for assurances the data was destroyed.
December 2016: Yahoo! data breaches reported and affected more than 1 billion users. The data leakage includes user names, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth, and hashed passwords
2017
April: A hacker group calling itself "The Dark Overlord" posted unreleased episodes of Orange Is the New Black TV series online after failing to extort the online entertainment company Netflix.
May: WannaCry ransomware attack started on Friday, May 12, 2017, and has been described as unprecedented in scale, infecting more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries. A hacked unreleased Disney film is held for ransom, to be paid in Bitcoin.
May: 25,000 digital photos and ID scans relating to patients of the Grozio Chirurgija cosmetic surgery clinic in Lithuania were obtained and published without consent by an unknown group demanding ransoms. Thousands of clients from more than 60 countries were affected. The breach brought attention to weaknesses in Lithuania's information security.
June: 2017 Petya cyberattack.
June: TRITON (TRISIS), a malware framework designed to reprogram Triconex safety instrumented systems (SIS) of industrial control systems (ICS), discovered in Saudi Arabian Petrochemical plant.
August: Hackers demand $7.5 million in Bitcoin to stop pre-releasing HBO shows and scripts, including Ballers, Room 104 and Game of Thrones.
May–July 2017: The Equifax breach.
September 2017: Deloitte breach.
December: Mecklenburg County, North Carolina computer systems were hacked. They did not pay the ransom.
2018
March: Computer systems in the city of Atlanta, in the U.S. state of Georgia, are seized by hackers with ransomware. They did not pay the ransom, and two Iranians were indicted by the FBI on cyber crime charges for the breach.
The town of Wasaga Beach in Ontario, Canada computer systems are seized by hackers with ransomware.
September: Facebook was hacked, exposing to hackers the personal information of an estimated 30 million Facebook users (initially estimated at 50 million) when the hackers "stole" the "access tokens" of 400,000 Facebook users. The information accessible to the hackers included users' email addresses, phone numbers, their lists of friends, Groups they are members of, users' search information, posts on their timelines, and names of recent Messenger conversations.
October: West Haven, Connecticut USA computer systems are seized by hackers with ransomware, they paid $2,000 in ransom.
November:
The first U.S. indictment of individual people for ransomware attacks occurs. The U.S. Justice Department indicted two men Faramarz Shahi Savandi and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri who allegedly used the SamSam ransomware for extortion, netting them more than $6 million in ransom payments. The companies infected with the ransomware included Allscripts, Medstar Health, and Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Altogether, the attacks caused victims to lose more than $30 million, in addition to the ransom payments.
Marriott disclosed that its Starwood Hotel brand had been subject to a security breach.
2019
March: Jackson County computer systems in the U.S. state of Georgia are seized by hackers with ransomware, they paid $400,000 in ransom. The city of Albany in the U.S. state of New York experiences a ransomware cyber attack.
April: Computer systems in the city of Augusta, in the U.S. state of Maine, are seized by hackers using ransomware. The City of Greenville (North Carolina)'s computer systems are seized by hackers using ransomware known as RobbinHood. Imperial County, in the U.S. state of California, computer systems are seized by hackers using Ryuk ransomware.
May: computer systems belonging to the City of Baltimore are seized by hackers using ransomware known as RobbinHood that encrypts files with a "file-locking" virus, as well as the tool EternalBlue.
June: The city of Riviera Beach, Florida paid roughly $600,000 ransom in Bitcoin to hackers who seized their computers using ransomware. Hackers stole 18 hours of unreleased music from the band Radiohead demanding $150,000 ransom. Radiohead released the music to the public anyway and did not pay the ransom.
November: The Anonymous hacktivist collective announced that they have hacked into four Chinese computer databases and donated those to data breach indexing/notification service vigilante.pw. The hack was conducted in order to support the 2019 Hong Kong protests, amidst the Hong Kong police's siege of the city's Polytechnic University. They also brought up a possible peace plan first proposed by a professor at Inha University in hopes of having the Korean reunification and the five key demands of the Hong Kong protest being fulfilled at once.
2020s
2020
February: Anonymous hacked the United Nations website and created a page for Taiwan, a country which had not had a seat at the UN since 1971. The hacked page featured the Flag of Taiwan, the KMT emblem, a Taiwan Independence flag, the Anonymous logo, embedded YouTube videos such as the Taiwanese national anthem and the closing score for the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame titled "It's Been a Long, Long Time", and a caption. The hacked server belonged to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
May: Anonymous declared a large hack on May 28, three days after the murder of George Floyd. An individual claiming to represent Anonymous stated that "We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." in a now-deleted video. Anonymous addressed police brutality and said they "will be exposing [their] many crimes to the world". It was suspected that Anonymous were the cause for the downtime and public suspension of the Minneapolis Police Department website and its parent site, the website of the City of Minneapolis.
May: Indian national Shubham Upadhyay posed as Superintendent of Police and, using social engineering, used a free caller identification app to call up the in-charge of the Kotwali police station, K. K. Gupta, in order to threaten him to get his phone repaired amidst the COVID-19 lockdown. The attempt was foiled.
June: Anonymous claimed responsibility for stealing and leaking a trove of documents collectively nicknamed 'BlueLeaks'. The 269-gigabyte collection was published by a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets. Furthermore, the collective took down Atlanta Police Department's website via DDoS, and defaced websites such as a Filipino governmental webpage and that of Brookhaven National Labs. They expressed support for Julian Assange and press freedom, while briefly "taking a swing" against Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia for having 'engaged in shady practices behind our prying eyes'. In the case of Reddit, they posted a link to a court document describing the possible involvement of a moderator of a large traffic subreddit (/r/news) in an online harassment-related case.
June: The Buffalo, NY police department's website was supposedly hacked by Anonymous. While the website was up and running after a few minutes, Anonymous tweeted again on Twitter urging that it be taken down. A few minutes later, the Buffalo NY website was brought down again. They also hacked Chicago police radios to play N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police".
June: Over 1,000 accounts on multiplayer online game Roblox were hacked to display that they supported U.S. President Donald Trump.
July: The 2020 Twitter bitcoin scam occurred.
July: User credentials of writing website Wattpad were stolen and leaked on a hacker forum. The database contained over 200 million records.
August: A large number of subreddits were hacked to post materials endorsing Donald Trump. The affected subreddits included r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/3amJokes, r/NFL, r/PhotoshopBattles. An entity with the name of "calvin goh and Melvern" had purportedly claimed responsibility for the massive defacement, and also made violent threats against a Chinese embassy.
August: The US Air Force's Hack-A-Sat event was hosted at DEF CON's virtual conference where groups such as Poland Can Into Space, FluxRepeatRocket, AddVulcan, Samurai, Solar Wine, PFS, 15 Fitty Tree, and 1064CBread competed in order to control a satellite in space. The Poland Can Into Space team stood out for having successfully manipulated a satellite to take a picture of the Moon.
August: The website of Belarusian company "BrestTorgTeknika" was defaced by a hacker nicknaming herself "Queen Elsa", in order to support the 2020–21 Belarusian protests. In it, the page hacker exclaimed "Get Iced Iced already" and "Free Belarus, revolution of our times" with the latter alluding to the famous slogan used by 2019 Hong Kong protests. The results of the hack were then announced on Reddit's /r/Belarus subreddit by a poster under the username "Socookre".
August: Multiple DDoS attacks forced New Zealand's stock market to temporarily shut down.
September: The first suspected death from a cyberattack was reported after cybercriminals hit a hospital in Düsseldorf, Germany with ransomware.
October: A wave of botnet-coordinated ransomware attacks against hospital infrastructure occurred in the United States, identified as . State security officials and American corporate security officers were concerned that these attacks might be a prelude to hacking of election infrastructure during the elections of the subsequent month, like similar incidents during the 2016 United States elections and other attacks; there was, however, no evidence that they performed attacks on election infrastructure in 2020.
December: A supply chain attack targeting upstream dependencies from Texas IT service provider "SolarWinds" results in serious, wide-ranging security breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments. White House officials did not immediately publicly identify a culprit; Reuters, citing sources "familiar with the investigation", pointed toward the Russian government. An official statement shared by Senate Finance Committee ranking member, Ron Wyden said: "Hackers broke into systems in the Departmental Offices division of Treasury, home to the department’s highest-ranking officials."
December: A bomb threat posted from a Twitter account that was seemingly hacked by persons with the aliases of "Omnipotent" and "choonkeat", against the Aeroflot Flight 102, a passenger flight with the plane tail number of VQ-BIL coming from Moscow to New York City. Due to that, a runway of New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport was temporarily closed and resulted in the delay of Aeroflot Flight 103, a return flight back to Moscow.
December: The Anonymous group initiated 'Christmas gift' defacements against multiple Russian portals including a municipal website in Tomsk and that of a regional football club. Inside the defacements, they made multiple references such as Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, freedom protests in Thailand and Belarus, and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party. They also held a mock award based on an event on the game platform Roblox that was called "RB Battles" where YouTubers Tanqr and KreekCraft, the winner and the runner up of the actual game event, were compared to both Taiwan and New Zealand respectively due to the latter's reportedly stellar performance in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
2021
January: Microsoft Exchange Server data breach
February: Anonymous announced cyber-attacks of at least five Malaysian websites. As a result, eleven individuals were nabbed as suspects.
February: Hackers including those with names of "张卫能 utoyo" and "full_discl0sure" hijacked an events website Aucklife in order to craft a phony bomb threat against the Chinese consulate in Auckland, New Zealand, and also a similar facility in Sydney, Australia. Their motive was a punitive response against China due to COVID-19. As a result, a physical search was conducted at the consulate by New Zealand's Police Specialist Search Group while Aucklife owner Hailey Newton had since regained her access to the website. Wellington-based cybersecurity consultant Adam Boileau remarked that the hack isn't 'highly technical'.
February: The group "Myanmar Hackers" attacked several websites belonging to Myanmar government agencies such as the Central Bank of Myanmar and the military-run Tatmadaw True News Information Team. The group also targeted the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, Trade Department, Customs Department, Ministry of Commerce, Myawady TV and state-owned broadcaster Myanmar Radio and Television and some private media outlets. A computer technician in Yangon found that the hacks were denial-of-service attacks, while the group's motive is to protest the 2021 Myanmar coup.
April: Over 500 million Facebook users' personal info—including info on 32 million in the United States—was discovered posted on a hackers' website, though Facebook claimed that the information was from a 2019 hack, and that the company had already taken mitigation measures; however, the company declined to say whether it had notified the affected users of the breach.
April: The Ivanti Pulse Connect Secure data breach of unauthorized access to the networks of high-value targets since at least June 2020 via across the U.S. and some E.U. nations due to their use of vulnerable, proprietary software was reported.
May: Operation of the U.S. Colonial Pipeline is interrupted by a ransomware cyber operation.
May: On 21 May 2021 Air India was subjected to a cyberattack wherein the personal details of about 4.5 million customers around the world were compromised including passport, credit card details, birth dates, name and ticket information.
July: On 22 July 2021 Saudi Aramco data were leaked by a third-party contractor and demanded $50 million ransom from Saudi Aramco. Saudi Aramco confirmed the incident after a hacker claimed on dark web that he had stolen 1 terabyte of data about location of oil refineries and employees data in a post that was posted on June 23.
August: T-Mobile reported that data files with information from about 40 million former or prospective T-Mobile customers, including first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver's license/ID information, were compromised.
September and October: 2021 Epik data breach. Anonymous obtained and released over 400gigabytes of data from the domain registrar and web hosting company Epik. The data was shared in three releases between September 13 and October 4. The first release included domain purchase and transfer details, account credentials and logins, payment history, employee emails, and unidentified private keys. The hackers claimed they had obtained "a decade's worth of data", including all customer data and records for all domains ever hosted or registered through the company, and which included poorly encrypted passwords and other sensitive data stored in plaintext. The second release consisted of bootable disk images and API keys for third-party services used by Epik; the third contained additional disk images and an archive of data belonging to the Republican Party of Texas, who are an Epik customer.
October: On October 6, 2021, an anonymous 4chan reportedly hacked and leaked the source code of Twitch, as well as information on how much the streaming service paid almost 2.4 million streamers since August 2019. Source code from almost 6,000 GitHub repositories was leaked, and the 4chan user said it was "part one" of a much larger release.
November and December: On November 24th, Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba's Cloud Security Team reported a zero-day vulnerability (later dubbed Log4Shell) involving the use of arbitrary code execution in the ubiquitous Java logging framework software Log4j. The report was privately disclosed to project developers of Log4j, a team at The Apache Software Foundation, on November 24. On December 8, Zhaojun contacted the developers again detailing how the vulnerability was being discussed in public security chat rooms, was already known by some security researchers, and pleaded that the team expedite the solution to the vulnerability in the official release version of Log4j. Early exploitations were noticed on Minecraft servers on December 9; however, forensic analysis indicates that Log4Shell may have been exploited as early as December 1 or 2nd. Due to the ubiquity of devices with the Log4j software (hundreds of millions) and the simplicity in executing the vulnerability, it is considered to be arguably one of the largest and most critical vulnerabilities ever. Yet, big names in security hacking helped in regaining control over server, like Graham Ivan Clark, and Elhamy A. Elsebaey. A portion of the vulnerability was fixed in a patch distributed on December 6, three days before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed on December 9.
2022
February: The German Chaos Computer Club has reported more than fifty data leaks. Government institutions and companies from various business sectors were affected. In total, the researchers had access to over 6.4 million personal data records as well as terabytes of log data and source code.
See also
List of cyberattacks
List of data breaches
References
Further reading
Computer Security Hacker History
Computer security
Hacking (computer security) |
41981099 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox%20%28protocol%29 | Tox (protocol) | Tox is a peer-to-peer instant-messaging and video-calling protocol that offers end-to-end encryption. The stated goal of the project is to provide secure yet easily accessible communication for everyone. A reference implementation of the protocol is published as free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later.
History
The initial commit to GitHub was pushed on June 23, 2013, by a user named irungentoo. Pre-alpha testing binaries were made available for users from February 3, 2014, onwards, and nightly builds of Tox are published by the Jenkins Automatron. On July 12, 2014, Tox entered an alpha stage in development and a redesigned download page was created for the occasion.
Features
Encryption of traffic
Users are assigned a public and private key, and they connect to each other directly in a fully distributed, peer-to-peer network. Users have the ability to message friends, join chat rooms with friends or strangers, voice/video chat, and send each other files. All traffic over Tox is end-to-end encrypted using the NaCl library, which provides authenticated encryption and perfect forward secrecy.
Revealing of IP address to friends
Tox makes no attempt to cloak your IP address when communicating with friends, as the whole point of a peer-to-peer network is to connect you directly to your friends. A workaround does exist in the form of tunneling your Tox connections through Tor. However, a non-friend user cannot easily discover your IP address using only a Tox ID; you reveal your IP address to someone only when you add them to your contacts list.
Additional messaging features
Tox clients aim to provide support for various secure and anonymised communication features; while every client supports messaging, additional features like group messaging, voice and video calling, voice and video conferencing, typing indicators, message read-receipts, file sharing, profile encryption, and desktop streaming are supported to various degrees by mobile and desktop clients. Additional features can be implemented by any client as long as they are supported by the core protocol. Features that are not related to the core networking system are left up to the client. Client developers are strongly encouraged to adhere to the Tox Client Standard in order to maintain cross-client compatibility and uphold best security practices.
Usability as an instant messenger
Though several apps that use the Tox protocol seem similar in function to regular instant messaging apps, the lack of central servers similar to XMPP or Matrix currently has the consequence that both parties of the chat need to be online for the message to be sent and received. The Tox enabled messengers deal with this in separate ways, some prevent the user from sending the message if the other party has disconnected while others show the message as being sent when in reality it is stored in the sender's phone waiting to be delivered when the receiving party reconnects to the network.
Architecture
Core
The Tox core is a library establishing the protocol and API. User front-ends, or clients, are built on the top of the core. Anyone can create a client utilizing the core.
Technical documents describing the design of the Core, written by the core developer irungentoo, are available publicly.
Protocol
The core of Tox is an implementation of the Tox protocol, an example of the application layer of the OSI model and arguably the presentation layer. Implementations of the Tox protocol not done by the project exist.
Tox uses the Opus audio format for audio streaming and the VP8 video compression format for video streaming.
Encryption
Tox uses the cryptographic primitives present in the NaCl crypto library, via libsodium. Specifically, Tox employs Curve25519 for its key exchanges, xsalsa20 for symmetric encryption, and Poly1305 for MACs. Because the tox protocol can be used by many different applications, and because the tox network broadcasts the used client, it is also possible for clients to use additional encryption when sending to clients which support the same features.
Clients
A client is a program that uses the Tox core library to communicate with other users of the Tox protocol. Various clients are available for a wide range of systems; the following list is incomplete.
There are also Tox protocol plugins for Pidgin (no longer maintained, but working as of 2018-03-30) and Miranda NG.
Disassociation with Tox Foundation
At July 11, 2015, Tox developers officially announced their disassociation with Tox Foundation, due to "a dispute over the misuse of donated funds" by Tox Foundation head and CEO, according to LWN.net. Due to domains being in control of the Tox Foundation, main development of the project was transferred to a new infrastructure, servers, and new domain.
Reception
Tox received some significant publicity in its early conceptual stage, catching the attention of global online tech news sites. On August 15, 2013, Tox was number five on GitHub's top trending list.
Concerns about metadata leaks were raised, and developers responded by implementing Onion routing for the friend-finding process. Tox was accepted into the Google Summer of Code as a Mentoring Organization in 2014 and 2015.
See also
Comparison of instant messaging clients
Comparison of instant messaging protocols
Comparison of VoIP software
List of free and open-source software packages
References
External links
2013 software
Android (operating system) software
Cross-platform software
Distributed computing
Free communication software
Free instant messaging clients
Free software programmed in C
Instant messaging clients
Instant messaging clients for Linux
Instant messaging clients that use GTK
IOS software
MacOS instant messaging clients
Secure communication
Videotelephony
VoIP protocols
VoIP software
Windows instant messaging clients
Onion routing
Peer-to-peer |
19263334 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux%20Documentation%20Project | Linux Documentation Project | The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) used to be an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux-related documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for hackers to share their documentation with each other and with their users, and for users to share documentation with each other. Its documents tend to be oriented towards experienced users such as professional system administrators, but it also contains tutorials for beginners.
History
The LDP originally began as an FTP site in 1992, but it went on the World Wide Web at MetaLab in 1993. It is believed to have been the first Linux related website ever.
Today, the LDP serves over 475 documents contributed by even more authors. About a dozen of them are book length, and most of those are available in print from major technical publishers including O'Reilly.
On 1 September 2008, LDP started a wiki to allow a better interaction with the authors and the users, with a plan to convert documentation to the wiki format
and a list of pages to be ported.
Presently (as of July 2020), the LDP is no longer active; the last entry under "Recent Changes" dates from 2016 to 2001-29,
the last guide inserted from Mar 2014.
Content
The LDP published many HowTo documents, which instruct a user on the specific steps to take to achieve a desired goal.
These goals are sometimes very specific, such as configuring a particular modem, and sometimes very broad, such as how to administer a network for an ISP.
Very broad topics were covered in the guides, which are book-length documents, usually on broad subjects such as security or networking.
The LDP also published Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) lists, man pages and other documents, as well as two webzines, the Linux Gazette and Linux Focus.
Much of the LDP collection is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Many other licenses are also used, as long as they are freely distributable. Current policy recommends the GFDL.
Linux Network Administrator's Guide is one book in the series.
References
External links
The Linux Documentation Project
The Linux Documentation Project HOWTO Generator
Linux documentation projects
How-to websites
Mass media companies |
9085653 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR%20%28software%29 | CNR (software) | CNR, or One-Click & Run, was a free one-click software delivery service that was created to make finding and installing Linux software easier. It assisted the user in finding and installing software on their computer, and sat dormant in the system tray when not in use.
CNR offered a large database of Linux programs that were suitable for everyday and specialty usage. It was available for Linspire and its derivatives, as well as various other Linux distributions.
History
In 2002, the legacy CNR was created as a digital software delivery service created by Linspire, Inc. The service provide the desktop Linux user with an online software warehouse from which they could click on a product and have it installed on their desktop automatically. It required a paid membership of $49.95 to use the service. The warehouse hosted free, non-free, and commercial Linux software titles. The service relied on a client application to work in concert with Debian's APT and dpkg to resolve dependencies and install files.
In 2006, in support of the community, Linspire changed its membership program to a two-tier system of CNR Basic and CNR Gold. Originally introduced as a $19.95-per-year subscription, the CNR Basic membership was later made free and so now user could access free and non-free software without a subscription.
Linspire announced plans on April 24, 2006, to release CNR under a free software/open source license. It could then be used by other Linux distributions.
In early 2007, Linspire announced that they were going expand their CNR service to other distributions than their own, namely Debian, Ubuntu, with future extensions for RPM. In doing so, Linspire hoped to consolidate and aggregate all desktop Linux software into one service to provide an easier method of finding and installing all software for desktop Linux.
In December 2007, Linspire announced the beta release of their new CNR.com service with support for the updated Linspire and Freespire distributions and for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy (planned for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy in April 2008).
On March 10, 2008, Linspire closed the legacy CNR service.
Web software
CNR also provides access to thousands of Web-based applications, providing the Linux community with the option of local Linux and Web Software, available through a single source (as of February 2008).
The same abilities to browse and search the library of products with additional abilities planned to improve the Web Software experience (bookmarking). The community will also have the ability to add new products to the already extensive library of applications available.
How it works
CNR.com is built as a collection of services in what is commonly referred to as a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The highly scalable architecture is built using the following JEE 5 technologies:
JavaServer Faces (JSF) with facelets
JBoss Seam
EJB 3.x
MySQL
Hibernate with JBoss Cache
JBoss
Apache Maven
The following is a list of the major services and some descriptive information about each one.
Import service
The import service is responsible for importing package repositories, parsing the package metadata, and matching the packages to products using a complex heuristically based algorithm. The Import service supports any Debian based distribution. RPM based packages can be supported by the domain model with additional work specific to the RPM package metadata schema and release management practices. The import service has a 98% success rate matching packages to products with admin support tools for finding and correcting any problems quickly. This service is responsible for making CNR.com the largest software warehouse for desktop Linux.
Warehouse service
The warehouse service contains the web services APIs used by external clients to acquire access to and install products from CNR.com. The APIs are open to the public and are SOAP based. The APIs consist of the following:
partnerLightup – The partnerLightup API provides a UUID MachineID which represents the installation life of a client. The resulting MachineID is required for other warehouse API requests. This API exists for the purpose of auditing the client usage for reporting back to the originating partner.
lightup – The lightup API is the same as the partnerLightup API with the exception that there is no build tracking number to record.
getOses – The getOses API is used to query the warehouse for a list of the supported operating systems. This list is needed when the client cannot properly identify the operating system it is running on and must ask the user to choose from a list of the supported operating systems.
getDistSnapIndex – The getDistSnapIndex API is used to query the server for the aggregate product information for the specified operating system. This API returns a URI for a payload that contains concise product information useful for searching, sorting and viewing in a client.
getDisstSnapIndexDelta – The getDisstSnapIndexDelta API is used to query the server for the aggregate updates and deletes for the product information store given for the specified operating system.
productActionRequest – The productActionRequest API is used to query the server for a download URL for a specific, single product. If the server cannot grant access to the product, a resolution URL will be returned to the client instead so that the request can be resolved and re-executed.
reportActionRequest – The reportActionRequest API is used to report on the execution of the productActionRequest. This data is used to audit the reportActionRequest API success and/or failure.
getProductIdsForPkgBins – The getProductIdsForPkgBins API is used for clients on initial configurations or after changing distributions to determine the products that are already installed on the machine. The client can determine all the binary packages currently installed on the system, and then using this API, can match these products against the products in the distribution snapshot.
The warehouse service also handles product requisite management. Product requisites are user access requirements that must be fulfilled before a user can gain install access to a product. The product requisites consist of the following:
Requires purchase
Requires EULA
Must purchase primary product first (used to secure dependencies)
Ecommerce service
The ecommerce service handles all purchases of commercial software, purchases of member services, and the collection of user acceptance of product EULAs for those products that require such. The ecommerce service is also responsible for handling the DRM requirements of software that have them, such as delivering activation codes to the user or account registration with ISVs.
User management
The user management service handles the creation and management of user accounts as well as the authentication and authorization of user accounts and user access respectively. Authentication is managed using LDAP and SSO is utilized via a token federation service.
Package management
The package management service handles the secure and non-secure storage of all the packages and provides for the secure delivery for all types of packages: free, non-free, and commercial, making CNR.com the industry leader for delivering desktop Linux software. This service is also responsible for the categorization of each product. The categories are an XDG base with an extended set of CNR categories not found in the XDG set intended to enhanced searchability.
Community service
The community service provides for the forum, wiki document and blogging features for both the community in general and for each product. Each product has its own mini-community where discussions and self-help community support can thrive.
CNR.com service
This is the presentation layer of the CNR.com architecture and is responsible for providing the Web 2.0 interfaces. These interfaces allow for the following features:
Add/Review/Edit the long and brief description for any product
Add/Review/Edit the product logo and logo thumbnail
Add/Review/Edit product screenshots
Add/Review/Edit product ratings
Add/Review/Edit product reviews
Filter and sort content
Product specifications with instant access to source code and build files
Other interfaces include the product chart that has a refresh cycle of once per 10 minutes and various administrative interfaces for viewing and managing product and user data.
Support service
The support service provides for the tracking, managing and resolving of user submitted support issues. It also has a facility for paid support features versus free support features.
Mail lists service
The mail list service is responsible for the mailing list enrollment and subscription management as well as the sending of system emails to the user as a result of some user-based activity on the site.
Secure data
The secure data service is responsible for the secure storage of credit card profiles that the user has elected to save.
Category data
The category data service is responsible for the storage of the data associated with product categories.
Audit data
The audit data service is responsible for the storage of user activity records such as installs, client registration, machine registrations, etc.
Product data
The product data service is responsible for the storage of product specific data as well as the product aggregation data.
Warehouse data
The warehouse data service is responsible for the storage of package level data and distribution level data.
Resource data
The resource data service is responsible for the storage of all images associated with a product including user provided images like logos and screenshots.
CNR client
The CNR client is a desktop client application that interfaces with apt and dpkg on the desktop and with the warehouse web services on the server. It is intended to provide a starting point for the community to build its own variations of client software. The application is written in C++ with the GUI built on the QT framework. API integration is done through the gsoap framework. The CNR client is open source and open licensed so that anyone can use it for their own purposes without any need to license it. Features include:
Installing and Uninstalling software
Listing all software on the local machine
Product and OS level updates with messaging
Auto updating of itself
Distribution selector to enable installing from more than one distribution
Package detection for packages installed outside the CNR system
CNR on other Linux systems
Linspire planned to port the CNR service to the Ubuntu distribution; the company announced plans on April 24, 2006 to release CNR under a free software/open source license. It could then be used by other Linux distributions.
On January 23, 2007, a CNR for all website was launched; however, the launching of the warehouse itself was announced for Q2 of 2007. The release of the new free/open-source CNR client and plug-in is planned to coincide with the release of Freespire 2.0 and Linspire 6.0, both of which will include the free/open-source CNR client and plug-in (this new CNR is known internally at Linspire/Freespire as "CNR 7").
On July 1, 2008, Linspire changed its corporate name to Digital Cornerstone and was acquired by Xandros. The deal gives Xandros ownership of all Linspire trademarks, patents, and assets, including CNR. It is expected that the CNR client will eventually be made available for Xandros' line of desktop Linux operating systems. In 2009, Xandros introduced a new "app store" based on CNR and includes access to it in their Presto operating system.
Support
Six distributions were expected to be supported at the time of the CNR 7 launch: Debian, Fedora Core, Freespire, Linspire, openSUSE, and Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn). Support for other distributions was expected starting in 2008.
A test version of CNR 7 was released on July 19, 2007.
See also
Linspire
Freespire
klik (packaging method)
References
External links
Desktop Linux - Linspire's CNR to go multi-Linux, remain free
Linux.com - Linspire to make CNR available to users of other distributions
Video - Using Linspire CNR To Install An Application
Linux PMS graphical front-ends
Free package management systems
Installation software
Linspire |
78122 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan%20Sutherland | Ivan Sutherland | Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. In 2012 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".
Biography
Sutherland's father was from New Zealand; his mother was from Scotland. The family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland was his elder brother. Ivan Sutherland earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963.
Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons. Sketchpad was an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his influential paper "As We May Think".
Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964.
From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster, Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by The Sword of Damocles, thus making the first virtual reality system. A prior system, Sensorama, used a head-mounted display to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Henry Fuchs, and Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and now president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.
In 1968 he co-founded Evans & Sutherland with his friend and colleague David C. Evans. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages.
Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's computer science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at Sun Microsystems. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at University of California, Berkeley (fall 2005 – spring 2008). On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. Sutherland and Marly Roncken are leading the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University.
He has two children. His elder brother, Bert Sutherland, was also a computer science researcher.
Awards
Computer History Museum Fellow "for the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education," 2005
R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 1998
Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, 1994
Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF Pioneer Award, 1994
ACM Software System Award, 1993
Turing Award, 1988
Computerworld Honors Program, Leadership Award, 1987
Member, United States National Academy of Sciences, 1978
National Academy of Engineering member
1973 "for creative contributions in computer science and computer graphics, particularly in the study of the interfaces between men and machines"
Kyoto Prize 2012, in the category of advanced technology.
National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductee, 2016.
Washington Award, 2018
BBVA Fronteras del conocimiento 2019.
Quotes
"A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."
"The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal."
When asked: "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?", Sutherland replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."
"It’s not an idea until you write it down."
"Without the fun, none of us would go on!"
Patents
Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:
US Patent 7,636,361 (2009) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication with flow control
US Patent 7,417,993 (2008) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication
US Patent 7,384,804 (2008) Method and apparatus for electronically aligning capacitively coupled mini-bars
US patent 3,889,107 (1975) System of polygon sorting by dissection
US patent 3,816,726 (1974) Computer Graphics Clipping System for Polygons
US patent 3,732,557 (1973) Incremental Position-Indicating System
US patent 3,684,876 (1972) Vector Computing System as for use in a Matrix Computer
US patent 3,639,736 (1972) Display Windowing by Clipping
Publications
SketchPad, 2004 from "CAD software – history of CAD CAM" by CADAZZ
Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. Thesis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology republished in 2003 by University of Cambridge as Technical Report Number 574, Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. His thesis supervisor was Claude Shannon, father of information theory.
Duchess Chips for Process-Specific Wire Capacitance Characterization, The, by Jon Lexau, Jonathan Gainsley, Ann Coulthard and Ivan E. Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-2001-100, October 2001
Technology And Courage by Ivan Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Perspectives Essay Series, Perspectives-96-1 (April 1996)
Counterflow Pipeline Processor Architecture, by Ivan E. Sutherland, Charles E. Molnar (Charles Molnar), and Robert F. Sproull (Bob Sproull), Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-94-25, April 1994
Oral history interview with Ivan Sutherland at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Sutherland describes his tenure as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1963 to 1965. He discusses the existing programs as established by J. C. R. Licklider and the new initiatives started while he was there: projects in graphics and networking, the ILLIAC IV, and the Macromodule program.
See also
List of pioneers in computer science
References
External links
American computer scientists
American software engineers
1938 births
Living people
Computer graphics professionals
Computer graphics researchers
Internet pioneers
Virtual reality pioneers
Engineers from California
Scientists from California
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Sun Microsystems people
Turing Award laureates
California Institute of Technology faculty
Harvard University faculty
University of Utah faculty
California Institute of Technology alumni
Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni
Scarsdale High School alumni
People from Hastings, Nebraska
People from Scarsdale, New York
20th-century American engineers
21st-century American engineers
20th-century American scientists
21st-century American scientists
Scientists from New York (state)
American people of Scottish descent
Engineers from New York (state)
Engineers from Nebraska
American people of New Zealand descent
UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty |
25138529 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumping%20Station%3A%20One | Pumping Station: One | Pumping Station: One is a non-profit hackerspace/makerspace in Chicago, Illinois. It's modeled after similar organizations located in the United States and Europe. The facilities consists of approximately of shop, workspace, and lounge areas.
About
The stated mission of Pumping Station One is to "foster a collaborative environment wherein people can explore and create intersections between technology, science, art, and culture." The organization provides a workspace and social group for people interested in learning and exploring all aspects of life including science, technology, arts, crafts, software development, foreign languages, and anything else members express an interest in. Members are encouraged to share the knowledge they already possess and structured classes are very common. A member is not necessarily a "hacker" in the computer sense — some members aren't computer experts — but rather "someone who makes something and modifies it and uses it in a way that wasn’t originally intended." Other members volunteer their professions to support the group, such as through legal support.
History
Pumping Station: One started as a loosely knit social group of like-minded individuals meeting regularly at local cafes. In April 2009 the lease was signed for 3354 N. Elston Ave. in the city of Chicago.
By the end of 2013, the organization has grown to over 270 members and in mid-June, moved to a new location at 3519 N. Elston Ave.
As of the end of 2016, membership had grown to 435. By this time, the shop had become very well equipped, including a large format CNC router, a 150 watt large format laser cutter, a vertical mill and lathe, as well as a number of 3d printers and other equipment.
As of January 1, 2018 there were 525 members.
Involvement in notable events
In August 2010, Pumping Station: One took part in a hackerspace challenge sponsored by Scion. Their entry was a Tron-cycle-powered ice cream maker.
Pumping Station: One member Jim Burke launched the Power Racing Series. The first season in 2009 consisted of 6 cars, all backed by other Pumping Station: One members. The second season in 2010 was hosted at the Maker Faire Detroit with competitors from several hackerspaces throughout the country.
Facilities
The Pumping Station: One facilities are divided up into areas, based on their function. These include:
CNC — All computer controlled tools, ranging from 3D printers, to laser cutters, to CNC mills.
Electronics/mechatronics lab — Where most electronics related things reside, such as meters, scopes, soldering equipment/supplies, and mixed electronics devices for hacking and parts salvaging.
General area — Includes a lounge room, work table spaces in the shop, and a scanning electron microscope.
Graphic Arts and Textiles — The sewing and fiber arts section of the space. This contains equipment for sewing, weaving and other related activities.
Hot Metals — A shop space for hot metals work, such as welding, grinding, and forging.
Kitchen — The area for all things food and drink related. Beer Church, the brewing group, is mostly hosted here.
Cold Metals — A shop space for cold metals works. Tools include mills, lathes, et cetera.
Woodshop — A shop space for woodworking projects. Tools include a SawStop table saw, router, jointer, and thickness planer.
Small Metals — A shop space for making jewelry, and other small metal sculpture.
References
External links
Official Pumping Station: One website
Vimby video overview of Pumping Station: One
Power Racing Series
GeekProm Chicago
Hackers of the world unite | Guardian.co.uk
Interview with Eric Michaud
Charcoal foundry build at Chicago hackerspace
Hackerspace at Pumping Station 1: Will the Arts Go Open Source?
Hacker groups
Computer clubs
Hackerspaces |
391478 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowl%20Championship%20Series | Bowl Championship Series | The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was a selection system that created five bowl game match-ups involving ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of American college football, including an opportunity for the top two teams to compete in the BCS National Championship Game. The system was in place for the 1998 through 2013 seasons and in 2014 was replaced by the College Football Playoff.
The BCS relied on a combination of polls and computer selection methods to determine relative team rankings, and to narrow the field to two teams to play in the BCS National Championship Game held after the other college bowl games (the game rotated among four existing bowl games from the 1998 to 2005 season, and was a separate game from the 2006 to 2013 seasons). The American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) was contractually bound to vote the winner of this game as the BCS National Champion and the contract signed by each conference required them to recognize the winner of the BCS National Championship game as the official and only champion. The BCS was created to end split championships and for the champion to win the title on the field between the two teams selected by the BCS.
The system also selected match-ups for four other prestigious BCS bowl games: the Rose Bowl Game, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl. The ten teams selected included the conference champion from each of the six Automatic Qualifying conferences plus four others (two others prior to the 2006 season). The BCS was created by formal agreement by those six conferences (the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big East, now the American Athletic Conference (The American), Big Ten Conference (Big Ten), Big 12 Conference (Big 12), Pac-10, now the Pac-12 Conference (Pac-12), and Southeastern Conference (SEC) conferences) and the three FBS independent schools, and evolved to allow other conferences to participate to a lesser degree. For the 1998 through 2005 seasons eight teams competed in four BCS bowls.
It had been in place since the 1998 season. The BCS replaced the Bowl Alliance, in place from 1995 to 1997, which had followed the Bowl Coalition, in place from 1992 to 1994. Prior to the Bowl Coalition's creation in 1992, the AP Poll's number one and two teams had met in a bowl game only 8 times in 56 seasons. The AP's top two teams met 13 out of the 16 seasons when the BCS was in place.
In the 2014 season, the BCS was discontinued and replaced by the College Football Playoff, which organizes a four-team playoff and national championship game.
History leading to the creation and dissolution of the BCS
The NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) is the only NCAA-sponsored sport without an officially organized NCAA tournament to determine its champion. Instead, the postseason has historically consisted of individual bowl games.
The bowl system began in 1902 with the first ever East–West game in Pasadena, California, held at Tournament Park on New Year's Day in conjunction with the Tournament of Roses parade. This game was an exhibition game pitting a highly rated team from the west coast against a team from east of the Mississippi River. This was an ideal time for a postseason game, as fans could take off work or school during this holiday period to travel to the game. In the first game, the University of Michigan Wolverines represented the east and easily defeated the west's representative Stanford by a score of 49–0. Due to the lopsided victory the game did not resume until 1916.
The game was renamed the Rose Bowl in the 1920s when play shifted to the Rose Bowl stadium, built by the city of Pasadena in conjunction with the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association. By the 1930s, the Cotton Bowl Classic, Orange Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl were also held on January 1 to showcase teams from other regions of the country.
By the 1940s, college football conferences began signing contracts that tied their championship team to a particular bowl. In 1947, the Big Ten Conference and the Pacific Coast Conference, a forerunner of today's Pac-12 Conference, agreed to commit their champions to play in the Rose Bowl every year, an agreement that continued under the BCS. This system raised the possibility that the two top-ranked teams in the final poll would not play each other in a bowl game, even in situations when there was a clear-cut top two. Indeed, since the AP began releasing its final poll after the bowl games in 1968, the two top-ranked teams in the final regular-season AP Poll had only played each other in a bowl six times until special bowl arrangements began in 1992. Under these circumstances, it was not uncommon to have the Coaches Poll crown a different national champion than the AP Poll, resulting in a split championship. This situation arose a total of ten different seasons before BCS was formed (1954, 1957, 1965, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1990, 1991, 1997).
For example, in 1991, the University of Miami Hurricanes and the University of Washington Huskies both finished the regular season undefeated and were considered the strongest teams in the nation. Since the Huskies were locked into the Rose Bowl as the Pac-10 Conference champion against Big Ten champion Michigan, they could not play then-independent Miami, who played in the Orange Bowl. Both teams won their bowl games convincingly and shared the national championship, Miami winning the Associated Press poll and Washington earning the top spot in the Coaches Poll. A split national championship has happened on several occasions since then as well (1997, 2003). (See: NCAA Division I FBS National Football Championship for a compilation of past "national champions" since 1869.)
Other teams have won the national championship despite playing presumably weaker schedules than other championship contenders. The BYU Cougars ended the 1984 season as the only undefeated and untied team in the nation, and the nine-time defending champions of the Western Athletic Conference. The Cougars opened the season with a 20–14 victory over No. 3 Pittsburgh, and won the Holiday Bowl against a 6–5 Michigan team that had been ranked as high as No. 2 that season. As the No. 4 ranked team at the end of the regular season, Washington was offered a slot against BYU in the Holiday Bowl; Washington declined, preferring instead to play in the more lucrative Orange Bowl where they beat No. 2 Oklahoma to complete a Pac-10 sweep of New Year's Day bowls (with USC winning the Rose Bowl and UCLA winning the Fiesta Bowl). Washington (11–1) was voted No. 2 following the bowl season with their only blemish a late season loss at Pac-10 champ USC. Coupled with winning its last 11 games in 1983, BYU finished the 1984 season with a 24-game winning streak. Several coaches and reporters claimed that BYU had not played a legitimate schedule and should not be recognized as national champion. Not only was Pittsburgh the only ranked team the Cougars faced all season, but at the time BYU played in the mid-major WAC. Nonetheless, BYU was a near-unanimous choice as national champion in final polls.
To address these problems, five conferences, six bowl games, and leading independent Notre Dame joined forces to create the Bowl Coalition, which was intended to force a de facto "national championship game" between the top two teams. By entirely excluding all the other conferences, the Bowl Coalition also made it impossible for a non-Bowl Coalition team to win a national championship. This system was in place from the 1992 season through the 1994 season. While traditional tie-ins between conferences and bowls remained, a team would be released to play in another bowl if it was necessary to force a championship game.
However, this system did not include the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions, as both were obligated to play in the Rose Bowl. The Coalition made several attempts to get the Tournament of Roses Association, which operates the Rose Bowl, to release the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions if necessary to force a championship game. However, those negotiations came to nothing, in part because the Tournament of Roses Association feared jeopardizing its long-standing contract with ABC if one or both teams were needed to force a title game. In 1994 —the last year of the Bowl Coalition— undefeated Penn State, from the Big Ten, played Oregon in the Rose Bowl while undefeated Nebraska played Miami in the Orange Bowl. In a system that paired top-ranked teams, Penn State would have played Nebraska for the national championship.
The Bowl Coalition was restructured into the Bowl Alliance for the 1995 season, involving five conferences (reduced to four for the 1996 season) and three bowls (Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange). The championship game rotated among these three bowls. It still did not, however, include the Pac-10 or Big Ten champions, the Rose Bowl, or any non-Bowl Alliance teams.
After a protracted round of negotiations, the Bowl Alliance was reformed into the Bowl Championship Series for the 1998 season; former Southeastern Conference commissioner Roy Kramer is considered to be the "father" of the BCS. The Tournament of Roses Association agreed to release the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions if it was necessary to force a national championship game. In return, the Rose Bowl was added to the yearly national championship rotation, and the game was able to keep its coveted exclusive TV time slot on the afternoon of New Year's Day. However, beginning with the 2006 season, the BCS National Championship Game became a separate event played at the same site as a host bowl a week following New Year's Day. The new Bowl Championship Series not only included the Big Ten and the Pac-10 conferences but also teams from mid-major conferences, based on performance.
No mid-major team, however, or team from any conference outside of the six aligned conferences (with the exception of independent Notre Dame, who played Alabama for the 2012 title), had ever played in the BCS Championship Game, causing increasing controversy. This controversy had become even more intense in light of the 4–1 record that mid-major teams had against teams from the six automatic qualifying conferences in the BCS Bowl games they had been allowed to play in. The performances and perfect record of Texas Christian in the 2010 season and Boise State in the season prior to that also fueled the controversy surrounding the perceived inequalities that the BCS seemed to perpetuate (see BCS Controversies below or in this more detailed separate article). However, little headway was made to institute an alternative system like a playoffs tournament, given the entrenched vested economic interests in the various bowls, until after the 2011 season, which saw LSU and Alabama, both members of the SEC West division, play each other in the 2012 BCS Championship game, where Alabama defeated LSU in a shutout win. Thereafter, acknowledging the many game, polling, and other related controversies, fans' complaints, and declining game viewership, among other factors, the major conferences decided to institute the College Football Playoff, which began after the 2014 regular season.
As a legal entity, the holding company "BCS Properties, LLC" continues to control the College Football Playoff.
Succession by College Football Playoff
The College Football Playoff replaced the BCS as the system used to determine the FBS college football champion beginning in the 2014 season. The four-team playoffs consist of two semifinal games, with the winners advancing to the College Football Championship Game. The game is hosted by a different city each year, with locations selected by bids, akin to the Super Bowl or the Final Four. AT&T Stadium hosted the first title game in 2015. The system is contracted to be in place through at least the 2025–2026 season per a contract with ESPN, which owns the rights to broadcast all games. Unlike the BCS, the system does not use polls or computer rankings to select participants. A 13-member committee chooses and seeds the teams for the two playoff games and four other top-tier bowl games, using a balloting procedure similar to the NCAA basketball tournament selection process.
Bowl games
In the BCS format, four regular bowl games and the National Championship Game were considered "BCS bowl games." The four bowl games were the Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, California, the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, and the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Florida.
In the first eight seasons of the BCS contract, the championship game was rotated among the four bowls, with each bowl game hosting the national championship once every four years. Starting with the 2007 BCS, the National Championship Games became a separate game played on January 8 at the site of the BCS bowl game that served as the final game on January 1, or January 2 if January 1 was a Sunday.
The University of Oklahoma and Ohio State University are the only schools to appear in all five BCS Bowls. Oklahoma played in the 2007, 2008, and 2011 Fiesta Bowl, the 2004 (national championship) and 2014 Sugar Bowl, the 2001 and 2005 Orange Bowl (both of which were national championships), the 2003 Rose Bowl, and the 2009 BCS National Championship Game. Oklahoma's record was 4–5 with a 1–3 record in National Title games. Ohio State played in the 2003 (national championship), 2004, 2006, and 2009 Fiesta Bowl, the 1999 and 2011 Sugar Bowl*, the 2014 Orange Bowl, the 2010 Rose Bowl, and the 2007 and 2008 BCS National Championship Game. Ohio State's record was 6*-4, with a 1–2 record in National Title Games. The University of Miami appeared in every BCS bowl except for the standalone National Championship Game, although Miami did appear in the national championship when that designation was assigned to the original four bowls in rotation. Miami played in the 2001 Sugar Bowl, 2002 Rose Bowl (national championship), 2003 Fiesta Bowl (national championship), and 2004 Orange Bowl.
* Ohio State won the 2011 Sugar Bowl, but vacated their appearance and victory due to NCAA penalties and sanctions for impermissible acceptance of monetary gifts.
Television
Initially, ABC held the rights to all four original BCS games, picking up the Fiesta and Orange Bowls from their former homes at CBS, and continuing their lengthy relationships with the Rose and Sugar Bowls. This relationship continued through the bowl games of January 2006.
From the 2006–07 season through the 2009–10 season, Fox Sports held the rights to the BCS games with the exception of the Rose Bowl, as the Tournament of Roses Association elected to continue its association with ABC. Under the terms of the contract, Fox aired three of the four BCS National Championship Games that were played during the time. The only exception was the 2010 contest, which aired on ABC as per its contracts with the Rose Bowl and Tournament of Roses Association.
After the January 2010 bowl games, the contract to air the BCS moved exclusively to ESPN. The network carried the BCS until its dissolution following the 2013–14 season; after that, the four former BCS bowls became part of the College Football Playoff, while ESPN retained their coverage of the contests.
Selection of teams
A set of rules was used to determine which teams competed in the BCS bowl games.
Certain teams were given automatic berths depending on their BCS ranking and conference, as follows:
No more than two teams from any one conference could receive berths in BCS games, unless two non-champions from an AQ conference finished as the top two teams in the final BCS standings, in which case they met in the National Title Game while their conference champion played in their conference's BCS bowl game.
The top two teams were given automatic berths in the BCS National Championship Game.
The champion of an AQ Conference (ACC, Big 12, Big East/The American, Big Ten, Pac-10/Pac-12, and SEC) was guaranteed an automatic BCS bowl bid.
Due to the "Notre Dame rule", independent Notre Dame received an automatic berth if it finished in the top eight. Other independents were not covered under this rule.
From the 1999 season onwards, the highest ranked non-champion in an AQ conference received an automatic berth, provided it was ranked in the top 4 and its conference did not already receive two automatic berths from the above rules. If the highest ranked non-champion was in the top 2 and thus played in the championship game, this provision extended to the highest ranked non-champion outside the top 2.
From the 2006 season onwards, the highest-ranked champion of a non-AQ conference (Big West, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt, and WAC) received an automatic berth if:
It was ranked in the top 12, or
It was ranked in the top 16 and higher than at least one AQ conference champion.
After the automatic berths were granted, the remaining berths, known as "at-large" berths, were filled from a pool of FBS teams who were ranked in the top 14 and had at least nine wins. The actual teams chosen for the at-large berths were determined by the individual bowl committees. Teams from both AQ and non-AQ conferences were eligible for at-large berths.
If there were not enough teams eligible for at-large selection to fill the BCS bowl games, then the remaining at-large teams would have been any FBS teams that were bowl-eligible, had won at least nine regular-season games, and were among the top 18 teams in the final BCS standings. If there were still not enough teams, the pool for potential at-larges continued to increase by four teams until enough teams were available.
All AQ conferences except the Big East/The American had contracts for their champions to participate in specific BCS bowl games. Unless their champion was involved in the BCS National Championship game, the conference tie-ins were:
Rose Bowl – Big Ten champion and Pac-10/Pac-12 champion
Fiesta Bowl – Big 12 champion
Orange Bowl – ACC champion
Sugar Bowl – SEC champion
The Big East/The American champion took one of the remaining spots.
If the Pac-10/Pac-12 or Big Ten champion was picked for the BCS National Championship Game, then the Rose Bowl was required to choose the highest-ranked school from a non-AQ conference if there was a non-AQ school ranked at least #4 in the final BCS standings. This was the case in 2010, when the #2 Oregon Ducks made it to the national championship, permitting the #3 TCU Horned Frogs to attend, and win, the 2011 Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl was permitted to override this provision if it had been used within the previous four seasons.
As agreed by all 11 conferences, the results of the 2004–07 regular seasons were evaluated to determine which conferences earned automatic qualification for the BCS games that concluded 2008–11 seasons. Three criteria were used: Rank of the highest-ranked team, rank of all conference teams, and number of teams in the top 25. The six conferences which met that standard were the AQ conferences. The 2008–11 seasons were used to determine if another conference achieved automatic qualification, or a conference that had AQ status lost it, for the BCS games that concluded the 2012 and 2013 seasons.
Rankings
For the portions of the ranking that were determined by polls and computer-generated rankings, the BCS used a series of Borda counts to arrive at its overall rankings. This was an example of using a voting system to generate a complete ordered list of winners from both human and computer-constructed votes. Obtaining a fair ranking system was a difficult mathematical problem and numerous algorithms were proposed for ranking college football teams in particular. One example was the "random-walker rankings" studied by applied mathematicians Thomas Callaghan, Peter Mucha, and Mason Porter that employed the science of networks.
1998–2003
The BCS formula calculated the top 25 teams in poll format. After combining a number of factors, a final point total was created and the teams that received the 25 lowest scores were ranked in descending order. The factors were:
Poll average: Both the AP and ESPN-USA Today coaches polls were averaged to make a number which is the poll average.
Computer average: An average of the rankings of a team in three different computer polls were gathered (Jeff Sagarin/USA Today, Anderson & Hester/Seattle Times, and The New York Times), with a 50% adjusted maximum deviation factor. (For instance, if the computers had ranked a team third, fifth, and twelfth, the poll which ranked the team twelfth would be adjusted to rank the team sixth.)
Strength of Schedule: This was the team's NCAA rank in strength of schedule divided by 25. A team's strength of schedule was calculated by win/loss record of opponents (66.6%) and cumulative win/loss record of team's opponents' opponents (33.3%). The team who played the toughest schedule was given .04 points, second toughest .08 points, and so on.
Margin of victory was a key component in the decision of the computer rankings to determine the BCS standings.
Losses: One point was added for every loss the team has suffered during the season. All games are counted, including Kickoff Classics and conference title games.
Before the 1999–2000 season, five more computer rankings were added to the system: Claire Sharpe, Richard Dunkel, Kenneth Massey, Herman Matthews/Scripps Howard, and David Rothman. The lowest ranking was dropped and the remainder averaged.
Beginning in 2001, The Peter Wolfe and Wes Colley/Atlanta Journal-Constitution computer rankings were used in place of the NYT and Dunkel rankings. The change was made because the BCS wanted computer rankings that did not depend heavily on margin of victory. The highest and lowest rankings were discarded, and the remainder averaged. A team's poll average, computer average, strength of schedule points, and losses were added to create a subtotal.
Also in 2001, a quality win component was added. If a team beat a team which was in the top 15 in the BCS standings, a range of 1.5 to .1 points was subtracted from their total. Beating the No. 1 ranked team resulted in a subtraction of 1.5-point, beating the No. 2 team resulted in a deduction of 1.4 points, and so on. Beating the No. 15 ranked team would have resulted in a deduction of .1 points. A team would only be awarded for a quality win once if it beat a Top 10 team more than once (such as in the regular season and a conference championship game), and quality wins were determined using a team's current subtotal, not the ranking when the game was played. The subtotal ranks were used to determine quality win deductions to create a team's final score.
The BCS continued to purge ranking systems which included margin of victory, causing the removal of the Matthews and Rothman ratings before the 2002 season. Sagarin provided a BCS-specific formula that did not include margin of victory, and The New York Times index returned in a form without margin of victory considerations. In addition, a new computer ranking, the Wesley Colley Matrix, was added. The lowest ranking was dropped and the remaining six averaged. Also in 2002, the quality win component was modified such that the deduction for beating the No. 1 team in the BCS would be 1.0, declining by 0.1 increments until beating the 10th ranked team at 0.1. Teams on probation were not included in the BCS standings, but quality win points were given to teams who beat teams on probation as if they were ranked accordingly in the BCS.
2004–2013
In response to the controversy created by the voters in the AP poll naming USC as the No. 1 ranked team at the end of 2003, when the BCS system had selected LSU and Oklahoma to play for the title, the formula was rewritten. Supporters of USC and the media in general criticized the fact that polls were not weighted more heavily than computer rankings and this criticism led to the new three part formula.
AP Poll (2004) / Harris Interactive Poll (2005–2013): A team's score in the poll was divided by the maximum number of points any team would have received if all voting members had ranked that team as Number 1.
Coaches' Poll: A team's score in the Coaches' poll was divided by the maximum number of points any team would have received if all voting members had ranked that team as Number 1.
Computer Average: The BCS used six ranking systems: Jeff Sagarin, Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Massey, and Dr. Peter Wolfe. Points were assigned in inverse order of ranking from 1 to 25. A team's highest and lowest computer ranking was discarded from figuring a team's computer poll average. The four remaining computer scores were averaged and the total was calculated as a percentage of 100.
All three components – The Harris Interactive Poll, the USA Today Coaches Poll, and the computer rankings – were added together and averaged for a team's ranking in the BCS standings. The team with the highest average ranked first in the BCS standings.
This system placed twice as much emphasis on polls than computer rankings (since there were two polls and an average of six computer rankings) and made it highly unlikely that the top team in both polls would be denied a place in the title game, as it happened in the 2003–04 season.
The BCS formula for the 2005–06 season was the same as 2004–05, except that the Harris Interactive College Football Poll replaced the AP poll. The Harris Interactive College Football Poll's maximum point value was 2,825 and for the Coaches' Poll, it was 1,550. The Harris Interactive College Football Poll was created expressly to replace the AP Poll after the Associated Press refused the use of its poll as a component of the BCS formula following the 2004 season. Before the 2006–07 season, the maximum point value of the Harris Poll was increased to 2,850 and the USA Today/Coaches' Poll was increased to 1,575.
In the week of April 20, 2009, Bowl Championship Series commissioners met for its annual spring meetings in Pasadena, California in conjunction with the Rose Bowl's staging the 2010 BCS title game. The commissioners considered a proposal from the Mountain West Conference, which would have established an eight-team playoff and provided better accesses to the four BCS bowl games for the five conferences that did not have automatic bids. The proposal also included a motion to replace the BCS rankings with a selection and a motion to change the automatic qualifier criteria to better reflect inter-conference performance. The BCS rejected the proposal in June 2009, citing a "lack of overall support" among the member conferences.
In June 2012, the BCS conference commissioners made the announcement that "we have developed a consensus behind a four-team, seeded playoff." This took effect in 2014, as the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee in Washington, D.C. gave its expected final approval a few days later.
History and schedule
The games are listed in chronological order, the rankings reflecting the final BCS standings, and the win-loss data was prior to the BCS Bowls.
1998–99 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 1998 regular season:
Friday, January 1, 1999 – Rose Bowl Game presented by AT&T: No. 9 Wisconsin (10–1, Big Ten champion) 38, No. 5 UCLA (10–1, Pac-10 champion) 31
Friday, January 1, 1999 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 4 Ohio State (10–1, At-large) 24, No. 6 Texas A&M (11–2, Big 12 champion) 14
Saturday, January 2, 1999 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 8 Florida (9–2, At-large) 31, No. 15 Syracuse (8–3, Big East champion) 10
Monday, January 4, 1999 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, (National Championship): No. 1 Tennessee (12–0, BCS No. 1, SEC champion) 23, No. 2 Florida State (11–1, BCS No. 2, ACC champion) 16
1999–2000 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 1999 regular season:
Saturday, January 1, 2000 – Rose Bowl Game presented by AT&T: No. 7 Wisconsin (9–2, Big Ten champion) 17, No. 22 Stanford (8–3, Pac-10 champion) 9
Saturday, January 1, 2000 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 8 Michigan (9–2, At-large) 35, No. 4 Alabama (10–2, SEC champion) 34 (OT)
Sunday, January 2, 2000 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 3 Nebraska (11–1, Big 12 champion) 31, No. 5 Tennessee (9–2, At-large) 21
Tuesday, January 4, 2000 – Nokia Sugar Bowl (National Championship): No. 1 Florida State (11–0, BCS No. 1, ACC champion) 46, No. 2 Virginia Tech (11–0, BCS No. 2, Big East champion) 29
2000–01 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2000 regular season:
Monday, January 1, 2001 – Rose Bowl Game presented by AT&T: No. 4 Washington (10–1, Pac-10 champion) 34, No. 17 Purdue (8–3, Big Ten champion) 24
Monday, January 1, 2001 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 6 Oregon State (10–1, At-large) 41, No. 11 Notre Dame (9–2, At-large) 9
Tuesday, January 2, 2001 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 3 Miami (FL) (10–1, Big East champion) 37, No. 7 Florida (10–2, SEC champion) 20
Wednesday, January 3, 2001 – FedEx Orange Bowl (National Championship): No. 1 Oklahoma (11–0, BCS No. 1, Big 12 champion) 13, No. 2 Florida State (10–1, BCS No. 2, ACC champion) 2
2001–02 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2001 regular season:
Tuesday, January 1, 2002 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 4 Oregon (10–1, Pac-10 champion) 38, No. 3 Colorado (10–2, Big 12 champion) 16
Tuesday, January 1, 2002 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 13 LSU (9–3, SEC champion) 47, No. 8 Illinois (10–1, Big Ten champion) 34
Wednesday, January 2, 2002 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 5 Florida (9–2, At-large) 56, No. 10 Maryland (10–1, ACC champion) 23
Thursday, January 3, 2002 – Rose Bowl Game presented by AT&T (National Championship): No. 1 Miami (FL) (11–0, BCS No. 1, Big East champion) 37, No. 2 Nebraska (11–1, BCS No. 2, Automatic) 14
2002–03 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2002 regular season:
Wednesday, January 1, 2003 – Rose Bowl Game presented by PlayStation 2: No. 7 Oklahoma (11–2, Big 12 champion) 34, No. 6 Washington State (10–2, Pac-10 champion) 14
Wednesday, January 1, 2003 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 3 Georgia (12–1, SEC champion) 26, No. 14 Florida State (9–4, ACC champion) 13
Thursday, January 2, 2003 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 4 Southern California (10–2, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 38, No. 5 Iowa (11–1, At-large) 17
Friday, January 3, 2003 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl (National Championship): No. 2 Ohio State (13–0, BCS No. 2, Big Ten champion) 31, No. 1 Miami (FL) (12–0, BCS No. 1, Big East champion) 24 (2 OT)
2003–04 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2003 regular season:
Thursday, January 1, 2004 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 3 Southern California (11–1, Pac-10 champion) 28, No. 4 Michigan (10–2, Big Ten champion) 14
Thursday, January 1, 2004 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 9 Miami (FL) (10–2, Big East champion) 16, No. 7 Florida State (10–2, ACC champion) 14
Friday, January 2, 2004 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 5 Ohio State (10–2, At-large) 35, No. 10 Kansas State (11–3, Big 12 champion) 28
Sunday, January 4, 2004 – Nokia Sugar Bowl (National Championship) No. 2 LSU (12–1, BCS No. 2, SEC champion) 21, No. 1 Oklahoma (12–1, BCS No. 1, Automatic) 14‡
‡ Though winning the BCS National Championship, the LSU Tigers were not consensus national champions. The USC Trojans ended the regular season ranked No. 3 in the final BCS standings, with three Coaches Poll voting coaches defecting from their agreement with the BCS to vote its designated game winner as champion, instead voting for USC. USC was voted No. 1 in the Associated Press poll, and the AP awarded USC their National Championship. The 2003 Season therefore ended with split champions which is what the BCS was organized to prevent. Because of this split championship, significant changes were made to the BCS formula for the 2004–05 season.
2004–05 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2004 regular season:
Saturday, January 1, 2005 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 4 Texas (10–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 38, No. 13 Michigan (9–2, Big Ten champion) 37
Saturday, January 1, 2005 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 6 Utah (11–0, MWC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 35, No. 21 Pittsburgh (8–3, Big East champion) 7
Monday, January 3, 2005 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 3 Auburn (12–0, SEC champion) 16, No. 8 Virginia Tech (10–2, ACC champion) 13
Tuesday, January 4, 2005 – FedEx Orange Bowl (National Championship): No. 1 Southern California* (12–0, BCS No. 1, Pac-10 champion) 55, No. 2 Oklahoma (12–0, BCS No. 2, Big 12 champion) 19
* USC later vacated the win
2005–06 season
These BCS bowl games were played following the 2005 regular season:
Monday, January 2, 2006 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 4 Ohio State (9–2, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 34, No. 6 Notre Dame (9–2, Automatic) 20
Monday, January 2, 2006 – Nokia Sugar Bowl: No. 11 West Virginia (10–1, Big East champion) 38, No. 7 Georgia (10–2, SEC champion) 35
Tuesday, January 3, 2006 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 3 Penn State (10–1, Big Ten champion) 26, No. 22 Florida State (8–4, ACC champion) 23 (3 OT)
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi (National Championship): No. 2 Texas (12–0, BCS No. 2, Big 12 champion) 41, No. 1 Southern California (12–0, BCS No. 1, Pac-10 champion) 38
2006–07 season
These BCS games were played following the 2006 regular season:
Monday, January 1, 2007 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 5 Southern California (10–2, Pac-10 champion) 32, No. 3 Michigan (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 18
Monday, January 1, 2007 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 8 Boise State (12–0, WAC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 43, No. 10 Oklahoma (11–2, Big 12 champion) 42 (OT)
Tuesday, January 2, 2007 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 6 Louisville (11–1, Big East champion) 24, No. 14 Wake Forest (11–2, ACC champion) 13
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 4 LSU (10–2, At-large) 41, No. 11 Notre Dame (10–2, At-large) 14
Monday, January 8, 2007 – Tostitos BCS National Championship: No. 2 Florida (12–1, BCS No. 2, SEC champion) 41, No. 1 Ohio State (12–0, BCS No. 1, Big Ten champion) 14
2007–08 season
These BCS games were played following the 2007 regular season:
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 7 Southern California (10–2, Pac-10 champion) 49, No. 13 Illinois (9–3, At-large) 17
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 5 Georgia (10–2, At-large) 41, No. 10 Hawaii (12–0, WAC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 10
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 9 West Virginia (10–2, Big East champion) 48, No. 4 Oklahoma (11–2, Big 12 champion) 28
Thursday, January 3, 2008 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 8 Kansas (11–1, At-large) 24, No. 3 Virginia Tech (11–2, ACC champion) 21
Monday, January 7, 2008 – Allstate BCS National Championship: No. 2 LSU (11–2, BCS No. 2, SEC champion), 38, No. 1 Ohio State (11–1, BCS No. 1, Big Ten champion) 24
2008–09 season
These BCS games were played following the 2008 regular season:
Thursday, January 1, 2009 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 5 Southern California (11–1, Pac-10 champion) 38, No. 8 Penn State (11–1, Big Ten champion) 24
Thursday, January 1, 2009 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 19 Virginia Tech (9–4, ACC champion) 20, No. 12 Cincinnati (11–2, Big East champion) 7
Friday, January 2, 2009 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 6 Utah (12–0, MWC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 31, No. 4 Alabama (12–1, At-large) 17
Monday, January 5, 2009 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 3 Texas (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 24, No. 10 Ohio State (10–2, At-large) 21
Thursday, January 8, 2009 – FedEx BCS National Championship: No. 2 Florida (12–1, BCS No. 2, SEC champion) 24, vs. No. 1 Oklahoma (12–1, BCS No. 1, Big 12 champion) 14
2009–10 season
These BCS games were played following the 2009 regular season:
Friday, January 1, 2010 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: No. 8 Ohio State (10–2, Big Ten champion) 26, No. 7 Oregon (10–2, Pac-10 champion) 17
Friday, January 1, 2010 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 5 Florida (12–1, At-large) 51, No. 3 Cincinnati (12–0, Big East champion) 24
Monday, January 4, 2010 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 6 Boise State (13–0, WAC champion, At-large) 17, No. 4 TCU (12–0, MWC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 10
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 – FedEx Orange Bowl: No. 10 Iowa (10–2, At-large) 24 vs No. 9 Georgia Tech (10–2, ACC champion) 14
Thursday, January 7, 2010 – Citi BCS National Championship: No. 1 Alabama (13–0, BCS No. 1, SEC champion) 37 vs No. 2 Texas (13–0, BCS No. 2, Big 12 champion) 21
2010–11 season
These BCS games were played following the 2010 regular season:
Saturday, January 1, 2011 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio: No. 3 TCU (12–0, MWC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 21 vs. No. 5 Wisconsin (11–1, Big Ten champion) 19
Saturday, January 1, 2011 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 7 Oklahoma (11–2, Big 12 champion) 48 vs. Connecticut (8–4, Big East champion) 20
Monday, January 3, 2011 – Discover Orange Bowl: No. 4 Stanford (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 40 vs. No. 13 Virginia Tech (11–2, ACC champion) 12
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 6 Ohio State* (11–1, At-Large) 31 vs. No. 8 Arkansas (10–2, At-Large) 26
Monday, January 10, 2011 – Tostitos BCS National Championship: No. 1 Auburn (13–0, BCS No. 1, SEC champion) 22 vs. No. 2 Oregon (12–0, BCS No. 2, Pac-10 champion) 19
* Ohio State later vacated the win
2011–12 season
These BCS games were played following the 2011 regular season:
Monday, January 2, 2012 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio: No. 5 Oregon (11–2, Pac-12 champion) 45 vs. No. 10 Wisconsin (11–2, Big Ten champion) 38
Monday, January 2, 2012 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 3 Oklahoma State (11–1, Big 12 champion) 41 vs. No. 4 Stanford (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 38 (OT)
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 13 Michigan (10–2, At-Large) 23 vs. No. 11 Virginia Tech (11–2, At-Large) 20 (OT)
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 – Discover Orange Bowl: No. 23 West Virginia (9–3, Big East champion) 70 vs. No. 15 Clemson (10–3, ACC champion) 33
Monday, January 9, 2012 – Allstate BCS National Championship: No. 2 Alabama (11–1, BCS No. 2, Automatic) 21 vs. No. 1 LSU (13–0, BCS No. 1, SEC champion) 0
2012–13 season
These BCS games were played following the 2012 regular season:
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio: No. 6 Stanford (11–2, Pac-12 champion) 20 vs. Wisconsin (8–5, Big Ten champion) 14
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 – Discover Orange Bowl: No. 12 Florida State (11–2, ACC champion) 31 vs. No. 15 Northern Illinois (12–1, MAC champion, Automatic non-AQ) 10
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 – Allstate Sugar Bowl: No. 21 Louisville (10–2, Big East champion) 33 vs. No. 3 Florida (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 23
Thursday, January 3, 2013 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: No. 4 Oregon (11–1, At-Large) 35 vs. No. 5 Kansas State (11–1, Big 12 champion) 17
Monday, January 7, 2013 – Discover BCS National Championship: No. 2 Alabama (12–1, BCS No. 2, SEC champion) 42 vs. No. 1 Notre Dame (12–0, BCS No. 1, Automatic) 14
2013–14 season
These BCS games were played following the 2013 regular season:
Wednesday, January 1, 2014 – Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio (Pasadena, California): No. 4 Michigan State (12-1, Big Ten champion) 24 vs. No. 5 Stanford (11-2, Pac-12 champion) 20
Wednesday, January 1, 2014 – Tostitos Fiesta Bowl (Glendale, Arizona): No. 15 UCF (11–1, American Athletic Conference champion) 52 vs. No. 6 Baylor (11-1, Big 12 champion) 42
Thursday, January 2, 2014 – Allstate Sugar Bowl (New Orleans): No. 11 Oklahoma (10–2, At-Large) 45 vs. No. 3 Alabama (11–1, Automatic "3–4 Rule") 31
Friday, January 3, 2014 – Discover Orange Bowl (Miami Gardens, Florida): No. 12 Clemson (10–2, At-Large) 40 vs. No. 7 Ohio State (12–1, At-Large) 35
Monday, January 6, 2014 – Vizio BCS National Championship (Pasadena, California): No. 1 Florida State (13–0, ACC champion) 34 vs. No. 2 Auburn (12–1, SEC champion) 31
Appearances
BCS appearances by team
+ Denotes BCS National Championship Game prior to the 2006 season* Win(s) vacated
BCS performance
Key
BCS National Championship Game appearances by team
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
!Appearances !! School !! W !! L !! Pct
!! class="unsortable" | Games
|-
| 4 || style=|[[Florida State Seminoles football| || 2 || 2 ||
|| Lost 1999 Fiesta BowlWon 2000 Sugar BowlLost 2001 Orange BowlWon 2014 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 4 || style=|[[Oklahoma Sooners football| || 1 || 3 ||
|| Won 2001 BCS National Championship GameLost 2004 Sugar BowlLost 2005 Orange BowlLost 2009 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 3 || style=|[[Alabama Crimson Tide football| || 3 || 0 ||
|| Won 2010 BCS National Championship GameWon 2012 BCS National Championship GameWon 2013 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 3 || style=|[[LSU Tigers football| || 2 || 1 ||
|| Won 2004 Sugar BowlWon 2008 BCS National Championship GameLost 2012 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 3 || style=|[[Ohio State Buckeyes football| || 1 || 2 ||
|| Won 2003 Fiesta BowlLost 2007 BCS National Championship GameLost 2008 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 2 || style=|[[Florida Gators football| || 2 || 0||
|| Won 2007 BCS National Championship GameWon 2009 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 2 || style=|[[Auburn Tigers football| || 1 || 1 ||
|| Won 2011 BCS National Championship GameLost 2014 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 2 || style=|[[Miami Hurricanes football| || 1 || 1 ||
|| Won 2002 Rose BowlLost 2003 Fiesta Bowl
|-
| 2 || style=|[[Texas Longhorns football| || 1 || 1 ||
|| Won 2006 Rose BowlLost 2010 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 2 || style=|[[USC Trojans football| || 1* || 1 ||
|| Won* 2005 Orange BowlLost 2006 Rose Bowl
|-
| 1 || style=|[[Tennessee Volunteers football| || 1 || 0 ||
|| Won 1999 Fiesta Bowl
|-
| 1 || style=|[[Nebraska Cornhuskers football| || 0 || 1 ||
|| Lost 2002 Rose Bowl
|-
| 1 || style=|[[Notre Dame Fighting Irish football| || 0 || 1 ||
|| Lost 2013 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 1 || style=|[[Oregon Ducks football| || 0 || 1 ||
|| Lost 2011 BCS National Championship Game
|-
| 1 || style=|[[Virginia Tech Hokies football| || 0 || 1 ||
|| Lost 2000 Sugar Bowl
|}
* Win(s) vacated
BCS appearances by conference
* USC's victory in the 2005 Orange Bowl was vacated* Ohio State's victory in the 2011 Sugar Bowl was vacated
BCS National Championship Game appearances by conference
† Both teams in the 2012 BCS National Championship Game were from the SEC
* USC's victory in the 2005 Orange Bowl was vacated
Controversies
Criticism
The primary criticism of the BCS centered around the validity of the annual BCS national championship pairings and its designated National Champions. Many critics focused on the BCS methodology itself, which employed subjective voting assessments, while others noted the ability for undefeated teams to finish seasons without an opportunity to play in the national championship game. In fact, in the last 6 seasons of Division I FBS football, there had been more undefeated non-BCS champions than undefeated BCS champions. Other criticisms involved discrepancies in the allocation of monetary resources from BCS games, as well as the determination of non-championship BCS game participants, which did not have to comply with the BCS rankings themselves. In the 2010–2011 bowl season, for example, the six automatic-qualifier (AQ) conferences were given $145.2 million in revenue from the BCS while the five non-AQ conferences received only $24.7 million.
A recent survey conducted at the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that 63% of individuals interested in college football preferred a playoff system to the BCS, while only 26% favored the status quo. President Barack Obama had been vocal about his opposition to the BCS. During an appearance on Monday Night Football during the 2008 presidential campaign season, ESPN's Chris Berman asked Obama to name one thing about sports he would like to change. Obama responded that he did not like using computer rankings to determine bowl games, and he supported having a college football playoffs for the top eight teams. When Steve Kroft asked then-President-elect Obama about the subject during an interview on 60 Minutes, Obama reiterated his support of eight-team playoffs; although he has said it is not a legislative priority.
Longtime college football announcer Brent Musburger also voiced his support for playoffs in college football in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. "My dream scenario – and it's not going to happen – would be to take eight conference champions, and only conference champions, and play the quarterfinals of a tournament on campuses in mid-December", Musburger said. "The four losers would remain bowl-eligible. The four winners would advance to semifinals on New Year's Day with exclusive TV windows. Then, like now, one week later, there would be the national championship game."
Antitrust lawsuits
In 2008, a lawsuit was threatened due to the exclusion of teams from the non-automatic qualifying conferences in the BCS system. Following Utah's win over Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced an inquiry into whether the BCS system violates federal antitrust laws. In 2009, senior Utah senator Orrin Hatch announced that he was exploring the possibility of a lawsuit against the BCS as an anti-competitive trust under the Sherman Antitrust Act. On November 27, 2009, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram ran a story that said that Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, announced that he would hold antitrust hearings on the BCS, again based on the Sherman Antitrust Act and its provisions outlawing non-competitive trusts, beginning in May 2010. Meanwhile, various organizations, including the BCS, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby the federal government both in support and in opposition to a college football playoffs system.
According to CBSSports.com wire reports and information obtained by the Associated Press, Senator Orrin Hatch received a letter from the Justice Department concerning the possibility of a legal review of the BCS. The letter, received on January 29, 2010, stated that the Obama administration would explore options to establish a college football playoffs including (a) an antitrust lawsuit against the BCS, (b) legal action under Federal Trade Commission consumer protection laws, (c) encouragement of the NCAA to take control of the college football postseason, (d) the establishment of an agency to review the costs and benefits of adopting a playoff system, and (e) continued legislation in favor of a playoff system. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote, "The administration shares your belief that the lack of a college football national championship playoff ...raises important questions affecting millions...." BCS Executive Director Bill Hancock responded to the letter that the BCS complied with all laws and was supported by the participating Division I universities.
In April 2011, Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff announced he would file an antitrust lawsuit against the BCS for, "serious antitrust violations that are harming taxpayer-funded institutions to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars." The announcement followed the April 12, 2011 delivery of a letter to the US Department of Justice signed by 21 "high-profile" economists and antitrust experts asking for an investigation into the BCS' anticompetitive practices.
Allegations of corruption and financial impropriety
The BCS bowls had been accused of promoting the BCS system because they and their executive officers greatly benefited financially from the system. Bowl executives, such as John Junker of the Fiesta Bowl, were often paid unusually high salaries for employees of non-profit organizations. To promote support for their bowls and the BCS system, these highly paid executives allegedly gave lavish gifts to politicians, collegiate sports executives, and university athletic directors.
In response, a pro-playoff organization, called Playoff PAC, in September 2010 filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service. The complaint alleged that the top BCS bowls, with the exception of the Rose Bowl, routinely abused favorable tax status by using charitable donations to give gifts and compensation to college athletic officials. In one example detailed in the complaint, the Orange Bowl treated its executive staff and invited college athletic directors to a four-day Royal Caribbean cruise in which no business meetings were held.
Vacated wins
There were several occasions where a team's victory in a BCS bowl game was subsequently vacated by NCAA sanctions.
USC's final appeals were exhausted in the Reggie Bush situation, with all penalties standing, including a two-year bowl ban and vacation of 14 wins, including a national championship in the Orange Bowl and the entire 2005 season. As a result, the BCS, in a first-time action, vacated the participation of USC in their 2004–2005 National Championship Game win and the 2005–2006 National Championship Game loss to Texas. The 2004–2005 BCS National Championship will remain permanently vacant. This issue was further compounded by the Associated Press, whose writers vote on their own National Championship. That title was retained, with the AP staying consistent with similar policies with teams on postseason bans. (Teams being penalized with postseason bans are still eligible for the AP National Championship title.)
In December 2010, five Ohio State University players were implicated in an illegal-benefits scandal preceding the 2011 Sugar Bowl. Though the five players were suspended for five games apiece, they were allowed to play in the Sugar Bowl. After defeating Arkansas, the scandal grew, including open deception by Ohio State coach Jim Tressel. As a result, the school fined Tressel $250,000 and then forced him out as coach on July 11, 2011, Ohio State vacated all of its wins in an effort to reduce their penalties. The NCAA gave Ohio State 3 years probation and reduced their football scholarships by 3 per year for three years. The BCS banned Ohio State from participating in any post season games for the 2012 season.
Support
While there was substantial criticism aimed at the BCS system from coaches, media, and fans alike, there was is also support for the system. Tim Cowlishaw of The Dallas Morning News cited several advantages that the BCS has over a playoff system. Under the BCS, a single defeat was extremely detrimental to a team's prospects for a national championship, although critics pointed out regularly that history shows non-AQ conference teams were hurt far more than AQ conference teams when they lost a game. Supporters contended that this created a substantial incentive for teams to do their best to win every game. Under a proposed playoffs system, front-running teams could be in a position of safety at the end of the regular season and could pull or greatly reduce their use of top players in order to protect them from injuries or give them recovery time (this happens frequently in the NFL). This may have been less likely to happen under the BCS system where a team in the running for a No. 1 or No. 2 ranking at the end of the year would likely have been punished in the polls for a loss, potentially eliminating them from contention.
While the BCS routinely involved controversy about which two teams are the top teams, in rare instances there was a clear-cut top two; the BCS ensured these top two would play each other for the championship. For example, USC and Texas in 2005 were the only undefeated teams; both teams were only tested a couple of times all season and mauled every other opponent they faced by large margins. Had this scenario occurred before the inception of the BCS, the teams would have been unable to play each other due to contractual obligations with the major bowls and there would have been dual national champions. Under the BCS system however, these two teams got to play for the championship.
The NCAA, the governing organization of most collegiate sports, had no official process for determining its FBS (Div. 1-A) champion. Instead, FBS champions were chosen by what the NCAA called in its official list of champions "selecting organizations".
According to its website, the BCS:
"...[wa]s managed by the commissioners of the 11 NCAA Division I-A conferences, the director of athletics at the University of Notre Dame, and representatives of the bowl organizations.
"...[wa]s a five-game arrangement for post-season college football that [wa]s designed to match the two top-rated teams in a national championship game and to create exciting and competitive match-ups between eight other highly regarded teams in four other games".
BCS Buster
The term "BCS Buster" referred to any team not from an AQ conference (other than Notre Dame) that managed to earn a spot in a BCS bowl game. These teams were often referred to as non-AQ when discussed outside of the post-season structure. Three teams had been BCS Busters twice: the University of Utah, Boise State University, and Texas Christian University. As of the 2013 season, two of those teams had joined Conferences with an automatic bid to a BCS Bowl (Utah to the Pac-12 Conference and Texas Christian to the Big 12 Conference).
The record of non-Automatic Qualifying conference teams in BCS Bowls was one primary statistic used by those who challenged the assumption that BCS AQ conference teams were inherently superior to non-AQ teams, as non-AQ teams had only lost two BCS Bowl games to a BCS AQ team (Hawaii lost the 2008 Sugar Bowl 41–10 to the University of Georgia and Northern Illinois lost the 2013 Orange Bowl to Florida State University) while winning four. Boise State defeated TCU 17–10 in the highly controversial 2010 Fiesta Bowl which was the only BCS Bowl pitting two non-AQ teams against each other rather than against a team from a BCS AQ Conference, making the complete record 5–3. This pairing was cited by critics as the BCS' attempt to prevent a loss (or potentially even two losses) to AQ teams in the same year, and as TCU defeated Wisconsin 21–19 in the 2011 Rose Bowl the next year those fears seemed to have been at least partly justified. The experience and results of the non-AQ teams in BCS bowl games had been cited as a strong objective example of a much closer parity between the AQ and non-AQ teams than most AQ teams and fans would have admitted.
With the exception of Notre Dame, it was generally extremely difficult for a non-AQ conference team to reach a BCS bowl, while it was much easier for an AQ conference team (see rules above) to do so due to the inherent bias built into the rules of the BCS system which guaranteed a spot to the winner of each of the AQ Conferences. All AQ Conference teams had to do was simply win their respective conference title and they were automatically invited to a BCS Bowl. This made becoming a BCS Buster very noteworthy. Despite the fact that there had been a number of eligible non-AQ conference teams, only eight teams (from only five schools – Utah, TCU, Boise State, Hawaii, and Northern Illinois) had succeeded in becoming BCS Busters. No team from a non-AQ conference had ever been in the BCS Championship, while a team from the SEC had been in—and won—the Championship game every year from 2006 to 2012. This consistent selection of one conference's teams (despite their success) had been one area of intense criticism of the BCS system and its exclusionary tendencies.
The University of Utah became the first BCS Buster in 2004 after an undefeated season, despite stricter limits in place before the addition of a 5th bowl in 2006 made BCS Busters more commonplace. The Utes played in the 2005 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, and beat their opponent, the Pittsburgh Panthers, 35–7. Utah also became the first non-AQ program to make a second BCS appearance. During the 2008 season, the Utes finished their regular season schedule undefeated (8–0 in the Mountain West Conference and 12–0 overall) and earned a berth in the Sugar Bowl against Alabama, winning 31–17. The Utes finished 2nd in the AP Poll and received 16 first place votes. In the 2011 season, the Utes began competing as members of the Pac-12 Conference, one of the six conferences with an automatic BCS tie in.
In 2006, Boise State became the second BCS Buster after a 12–0 regular season and subsequent Fiesta Bowl berth against the Oklahoma Sooners. The Broncos won 43–42 in overtime in what many fans, pundits, and others consider to be one of the best Bowl games in history.
In 2007, Hawaii also finished the regular season at 12–0, but were defeated by the Georgia Bulldogs 41–10 in the Sugar Bowl. This was the first loss by a BCS Buster.
The 2009 season was the first in which two teams from non–AQ conferences earned BCS bowl berths. TCU, which finished the regular season 12–0 as champions of the Mountain West, earned the automatic BCS berth with a No. 4 finish in the final BCS rankings. Two slots behind the Horned Frogs were WAC champions Boise State, which finished at 13–0 for its second consecutive unbeaten regular season and fourth in six years. Boise State became the first and (so far) only BCS Buster to reach a BCS bowl game with an at-large selection. The Broncos defeated the Frogs 17–10 in the 2010 Fiesta Bowl, which marked the first BCS matchup between non-AQ schools, and the first time in BCS history that two unbeaten teams met in a BCS game other than the title match. This pairing created considerable controversy as the AQ conferences and the selection committees were accused of cowardice, pairing the two BCS Busters against each other so that the risk of AQ conference teams losing was eliminated.
In 2010, TCU was the only non–AQ conference team to get a BCS bowl berth. Boise State was ranked in the top five for most of the season, but a late-season overtime loss to Nevada knocked the Broncos out of serious contention for a BCS bowl bid, despite their continuing eligibility. TCU would defeat Wisconsin 21–19 in the 2011 Rose Bowl, once again calling into question the claim of AQ conference superiority. There was a movement to lobby those voting in the AP poll, which is not bound to vote for the BCS Championship winner as the Coaches Poll is, to vote TCU first and split the National Championship. While TCU got a few first place votes, this effort did not change the outcome of the AP poll, and TCU ended up in the No. 2 spot in all of the final major polls. As Utah had already done, TCU soon joined a conference with an automatic BCS tie, namely the Big 12 Conference (home of several other former members of the Southwest Conference, which TCU competed in for over 70 years) beginning with the 2012 season.
In 2012, Northern Illinois (NIU) became the first BCS Buster with a regular-season loss. NIU was also the first BCS Buster to qualify automatically with a ranking between 13 and 16 (and higher ranked than at least one AQ-Conference Champion); NIU was ranked higher than two AQ-Conference Champions (Big Ten and Big East). They were selected for the 2013 Orange Bowl, where they were defeated by the Florida State Seminoles, 31–10. NIU is the first BCS Buster team from a conference other than the Mountain West or Western Athletic Conferences to play in a BCS Bowl game.
BCS Busters were 5–3 in BCS bowls, and 4–2 in BCS bowls against opponents from AQ conferences. Utah and TCU joined AQ conferences after their repeated appearances as BCS Busters; Boise State, Hawaii, and NIU had not (as of January 2014).
The following table shows all 18 teams that were eligible to become BCS Busters, including the eight that succeeded. (The entries are ordered by year and sorted according to the BCS Rank within each year.)
Locations of all AQ conference teams
Former logos
See also
College Football Playoff
BCS controversies
BCS statistics
NCAA Division I FBS National Football Championship
Mythical national championship
AP Poll
Coaches Poll
Harris Interactive College Football Poll
Grantland Rice Award
Dickinson System
Bowl Championship Series on television and radio
College football playoff debate
References
Further reading
External links
Recurring sporting events established in 1999
Recurring events disestablished in 2014
College football awards organizations |
42738050 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CapacityPlus | CapacityPlus | CapacityPlus is a global project funded by the United States Agency for International Development and led by IntraHealth International. Focused on strengthening the health workforce needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the project assists countries to improve accessibility and quality of health services by addressing deficits in human resources for health (HRH).
The specific goals of the project are:
Fostering global leadership and advocacy for HRH
Enhancing HRH policy and planning, including HRH management and HRH information systems
Improving health workforce development, including pre-service education, in-service training, and continuing professional development
Strengthening support to health workers to improve retention and productivity
Generating and disseminating knowledge about HRH
Fostering partnerships to improve HRH, including private-sector and faith-based partners and partners outside the health sector
Background
CapacityPlus started in 2009 and works to address many of the key human resources for health (HRH) issues that have been highlighted globally. In 2006 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a global shortage of over four million health workers and identified 57 countries as having a health workforce crisis. A 2013 report issued by the Global Health Workforce Alliance and the World Health Organization found that 83 countries fall below a threshold of 22.8 skilled health professionals per 10,000 population.
The constraint issues surrounding HRH include:
Shortages of health workers, especially in rural and underserved areas
Poor distribution of the health workforce compared to need
Mismatches between health needs and the composition of the health workforce
Insufficient skills tied to inadequate education and training capacity
Low retention and productivity
Weak human resources management systems
A trained, motivated, and accessible health workforce can provide access to vital health information, services, and commodities.
CapacityPlus works in Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Laos, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The project has completed activities in Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Peru, and Zimbabwe.
Activities
Health Workforce Development
CapacityPlus’s Bottlenecks and Best Buys approach has been used in over 50 health professional schools in eight countries. The approach enables schools to identify critical bottlenecks to providing quality pre-service education for health workers and prioritize affordable actions for increasing the quantity of graduates while maintaining or improving the quality of education. To help health professional schools improve their management, CapacityPlus co-developed with schools a series of management tools as well as the Dean’s Dashboard, free open source school management software. CapacityPlus also partnered with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank, and the Global Health Workforce Alliance in an exploration of innovative solutions for the financing of education to increase the number of health workers available to provide care to growing populations. CapacityPlus is a partner with the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to improve graduate tracking, community-based education, and distance learning in African medical schools, as well as a partner with the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI) to conduct capacity assessments and costing analyses of African nursing and midwifery schools.
Rural Health Workforce Retention
The World Health Organization issued 16 global recommendations for improving the recruitment and retention of health workers in rural areas—a challenge faced by most countries and a barrier to universal health coverage. In Laos, the Ministry of Health partnered with CapacityPlus and the WHO to apply the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit (developed by CapacityPlus using the WHO recommendations) and iHRIS Retain costing software to assess which of the recommendations would be most effective in the Laotian context and subsequently inform a new national policy for recruiting and retaining health workers. Similar work in Uganda led to the development of a new retention package for public-sector health workers.
Human Resources Management
With input from applications in Ghana, Nigeria, and several other countries, CapacityPlus refined its Human Resources Management (HRM) Assessment Approach to guide policy-makers, managers, and HR practitioners toward better understanding and responding to HRM challenges facing their health systems. The approach promotes the collection and analysis of information on defined HRM challenges, and informs development of effective policy, strategy, systems, and process interventions in response. Working with the Dominican Republic to compare health worker payrolls with facility staffing, CapacityPlus helped identify over 10,000 ghost workers and helped the government save $7 million per year in lost wages that are now being reinvested in the Dominican health system to increase health worker wages and eliminate service fees.
Human Resources Information Systems
CapacityPlus supports the iHRIS platform, free, open source software that assists countries to maintain accurate information on their health workforce and to use that information to make decisions and develop policies that strengthen HRH systems. Because it is built on a flexible framework and distributed under an open source license, iHRIS can be customized and extended to address local needs. Currently, almost 20 countries are using the iHRIS software applications in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages. Worldwide, more than 800,000 health worker records are captured in iHRIS, making it the most widely used open source HRIS software. In Ghana, for example, CapacityPlus is helping the Ministry of Health move its system from paper to computer, enabling the ministry to better manage its 98,000 employees. Because the iHRIS software is free, governments have saved almost $150 million in proprietary software fees.
HRH Global Resource Center
CapacityPlus hosts the HRH Global Resource Center (GRC) (launched in 2006 by the previous Capacity Project), a digital library and eLearning platform committed to reducing access barriers in developing countries to the best human resources for health information available. With over 4,000 resources and an average of 60,000 monthly users from 172 countries, the GRC provides the largest collection of open access HRH resources and user base of the existing HRH digital libraries and knowledge hubs.
Partners
CapacityPlus is led by IntraHealth International with partners:
Abt Associates
IMA World Health
LSTM Consulting
Training Resources Group, Inc. (TRG)
The project also has four regional associate partners:
African Population & Health Research Center (APHRC)
Asia-Pacific Action Alliance on Human Resources for Health (AAAH)
West African Institute of Post-Graduate Management Studies (CESAG)
Partners in Population and Development (PPD)
References
External links
CapacityPlus Project
IntraHealth International
iHRIS: Open Source Human Resources Information Solutions - Open source software that supplies health systems leaders with information to track, manage, and plan the health workforce
HRH Global Resource Center - Knowledge management platform of CapacityPlus and IntraHealth International
United States Agency for International Development |
2711613 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV | P2PTV | P2PTV refers to peer-to-peer (P2P) software applications designed to redistribute video streams in real time on a P2P network; the distributed video streams are typically TV channels from all over the world but may also come from other sources. The draw to these applications is significant because they have the potential to make any TV channel globally available by any individual feeding the stream into the network where each peer joining to watch the video is a relay to other peer viewers, allowing a scalable distribution among a large audience with no incremental cost for the source.
Technology and use
In a P2PTV system, each user, while downloading a video stream, is simultaneously also uploading that stream to other users, thus contributing to the overall available bandwidth. The arriving streams are typically a few minutes time-delayed compared to the original sources. The video quality of the channels usually depends on how many users are watching; the video quality is better if there are more users.
The architecture of many P2PTV networks can be thought of as real-time versions of BitTorrent: if a user wishes to view a certain channel, the P2PTV software contacts a "tracker server" for that channel in order to obtain addresses of peers who distribute that channel; it then contacts these peers to receive the feed. The tracker records the user's address, so that it can be given to other users who wish to view the same channel.
In effect, this creates an overlay network on top of the regular internet for the distribution of real-time video content.
The need for a tracker can also be eliminated by the use of distributed hash table technology.
Some applications allow users to broadcast their own streams, whether self-produced, obtained from a video file, or through a TV tuner card or video capture card. Many of the commercial P2PTV applications were developed in China (TVUPlayer, PPLive, QQLive, PPStream). The majority of available applications broadcast mainly Asian TV stations, with the exception of TVUPlayer, which carries a number of North American stations including CBS, Spike TV, and Fox News. Some applications distribute TV channels without a legal license to do so; this utilization of P2P technology is particularly popular to view channels that are either not available locally, or only available by paid subscription, as is the case for some sports channels. Distributing links to pirated P2PTV feeds on a U.S.-based Web site can result in the U.S. government seizing the Web site, as it did with several P2PTV aggregation sites prior to Super Bowl XLV. By January 2009, there were about 14,000 P2P channels on PPStream.
Other commercial P2PTV applications outside China are Abroadcasting (USA), Zattoo (Switzerland/USA), Octoshape (Denmark), LiveStation (UK).
Issues for broadcasters
Broadcasting via a P2PTV system is usually much cheaper than the alternatives and can be done by private individuals.
No quality of service (QoS). Compared to unicasting (the standard server-client architecture used in streaming media) no one can guarantee a reliable stream, since every user is a rebroadcaster. Each viewer is a part of a chain of viewers who can all have a negative influence on the reliability of the stream (by having a slow PC, a filled downlink or uplink or an unreliable consumer grade DSL or cable connection).
Less control. If a broadcaster prefers to limit access to their content based on regions, and would like good data on viewer behaviour, such as volume, trends and viewing time, then a traditional broadcasting solution offers more control.
Professional broadcasters and distributors have used a hybrid solution for many years. Distribution servers are not centrally installed, but are rolled out in a smart, decentralized way. A central management facility manages content distribution over multiple peer servers (also known as edge servers, or caches), strategically located near user swarms (generally popular access ISP networks), manages load balancing, redirection of users, view reporting and QoS. An example is Akamai.
Notable applications
Compared
Branded webtv service for end-users
Afreeca – based in South Korea
Funshion – based in China mainland
Hypp.TV (live and non-live) – based in Malaysia
Miro (non-live)
PPLive – based in China mainland, Chinese only program.
PPStream – based in China mainland
QQLive – based in China mainland
Zattoo.com (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Commercial solutions for broadcasters
Alluvium – based in Texas, USA
CDNetworks (CDN service)
Rawflow
Free P2P TV software for end users and amateur broadcasters
Ace Stream - P2PTV software solution based in Russia and derived from BitTorrent
Unclassified (yet)
Pulse – (Windows, Linux) LGPL P2PTV engine with announcement portal and unrestricted access
Red Swoosh
Discontinued services
Babelgum.com (non-live, used peer-to-peer technology until March 2009)
BBC iPlayer (live and non-live, used peer-to-peer technology until December 2008)
CoolStreaming (discontinued service)
Joost.com (non-live, live trials)
LiveStation.com (Windows, Linux, Mac) – based in United Kingdom
Pando
Sopcast
Streamtorrent
Tribler – linked to P2P-Next, relies on BitTorrent protocol
TVUnetworks – P2PTV software (Windows and Mac OS X) and network (Discontinued, Service is shut down)
See also
Comparison of streaming media systems
Comparison of video services
Digital television
Internet television
IPTV
List of music streaming services
List of streaming media systems
Multicast
Peercasting
Portable application
Protection of Broadcasts and Broadcasting Organizations Treaty
Push technology
Software as a service
Streaming media
Webcast
Web television
References
Computer networking
Applications of distributed computing
Cloud storage
Digital television
Distributed algorithms
Distributed data storage
Distributed data storage systems
File sharing networks
Film and video technology
Internet broadcasting
Streaming television
Multimedia
Peer-to-peer computing
Streaming media systems
Video hosting
Video on demand |
52321243 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen%20I/O | Shenzhen I/O | Shenzhen I/O is a puzzle video game and programming game developed by Zachtronics for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS-based personal computers. The game was released in November 2016.
Gameplay
Shenzhen I/O is a puzzle video game set in the near future in which players assume the role of an electronics engineer who has emigrated to Shenzhen, China to work for fictional technology company Shenzhen Longteng Electronics. The player is tasked with creating products for clients, which involves constructing circuits and then writing code to run them. The programming language used in the game is similar to assembly language and the circuit elements resemble simplified versions of real-world electronics.
The game allows players to create their own challenges by writing Lua scripts.
Development and release
Shenzhen I/O was developed by Zachtronics. The game is seen as a spiritual successor to their previous title TIS-100, a coding puzzle game released in 2015. Shenzhen I/O was designed with the same niche audience in mind, specifically people interested in programming. The idea of using the city of Shenzhen, which is a major electronics and high technology manufacturing center in China, as the setting came from Barth reading blogs from Andrew "bunnie" Huang about his experiences there.
The game features a more approachable user interface than TIS-100 and a cast of characters. Zachtronics was reluctant to include a tutorial to teach players how to play Shenzhen I/O. Instead they opted to include a dense manual containing helpful information. Narrative elements are woven into the manual and gameplay by tasking the player to create fictional products.
Zachtronics announced Shenzhen I/O in September 2016, and released an in-development version of the game via Steam Early Access in October 2016. The game launched out of early access for Linux, macOS, and Windows on November 17, 2016. The release was at the conclusion of about six months of development work.
From players' feedback, Zachtronics also released Shenzhen Solitaire, a mini-game within Shenzhen I/O, as a separate, standalone title on December 16, 2016.
Reception
Shenzhen I/O was received favourably by Rock, Paper, Shotgun writer Brendan Caldwell.
Although Shenzhen I/O has a higher price tag than its predecessor TIS-100, Zachtronics observed that the game was selling faster during its early access period.
The game was nominated for "Excellence in Design" at the Independent Games Festival Competition Awards.
Turing Completeness
Shenzhen I/O was proven Turing complete on December 17, 2016 by YouTube user gtw123, who simulated Conway's Game of Life.
The game joins Opus Magnum, another Zachtronics game, in being proven Turing complete.
References
External links
2016 video games
Assembly languages
Early access video games
Linux games
MacOS games
Programming games
Puzzle video games
Single-player video games
Video games developed in the United States
Windows games
Video games set in China
Shenzhen in fiction
Lua_(programming_language)-scripted_video_games |
5911724 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthusiast%20computing | Enthusiast computing | Enthusiast computing refers to a sub-culture of personal computer users who focus on extremely high-end computers. Manufacturers of performance-oriented parts typically include an enthusiast model in their offerings. Enthusiast computers (often referred to as a "box", "build", or "rig" by their owners) commonly feature extravagant cases and high-end components, and are sometimes liquid cooled.
Although high-end computers may be bought retail in the same manner as the common computer, they are frequently assembled by their owners. Enthusiasts assemble their systems to simply enjoy the best images and effects a new PC game has to offer, to design an aesthetically pleasing PC, or even simply to obtain the best possible performance at a variety of tasks.
Influence of gaming
Games have historically been the driving force behind the rapid pace of consumer hardware development. For example, The 7th Guest and Myst helped drive the adoption of CD-ROMs. Intel and AMD both incorporated instruction sets such as MMX, 3DNow!, and Streaming SIMD Extensions into their processors to support the PC's growing role as a home entertainment device.
More recently, however, other types of applications have piqued the interest of computing enthusiasts. Scientific distributed computing tools such as Folding@home, GIMPS, and SETI@home, along with other computationally intensive tasks, including cryptocurrency mining, may also push CPUs and GPUs to their limits, and may also serve as a means of competition, such as tracking how many data sets a user has completed.
Cost
An enthusiast PC implies the early adoption of new hardware, which is sold at a premium price. As an example, the video card ATI Radeon 9700 Pro was released at US$399 in 2002. Many gaming PCs support the use of multiple video cards in SLI or CrossFire, making it possible to spend thousands of dollars in graphics cards alone.
Beyond a certain level of performance, price increases dramatically while offering smaller increases in performance; this is a classic example of diminishing returns. For example, a user who purchased three Nvidia Titan X graphics cards in 2015 would have spent over $4000, while 2016's high-end graphics card offering from Nvidia, the GTX 1080, in three-way SLI would offer a significant increase in performance at less than half the price.
Hardware description
Case, power supply, cooling, and other case accessories
As well as the computing components themselves, case and related accessories often form a target for enthusiast attention, for functional and aesthetic reasons.
Computer cases, especially of gaming computers, are often selected with care, for their aesthetic and functional value. Functionally, the case must be able to provide cooling for high-end, possibly overclocked components, and have room for expansion and customization. Aesthetically, case modding usually includes features that show off the creator's intent: clear sides to reveal the internal components and layout, which may be adorned with LEDs, images on the graphics cards or power supply units.
Computer power supplies may be selected for very high quality electrical stability and performance, so that the high speed electronics reliant on them will not suffer from irregularities or disruption, and so that high power processors and graphics cards can be properly supplied with the often high levels of current needed. Power supply reviews for enthusiasts may, for example, take apart the item to identify the exact manufacturers of components, the types and sources of capacitors or power regulation circuitry involved, the quality of PCB soldering, and the calibre of any wiring.
Cooling systems may receive careful attention, both to ensure high quality airflow and reduced operating temperatures under heavy workloads or intense activity, to support overclocking, and as part of quiet computing as well.
Water cooling, in which a water is used to cool a part of the computer, is becoming cheaper and more available. While much more expensive than an ordinary fan, it transfers heat more efficiently and is generally quieter. As building a computer becomes more of an enthusiast activity, due to the rise of tablets, laptops, and cell phones, more cases appeal to water cooling setups.
Quiet computing is a specialist aspect of enthusiast activity, whereby the user aims to ensure the computer runs very quietly, with the goal of enjoyable ambience. Fans, hard drives, and any other noisy components may be selected for their acoustic properties, and then mounted in ways that dampen vibration and provide acoustic isolation.
Motherboard
The motherboard is the circuit board to which nearly all components and peripherals are connected to. It also houses the externally-accessible USB, Ethernet, audio, and display ports, which can be used to connect different peripherals. Every hardware component is connected to the motherboard in some way. Storage drives connect to a motherboard's SATA or M.2 ports and sometimes receive power directly from the motherboard. Video cards are typically seated in a PCIe slot in the motherboard, and receive up to 75 watts of power from it. In modern systems, the power supply typically has a 24-pin cable that plugs directly into the motherboard. The CPU is seated in the CPU tray, and is connected by the motherboard to PCIe lanes, which in turn connect the processor to other hardware components. All case fans and coolers connect to headers on the motherboard, as do the case's LED, reset, and power button cables, and RAM is seated in the motherboard's DIMM slots. Motherboards' compatibility with other components is determined primarily by its CPU socket type, which must be compatible with the processor intended for use, and its chipset.
Central processing unit
The CPU is mainly responsible for computing physics, AI and central game processes. Modern gaming PCs use high-end processors. With the rise of multi-threaded games, multi-core processor setups have become more necessary, providing better performance by offloading work to all available cores at once. Furthermore, an ample amount of L2 Cache within the CPU, generally 4 MB or more, is recommended to reap the benefits of even faster game performance. In addition, a gaming processor should be capable of running at least the SSE3 instruction set extension, which is available with CPUs produced since at least 2006.
Graphics
Gaming PCs use hardware accelerated video cards which offer high-end rasterisation-based rendering/image quality. A graphics card is the most important component, being the main determining factor of the capabilities of a gaming PC. Memory capacity on 3D cards is usually at least 256 MB to 12 GB. The amount of video RAM is more important while gaming in higher resolution or using high resolution textures, and/or with extensive modding. Having at least 2GB to 4GB of VRAM or more is suggested for today's standards when gaming. The type of memory used, however, is an important factor. The current VRAM standards are GDDR5, GDDR5X, GDDR6, GDDR6X and HBM2. VRAM standards meaning the type of memory used in the cards manufacturing. GDDR5 and GDDR6 are generations of GDDR, whereas the GDDR5x and 6x variants denote a speed increase over their non-x counterparts. HBM2 memory is generally slower however it comes with the benefit of having massive capacities. Modern graphics cards use the PCI Express expansion slot. Two or more graphics cards can be used simultaneously on motherboards supporting SLI or ATI CrossFire technology, for Nvidia and AMD based cards respectively. Both technologies allow for between two and four graphics cards, although Nvidia recommends only using multiples of the same model, to be used in unison to process and render an image. However, the technologies that allowed for the use of multiple graphics cards in tandem have largely been phased out. As of 2021, only Nvidia's SLI remains and at that, only on their top-of-the-line model, the RTX 3090. The decline of these technologies are largely due to the decrease in support for multiple cards in applications and indeed, games, as well as the decrease in returns on investment, or in other words, consumers were paying a heavy premium for little to no improvement, or in some cases, even performance decrease.
A high-end graphics card will also use more electricity, or have a higher power draw, than a lower-end card. This power draw only increases as the number of graphics cards increases, adding another cost to a high-end computer. Overclocking a graphics card, or multiple, also adds additional power draw. However, as the number of graphics cards increases, the performance gains by adding another graphics card decreases significantly due to the complexity of more than two GPUs communicating to each other in an efficient way. This is another example of depreciating returns.
Memory
Random access memory, or RAM, acts as a cache for non-graphical resources that games use. Enthusiasts will often purchase the fastest RAM, which has a lower latency, thus offering negligible performance increases in most cases. For gaming, a higher frequency of memory than would be necessary for an average computer user can offer some benefits. This has led to certain motherboards supporting RAM overclocking, with the new XMP standard. As RAM frequency is increased, however, the stability of the system decreases, increasing the risk of random computer shutdowns.
8 GB is usually the recommended amount of memory for gaming computers, as some 64-bit games can use over 4 GB of RAM. Most gaming PCs as of the early 2020s have at least 8 GB of RAM.
While 16 GB of RAM is often considered a sweet spot for gaming, 32 GB of RAM is increasingly used for future-proofing.
The current maximum amount supported on consumer hardware is 128 GB (for quad-channel configuration), with 8 slots on some LGA 2066 motherboards, each slot supporting up to a 16 GB DIMM.
Storage
In gaming PCs, it is desirable to have fast hard drives, which will generally result in shorter loading times in games. For this reason, some gaming PCs use certain RAID setups to lower latency and increase throughput to mass storage. Since the space taken up by games is nominal compared to the total availability on modern hard drives, speed is preferred over capacity.
Recently, solid-state drives have become popular, which offer significantly higher speeds than mechanical hard drives. Though originally more expensive, prices have significantly dropped. The performance of SSDs is now considered a minimum, and some consider them necessary even in budget PCs.
Currently NVMe drives have become the standard for fast storage. These drives connect straight into the motherboard, allowing for extremely fast data read and write speed. These drives are very fast and most NVME PCIe drives easily pass the speed of SATA and M.2 SSDs.
Audio
While sound hardware is usually integrated onto modern gaming motherboards, gaming PCs can also be equipped with a dedicated sound card and speakers in a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound configuration. A speaker setup or a set of quality headphones is required to enjoy the advanced sound found in most modern computer games. Sound cards have hardware accelerated technologies, such as EAX. The Sound Blaster X-Fi, with its Fatal1ty editions having 64 MB of onboard RAM (unmatched for a sound card), targets enthusiasts as its main demographic, having a dedicated "gaming mode".
However, sound cards have largely died out in popularity due to more motherboards supporting onboard audio that is perfectly acceptable for most use cases. The decline of sound cards started with the introduction of the new millennia. From 2000-2007 the market for these cards collapsed 80%, greater than the financial decline during the same period.
Peripherals
Display
A fast response time and high refresh rate is desired in order to display smooth motion. A framerate of 60 frames per second (FPS) is generally the minimum acceptable framerate in a video game for enthusiasts, with some enthusiasts preferring 144 FPS or in some cases 165 FPS, to match the refresh rate of their monitor (144 Hz or 165 Hz, respectively). Some gaming monitors can be overclocked to achieve higher refresh rates. Gaming with multiple monitors is possible, but this is not a feature supported by all games. Many players game using three monitors, which increases the load on the graphics card threefold.
Some monitors are designed exclusively for gamers, featuring higher refresh rates and improved response times at the expense of a lower resolution. E-sports, or competitive gamers, often favor higher framerates at the expense of reduced color accuracy, preferring TN panels over IPS panels.
Interface
There are many hardware interfaces designed specifically for gaming. Such interfaces include keyboards and mice built for gaming (these typically include additional keys or buttons for game-related functions as well as LCD screens, higher sensitivity (for mice), lower input latency, higher durability (structural and more switch actuations before breaking), better adherence (for keyboards and mice) and less/more friction depending on the user's needs), joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels, PC-compatible airplane gauges and panels, etc. A keyboard and mouse is the preferred control method for most games, giving the best speed and accuracy. Touch screens are rarely used for PC gaming at this point. "Haptic feedback" commonly known as force feedback, allows for greater immersion in games played. While there are no keyboards that support haptic feedback, some mice and most forms of game controllers do.
Networking
While typical computers, including high-end systems, tend to use wireless connections to connect to other computers as well as a router, gaming PCs often use Ethernet cables for the fastest and most reliable connection possible. Some companies sell dedicated network cards to reduce lag in multiplayer games. A dial-up Internet connection is not an acceptable solution due to the very high latency (~400ms is common). Mobile broadband connections can also cause the same undesirable effects as dial-up connections, but can be considered less substantial, with latency of or exceeding 150ms, less than 100ms being desirable in a first-person shooter.
Performance and benchmarks
As a general guideline, enthusiast PCs must achieve high scores on 3D benchmarks such as 3DMark when first built or upgraded. Enthusiasts who understand how to overclock sometimes do so to prolong the usefulness of their hardware. The highest results are always achieved by overclocking.
However, synthetic benchmark results rarely equate to real application performance, as measured by framerate. The framerate is measured in frames per second, which refers to the number of times the video card recalculates the image shown on screen. While framerates above 60 FPS (standard NTSC framerate) become increasingly difficult to distinguish with the human eye, enthusiast PCs with a multi-video card setup often boast framerates in excess of 100 FPS. To maintain a challenge, the standard for comparison is constantly refreshed with new games and higher detail settings.
Overclocking
Overclocking is used by enthusiasts to achieve component or system performance that exceeds the manufacturer's officially stated specification. Overclocking is a significant part of enthusiast culture, with popular and widely respected websites such as Anandtech and Tom's Hardware often including overclocking as part of a review. Hardware manufacturers release high-end components that facilitate overclocking. Examples include CPUs with unlocked multipliers, oversized heatsinks or water cooling, and motherboards with user-configurable voltages and incremental bus speeds. "Professional" overclockers commonly overclock only one core of processors, typically older AMD CPUs, to obtain CPU speeds well beyond the ability of the official configuration.
Some system builders and part manufacturers now offer factory overclocking, which is covered under warranty. Alternatively a manufacturer or user may seek individual components that overclock, in order to buy a cheaper product that will prove to run to a higher quality product's standard.
Risks
There are significant hazards to be aware of when overclocking a computer. At a mundane level some components will not work under too high a demand, and the computer will not work until overclocking is reduced or disabled entirely. More seriously, some components may be damaged or destroyed by increased heat or voltages routinely caused by overclocking if the user is reckless or uninformed, and therefore caution and some level of prior understanding is needed.
In particular, overclocked CPUs (central processing units) generally run hotter than normal, and components such as CPUs, memory controllers, graphics cards and RAM may require higher voltages to produce higher performance. The higher voltage results in increased heat and can stress the electrical channels of the components. This can cause damage, degradation, or critical failure.
Benefits
While most components usually see marginal or barely perceptible benefits, CPUs see much larger performance improvements, especially when using a high-end cooling solution. However, CPUs are also the most complex component to overlock, making it significantly harder for newcomers and beginners to achieve good results.
GPUs (Graphics processing units) on the other hand, while able to be overclocked, rarely see significant performance gains, while results can be wildly inconsistent. "The Silicon lottery" is a term used by overclocking enthusiasts to describe components that turned out better during the manufacturing process, therefore making them more durable (less commonly, this can also be the case with CPUs), capable of handling the pressure of overclocking better, resulting in more overclocking headroom. GPUs are the most popular component to overclock despite downsides.
In terms of complexity, RAM (Random-access memory) is closely tied with CPUs, but performance gains are not as significant. In particular, DDR4 SDRAM is more prominent compared to its predecessors DDR3 and DDR2. However, even though higher speeds aren't usually very noticeable in most applications there are a few scenarios where overclocking RAM is legitimately important. One such scenario is with AMD Accelerated Processing Units where the CPU and GPU are combined in one chip, meaning they have to share memory resources. Typically, a GPU has its own RAM that is much faster than desktop DDR3 or DDR4 SDRAM, but with an APU it has to work with slower desktop RAM. In this particular scenario, overclocking RAM is highly recommended, giving meaningful performance increases.
See also
Homebuilt computer
Portable desktop
Overclocking
PC Master Race
Streamer
SFF Enthusiast
References
Personal computing |
43230825 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer%20%28video%20game%29 | Pioneer (video game) | Pioneer is a free and open source space trading and combat simulator video game inspired by the commercial proprietary Frontier: Elite 2. It is available for Linux, and Microsoft Windows.
Setting
Pioneer is set at the start of the 33rd century. The player may choose from one of three starting locations: Mars, New Hope or a space station around Barnard's Star.
Gameplay
The game has no set objective, and the player is free to explore the galaxy and accrue money by performing tasks like trading, piracy or combat missions, allowing them to achieve a higher rank, buy better ships and equipment and hire more crew.
It has a realistic flight and orbital model based on Newtonian physics and a rudimentary atmospheric model with drag and heat build-up.
Development
Development was started in 2008 by Tom Morton, also known for his work on GLFrontier, as a remake and homage to Frontier: Elite 2. The game is written in C++ and uses OpenGL for graphical rendering. It uses Lua for scripting support. The development migrated in 2011 to a SourceForge.net repository, and some years later to GitHub (downloads are still distributed from Sourceforge).
The project had at times up to 50 developers
Reception and impact
Pioneer was selected in March 2013 as "HotPick" by Linux Format. Pioneer was used in a physical spaceship flight simulator project in 2013. In 2014 Pioneer was described by PCGamer as "incredibly slick" and named among the "Ten top fan remade classics you can play for free right now". In 2015 a Der Standard article noted the enormous work the fans have achieved with Pioneer as Elite remake and continuation.
Pioneer became a quite popular open source freeware title; between 2011 and May 2017, the game was downloaded via SourceForge.net over 260,000 times.
See also
Vega Strike
List of open source games
List of space flight simulation games
References
External links
Pioneer Space Sim homepage
2006 video games
Linux games
Windows games
Open-source video games
Space flight simulator games
Space trading and combat simulators
Virtual economies
Creative Commons-licensed video games
Video game clones
Freeware games
Fangames
Lua (programming language)-scripted software |
287134 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco%20Adam | Coleco Adam | The Coleco Adam is a home computer and expansion device for the ColecoVision released in 1983 by American toy and video game manufacturer Coleco. It was an attempt to follow on the success of the company's ColecoVision video game console. The Adam was not very successful, partly because of early production problems, and was discontinued in early 1985.
History
Coleco announced the Adam at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in June 1983, and executives predicted sales of 500,000 by Christmas 1983. From the time of the computer's introduction to the time of its shipment, the price increased, from US$525 to $725.
The Adam announcement received favorable press coverage. Competitors such as Commodore and Atari almost immediately announced similar computer-printer bundles. The company announced an extensive marketing campaign, with television commercials for "boys age 8 to 16 and their fathers ... the two groups that really fuel computer purchases", and print advertisements in nontechnical publications like Time and People.
The Boston Phoenix, observing that Adam's $600 price was comparable to the lowest price for a letter-quality printer alone, stated "a nice trick if they can do it!" It was a trick; the computers were shown behind tinted glass that hid the fact that they were hand-made and had non-working tape drives. In June, Coleco promised to ship the computer by August. In August it promised to ship a half million Adams by Christmas, but missed shipping dates of 1 September, 15 September, 1 October, and 15 October. Ahoy! reported that Coleco had not shipped by early October because of various problems. Each month of delay could mean losing the opportunity to sell 100,000 units, the magazine reported, adding that missing the Christmas season would result in "inestimable losses". CEO Arnold Greenberg promised in late September to ship by "mid-October", but claimed that Adam was "not, primarily, a Christmas item". The printer was the main cause of the delays; after it failed to function properly at demonstrations, by November InfoWorld reported on "growing skepticism" about its reliability, speed, and noise.
Greenberg refused to say how many units he expected Coleco to ship by the end of the year. The company did not ship review units to magazines planning to publish reviews before Christmas, stating that all were going to dealers, but admitted that it would not meet the company's goal of shipping 400,000 computers by the end of the year; Kmart and J. C. Penney announced in November that it would not sell the Adam during the Christmas season because of lack of availability. Despite much consumer interest for Adam and a shortage of competing home computers, Coleco shipped only 95,000 units by December, many of which were defective; Creative Computing later reported that "the rumored return rate was absolutely alarming". One store manager stated that five of six sold Adams had been returned, and expected that the sixth would likely be returned after being opened on Christmas. Coleco partnered with Honeywell Information Systems to open up repair chain stores around the nation. By December 1983, the press reported that company executives at a news conference "fielded questions about Coleco's problems with its highly-publicized new Adam home computer, which has been plagued by production delays and complaints of defects", with the company able to fulfill only one third of its Canadian orders for Christmas. Less than 10% of Adam units had defects, the company claimed, "well below industry standards".
An analyst stated in early 1984 that the company had
By March 1984, John J. Anderson declared Adam as having caused for Coleco "a trail of broken promises, unfulfilled expectations, and extremely skittish stockholders." On January 2, 1985, after continuing complaints about Adam failures and low sales, Coleco announced that it was discontinuing the Adam and would be selling off its inventory.
Coleco revealed that it lost $35 million in late 1983 (the time of the Adam's launch), along with a loss of $13.4 million in the first 9 months of 1984. Coleco did not reveal which company they were selling the inventory to, but stated that they had worked with this partner before. No final sales numbers were revealed of the Adam computer and expansion, but one analyst estimated that Coleco had sold 350,000 Adams in 1983 and 1984.
Technical details
In its favor, the Adam had a large software library from the start. It was derived from and compatible with the ColecoVision's software and accessories, and, in addition, the popular CP/M operating system was available as an option. Its price gave a complete system: an 80 kB RAM computer, tape drive, letter-quality printer, and software including the Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom video game. The IBM PCjr sold for $669 but included no peripherals, and although the popular Commodore 64 sold for around $200, its price was not much lower after the purchase of a printer, tape or disk drive, and software.
Like many home computers of its day, the Adam was intended to use a television set for its display. The SmartWriter electronic typewriter loaded when the system was turned on. In this mode, the system operated just like a typewriter, printing letters as soon as the user typed them. Pressing the Escape/WP key put SmartWriter into word processor mode, which functioned similarly to a modern word processor.
SmartBASIC
Unlike other home computers at the time, the Adam did not have its BASIC interpreter stored in ROM. Instead, it featured a built-in electronic typewriter and word processor, SmartWriter, as well as the Elementary Operating System (EOS) OS kernel and the 8kB OS-7 ColecoVision operating system. The SmartBASIC interpreter was delivered on a proprietary-format Digital Data Pack tape cassette; this version of BASIC was designed to be mostly compatible with Applesoft BASIC. The interpreter was developed by Randall Hyde of Lazer Microsystems.
Software developers who received technical information from Coleco had to agree to an extremely restrictive license. Coleco demanded the right to inspect and demand changes in their software, forced them to destroy inventories of software if Coleco revoked the license, and prohibited them from publicly criticizing Coleco in any way.
A less expensive version of the Adam plugged into a ColecoVision, which delivered on one of ColecoVision's launch commitments that owners would one day be able to upgrade their game system to a fully featured computer system.
Printer
The Adam printer computer used daisy wheel printing, giving a higher quality print than most dot-matrix printers of the time. The print ribbon was a one-time ribbon, of the type also used by IBM Selectric typewriters. The one-time ribbon produced better quality print than reusable ribbons, but they needed to be replaced more often. While the print quality was high, the print speed was quite low. Daisy wheels with different fonts were available, but difficult to find. The printer had a friction feed rather than a tractor feed system, so they didn't need continuous form paper. The printer was only capable of printing text, so it couldn't do graphics (other than ASCII art).
Problems
Many early Adams were defective. An author of the computer's manual reported receiving "300 calls on Christmas week" from owners with problems; "some callers who were on their fourth or fifth Adam", he said. Defective computers at the time could be repaired only by mailing it to Coleco in Connecticut. Despite improving product quality and the Honeywell repair partnership, the company could not improve the computer's poor reputation. Problems included:
The Adam generates a surge of electromagnetic energy on startup, which can erase the contents of any removable media left in or near the drive. Making this problem worse, some of the Coleco manuals instructed the user to put the tape in the drive before turning the computer on; presumably these were printed before the problem was known. A sticker on later Adams warned users to not turn on the power with tapes in the drive.
Since Coleco made the unusual decision of using the printer to supply power to the entire Adam system, if the printer's power supply failed or the printer was missing, none of the system worked. Amstrad CPC and PC designs of the era did similar with the power supply in the monitor.
Once put into Word Processor mode, SmartWriter could not get back into the typewriter mode without the system being rebooted.
The Adam's Digital Data Pack drives, although faster and of higher capacity than the audio cassette drives used for competing computers, were less reliable and still not as fast as a floppy disk drive. At the time of Adam's design, tape drives were still a popular storage medium for home users, but by the time of its release, floppy disks had dropped in cost and in some markets were the preferred medium. Coleco eventually shipped a 160kB 5¼ inch disk drive for the Adam.
The mounting holes in the motherboard did not line up with the threaded mounts molded into the case.
Software
Colecovision software that was not built in were mostly on ROM cartridges, with Adam Calculator, Personal Checkbook, and Smart Filer programs also being on tape.
Adam Banner
AdamCalc
Business Pack I
CP/M 2.2 and Assembler
Data Calculator
Home Budget Planning
Personal Accountant
Personal Checkbook
Power Print
Savings and Loan
Smart Filer
Smart Letters & Forms
Smart Logo
Turbo Load
Update for Coleco AdamLink Modem
Reception
To showcase the machine at the June 1983 CES, Coleco decided to demonstrate a port of its ColecoVision conversion of Donkey Kong on the system. Nintendo was in the midst of negotiating a deal with Atari to license its Famicom (later called the Nintendo Entertainment System) for distribution outside Japan, and the final signing would have been done at CES. Atari had exclusive rights to Donkey Kong for home computers (as Coleco had for game consoles), and when Atari saw that Coleco was showing Donkey Kong on a computer, its proposed deal with Nintendo was delayed. Coleco had to agree not to sell the Adam version of Donkey Kong. Ultimately, it had no bearing on the Atari/Nintendo deal, as Atari's CEO Ray Kassar was fired the next month and the proposal went nowhere, with Nintendo deciding to market its system on its own.
Byte reported in September 1983 that the Adam's introduction had "dominated" the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Citing its $599 price, bundled hardware, and compatibility with ColecoVision and CP/M software, the magazine compared the Adam's potential impact on the home-computer industry to that of the Osborne 1. Ahoy! reported in January 1984 that "Early indications were that the Adam would be a runaway best seller" but the delays, technical problems, and Coleco's reputation as a toy company "should combine to keep buyers away in droves", and predicted that "there is no reason to think that the Adam will topple the C-64 from the catbird seat".
The Washington Posts T. R. Reid gave "an 'A' for ingenuity [but] would have to stretch to give Adam a gentleman's 'C' for performance" in January 1984. While praising the keyboard and SmartWriter's ease of use, and calling the data pack "a reasonable compromise", he described the documentation as "wholly inadequate" and "generally inexcusable". "A more serious flaw with Adam is in the hardware", Reid said, citing defects in a data pack and both the printer and a replacement, and the computer's unusability without a working printer. He concluded that "I'd dearly like to" recommend the Adam, but "for the time being, though, I'd advise you to proceed with caution", including confirming that the computer worked before leaving the store. Popular Mechanics in February 1984 was more favorable. Calling the bundle "the most revolutionary concept in how to design and sell a home computer that we have seen", it also praised the keyboard and SmartWriter. While citing flaws such as the "slow and very noisy printer", the magazine concluded that "Adam competes with and overpowers everything else in its class", inferior only to the IBM PC and Apple IIe.
Compute!s March 1984 review also approved of the Adam's prepackaged, all-in-one nature and called the keyboard "impressive", but cited widespread reports of hardware failures. Bytes April 1984 review was much harsher, stating that "It is often said that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The Coleco Adam is no exception to this rule". It called the tape-drive technology "impressive", and approved of the keyboard, but reported several cases of data errors and deletions when using the tape drives, a buggy word processor, and a BASIC manual that was "the worst I have ever seen". The reviewer reported that he was waiting for his fifth Adam after four previous systems malfunctioned in two months; only the keyboard did not fail. Surmising that "the computer was apparently rushed into production", he advised "don't buy an Adam—yet. Wait until Coleco fixes all of the Adam's bugs and delivers on all of its promises", and concluded "Coleco is [apparently] betting the whole company on the Adam and it's not yet clear that it's going to win that bet".
The Adam received some good reviews based on the quality of its keyboard and printer, and offered competitive sound and graphics. Its BASIC interpreter, called SmartBASIC, was largely compatible with Applesoft BASIC, which meant that many type-in programs from computer books and magazines would work with the Adam with little or no modification.
Sales were weak, especially after the technical problems became obvious. Coleco lost $35 million in the fourth quarter of 1984 as returns flooded in. Officially, Coleco blamed "manuals which did not offer the first-time user adequate assistance." Coleco reintroduced Adam with a new instruction manual, lower price, and a $500 college scholarship along with each unit for use by a young child (with $125 paid for each completed year of college). Fewer than 100,000 units ultimately sold.
New York City advertising firm, Ketchum Advertising, won the assignment of promoting the computer. The agency staffed up to handle the work, and the prestige, of the new business, but agency executives were caught off-guard, when they opened the New York Times January 1985 morning edition, to read, with no previous warning, that Coleco was abandoning the computer.
The Adam was permanently discontinued in 1985, less than two years after its introduction.
Legacy
A group of Adam enthusiasts have been gathering every year since 1989 for an event called AdamCon.
Third-party developers contributed to the overall success of the Adam after Coleco abandoned the Adam. Developers such as Orphanware, In House Reps, Thomas Electronics, Oasis Pensive, Eve, E&T, Micro Innovations, Microfox Technologies and others added multiple-density disk drives, memory expanders, speech synthesizers, serial cards, printer cards, IDE cards and other hardware so the Adam could follow other computers into a newer modern age.
Specifications
CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 3.58 MHz
Support processors: three Motorola 6801 processors at 1 MHz (memory & I/O, tape, and keyboard control)
Memory: 64 kB RAM, 16 kB video RAM; 32 kB ROM
Expansion: 3 internal slots, 1 cartridge slot, and a 62.5 kbit/s half-duplex serial bus called AdamNet. Both the stand-alone and expansion-module versions also have an external expansion port of the same type as the ColecoVision expansion port, on the right hand side.
Secondary storage: Digital Data Pack tape cassette, 256 kB
Graphics: Texas Instruments TMS9928A (a close relative of the TMS9918 in the TI-99/4A)
256 × 192 resolution
32 sprites
Sound: Texas Instruments SN76489AN (a rebranded version of the TMS9919 in the TI-99/4A)
3 voices
white noise
References
External links
The Dot Eaters history of Coleco and the ADAM
Adamcon
Oldcomputers.net's Adam page with photos of components
1984 ADAM TV commercial (WarGames parody)
Adam
Computer-related introductions in 1983
Home computers
Orphaned technology
Video game console add-ons
Z80-based home computers |
38300245 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung%20Galaxy%20Tab%20series | Samsung Galaxy Tab series | The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a line of Android-based and Windows-based tablet computers produced by Samsung Electronics. The first model in the series, the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, was presented to the public on 2 September 2010 at the IFA in Berlin and was available on 5 November 2010. Since then several models have been released, including models with 7.7, 8.9 and 10.1-inch displays. The Wi-Fi versions of the tablet all include a GPS system, and the 3G/4G/5G tablets add cellular capability.
Models
Samsung Galaxy Tab
The original Samsung Galaxy Tab series was the original line of Samsung tablets. It was later split into three separate lines: the Galaxy Tab S series for high-end tablets, the Galaxy Tab A series for mid-range tablets, and the Galaxy Tab E series for entry-level tablets.
2010-2011
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
2012
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1
2013
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1
2014
Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 8.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro
The original Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro devices, released in 2014, were a series of three high-end tablets running the Android operating system. These tablets would be succeeded by the Galaxy Tab S series. In 2016, Samsung released another device in the Tab Pro line, the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S, although that tablet ran Windows 10 instead of Android. It was succeeded by the Samsung Galaxy Book the following year.
2014
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 12.2
2016
Samsung Galaxy TabPro S
Samsung Galaxy Tab S
The Galaxy Tab S series is Samsung's high-end tablet line, running the Android operating system and mirroring the Galaxy S series of smartphones.
2014
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5
2015
Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7
2017
Samsung Galaxy Tab S3
2018
Samsung Galaxy Tab S4
2019
Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e
Samsung Galaxy Tab S6
2020
Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite
Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 and S7+
2021
Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
2022
Samsung Galaxy Tab S8, S8+ & S8 Ultra
Samsung Galaxy Tab A
The Galaxy Tab A series is a mid-range to low-end tablet line, mirroring the Galaxy A series of smartphones.
2015
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (2015)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7 (2015)
2016
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2016)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 LTE (2016)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0 (2016)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0 LTE (SM-T285, SM-T287)(2016)
2017
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (2017)
2018
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (2018)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.5 (2018)
2019
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2019)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (2019)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 Kids Edition (2019)
2020
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.4 (2020)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 10.4 (2020)
2021
Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (2021)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Kids Edition (2021)
Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 10.5 (2021)
Samsung Galaxy Tab E
The Samsung Galaxy Tab E series is a line of entry-level tablets.
2014
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 8.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 10.5
2015
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 9.6 (T560, T561)
2016
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 8.0 (T375, T377)
Model comparison
Galaxy Tab S
Galaxy Tab A
Galaxy Tab
Galaxy Tab (2010-2011)
Galaxy Tab 2 (2012)
Galaxy Tab 3 (2013)
Galaxy Tab 4 (2014)
Galaxy Tab Pro
See also
Samsung Galaxy Book
Samsung Galaxy
Samsung Galaxy A series
Samsung Galaxy S series
Samsung Galaxy Note series
Android OS
Tablet PC
Barnes & Noble Nook (Samsung Galaxy Tab Nook)
References
External links
Samsung Galaxy Tab
Android (operating system) devices
Galaxy Tab
Tab
Tablet computers
Products introduced in 2010 |
198688 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase | Sybase | Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company that produced software to manage and analyze information in relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; SAP ceased using the Sybase name in 2014.
History
1984: Robert Epstein, Mark Hoffman, Jane Doughty, and Tom Haggin found Sybase (initially as System ware) in Epstein's home in Berkeley, California. Their first commercial location is half of an office suite at 2107 Dwight Way in Berkeley. They set out to create a relational database management system (RDBMS) that will organize information and make it available to computers within a network.
March 1986: Sybase enters into talks with Microsoft to license Data Server, a database product built to run on UNIX computers. Those talks lead to a product called Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0, shipping in May 1989.
January 1998: Sybase announced that it had found inconsistencies in profits reporting from its Japanese division, and would restate the financial results for the company for the last three quarters of 1997. Five executives in Sybase's Japanese subsidiary were found to have used side letters to artificially inflate the profits from their operations. Following a class-action lawsuit, the five executives involved were fired.
November 1998: John S. Chen is appointed Chairman, CEO and President.
2007: Sybase crossed the $1 billion mark.
March 2009: Sybase and SAP partner to deliver the SAP Business Suite software to iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and other devices.
May 2009: Sybase begins packaging MicroStrategy business intelligence software with its Sybase IQ server.
September 2009: Sybase and Verizon partner to manage mobility services for enterprises worldwide through Verizon's Managed Mobility Solutions, which uses Sybase's enterprise device management platform.
May 2010: SAP and Sybase, Inc. announced SAP America, Inc. has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Sybase, Inc. for all of the outstanding shares of Sybase common stock at $65.00 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $5.8 billion.
SAP ownership era
July 2010: In 2010-07-30, SAP AG announced it has completed the acquisition of Sybase, Inc., with Sybase surviving the merger as a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP America.
October 2012: All Sybase employees are incorporated into SAP's workforce. In 2012-10-30, SAP announced Sybase, Inc. CEO and President John S. Chen leaving Sybase, effective in 2012-10-31, after leading Sybase for 15 years.
References
SAP SE acquisitions
Companies based in Alameda County, California
Software companies established in 1984
1984 establishments in California
Defunct software companies of the United States
Dublin, California
Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Data companies
2010 mergers and acquisitions
American subsidiaries of foreign companies |
8610587 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt | Loopt | Loopt was a company based in Mountain View, California, United States which provided a service for smartphone users to share their location selectively with other people (see location-based service). The service supported iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phones. Loopt's services had more than five million registered users and partnerships with every major U.S. mobile phone carrier. Their applications offered a variety of privacy controls. In addition to its core features, users also had the ability to integrate Loopt with other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
The company was founded in 2005 and received initial funding from Y Combinator, and completed Series A and B financing led by Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The company's board members included TiVo-founder Mike Ramsay and Greg McAdoo of Sequoia Capital. In March 2012 Loopt agreed to be acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in cash, with $9.8 million of that to be set aside for employee retention.
History
Loopt began with seed funding from Y Combinator. That summer, Stanford sophomores Sam Altman and Nick Sivo worked to build the first prototype of Loopt. They were later joined by Alok Deshpande as well as two of Sam's childhood friends, Rick & Tom Pernikoff.
Loopt received US$5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates and struck a deal to launch the service on Boost Mobile devices in September 2006. Boost Mobile featured Loopt in a series of commercials that are most known for the "Where you at?" tag line.
In August 2007, Loopt expanded the service to select Sprint phones, and in June 2008, to Verizon. Loopt announced support for most GPS-enabled Blackberries on June 13, 2008. Loopt received US$8.25 million in Series B funding in July 2007.
In February 2008, Loopt and CBS did a deal to deliver location based advertising. Seven months later, Loopt released an opt-in feature in Loopt's iPhone application, called Loopt Mix, which uses location-based services to enable iPhone users to find and meet new people nearby.
At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2008, Altman presented the Loopt application for the iPhone. Loopt for the iPhone became available to US customers of the Apple iTunes App Store on July 11, 2008. The application is not yet available in other countries.
In the summer of 2008, Loopt sponsored Black20.com's The Middle Show with host Dave Price.
In October 2008, Loopt was sued by Earthcomber for patent infringement. The case was dropped by Earthcomber in March 2009.
In February 2009, Loopt expanded service again to select AT&T phones, making it the first service since SMS available across all major networks.
In October 2009, Loopt acquired Y Combinator-backed startup GraffitiGeo for an undisclosed sum.
In March 2010, Loopt launched an upgraded version of its iPhone app, incorporating place and event information to its Pulse database, bringing in content from ZVents, Metromix, and SonicLiving. These are added to existing content partnerships with Citysearch, Zagat, and Bing.
In March 2010, Loopt launched a product called Loopt Pulse, exclusively designed for the iPad.
In April 2010, Loopt launched an upgraded version of its BlackBerry app. The upgraded version includes the same places and events upgrade formerly launched in March 2010 for iPhone users.
In December 2010, Loopt launched Loopt version 4.0, which featured a completely updated design.
In March 2012, after raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt announced it had agreed to be acquihired by Green Dot Corporation for US$43.4 million.
Products and services
Loopt's geosocial networking services, similar to the likes of whrrl, buzzd, and brightkite, show users where friends are located and what they are doing via maps on their mobile phones. It is available on select devices across Sprint/Nextel, AT&T, Boost Mobile, Verizon, and MetroPCS, as well as the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.
Mobile application — the Loopt software provides real-time location updating (with the exception of the iPhone until OS4.0 ships - see below). Users can update location and status and share with friends. Loopt is currently supported on over 100 different phones across all major carriers.
In April 2010, Apple announced iOS 4.0, which allowed background real-time location updating on Loopt iPhone app. Loopt had indicated they would support this as soon as Apple ships iOS 4.0 for the iPhone ships in summer 2010.
Loopt for iPhone and Android — This is Loopt's core application—the most updated and versatile. It can help find friends, discover places, and get rewards/deals.
Website — Loopt provides a web portal which is synchronized with the mobile version of the service.
Facebook application — This was developed in 2008 for users to share location with friends in the Facebook network.
Twitter and Facebook integration — Status updates with a location link can be sent via Loopt to a user's Twitter status or Facebook status.
Loopt Star — This mobile game rewards people for often checking into certain places. In late 2010, all related functions were moved into the core Loopt app for iPhone and Android. Accordingly, Loopt Star was removed from the iOS App Store and Android Market.
Privacy
Loopt was permission-based and users shared location information only with their selected friends, networks, and services. Loopt users could turn location-sharing on or off at any time on a friend-by-friend basis or for all friends at once.
Loopt worked regularly with select organizations that focus on privacy and security including: The Family Online Safety Institute (board member); ConnectSafely.org; Ponemon Institute; Electronic Frontier Foundation; National Network to End Domestic Violence; Progress & Freedom Foundation's Center for Digital Media Freedom; Internet Education Foundation; and Cyber Safe California by the California Office of Privacy Protection (member, advisory committee). Loopt sat on the CTIA's WIC Leadership Council and was an active participant in the creation of the CTIA LBS Best Practices.
More details are on Loopt's privacy pages.
SMS invitation issues
Users of Loopt must register their mobile phone number, full name, and date of birth. Loopt's privacy notice states that users can control who receives geo-location information via privacy settings.
When Loopt released its native iPhone application on July 10, 2008, the software quickly gained notoriety for sending Short Message Service (SMS) invites to users' address books without, it seemed, the user's knowledge. More upsetting, the SMS service failed to respond to the industry required STOP message. Merlin Mann complained, "I'm getting SMSs from Loopt users asking me to be their friend or whatever. I never asked for this. SMSs cost money."
On July 14, 2008, Loopt posted to its blog that the mass invites could be attributed to a confusing user interface, and they are working on an improved invitation flow. The comments, however, point out they continue to ignore STOP messages (a command that automated text-message services use which is supposed to allow people to control whether they receive messages). Respect for STOP was announced July 15, 2008, and on July 17, 2008, Loopt released an updated version which addressed the issues with the confusing user interface.
See also
Location awareness
Notes
References
External links
Y Combinator companies
Android (operating system) software
BlackBerry software
IOS software
Mobile social software
Geosocial networking
Customer loyalty programs
Software companies established in 2005
Software companies disestablished in 2012
2012 disestablishments in California
2012 mergers and acquisitions |
20097586 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online%20OS | Online OS | The Online Operating System was a fully multi-lingual and free to use web desktop written in JavaScript using Ajax. It was a Windows-based desktop environment with open-source applications and system utilities developed upon the reBOX web application framework by iCUBE Network Solutions, an Austrian company located in Vienna.
About the project
OOS.cc, which is short for Online Operating System, was a web application platform that mimicked the look and feel of classic desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or KDE. It consisted of various open source applications built upon the so-called reBOX web application framework.
As applications could be executed in an integrated and parallel way, the OOS could have been considered a web desktop or webtop. It provided basic services such as a GUI, a virtual file system, access control management and possibilities to develop and deploy applications online. As the Online Operating System was executed within a web browser, it was no real operating system but rather a portal to various web applications, offering a high usability and flexibility.
The project was partly funded by grants from the Internetprivatstiftung Austria (IPA). As at 01.08.2008 almost 20.000 users have joined the oos.cc community, using the offered featured and applications.
History
The development of the web desktop was started by iCUBE Network Solutions in 2005, followed by the first beta releases in 2006. Hence, together with YouOS and eyeOS, it can be considered to be one of the first publicly available systems of its kind. The first full version including core-level multi-language support, the file system and a basic set of applications was released to the public in March 2007 on the occasion of a national exhibition (ITnT Austria) and has left beta state half a year later in October 2007. The first release considered stable (1.0.0) was published in July 2007. The project itself and the contained applications have received several national innovation awards (see,) and have gained attention mainly due to the comprehensive approach taken (see,).
OOS.cc started as a national project. The full platform including all offered applications are currently available in three languages (German, English as well as Spanish) and is receiving increasing coverage around the world (for examples see, or).
The current version is 1.3.01 from 01.08.2008.
Technical Overview
The project is fully written in JavaScript, exclusively using DHTML techniques to run in any web browser without any additional software installation needed. The system implements a modern kind of web application model, excessively using Ajax for communicating between client components and the Java server backend in an exclusively asynchronous manner. Aim is to offer users the unique interaction behavior following the desktop metaphor, which is the main idea of any web desktop.
Also typical for this sort of web application is the broadly use of Javascript-on-demand techniques, cutting the complete project source into pieces and loading them instantly when needed.
Based on this technical basis, reBOX was the framework library all applications in oos.cc were built of. It is a fully flexible and extensible API, including a GUI widget set, communication mechanisms and server services offering general and framework specific services.
The Online Operating System itself consisted of a basic framework, which was able to launch any JavaScript application using the reBOX library.
The user interface was based on the behavior of the Windows desktop with a start menu, a task bar and a desktop background. All applications were running in this environment. At server side, there were Java based web services that ran to serve the client processes and to provide data from the relational database in the backend.
oos.cc also provided an integrated development environment called Developer Suite, which allowed the community to build own applications for the desktop environment based on reBOX (see development section below).
License
All applications available in oos.cc were open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).
The reBOX development toolkit is free to use developing any applications for the webtop.
Features
As mentioned above, all applications published on oos.cc are open source based on the EUPL, and can be "installed" or "deinstalled" to what-ever preferences the user has.
Besides global services like the multi-language support or the global theme support, as well as some minor tools and games, oos.cc offered four major services that could be used completely free of charge.
Integrated and fully flexible file storage (1 GB per user)
HTTP as well as FTP file transfer from and to local file system
User-based file-shares within the oos-community
WebDAV access
Document Management (including Version Control and File Locking mechanisms)
Image publishing, organization and post-processing
A free sub domain (user.oos.cc) for web- or image publishing, directly integrated in the desktop
Groupware applications, including free mail, fetchmail and contact management
An integrated development environment where oos-applications can be created directly from within the system (see development section below)
Next releases were planned to focus on an extensive security and privacy suite, dealing with challenges like anonymous communication (browsing as well as temporary mail-addresses) as well as offering encrypted password and file storage and connectivity services. Since its initial stable release, OOS.cc could have been accessed using https to ensure secure communication.
Limitations and drawbacks
Limited number of applications: no commercial applications can be hosted. Only reviewed applications are being published
No processing of popular office formats (.doc, .odt, etc.)
Limited language support: Only English, German and Spanish
Dependence on foreign infrastructure: No possibility to extend storage, no additional/guaranteed bandwidth, etc.
Development
One of the key focuses of the team was right from the beginning to offer a very flexible and comprehensive API, that can be used to develop not only custom applications within oos.cc, but also stand-alone web-applications or to integrate single components in existing web-sites. By decoupling the development from web-related "problems" using the reBOX API web-applications can be development in a similar fashion to any Java program: Elements can be positioned and can interact like in high-level object oriented programming languages, without taking care of divs, browser specific behavior or communication handling. The framework also offers multi-language and theme support for existing as well as newly created applications, allowing changing almost every aspect of the look and feel of the used components according to the preferences of its users.
For taking advantage of this approach, one of the applications offered in the OOS was an integrated Development Suite, allowing directly writing and executing code and hence creating new programs within the boundaries of the web computer. All applications on oos.cc were released as open source, thus all existing programs were offered to be imported, reviewed or changed and then locally deployed. Following this idea, every user was free to submit changed or newly created applications to be included in the globally offered application set. The last release offered features like auto-completion and an outline-window.
See also
Web portal
Web desktop
Similar applications
Jolicloud
youOS
eyeOS
DesktopTwo
SilveOS
G.ho.st
The Sky Pc
References
External links
Official Project Homepage [dead]
Project Description
Official Company Homepage
Web desktops
Web 2.0
Cloud computing
Software using the European Union Public Licence |
11006780 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse%20connection | Reverse connection | A reverse connection is usually used to bypass firewall restrictions on open ports. A firewall usually blocks incoming connections on open ports,
but does not block outgoing traffic. In a normal forward connection, a client connects to a server through the server's open port,
but in the case of a reverse connection, the client opens the port that the server connects to.
The most common way a reverse connection is used is to bypass firewall and router security restrictions.
For example, a backdoor running on a computer behind a firewall that blocks incoming connections can easily open an outbound connection to a remote host on the Internet. Once the connection is established, the remote host can send commands to the backdoor.
Remote administration tools (RAT) that use a reverse connection usually send SYN packets to the client's IP address.
The client listens for these SYN packets and accepts the desired connections.
If a computer is sending SYN packets or is connected to the client's computer, the connections can be discovered by using the netstat command or a common port listener like “Active Ports”.
If the Internet connection is closed down and an application still tries to connect to remote hosts it may be infected with malware.
Keyloggers and other malicious programs are harder to detect once installed, because they connect only once per session. Note that SYN packets by themselves are not necessarily a cause for alarm, as they are a standard part of all TCP connections.
There are honest uses for using reverse connections, for example to allow hosts behind a NAT firewall to be administered remotely. These hosts do not normally have public IP addresses, and so must either have ports forwarded at the firewall, or open reverse connections to a central administration server.
External links
Reverse SSH Tunneling
Network architecture |
641907 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLX | GLX | GLX (initialism for "OpenGL Extension to the X Window System") is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System. GLX distinguishes two "states": indirect state and direct state.
History
Silicon Graphics developed GLX as part of their effort to support OpenGL in the X Window System. In 1999 SGI released GLX under an open-source license, letting it be incorporated in XFree86 source code version 4.0 in 2000. From there, the code was inherited by the forked X.Org Foundation version of the X Window System X11R6.7.0. On September 19, 2008, SGI created a new SGI FreeB License Version 2.0, which "now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org" and "meets the free and open source software community's widely accepted definition of 'free'". In 2009 the Free Software Foundation endorsed the SGI Free License B to be a free-software license, and GLX to be an important free-software graphics project. As of 2011, GLX has reached version 1.4.
The first internal implementation of GLX API, called GLcore, loaded a version of the software renderer of Mesa inside the X server and rendered the OpenGL commands in a window or pixmap. With the development of DRI, the ability to use hardware accelerated OpenGL through direct contexts was added (primarily used by videogames). In 2006, the popularization of the nested Xgl X server and Compiz compositing window manager lead to the development of Accelerated Indirect GLX (AIGLX). AIGLX brings hardware acceleration to the GLX (indirect context) applications by loading the Mesa DRI driver inside the X server. This method enables the sharing of GL objects between X clients using indirect contexts (they all are in the same address space in the X server) and also between a X client and the compositing window manager, thus accelerating composition. In 2008 the binding in GLcore to the Mesa software renderer was rewritten as a DRI interface module, called swrast_dri.so, improving the coupling of Mesa and the X server. Also in the year 2008 the new DRI2 was introduced to replace DRI, and with it a new model based in the Kernel mode-setting. In 2011, the Glamor project started, aiming to add a generic hardware-accelerated 2D X driver based in OpenGL. In 2013 Adam Jackson did a major rewrite of GLX code to consolidate the diverse paths from Glamor, indirect rendering, ... to one unique path to OpenGL's library libGL.
Features
GLX consists of three parts:
An API that provides OpenGL functions to an X Window System application.
An extension of the X protocol, which allows the client (the OpenGL application) to send 3D rendering commands to the X server (the software responsible for the display). The client and server software may run on different computers.
An extension of the X server that receives the rendering commands from the client and passes them on to the installed OpenGL library
If client and server are running on the same computer and an accelerated 3D graphics card using a suitable driver is available, the former two components can be bypassed by DRI. In this case, the client application is then allowed to directly access the video hardware through several API layers.
Implementations
Mesa 3D – a free and open-source library which implements a couple of graphical APIs and also the available Free and open-source device drivers: graphics; for a last resort Mesa 3D also offers fallback software rendering.
The proprietary device drivers for graphics chips also include an implementation of GLX.
See also
WGL – the equivalent Microsoft Windows interface to OpenGL
CGL – the equivalent macOS interface to OpenGL
EGL – a similar cross-platform interface between OpenGL ES or VG and the underlying native platform window system
GLUT – library of utilities for OpenGL programs
References
External links
OpenGL® Graphics with the X Window System®
Current OpenGL API, OpenGL Shading Language and GLX Specifications and Reference Pages
OpenGL
X Window extensions
X-based libraries |
1576401 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir%20Dystic | Sir Dystic | Josh Buchbinder,
better known as Sir Dystic, has been a member of Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) since May 1997,
and is the author of Back Orifice.
He has also written several other hacker tools, including SMBRelay, NetE, and NBName.
Sir Dystic has appeared at multiple hacker conventions, both as a member of panels and speaking on his own. He has also been interviewed on several television and radio programs
and in an award-winning short film about hacker culture in general and cDc in particular.
Dystic's pseudonym is taken from a somewhat obscure 1930s bondage comic character named "Sir Dystic D'Arcy." According to the cDc's Sir Dystic, his namesake "tried to do evil things but always bungles it and ends up doing good inadvertently."
Software
Back Orifice
Back Orifice (often shortened to BO) is a controversial computer program designed for remote system administration. It enables a user to control a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system from a remote location. The name is a pun on Microsoft BackOffice Server software. The program debuted at DEF CON 6 on August 1, 1998. It was the brainchild of Sir Dystic, a member of the U.S. hacker organization CULT OF THE DEAD COW. According to the group, its purpose was to demonstrate the lack of security in Microsoft's operating system Windows 98.
According to Sir Dystic, "BO was supposed to be a statement about the fact that people feel secure and safe, although there are wide, gaping holes in both the operating system they're using and the means of defense they're using against hostile code. I mean, that was my message and BO2K really has a different message." Vnunet.com reported Sir Dystic's claim that this message was privately commended by employees of Microsoft.
SMBRelay & SMBRelay2
SMBRelay and SMBRelay2 are computer programs that can be used to carry out SMB man in the middle (mitm) attacks on Windows machines. They were written by Sir Dystic and released 21 March 2001 at the @lantacon convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
NBName
NBName is a computer program that can be used to carry out denial-of-service attacks that can disable NetBIOS services on Windows machines. It was written by Sir Dystic and released 29 July 2000 at the DEF CON 8 convention in Las Vegas. Sir Dystic reported the issue that NBName exploits to Microsoft; he was acknowledged in a security bulletin.
External links
References
Cult of the Dead Cow members
People associated with computer security
Living people
Computer programmers
Year of birth missing (living people)
Hackers |
17283077 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform%20virtualization | Cross-platform virtualization | Cross-platform virtualization is a form of computer virtualization that allows software compiled for a specific instruction set and operating system to run unmodified on computers with different CPUs and/or operating systems, through a combination of dynamic binary translation and operating system call mapping.
Since the software runs on a virtualized equivalent of the original computer, it does not require recompilation or porting, thus saving time and development resources. However, the processing overhead of binary translation and call mapping imposes a performance penalty, when compared to natively-compiled software. For this reason, cross-platform virtualization may be used as a temporary solution until resources are available to port the software. Alternatively, cross-platform virtualization may be used to support legacy code, which running on a newer and faster machine still maintains adequate performance even with virtualization overhead.
By creating an abstraction layer capable of running software compiled for a different computer system, cross-platform virtualization characterizes the Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements outlined by Gerald J. Popek and Robert P. Goldberg in their 1974 article "Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures". Cross-platform virtualization is distinct from simple emulation and binary translation - which involve the direct translation of one instruction set to another - since the inclusion of operating system call mapping provides a more complete virtualized environment. Cross-platform virtualization is also complementary to server virtualization and desktop virtualization solutions, since these are typically constrained to a single instruction set, such as x86 or Power ISA. Modern variants of cross-platform virtualisation may employ hardware acceleration techniques to offset some of the cost incurred in the guest-to-host system translation.
See also
Instruction set simulator
Platform virtualization
Virtual machine
Emulator
Porting
Cross-platform
References
Hardware virtualization |
56202414 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%20O.%20Wobbrock | Jacob O. Wobbrock | Jacob O. Wobbrock is a Professor in the University of Washington Information School and, by courtesy, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is Director of the ACE Lab, founding Co-Director of the CREATE center, and a founding member of the DUB Group and the MHCI+D degree program.
Wobbrock conducts research and teaches in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with a focus on input and interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing. He frequently publishes on interaction techniques, text entry methods and their evaluation, gesture recognition and design, statistical methods and tools, mobile user interfaces, and accessible user interfaces, among other topics.
Wobbrock has co-authored over 180 peer-reviewed papers and received 25 paper awards, including seven best papers and eight honorable mentions from ACM's CHI conference. In 2021, he was named an ACM Fellow "for contributions to human-computer interaction and accessible computing." In 2019, he was inducted into the CHI Academy. For his work on accessible computing, he received the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award and the 2019 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award. He is also the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and seven other National Science Foundation grants. In both 2018 and 2021, he was #1 of 100 on AMiner's Most Influential Scholars in HCI list, and was runner-up in 2020. (AMiner is an automatic citation-ranking system from Tsinghua University.) From 2012 to 2022, he served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. His advisees have gone on to positions at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado, Washington, Brown, Simon Fraser, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others.
As an entrepreneur, Wobbrock was the venture-backed co-founder and C.E.O. of AnswerDash from 2012 to 2015. AnswerDash was acquired by CloudEngage in June 2020.
Education
Wobbrock grew up in Lake Oswego, Oregon and graduated with academic honors from Lake Oswego High School. He attended Stanford University, where he received his B.S. with Honors in Symbolic Systems (1998) and his M.S. in Computer Science (2000). In both degrees, he had a formal specialization in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). After working in Silicon Valley startups for a few years, he attended the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. (2006). At graduation, he was honored with CMU's School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award, the HCI Institute's only recipient of the award as of 2019.
Research
Wobbrock's research seeks to scientifically understand people's experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences by inventing new interactive technologies, especially for people with disabilities. His research topics include input and interaction techniques, human performance measurement and modeling, HCI research and design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing.
Some of his notable research projects are the $-family gesture recognizers, the end-user elicitation design method, the Slide Rule design for accessible touchscreen gestures (which some have noted might have influenced Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility software design), the ARTool statistics tool for nonparametric ANOVA-type analyses, the Pointing Magnifier 2 assistive pointing and visual aid, and the versatile EdgeWrite text-entry system. Wobbrock is also known for his formulation of Ability-Based Design, which scrutinizes technologies for their ability assumptions and insists that technologies accommodate people, rather than the other way around.
Teaching
Wobbrock teaches technical and design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) subjects, and courses on research methods, statistics, and research design. He has also developed courses on experience design, interactive technology design, and input and interaction techniques. In February 2016, he launched Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments on the Coursera platform. This massive open online course (MOOC) focuses on experiment design and data analysis in the R programming language for formal Human-Computer Interaction studies.
Industry
Wobbrock was the venture-backed cofounder and CEO of AnswerDash, a SaaS startup that provides intelligent in-context help to websites and mobile apps. His cofounders were fellow professor Amy J. Ko, and then-Ph.D. student Parmit Chilana, now a professor at Simon Fraser University. After running AnswerDash from 2012–2015, Wobbrock returned to his full-time academic position at the University of Washington. AnswerDash was acquired by CloudEngage in June 2020.
Between graduating from Stanford University and starting his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, Wobbrock worked at Silicon Valley startups DoDots and Google. While in college, he held two technical internships at Intel.
Personal life
Wobbrock lives in Seattle, Washington and is married to Alison Wobbrock (née Pawluskiewicz), a daughter of Polish emigrants from Nowy Targ, Poland and the niece of celebrated Polish composer Jan Kanty Pawluskiewicz.
References
American computer scientists
Human–computer interaction researchers
Living people
1976 births |
37614961 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%20GB%20limit | 2 GB limit | The 2 GB limit refers to a physical memory barrier for a process running on a 32-bit operating system, which can only use a maximum of 2 GB of memory. The problem mainly affects 32-bit versions of operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Linux, although some variants of the latter can overcome this barrier. It is also found in servers like FTP servers or embedded systems like Xbox. The use of Physical Address Extension (PAE) can help overcome this barrier.
While Linux, FreeBSD, and most Unix-like operating systems support PAE so long as the hardware does, Windows needs this boot option enabled manually. This is known as 4-gigabyte tuning (4GT), or the /3GB switch. Once enabled, executables can have the "large address aware" flag set to increase their memory limit to 3 GB. 32-bit processes on 64-bit Windows are also limited to 2 GB. However, they can use the "large address aware" flag as well, except that it doesn't require the /3GB switch and increases the limit to 4 GB.
See also
640 KB barrier
3 GB barrier
References
Computer files
Computer file systems |
3133356 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch%20virtual%20interface | Switch virtual interface | A switch virtual interface (SVI) represents a logical layer-3 interface on a switch.
VLANs divide broadcast domains in a LAN environment. Whenever hosts in one VLAN need to communicate with hosts in another VLAN, the traffic must be routed between them. This is known as inter-VLAN routing. On layer-3 switches it is accomplished by the creation of layer-3 interfaces (SVIs). Inter VLAN routing, in other words routing between VLANs can be achieved by SVIs.
SVI or VLAN interface, is a virtual routed interface that connects a VLAN on the device to the Layer 3 router engine on the same device. Only one VLAN interface can be associated with a VLAN, but you need to configure a VLAN interface for a VLAN only when you want to route between VLANs or to provide IP host connectivity to the device through a virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) instance that is not the management VRF. When you enable VLAN interface creation, a switch creates a VLAN interface for the default VLAN (VLAN 1) to permit remote switch administration.
SVIs are generally configured for a VLAN for the following reasons:
Allow traffic to be routed between VLANs by providing a default gateway for the VLAN.
Provide fallback bridging (if required for non-routable protocols).
Provide Layer 3 IP connectivity to the switch.
Support bridging configurations and routing protocol.
Access Layer - 'Routed Access' Configuration (in lieu of Spanning Tree)
SVIs advantages include:
Much faster than router-on-a-stick, because everything is hardware-switched and routed.
No need for external links from the switch to the router for routing.
Not limited to one link. Layer 2 EtherChannels can be used between the switches to get more bandwidth.
Latency is much lower, because it does not need to leave the switch
An SVI can also be known as a Routed VLAN Interface (RVI) by some vendors.
References
Cisco Systems, Configure InterVLAN Routing on Layer 3 Switches
Cisco Systems, Configuring SVI
Cisco Systems, 2006, "Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks" (Version 3.0), Cisco Systems Inc.
Switch Virtual Interfaces (SVI) configuration
Data Centre Networking Module (COMH9003) | Cork Institute of Technology
Computer networking |
307229 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional%20lockout | Regional lockout | A regional lockout (or region coding) is a class of digital rights management preventing the use of a certain product or service, such as multimedia or a hardware device, outside a certain region or territory. A regional lockout may be enforced through physical means, through technological means such as detecting the user's IP address or using an identifying code, or through unintentional means introduced by devices only supporting certain regional technologies (such as video formats, i.e., NTSC and PAL).
A regional lockout may be enforced for several reasons, such as to stagger the release of a certain product, to avoid losing sales to the product's foreign publisher, to maximize the product's impact in a certain region through localization, to hinder grey market imports by enforcing price discrimination, or to prevent users from accessing certain content in their territory because of legal reasons (either due to censorship laws, or because a distributor does not have the rights to certain intellectual property outside their specified region).
Multimedia
Disc regions
The DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and UMD media formats all support the use of region coding; DVDs use eight region codes (Region 7 is reserved for future use; Region 8 is used for "international venues", such as airplanes and cruise ships), and Blu-ray Discs use three region codes corresponding to different areas of the world. Most Blu-rays, however, are region-free.
On computers, the DVD region can usually be changed five times. Windows uses three region counters: its own one, the one of the DVD drive, and the one of the player software (occasionally, the player software has no region counter of its own, but uses that of Windows). After the fifth region change, the system is locked to that region. In modern DVD drives (type RPC-2), the region lock is saved to its hardware, so that even reinstalling Windows or using the drive with a different computer will not unlock the drive again.
Unlike DVD regions, Blu-ray regions are verified only by the player software, not by the computer system or the drive. The region code is stored in a file or the registry, and there are hacks to reset the region counter of the player software. In stand-alone players, the region code is part of the firmware.
For bypassing region codes, there are software and multi-regional players available.
A new form of Blu-ray region coding tests not only the region of the player/player software, but also its country code, repurposing a user setting intended for localization (PSR19) as a new form of regional lockout. This means, for example, while both the US and Japan are Region A, some American discs will not play on devices/software configured for Japan or vice versa, since the two countries have different country codes. (For example, the United States is "US" (21843 or hex 0x5553), Japan is "JP" (19024 or hex 0x4a50), and Canada is "CA" (17217 or hex 0x4341).) Although there are only three Blu-ray regions, the country code allows much more precise control of the regional distribution of Blu-ray Discs than the six (or eight) DVD regions.
AnyDVD HD (7.5.9.0 and higher) has an option to turn off the check of the country code of by using the value 4294967295 or hex 0xFFFFFFFF. The software developers say users can also change the country code in the registry value "bdCountryCode" themselves. (Before the change of the value, AnyDVD must be closed, and after changing, it must be restarted.)
Software
Some features of certain programs are/were disabled if the software is/was installed on a computer in a certain region.
In older versions of the copy software CloneCD, the features "Amplify Weak Sectors", "Protected PC Games," and "Hide CDR Media" were disabled in the United States and Japan. Changing the region and language settings in Windows (e.g., to Canadian English) or patches could unlock these features in the two countries. SlySoft decided to leave these options disabled for the US for legal reasons, but, strangely enough, in the program "AnyDVD", which is also illegal according to US law, no features were disabled. The current version of CloneCD (5.3.1.4) is not region-restricted anymore.
The newer versions of the copy software (9.1.5.0 and higher) come in a US version (no Blu-ray-ripping feature), which is downloaded if the homepage dvdfab.cn identifies a US IP address, and a non-US version (with working Blu-ray-ripping feature). Some webpages allow the download of the non-US version also from the US (they store the non-US version directly and do not use download links to the developer's homepage).
The software CCleaner v5.45.6611 has an added check to prevent the use in embargoed countries.
Some programs (e.g., games) are distributed in different versions for NTSC and PAL computers. In some cases, to avoid grey market imports or international software piracy, they are designed not to run on a computer with the wrong TV system. Other programs can run on computers with both TV systems.
Kaspersky Lab sells its anti-virus products at different prices in different regions and uses regionalized activation codes. A program bought in a country of a region can be activated in another country of the same region. Once activated, the software can also be used in and download updates from other regions as long as the license is valid. Problems may arise when the license must be renewed, or if the software must be reinstalled, in a region other than the one where it was bought. The region is identified by the IP address (there is no activation possible without Internet connection), so the use of VPN or a proxy is recommended to circumvent the restriction.
The Kaspersky regions are:
Region 1: Canada, United States, Mexico, and Bermuda
Region 2: Western Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Egypt, and Japan
Region 3: Southeast Asia
Region 4: Central America, South America (excluding French Guiana), and Oceania; Mexico uses software that uses flags for both regions 1 and 4
Region 5: Africa, India, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (also includes Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Serbia)
Region 6: Mainland China
Region 7: Elsewhere
Region 8: Special international area (airplane, steamer, etc.)
The desktop versions of HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario are region-locked, according the build is 91UKV6PRA1, for the A6740uk released in 2009. WildTangent EMEA, Magic Desktop will not work on models in the US.
The HP FlexBuild Regions Are:
USA: United States
JAP: Japan
KOR: Korean
EMEA: Elsewhere
TOUCH: Designed for HP Touchsmart only
Websites
On the internet, geo-blocking is used primarily to control access to online media content that is only licensed for playback in a certain region due to territorial licensing arrangements.
Video games
Regional lockouts in video games have been achieved by several methods, such as hardware/software authentication, slot pin-out change, differences in cartridge cases, IP blocking and online software patching. Most console video games have region encoding.
The main regions are:
Japan and Asia (NTSC-J)
North America and South America (NTSC-U)
Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Middle East, India, South Africa (PAL region)
China (NTSC-C)
Atari Inc.
The Atari 2600 does not have regional locking, but NTSC games can display wrong colors, slow speed and sound on PAL systems and vice versa.
Atari 7800 has regional locking on NTSC systems, leaving PAL-made games unplayable on them. However, the PAL versions of Atari 7800 can run NTSC games, but suffering from the same problems as Atari 2600 did.
The Atari 5200, Lynx and Jaguar are region-free.
Nintendo
Nintendo was the first console maker to introduce regional locks to its consoles, and used them for every one of its consoles except the Nintendo Switch, while mostly eschewing them for its handheld products.
Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) were locked through both physical and technical means; the design of cartridges for the NES differed between Japan and other markets, using a different number of pins. As the Famicom (the Japanese model) used slightly smaller cartridges, Japanese games could not fit into NES consoles without an adapter (and even with that, they could still not use the extra sound functionalities of the Famicom due to their differing hardware). Official adapters existed inside early copies of Gyromite and could be disassembled then swapped with a different Famicom game.
Additionally, the NES also contained the 10NES authentication chip; the chip was coded for one of three regions:
NTSC (North America)
PAL-A (United Kingdom, Australia and Italy)
PAL-B (other European countries and South Korea)
Asia (South East Asia, India, and Hong Kong)
A game's region is recognized by the console using the 10NES chip. If the chip inside the cartridge conflicts with the chip inside the console, the game will not boot. The 10NES chip also doubled as a form of digital rights management to prevent loading unlicensed or bootleg games. The redesigned Nintendo Entertainment System (Model NES-101) released in 1993/1994 lacks the 10NES chip, and can play PAL and unlicensed games, although Famicom games still need a converter. The Famicom does not include a 10NES chip, but is still unable to play imports unless an adapter is used, due to the different size of the media.
The American Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and the Super Famicom use differences in cartridge cases. A Super NES cartridge will not fit in a Super Famicom/PAL SNES slot due to its different shape and two pieces of plastic in the SNES slot prevent Super Famicom cartridges from being inserted in the SNES. PAL SNES carts can be fully inserted in Japanese consoles, but a similar chip to the 10NES, called the CIC, prevents PAL games from being played in NTSC consoles and vice versa. While physical modification of the cases (either console or cartridges) is needed to play games from the different regions, in order to play games of different TV systems, a hardware modification is also needed. Region locks could be bypassed using special unlicensed cartridge adapters such as Game Genie. The swapping of cartridge shells also bypasses the physical regional lockout.
The Nintendo 64 features similar lockout methods as the Super NES. The GameCube and Wii are both region-locked, the Wii Shop Channel is also region-locked. Wii channels from other regions will display an error message "This channel can't be used." The coded regions are:
NTSC-U (The Americas and Asia)
PAL (Europe and Oceania)
NTSC-J (Japan)
NTSC-K (South Korea)
The GameCube and Wii's regional lockout can be bypassed either by console modification (the Wii also through BIOS hacking, via The Homebrew Channel), or simply by third party software. Datel's FreeLoader or Action Replay discs are most notable.
The Wii U is also region-locked. Nintendo also region-locked Wii U Gamepads.
Not counting the NES-101 "top loader", the Nintendo Switch is Nintendo's first region-free console, and it is region-free to the fullest extent, such that games from its Nintendo eShop can be purchased and downloaded regardless of region.
These regions are:
Japan
The Americas (North/South America)
Europe
Oceania (Australia/New Zealand)
Asia Pacific (Hong Kong/Taiwan/South Korea) (Versions 8.0.0 and later)
Before version 8.0.0, most Asian countries belonged to the Americas, just like with the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
The one exception to this being the Chinese version of the Nintendo Switch distributed by Tencent in Mainland China. This version can play cartridge games from any region, but is only able to connect to the Chinese servers, thus it can not access any game updates, DLC or online modes from imported games, or download said games digitally. All other versions of the Nintendo Switch are also unable to play cartridges released specifically by Tencent for the Chinese Nintendo Switch.
All Nintendo handhelds except both Nintendo DSi models and the Nintendo 3DS are fully region-free. In the case of the former, only the physical and digital games that cannot be played on earlier DS models are region-locked. The latter's region lock strictly applies to all software designed for it, with the only exception being the application Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre, which is not a game in of itself.
Sony
The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 are region-locked into three regions: NTSC U/C, NTSC-J, and PAL. However, it is possible to disable region locking on the PlayStation 2 via using a mod chip or Swap Magic disc.
All PlayStation 3 games, except for Persona 4 Arena and Way of the Samurai 3, are region free. Although publishers could choose to region-lock specific games based on a mechanism that allows for the game to query the model of the PS3, none did so during the first three years after the PS3's launch. In the case of Persona 4 Arena; publisher Atlus declined to reverse its decision despite substantial outcry by some of their fanbase. The decision was made to avoid excessive importing, because all versions of the game share the same features and language support, but have differing price points and release dates in each region. They did, however, decide not to apply region-locking to its sequel (Persona 4 Arena Ultimax). There is region locking for backwards-compatible PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games, as well as DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies. Additionally, some games separate online players per region, such as Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The PlayStation Store only contains content for its own country. For example, the EU store will not supply usable map packs for an imported US copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In addition, downloadable content for the PlayStation 3 systems is region-matched with the game, so you need to buy DLC from US PlayStation Store to use it in a US game. More specifically, the PS3's file system includes region-of-origin, so DLC cannot be shared between different region games much like save files cannot. Also, the PSN Store is tied to each user's PSN account, and payment methods for PSN is also region-locked. For example, a user with a Japanese PSN account will only be able to access the Japanese PSN store despite owning a US PS3, and can only pay for a game with a Japanese PSN gift card or Japanese credit card. However, with a few rare exceptions, notably Joysound Dive, downloaded content from each PSN store are also region free, as are PSOne and PS2 classics offered on the store.
Although PlayStation Portable has no region locking for UMD games; UMD movies are locked by region. However, Sony has confirmed that it is possible to implement region-locking on the PSP, and the firmware will disable features based on region. For example, Asian region PSPs will not display the "Extras" option on the XMB despite having been upgraded to the US version of Firmware 6.20, preventing owners of such PSPs from installing the Comic Book Viewer and the TV Streaming applications. As the applications are installed through a PC, and users from the region are not blocked from downloading them, it is possible to install them on non-Asian PSPs that have been imported into the region.
While PlayStation Vita games had the potential to be region-locked, all games released for the system are region-free.
Like their predecessors, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 are not region-locked, although it is still possible to develop region-locked games. Sony's official stance is that they discourage developers from region-locking and will only relent in special cases (as with the PS3 Persona 4 Arena). However, as with the PlayStation 3, digital content such as downloadable content for games still requires a PSN account from the region the content was made for. That said, PSN accounts themselves are not region-locked and an account for one region can be made on a console from another one.
Sega
The SG-1000 does not have region lockout between Japanese and Australian systems, the same applies with SC-3000 games on cartridge and cassettes, as well SF-7000 disks.
Western Sega Master Systems have a different shape from the Japanese cartridge connector, meaning Sega Mark III and SG-1000 games are incompatible with it. A BIOS included prevents Japanese cartridges (both Mark III and SG-1000) to be used on Western systems, even with adapters. The Sega Card slot on these systems has the same pinout from its Japanese counterpart, but they cannot run Japanese and SG-1000 cards due to lack of a certain code in the ROM header. This can be circumvented by removing the BIOS IC from it. However, some European-only games such as Back to the Future Part III will refuse to boot on NTSC systems. Japanese games can be run on Power Base Converter with use of adapters, but it will not run SG-1000 games, regardless of region.
Japanese Sega Mega Drive cartridges have a different shape and will not fit in the Genesis or PAL Mega Drive slot, which have the same shape (although the Genesis 3 in the US will accept Japanese titles due to its wider slot.) Japanese Mega Drive systems have a piece of plastic that slides in a place of the cartridge when the power switch is turned on, thus, inserting an American or European cart will make it impossible to use on a Japanese MD (though minor modifications to the plastic locks in the systems will bypass this). The console main board, however, was designed with language and frequency jumper sets which originally activated features in the same ROM for the different regions. This feature was later used to enable software-based regional locks that display warning messages that prevent the game from being played. Switches, instead of the jumpers, were used to bypass the locks. In region-locked games, if there is a multiple language feature, it can be changed with the switches after the game has booted-up (as with the case of Cyber Brawl/Cosmic Carnage for the Super 32X). Despite the console itself being region-locked, most of the games, especially ones made by Sega, were region-free and could be played on any region, unless the cartridge doesn't fit the console.
The Sega Game Gear is region free, and some games have dual language depending on which system is used, such as Puyo Puyo (game name changes to Puzlow Kids) and Donald no Magical World (Ronald in Magical World), which are both Japan-exclusive games, but if run on Western units, they will be fully translated.
Sega Mega-CD games are region-locked. The region can be changed when making CD-R copies but it is not always possible (i.e. Sengoku Denshou in American consoles will hang in the Sega license screen with a region-changed CD-R copy). Furthermore, third party accessories exist that allow booting any regional Sega CD BIOS off a flashcart adapter in the main console's cartridge slot. The Mega CD will work if connected to a Genesis. However it does not share the same AC voltage as the Sega CD.
Most American Sega Saturn discs can be played in Japanese consoles, but most Japanese games are locked for American and European consoles. Like in the Mega Drive/Genesis, the use of a switch will circumvent the region-lock but won't change the language. In addition, the use of certain unlicensed backup/RAM cartridges will also allow a console to play games from different regions, except for games that use proprietary ROM-RAM carts. Games from different television systems may have graphical problems.
Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM discs were region-locked, but this could be circumvented with the use of boot discs. MIL-CDs and backup CDs are region-free.
Microsoft
The Xbox and the Xbox 360 are region-locked, but some games are region-free and will play in any region. Digital content through Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 and original Xbox are also region-locked, such as DLC, movies, and apps.
The Xbox One was initially planned to have a region blocking policy that would have prevented its use outside its region in an effort to curb parallel importing. Microsoft later reversed the policy and the final retail version of the console was not region-locked. It was reported, though, that the console would be region-locked in China. However, this decision has since been reverted as of April 2015.
Other
The Philips CD-i and the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer are region-free. Japanese 3DO units, however, have a kanji font in ROM, which is required by a few games. When such games can't find the font, they can get locked or rendered unplayable.
The Neo Geo Pocket line is also region-free.
Amongst PC games, regional lockout is more difficult to enforce because both the game application and the operating system can be easily modified. Subscription-based online games often enforce a regional lock by blocking IP addresses (which can often be circumvented through an open proxy) or by requiring the user to enter a national ID number (which may be impossible to verify). A number of other games using regional lockout are rare but do exist. One of the examples of this is the Windows version of The Orange Box, which uses Steam to enforce the regional lockout. Steam also enforces a form of regional lockout in adherence to German law by offering to German users special versions of some games with banned content – most notably swastikas – replaced. Steam is also used to restrict the release of the PC port of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to US and Europe only due to Sony having an exclusivity deal with Konami in Asia, and to restrict the Asian release of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy to Japanese-only versions of the games. Besides the law and licensing issues, there is also a financial reason for Steam to region lock their games, since in Russia and other CIS countries prices of games on Steam are much lower than in the EU or North America.
Printers
Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges have been regionalised since 2004. Thus they do not work in printers with a different region code, unless the user calls technical support for the device to be reassigned to the appropriate region.
HP printers have four regions:
Americas, Greenland, Australia, New Zealand, Koreas, Mongolia, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, East Asia
Western Europe, Turkey
CIS, Africa, Near East, Japan
China (except Hong Kong and Taiwan) and India
The region can be changed three times; then, the printer will be locked to a region.
Lexmark printers use different region-coding systems:
a) e.g. OfficeEdge Pro4000, OfficeEdge Pro4000c, OfficeEdge Pro5500, OfficeEdge Pro5500t, CS310, CS410 Color Laser Printer
Americas
Greenland, EU, EFTA
(in CS310, CS410 Color Laser Printer called Region 8): Former Yugoslavian states, except for EU members Croatia and Slovenia, and rest of world (East Europe, Africa, Near East, Asia, Australia)
b) e.g. MS710, MS810 Monochrome Laser Printer
USA, Canada
Greenland, EU, EFTA
Asia, Australia, New Zealand
Central and South America
Former Yugoslavian states (except Croatia and Slovenia), Eastern Europe, Turkey, Near East, Africa
Canon print cartridges for the Pixma MP 480 will not work in printers of that type with a different region code either (even when listed on the packaging of the Canon printer cartridges in question).
Epson ink cartridges are also use region-coded.
Xerox also uses region codes. Their printers are shipped with neutral "factory" ink sticks with no region coding. Upon the installation of the first new ink stick after these factory sticks, the machine will set a region code based on the installed ink stick and will only accept ink stick for that region from that point forward. "Officially, " only three starter ink sticks per color can be used; then, the printer will no longer accept them and will want region-coded ink sticks to be inserted, but there are workarounds for that problem.
Common region settings are:
NA (North America)
Metered-NA
DMO (developing markets, such as Asia and South America)
XE (Europe).
Circumvention
One method to bypass printer-region-coding is to store empty cartridges from the old region and refill them with the ink of cartridges from the new region, but many modern ink cartridges have chips and sensors to prevent refilling, which makes the process more difficult.
Some manufacturers of regionalized printers also offer region-free printers specially designed for travelers.
See also anti-refilling protections used by printer manufacturers.
Smartphones, tablets, and computers
Samsung devices
Starting from the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung phones and tablets contained a warning label stating that it would only operate with SIM cards from the region the phone was sold in. A spokesperson clarified the policy, stating that it was intended to prevent grey-market reselling, and that it only applied to the first SIM card inserted. For devices to use a SIM card from other regions, one of the following actions totaling five minutes or longer in length must first be performed with the SIM card from the local region:
Make calls on the phone or watch from the Samsung Phone app
Use the Call and Text on Other Devices feature to make calls
Country Specific Codes (CSCs) for Samsung devices
OYM/OYN: United States (cellular devices only)
OYA: Canada (cellular devices only)
CHN/CHC: Mainland China (all devices)
OKR: South Korea (cellular devices only)
OXM: All other countries (including US/Canada/South Korea Wi-Fi only devices)
As of the Galaxy Tab S6, Wi-Fi only devices are no longer region locked, and the Call and Text on Other Devices features on those devices can work on SIM cards from most regions (excluding mainland China). All regions (except for mainland China) share the same CSC in their firmware version.
Windows devices
Starting with Windows Phone 7 for mobile devices and Windows 8 for computers, not all display languages are preinstalled/available for download on all devices with an OEM license of Windows. Users may not see all the display languages listed as options on the device or as options available for download as separate language packs. These exact options depend on the device manufacturer and country/region of purchase (and the mobile operator, if the device features cellular connectivity). Microsoft believes region locking is necessary because these display languages (which contains additional features like text suggestions, speech languages, and supplementary fonts) can take up a significant amount of storage, which leaves less space for data and media and impacts device performance. For cellular-connected devices, some mobile operators may choose not to support particular languages. For example, a wireless carrier in North America may not feel comfortable supporting European languages.
Credit cards
As a protection against theft and misuse in foreign countries, some credit cards can be locked for certain regions. If the card holder wants to travel abroad and to use the credit card there, the lock of a certain region can temporarily be deactivated by the bank.
Not all banks offer this service yet, and the region systems used may vary by banks.
For example, the Sparkasse Schwyz AG (Switzerland) uses the following system:
Region 1: Switzerland and Liechtenstein
Region 2: Europe (including Turkey and Greenland; overseas territories have the region code of their location.)
(Regions 1 and 2 are usually not locked.)
Region 3: Russia and CIS
Region 4: Africa
Region 5: Canada
Region 6: USA (except American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands) and Mexico
Region 7: Latin America and Caribbean
Region 8: Middle East (except Turkey and Egypt), Asia-Pacific, Australia
See also
10NES
CIC
Fan translation
Modchip
NTSC-C
NTSC-J
NTSC
PAL region
Parallel import
Parallel importing in video games
Trusted Platform Module
References
External links
Criticism of intellectual property
Compact Disc and DVD copy protection
Digital rights management
DVD
Hardware restrictions
Video game development |
4719390 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun%20Devil%20Marching%20Band | Sun Devil Marching Band | The Sun Devil Marching Band (SDMB), also known as The Pride of the Southwest, is the athletic band of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. The Sun Devil Marching Band motto is “Expect Great Things.” The acronym EGT is inscribed on a sign that hangs from the director’s podium towering over the band's practice field, and is a symbol of the high standards that band members strive to meet. The ASU Band program, which includes the Marching, Pep, and Dixieland bands, is a part of the Sun Devil Athletics department. The band is currently under the direction of Director of Athletic Bands James G. "The Hammer" Hudson, who took over the program in 2006. The Sun Devil Marching Band is a major ambassador for Arizona State University and the state of Arizona. Each year almost 500,000 people are entertained by the band, which plays at home football at Sun Devil Stadium and as a pep band for basketball games at Wells Fargo Arena, homecoming, bowl game parades, other community events in the Valley, across the country, and even abroad.
History
On September 20, 1915, the Arizona Board of Education accepted and ratified the creation of the Tempe Bulldogs Marching Band under Mrs. Lillian Williams (1915–1917). Under her guidance she furnished on her own the band's instruments, uniforms, and repertoire of standard classical music. The Bulldogs Marching Band though would be discontinued due to World War I. Williams last appearance was during 1947 concert as then Sun Devil Marching Band director Felix E. McKernan honored her. The Bulldogs Marching Band return in 1929 under short tenure of the direction of John Paul Jones. In transition under the direction of Carl G. Hoyer in 1937 the band's first bowl appearance for the Tournament of Roses Parade where the band won second prize. Though that year Hoyer would leave after then Arizona governor, Benjamin Baker Moeur, rejected his Arizona State Song for the state song of Arizona. During Dr. Robert G. Lyon five-year tenure was the addition of new parade and marching formations as well as swing music. Under Felix E. McKernan direction saw the various changes taken place for the band and the school. In 1946, the school's, mascot was redesigned by former Disney illustrator, Bert Anthony, from the Bulldog to Sparky, the Sun Devil. McKernan made his marks in the band by composing the school's fight song Maroon & Gold, implementing script drill formations in pregame and halftime shows, holding auditions for instrumentation placing, offering scholarships to boost membership, recruiting high school band members, establishing Band Day, and formatting three weekly rehearsals. All of which laid the basis for band to grow rapidly. The band's growing reputation brought a lot of praise from directors across the nation such as Clarence Sawhill (1947–1952) of the USC Trojan Band proclaimed the band as "The Best Marching Band in the Southwest." McKernan's successor, Harold C. Hines, as well added to McKernan's body of work by holding band camp a week before the Fall semester begins, additions to pregame pageantry, 1957 implementing fireworks, band's active role in Proposition 200 in 1958 for university status, and establishing the Alumni Band for Homecoming Games. August 1974 initiated a new period in the history of the Sun Devil Band program with the hiring of two new directors. The two men brought a new style of marching and philosophy to ASU's band program. Dr. Richard E. "Doc" Strange (1974–1999) became Director of Bands and brought (now) Dr. Robert C. "Coach" Fleming (1974–2002) as Assistant Director of Bands; this position was ultimately elevated to Associate Director of Bands, and is now designated Director of Athletic Bands. The Marching Band gained national recognition by performing at the 1987 and 1997 Rose Bowl games and Tournament of Roses Parades. Also to the band's credit are performances at Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, the then Los Angeles Raiders and Los Angeles Rams professional football games, Phoenix Suns professional basketball games, SeaWorld, Knott's Berry Farm, Disneyland, Universal Studios, SeaWorld San Diego, on the deck of the Navy carrier USS Ranger (CV-61), and the 1990 Coca-Cola Bowl in Tokyo, Japan. Of note during the San Francisco 49er gig fans were impressed by the Sun Devil Marching Band rendition of George Cory's I Left My Heart in San Francisco the franchise insisted on the band making a 1963 recording and continued on using it at 49ers home games. On November 9, 1991, the Sun Devil Marching Band became the first Pac-10 marching band to receive the prestigious Sudler Trophy. This great honor is awarded (now biennially) to a college or university marching band that has demonstrated the highest musical standards and innovative marching routines and ideas. On multiple occasions, the band was invited by the NFL, to be part of the pregame and halftime festivities of Super Bowl XLII and Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona.
Directors
Source:
Lillian Williams, 1915–1917
John Paul Jones, 1929–1930
Carl G. Hoyer, 1931–1937
Dr. Robert G. Lyon, 1938–1943
Miles A. Dresskell, 1945
Felix E. McKernan, 1946–1951
Harold C. Hines, 1952–1965
William H. Hill, 1966–1969
William Mitchell 1969
Dr. Kenneth O. Snapp and Robert W. Miller, 1970–1973
Dr. Richard E. "Doc" Strange (1974–1999) and Dr. Robert C. "Coach" Fleming, 1974–2001
Martin Province, 2002–2005
James G. "The Hammer" Hudson, 2006–present
Drum Majors
Membership
Membership in the Sun Devil Marching Band is open to all university and community college students with previous high school or college marching band experience. In order to receive one credit hour for the class for full-time ASU students and non-degree community college students seeking the credit, enrollment in the class is required in order to obtain the credit hour. For individuals interested in participating in the Sun Devil Marching Band, but are not considered full-time degree seeking students at ASU are required to apply to ASU as non-degree students in order to register for the course. Currently an alternate “registration” route is offered for those who will only be registered for the marching band course(s), giving them the opportunity to participate in the Sun Devil Marching Band without incurring full tuition costs. Color Guard, Spirit Squad and Percussion have an additional class to add for one credit hour.
The Fight Songs
"Maroon & Gold", ASU’s fight song, is a familiar tune for Sun Devils all over the country, but is not the only "fight song" at ASU. In 1940, during World War II, Fred Waring composed a piece for the Arizona State College called "Fight, Arizona State (March On, Arizona)" which had become lost in history until 2015 when director James G. Hudson discovered it in the archives. He arranged it to be a part of the pregame show during the band program's 100th anniversary. Also in the 1940s, band director Albert Davis wrote "Go, Go Sun Devils" (more commonly known to the band as "The Al Davis Fight Song"); to this day, though Davis retired in the 1950s, the Sun Devil Marching Band continues to play the Al Davis Fight Song in their pregame performance as the Sun Devils come out of the tunnel onto the field, and occasionally make up humorous lyrics.
Another fight song that was written for the school but used sparingly was the song penned by former ASU President, G. Homer Durham. It was called "Sing a Song for ASU" and was last used at homecomings in the very early 1970s.
Stand Tunes Repertoire
The band not only performs during pregame and halftime of the football games, but also in the stands. The music in the stands is a combination of short and long tunes to help keep the energy in the stadium and keep the crowd excited. Songs used for stand tunes include popular past and contemporary songs from many genres of music. One such example is the excerpt from "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" that the band plays when ASU's defense takes the field.
Special Appearance Performances
In the 2006 and 2007 seasons the band had opportunities of bringing in guest appearances of nationally and world-renowned recording artists for halftime performances.
Horn-based soul band Tower of Power performing their hits You're Still a Young Man/ Diggin' on James Brown and Tower of PSo "So Very Hard to Go" / "What is Hip?" during November 18, 2006, game against UCLA Bruins
Rendition of Juan Tizol's Caravan with The Boston Brass quintet during the October 13, 2007, game against Washington Huskies
Musical legend and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Little Richard performing his hits Tutti Frutti; Jenny, Jenny; and Good Golly Miss Molly during Thanksgiving Day November 22, 2007, game against USC Trojans
Journey founding member and lead guitarist Neal Schon accompanied by long-time keyboardist and backing vocalist Jonathan Cain performed the National Anthem before the September 28, 2013, game against USC Trojans
Medley of Duke Ellington jazz standards with The Boston Brass during the football season opener against Northern Arizona University on September 3, 2016
Arizona State University Band Day
The first Band Day was held on December 4, 1948, in conjunction with the 1948 Homecoming. Since then, the ASU Sun Devil Marching Band hosts its Band Day on the football team's road game or bye week at Sun Devil Stadium. High school bands from all over the state of Arizona come to play for judges and their peers. About 50+ high school bands perform, followed by the Sun Devil Marching Band. There is a morning block for one half of the bands to perform and a night block known as Sun Devil Showdown of the rest of the bands to perform which makes Band Day an all-day event, as well as making ASU Band Day the biggest marching band competition in the state. For the 2008 Band Day, the top high school band, Mesa Mountain View Toro Band won the first Dr. Robert "Coach" Fleming Outstanding Band Award in honor of the Sun Devil Marching Band's eleventh band director. Starting with the 2017 season, the ASU Sun Devil Marching Band will be hosting the ABODA State Marching Championships (DIV I, II, III, and IV) as an alternative to the traditional Band Day.
Recent ASU Band Day shows
Pass in Review
Towards the end of every marching season the band performs Pregame and all Halftime shows headlining the "Pass in Review" concert which was previously held in Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium. Digital and compact disc recordings of the Sun Devil Marching Band performance at Pass in Review are available through Sun Devil Marching Band Merchandise Website. Pass in Review also takes time to recognize upperclass band members who will not be returning the following year by allowing them to lead in a rendition of Maroon & Gold. Since 2010, Pass in Review has been held in Desert Financial Arena courtesy of Sun Devil Athletics Department.
Trips
The band has traveled all over the original Pac-10. Prior to 2009, the band made an annual trip to Los Angeles, California, for either the USC or UCLA games. The band continues to travel bi-annually to Tucson, Arizona, to play against rival University of Arizona. They also follow the football team to any bowl game that they get invited to if funding is available. For the 2018 season, the band traveled to San Diego State University for the ASU vs. SDSU football game.
Bowl game appearances
The 1940, 1941, 1997, 2004, 2014, 2017, and 2019 Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas
The 1950 and 1951 Salad Bowl in Phoenix, Arizona
The 1970 Peach Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia (now the Chick-fil-A Bowl)
The 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1983 Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona (now in Glendale, Arizona)
The 1978 Garden State Bowl in East Rutherford, New Jersey
The 1985, 2002, 2007, and 2013 Holiday Bowl in San Diego, California
The 1987 Freedom Bowl in Anaheim, California (dissolved in 1995, conference alliance merged with the Holiday Bowl)
The 1987 and 1997 Rose Bowl, the "Granddaddy of them all" in Pasadena, California
The 1990 Coca-Cola Bowl in Tokyo, Japan
The 1999 and 2000 Aloha Bowl in ʻAiea, Hawaii
The 2005 Insight Bowl and 2016 Cactus Bowl in Phoenix, Arizona (now the Cactus Bowl in Tempe, Arizona)
The 2011 and 2018 Las Vegas Bowl in Las Vegas, Nevada
The 2012 Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco, California
2006 Sheraton Hawaii Bowl
On one occasion the band was unable to support the Sun Devil football team at the 2006 Sheraton Hawai’i Bowl in Honolulu (Halawa), Hawaii. The bowl payout for 2006 was $300,000 in addition the Pac-10 conference paid $389,000 (total $689,000) to offset expenses for the university. However, the university spent $824,000 total on the trip, losing $135,000 on the trip. In contrast the 1999 & 2000 Aloha Bowl paid $750,000 with no conference contribution, but with a higher ticket guarantee and only lost $70,000 on each trip. The bowl after decided to drop the Pac-10 Conference deal and made a current deal with Conference USA.
Uniforms
Timeline
1915-1917 Cap and Coat
1929 All White Uniform, Military Boots, and Dark Cape
1938 Women's Bugle Corps wore Maroon and Gold Uniforms
1947 Red Coats, White Pants, Red Officer-Style Hats, and White Shoes
1954 Maroon Coats with Gold Overlay (Sparky embroidered center front), Maroon Pants with gold stripe, Maroon Shako hat with gold band top and bottom, Gold Plume, White shoes. Drum major white coat/gold overlay, white pants, white busby hat; majorettes white coat/maroon overlay, white skirt, white shako hat/maroon plume, white boots.
1963 Black wool coat and pants with a cream overlay, originally worn with a white fur busby and gold plume, later a black West Point shako hat with Gold sunburst front emblem, white plume, and white Gloves.
1972 The first custom-designed college band uniforms in the US, uniform was designed by the ASU College of Art and manufactured using a new wool/poly blend fabric designed specifically for use in hotter climates. Gold short-waist tail coat, front/back tails/sleeve cuffs appliqued and embroidered with a satin rising sun and Red, Yellow, Orange, and Purple satin flames with an emerging Maroon Sparky pitchfork; Gold wool/poly blend high-waisted pants with Maroon and White stripes down the outside of the leg; Gold fur 12" Busby with White Feather Plume, White Gloves, and White Shoes
1980s Various versions of gold pants and white/gold drum corps-style blouses with Maroon/White attached sashing, Maroon velour cowboy hats.
1986 Maroon pants with Gold/White button front jackets, with a shoulder-attached multicolored satin cape, the front in stripes of Maroon, Gold, Royal Blue, Turquoise, and Orange imitating the Arizona State Flag, the reverse solid gold satin. Maroon and white West Point hats with gold sunburst front emblem and White feather plume, white gloves, white shoes.
2005 Short lived Maroon pants with Gold Pitchforks on the sides and on the collar, Gold jacket with emblazoned Sparky logo on the chest, emblazoned ASU logos on the shoulders, custom Sun Devils logo on back, Maroon with emblazoned Gold flames hats, White feather plume, White gloves, and White shoes.
Current uniforms
In 2007, in its 60th season titled as the Sun Devil Marching Band the band received a very generous donation from donor Dr. Verde Dickey, funding the purchase of a new set of uniforms for the Sun Devil Marching Band. These new uniforms consist of white jackets fading into gold with a sunburst at the clip. In the middle of the sunburst is a mirror which represents the illumination of not only the sun, but also the bright personality a Sun Devil reflects. One arm of the jacket is maroon, while the other is gold. White gauntlets fastened with suns, and white gloves using Velcro finish the sleeves. A cape with the ASU lettering is added to the ensemble as a throwback to capes worn by the band in years past. The pants are purely black, rising to about chest level with the aid of suspenders. Black Viper marching shoes are used paired with equally black socks.
Instrumentation
The marching band uses many different instruments of varying range and sound in its ranks. Providing a central point to tempo and beat by conducting on the sideline are the four Drum Majors. The hornline is divided into two major groups: woodwinds and brass. In addition to the hornline, the band also uses a percussion section that is divided into a marching battery of drums and a stationary sideline pit. With presence of a pit as part of the percussion section, it makes the Sun Devil Devil Marching Band one of the few college marching bands to field a pit. The other Pac-12 marching band currently fielding a pit is the Oregon Marching Band. The bottom bass drum in the battery section was known as "thumper". This bass was used for count offs for the band during march around the stadium, parades, and entering the field for halftime shows.
Hornline
Hornline is sponsored by Jupiter Band Instruments.
Percussion
Percussion is sponsored by Mapex Drums and Majestic Percussion, Vic Firth Drumsticks, Remo, and Avedis Zildjian Company. In the past, outside of marching season, the drum line has branched out to other spectrums of the percussion world. They formed the ASU PASIC Drumline in 1995 with Percussive Arts Society International Convention being held locally and hosted by Dr. J.B. Smith, Professor of Music and the Coordinator of Percussion Studies in the School of Music at Arizona State University, at Phoenix Civic Plaza in Phoenix, Arizona. With the recent sensation of indoor percussion has had few lines part take in it. Initially with the 1998 ASU Spring Line and with the addition of the pit during the 2006 marching season the staff formed the 2007 ASU Winter Drumline. Competing locally in the Winter Guard Arizona circuit as well as nationally in Winter Guard International Percussion Regionals in Phoenix and Las Vegas in order to qualify in Winter Guard International Percussion World Championship in Dayton, Ohio. The winter line was on hold due to constraints since its inaugural line in 2007, but was re-established in 2013.
Auxiliary
Outside of the music producing sections of the band are the Sun Devil Spirit Squad/Dance Team, Featured Twirlers, and the Colorguard, all in charge of providing visually stimulating color and movement to the band in addition to the band's show forms and design.
Colorguard
Implemented in the 1975 season, known for the most visible aspects of the Sun Devil Marching Band, other than the Sousaphone Section. Presenting the visual story of the band's halftime performance through the use of flags, rifles, sabers, props, and dance. Colorguard members get a "corps-style" choreography and benefit from the instruction by some of the field's leaders. The colorguard program also features a World Class Winterguard in the off season and holds auditions in the fall for the next active winter season. The ASU Winterguard competes locally in the Winter Guard Arizona circuit as well as WGI regional events culminating at the Winter Guard International Championship held in Dayton, Ohio. In April, 2012, the ASU Winter Guard (competing under the name FeniX Independent) won the bronze medal in the Independent Open Class of the WGI World Championships. For the 2017 season, they competed in the Independent World Class and placed 14th in World Class Finals with a score of 83.050.
Feature Twirlers
The Feature Twirler position offers one of the most prestigious twirling opportunities in the country. Through competitive auditions for one-year appointments, nationally recognized twirlers are used prominently during all Sun Devil Marching Band shows. Handling of the baton instrument to create visual images, pictures, and patterns, executed with dexterity, smoothness, fluidity, and speed, both close in and around the body and by releasing the baton into the air.
Spirit Squad/ Dance Team
As a visible representative and ambassador of the university's athletics, the Spirit Squad/Dance Team devotes 15–20 hours every week to rehearsals, football games (home and away), Men's and Women's Basketball games, special appearances, clinics, competitions, and various special events. The creation of the Spirit Squad came in Spring 2008 with the university's decision to disband the cheerleading squad and merge the cheer and dance team, under the direction of the Athletic Band Director. Male members of the Spirit Squad are known as Sparky's Crew, assisting Sparky the Sun Devil and Spirit Squad in cheers with megaphones, banners, and signs.
The 2012-2013 ASU Dance Team, under the direction of April Hoffman, competed in the UDA College Nationals, in Orlando, Florida, placing second in Division IA Jazz, and 5th in Division IA Hip-Hop. In addition, our dance team also represented USA in 2013 and 2017, competing and placing gold in the 2013 ICU World Cheerleading Championship in Team Cheer Jazz.
Pep Band
Members of the Sun Devil Marching Band are allowed to participate in the ASU Pep Band, which plays at all home Men's and Women's Basketball games at Wells Fargo Arena and travels annually to Seattle for the Women's Pac-12 tournament and Las Vegas for the Men's Pac-12 tournament. However, starting with the 2018-2019 season, both tournaments will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the newly established T-Mobile Arena. They also follow the teams to any NCAA and NIT tournaments they qualify for.
Dixieland Bands
In addition the Dixie Devils and Sparky's Sliders are the newest members of the ASU Athletic Band family. Both groups, under the direction of world renown and ASU School of Music Professor Sam Pilafian. Dixie Devils is a traditional six-piece Dixieland Combo that specializes in Early Jazz, Ragtime, and Swing Music, focusing primarily on the music of Louis Armstrong, Bix Biederbecke, King Oliver, and Freddie Keppard. The Dixie Devils can be seen outside around Sun Devil Stadium at all Sun Devil home football games, select basketball and baseball games and are available for all functions, Commercial or Private. Sparky's Sliders is an all Trombone Dixie Band that can be seen inside Wells Fargo Arena for Devil's Lair tailgating entertaining fans before games.
Notes and references
External links
Sun Devil Marching Band Herberger Institute Site
Sun Devil Marching Band Official Site
ASU Sun Devil Spirit Squad/ Dance Team Facebook Page
Dixie Devils Facebook Page
Beta Omicron Site
ASUSDMB Alumni Devil's Horns Facebook page
Arizona State University Site
1915 establishments in Arizona
Arizona State University
College marching bands in the United States
Pac-12 Conference marching bands
Musical groups from Tempe, Arizona
Musical groups established in 1915 |
42823797 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeware | Chargeware | Chargeware is seemingly valid looking mobile applications used to charge a user for services without proper notification or knowledge. Often focused on Internet pornography, third-party porn apps are downloaded onto a user's mobile device, in turn infecting their phone with the malware known as Chargeware.
The purpose of Chargeware is to manipulate a user into agreeing to unclear terms such that fees and charges are applied without the user's full understanding or consent.
Chargeware is deliberately difficult to renege from, so that charges can continue for as long as possible without carrier interference.
In 2013, hundreds of thousands of users, primarily in France and the UK, experienced applications of this nature which ultimately led to other forms of malware on their mobile device(s). Various other countries, such as Spain, encountered Chargeware infections that almost matched the number of adware infections; Japan had the lowest number of Chargeware infections of any other country.
Hackers are reportedly learning their market and changing tactics (i.e., mobile malware) so that operations are harder to trace and harder to shut down. Said markets also include specific countries, since charging practices can vary on either a country or carrier basis.
References
Types of malware
Internet fraud |
12990231 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian%20identity%20card | Estonian identity card | The Estonian identity card () is a mandatory identity document for citizens of Estonia. In addition to regular identification of a person, an ID-card can also be used for establishing one's identity in electronic environment and for giving one's digital signature. Within Europe (except Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and United Kingdom) as well as French overseas territories and Georgia, the Estonian ID Card can be used by the citizens of Estonia as a travel document.
The mandatory identity document of a citizen of the European Union is also an identity card, also known as an ID card. The Estonian ID Card can be used to cross the Estonian border, however Estonian authorities cannot guarantee that other EU member states will accept the card as a travel document.
In addition to regular identification of a person, an ID-card can also be used for establishing one's identity in electronic environment and for giving one's digital signature. With the Estonian ID-card the citizen will receive a personal @eesti.ee e-mail address, which is used by the state to send important information. In order to use the @eesti.ee e-mail address, the citizen has to forward it to his or her personal e-mail address, using the State Portal eesti.ee.
The Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) on 25 September 2018 introduced the newest version of Estonia's ID card, featuring additional security elements and a contactless interface, which will begin to be rolled out no later than next year. The new cards also utilize Estonia's own font and elements of its brand. One new detail is the inclusion of a QR code, which will make it easier to check the validity of the ID card. The new design also features a color photo of its bearer, which doubles as a security element and is made up of lines; looking at the card at an angle, another photo appears. The new chip has a higher capacity, allowing the addition of new applications to it.
Scope
The Estonian ID cards are used in health care, electronic banking, signing contracts, public transit, encrypting email and voting. Estonia offers over 600 e-services to citizens and 2400 to businesses. The card's chip stores digitized data about the authorized user, most importantly: the user's full name, gender, national identification number, and cryptographic keys and public key certificates.
Types of Estonian ID cards
There are several types of identity documents issued by the Estonian state that are usually referred to as the Estonian ID card.
These are the identity card, the digital identity card, the residence permit card, the
e-resident’s digital identity card and the diplomatic identity card.
While these identity documents are issued to different categories of persons and have a different appearance,
all these documents provide the same electronic functionality via a smart card chip.
Electronic functionality of the ID card
From its introduction in 2002 until now, the core electronic
functionality provided by the Estonian ID card has stayed the same.
The ID card contains two asymmetric (RSA or ECC) key pairs with the corresponding X.509 public-key certificates,
and symmetric keys to perform card management operations.
Authentication key.
The authentication key is used to log into e-services
by providing a signature in the TLS client certificate authentication process.
This key can also be used to decrypt documents encrypted for the cardholder. This is used only infrequently, as such documents would become unreadable if the card were lost or destroyed.
Cryptographic signature and decryption operations with this key have to be authorized using the 4-digit PIN1 code.
Digital signature key.
The digital signature key is used to give legally binding digital signatures
that under eIDAS are recognized as qualified electronic signatures.
Each signature operation with the key has to be authorized using the 5-digit PIN2 code.
Personal data file.
The ID card chip contains a publicly readable personal data file, which consists of
16 records containing the same information as is printed on the card.
Card management operations.
The cards are preloaded with symmetric keys that can be used by the manufacturer to perform
various card management operations in the post-issuance phase.
This provides a method to reset PIN codes in the event the cardholder
forgets them, generate new keys, write new certificates,
and even reinstall the whole smart card applet if needed.
The Estonian state provides DigiDoc software allowing users to cryptographically sign digital documents. Since 2016 the DigiDoc software can create files that follow the EU-wide ETSI standard called ASiC-e.
By 7 September 2021, 1,391,704,193 electronic signatures were given, thus averaging to 50 signatures per card user per year.
Under Estonian law, since 15 December 2000 the cryptographic signature is legally equivalent to a manual signature. This law has been superseded by the EU-wide eSignature Directive since 2016.
Uses for identification
The card's compatibility with standard X.509 and TLS infrastructure by providing a client certificate to each person has made it a convenient means of identification for use of web-based government services in Estonia (see e-Government). All major banks, many financial and other web services support ID-card based authentication. Adding support of Estonian ID-card based identification is very simple nowadays because majority of used browsers, web servers and other software supports TLS (SSL) client-certificate based authentication and Estonian ID-card use exactly that system.
Web discussion forums
Web commentary columns of some Estonian newspapers, most notably Eesti Päevaleht, used to support ID-card based authentication for comments. This approach caused some controversy in the internet community.
Public transport
Larger cities in Estonia, such as Tallinn and Tartu, have arrangements making it possible for residents to purchase "virtual" transportation tickets linked to their ID cards.
Period tickets can be bought online via electronic bank transfer, by SMS, or at public kiosks. This process usually takes less than a few minutes and the ticket is instantly active from the moment of purchase or since the first use of the ticket.
Customers also have the option of requesting e-mail or SMS notification alerting them when the ticket is about to expire, or of setting up automatic renewal through internet banking services.
To use the virtual ticket, customers must carry their ID card with them whenever they use public transport. During a routine ticket check, users are asked to present their ID card, which is then inserted into a special device. This device then confirms that the user holds a valid ticket, and also warns if the ticket is about to expire. The ticket check usually takes less than a second.
Ticket information is stored in a central database, not on the ID card itself. Thus, to order a ticket, it is not necessary to have an ID-card reader. Ticket controllers have access to a local archive of the master database. If the ticket was purchased after the local archive was updated, the ticket device is able to confirm the ticket from the master database over mobile data link.
Electronic voting
The Estonian ID card is also used for authentication in Estonia's Internet-based voting program called i-Voting.
In February 2007, Estonia was the first country in the world to institute electronic voting for parliamentary elections. Over 30,000 voters participated in the country's e-election. In the Parliamentary election of 2011 140,846 votes were cast electronically representing 24% of total votes.
The software used in this process is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.
Use as a travel document
Since Estonia's accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004, Estonian citizens who possess an Estonian identity card have been able to use it as an international travel document, in lieu of a passport, for travel within European Economic Area (except Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) as well as French overseas departments and territories, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, Vatican State, Northern Cyprus and Georgia.
However, non-Estonian citizens resident in Estonia are unable to use their Estonian identity cards as an international travel document.
Security issues
Over the years the Estonian ID card and its ecosystem has experienced several security incidents and similar issues.
Below are listed some of the most significant security incidents that have been encountered.
Infineon's RSA key generation flaw
In August 2017, a security threat was discovered that affected 750,000 ID and e-residency cards issued between 16 October 2014 and 26 October 2017.
It was reported that a code library developed by Infineon, which had been in widespread use in security products such as smartcards and TPMs, had a flaw (later dubbed the ROCA vulnerability) that allowed private keys to be inferred from public keys. As a result, all systems depending upon the privacy of such keys were vulnerable to compromise, such as identity theft or spoofing. Affected systems include 750,000 Estonian national ID cards, and Estonian e-residency cards.
On 2 November 2017, the Estonian government decided to suspend the affected certificates on the midnight of November 3. For the next five months until 31 March 2018 (incl.), the holders of the suspended certificates were still able to update their ID cards at PPA customer service points and remotely over the internet. On 1 April 2018, the certificates of the non-renewed ID cards were revoked and the renewal service for the affected ID cards was discontinued.
The governments decision to postpone the revocation of the affected certificates and allowing the remote renewal of suspended certificates have been criticized for not being in compliance with eID legal requirements.
The incident resulted in a litigation process as the ID card manufacturer Gemalto failed to inform the Estonian state about the vulnerability in a timely manner. In February 2021, it was reported that Gemalto and the Estonia state reached a compromise agreement, with Gemalto agreeing to pay the state 2.2 million EUR in compensation.
Security flaws in key management
There have been several isolated cases of security flaws being discovered in the ID card key management process. In particular, in some cases, contrary to the security requirements, the ID card manufacturer Gemalto had generated private keys outside the chip. In several cases, copies of the same private key have been imported in the ID cards of different cardholders, allowing them to impersonate each other. In addition, as a result of a separate flaw in the manufacturing process, corrupted RSA public key moduli have been included in the certificates, which in one case led to the full recovery of the corresponding private key.
See also
National identity cards in the European Union
Estonian passport
Estonian seafarer's discharge book
Estonian temporary travel document
Estonian alien's passport
Estonian travel document for refugees
Estonian nationality law
Visa requirements for Estonian citizens
Visa requirements for Estonian non-citizens
e-Residency of Estonia
e-Estonia
ROCA vulnerability
References
External links
New Estonian ID Card 2019
Information about Estonian ID Card by Estonian Police and Border Guard Board
Information about Estonian ID Card by Prado Consilium
Sample ID Card of an Estonian citizen, issued by Estonian Police and Border Guard Board starting from 01.01.2011
A map of Estonian representations abroad
Certificate of Return for Estonian citizen
Identity Documents Act
Visa-Free Country List by Estonian Foreign Ministry
Passport Index Visa-Free Score Estonian Passport
Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index Map
Issuing authority's official website in English
ID Ticket website
ID card official information page
ID card information on the e-estonia website
Government of Estonia
National identity cards by country
Smart cards |
65618219 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna%20Paisano | Edna Paisano | Edna Lee Paisano (January 1, 1948—September 3, 2014) was a Nez Perce and Laguna Pueblo demographer and statistician. She worked to improve the representation of Indigenous communities in the United States census. She advocated using statistics and computer programming to accurately represent the demography of the United States, arguing that without accurate counts of minority populations they would not receive proportional resources. Paisano put this into practice as the first Native American fulltime employee of the United States Census Bureau. She has been credited with substantially increasing the accuracy of the American Indian and Alaska Native census category between the 1980 census and the 1990 census.
Life and career
Paisano was born on the Nez Perce Reservation in Sweetwater, Idaho on January 1, 1948. Her mother was active in education efforts on the Reservation, and when Edna Paisano was a child, her mother was awarded the Leo Reano Memorial Award from the National Educational Association for that work. Paisano attended school in Lapwai, Idaho, and then spent two years at Boise College. After two years, she switched to the University of Washington. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1971. She then obtained a master's degree at the University of Washington in social work, and as part of her graduate work she studied statistics.
During her time at the University of Washington, she worked as part of a successful effort to found an American Indian cultural center in Fort Lawton. Fort Lawton had not been ceded to the United States government, and in 1976 Paisano was briefly imprisoned for actions as an activist attempting to secure the return of that land.
In 1980, Paisano was hired by the United States Census Bureau, becoming the first Native American to work there fulltime. She worked in particular on issues related to the American Indian and Alaska Native census category. There Paisano discovered that Native American communities were being dramatically under-counted in the United States census, which caused them to receive disproportionately few government resources and services. Upon arriving at the census bureau, she described realizing "how important it is for American Indians to know demography, computer programming and statistics: first, because there are very few American Indians in these fields; and second, because, the government is always trying to assess things".
In her work at the Census Bureau, Paisano identified a systematic undercount of regions where there were very large proportions of Native Americans. She attempted to rectify the imbalance using her training in statistics and computer programming, combined with a large public information campaign aimed at increasing the number of Native Americans who filled out the census. In particular, she developed a questionnaire to estimate the number of Native Americans who may not have been counted in the 1980 census, and she used her training in statistics to suggest improvements to how the US census attempted to count Native communities. Her efforts have been credited with being the catalyst for dramatically more accurate counts of Native Americans in the United States Census, resulting in a 38% increase in the number of people counted in the American Indian and Alaska Native category in the 1990 census compared to the 1980 census.
In addition to her work with the Racial Statistics Branch in the Population Division of the Census Bureau, Paisano also participated in the Interagency Task Force on American Indian Women. After 20 years at the Census Bureau, Paisano took a job with the Environmental Protection Agency. After a year, she became the chief statistician of the Indian Health Service within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Paisano retired from the federal government in 2011. She died on September 3, 2014, in Lewiston, Idaho.
Selected awards
Bronze Medal Award for Superior Federal Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1987
Department of Commerce Silver Medal, 1994
Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Washington, 2003
Selected works
We the First Americans, US Census Bureau report, 1987
We the American-Pacific Islanders, US Census Bureau report, 1993
We the American-Asians, US Census Bureau report, 1993
References
1948 births
2014 deaths
Nez Perce people
Laguna Pueblo
Native American scientists
Native American social scientists
Women statisticians
United States Census Bureau people
Survey methodologists
American demographers
American statisticians |
54644076 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963%20NCAA%20University%20Division%20Basketball%20Championship%20Game | 1963 NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game | The 1963 NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game was the final of the 1963 NCAA University Division Basketball Tournament and determined the national champion in the 1962–63 NCAA University Division men's basketball season. The game was held on March 23, 1963, at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky. The matchup pitted the Loyola Ramblers, who were making their first NCAA Tournament appearance, against the Cincinnati Bearcats, the two-time defending national champions. After trailing by 15 points in the second half, Loyola rallied to force an overtime period, and won the game 60–58 on a basket by Vic Rouse with one second left. The Ramblers earned their first championship in men's college basketball.
Background
Cincinnati
The 1962–63 Bearcats were coached by Ed Jucker, who was in his third season on the job. In the previous two seasons, Cincinnati won the national championship, defeating Ohio State in the 1961 and 1962 national championship games. The Bearcats were attempting to become the first program ever to win the NCAA Tournament for a third consecutive year. They began the season as the number-one ranked team in the AP Poll. Their first game was a 97–39 win over DePauw on December 1, after which they defeated Virginia by 49 points. Cincinnati won its next three games by double-figure margins, before traveling to Kansas, where the team posted a 64–49 victory at Allen Fieldhouse. In their next contest, Dayton became the first team to avoid a double-digit defeat against the Bearcats, losing 44–37 in Cincinnati's lowest-scoring game of the season.
After three more victories brought the Bearcats' record to 10–0, the team began play in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) with a January 5, 1963 home game against Wichita (now known as Wichita State), the eighth-ranked team in the country. By a 63–50 score, Cincinnati maintained their perfect record. The Bearcats remained undefeated through mid-February; their victories included a 62–53 win at third-ranked Illinois, along with seven MVC games. On February 16, the Bearcats suffered their first and only defeat of the regular season: in a second game against Wichita, the Shockers prevailed by one point, 65–64. Cincinnati won their next four games, ending the regular season with a 23–1 record. The Bearcats remained the top-ranked team in the AP Poll throughout the season, and they won the MVC championship with an 11–1 conference record, four games ahead of second-place Wichita.
The Bearcats played conservatively on offense and were the NCAA's leading defensive team statistically, allowing an average of 51.9 points a game to opponents. Their leading scorer was forward Ron Bonham, who averaged 21.0 points per game. Forward Tom Thacker had per-game averages of 15.8 points and 10.0 rebounds, while center George Wilson averaged 15.0 points and a team-high 11.2 rebounds per game. Other regular players included guards Larry Shingleton and Tony Yates, and Ken Cunningham and Dale Heidotting were among the bench players.
Cincinnati received an invitation to the 1963 NCAA Tournament, where they were matched up with Texas in the Midwest regional semifinals. After not having to play in the first round, the Bearcats advanced to the regional final with a five-point win. The team then earned a place in the Final Four of the tournament by defeating Colorado 67–60. In the Final Four, they faced Oregon State. After leading by three points at halftime, the Bearcats clinched a berth in the national championship game with an 80–46 victory. Cincinnati held the Beavers to 28.8% shooting for the game, while making 54.9% of their shots; Wilson led the Bearcats with 24 points and made eight of his nine field goal attempts.
Loyola
The Ramblers, coached by George Ireland, began the season ranked fourth in the AP Poll. In their first game, against Christian Brothers on December 1, Loyola posted a 114–58 victory. After three more wins by margins of more than 45 points, the Ramblers scored 123 points against Western Michigan, their highest total of the season. A 12-point victory at Indiana followed, after which Loyola defeated 10th-ranked Seattle 93–83. The Ramblers remained undefeated entering 1963, and started the year as the number two team in the country. Their first game in 1963 was a 45-point win over Marshall; the Rambers ultimately won their first 21 games of the season. On February 16, Bowling Green State gave the Ramblers their first loss, by a score of 92–75. After wins in their next three games, Wichita defeated Loyola in the Ramblers' regular season finale, leaving them with a 24–2 record. The Ramblers finished third in the final AP Poll.
In contrast to Cincinnati, the Ramblers played an aggressive style of offensive basketball, and their defense frequently pressed the opposition. With an average point output of 93.9 per game, Loyola led the country in scoring. Jerry Harkness posted a team-high 21.4 points per game, and four other regulars—Les Hunter, John Egan, Vic Rouse, and Ron Miller—each averaged more than 13.0 points per game. Rouse was the Ramblers' leading rebounder, with 12.1 rebounds per game.
Loyola's berth in the NCAA Tournament was the first in program history. Unlike Cincinnati, the Ramblers were required to play in the first round; they were placed in the Mideast regional and faced Tennessee Tech. By a 69-point margin, they advanced to the regional semifinals and a matchup with the Mississippi State Bulldogs. At the time, teams from Mississippi were unofficially banned from playing against integrated opponents due to segregation policies in the state. According to USA Today's Mike Lopresti, the Bulldogs "had to rush out of Starkville just to get to the tournament" game in Michigan, which came against a Loyola team with four black starters. The action came despite an injunction in the state, and the resulting contest became known as the "Game of Change". The Ramblers advanced with a 61–51 win over Mississippi State.
In the regional final against Illinois, the Ramblers gained a spot in the Final Four with a 15-point victory. There, they faced Duke, the second-ranked team in the country. Ireland, noting Duke's lack of experience against teams with African-American players, claimed before the game that "Any good team with a predominantly Negro lineup could beat them. Behind 29 points by Hunter and 20 from Harkness, Loyola earned a place in the NCAA final by defeating Duke 94–75.
Game summary
The game took place on March 23 at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, before an announced crowd of 19,153 spectators, a sellout. Prior to the championship game, a third-place game was held between Final Four losers Duke and Oregon State. The Blue Devils prevailed by an 85–63 score. Cincinnati had six players compete in the game: Bonham, Heidotting, Shingleton, Thacker, Wilson, and Yates. Loyola featured five players for the entire game: Egan, Harkness, Hunter, Miller, and Rouse. Seven of the 10 starters were African-American; this marked the first time that over half the players in the NCAA championship contest were black.
Loyola's shooters started the game slowly, missing all but one of their first 14 field goal attempts. Early on, the Bearcats took a 19–9 lead, as picks by Shingleton set up Bonham to score. The Ramblers' poor shooting continued for the rest of the first half, as they missed 26 of 34 shots and Harkness was held scoreless. At halftime, the Bearcats held a 29–21 advantage. Sports Illustrated'''s Ron Fimrite wrote that "The Bearcats' lead was not so much the product of an impenetrable defense as of a Rambler offense decidedly out of whack."
The Bearcats extended their advantage at the beginning of the second half. Behind a streak of three consecutive field goals by Bonham, Cincinnati made five of six attempts at one point. Just over six minutes into the second half, the Bearcats held a 15-point advantage, 45–30. However, they were required to make a substitution a few minutes later after Wilson was called for a foul, his fourth of the game; he was briefly benched in favor of Heidotting. The Bearcats suffered from an accumulation of fouls as the second half progressed, as Thacker and Yates picked up four fouls each and neared the point of fouling out. Still, Cincinnati maintained a 48–36 lead into the final eight minutes. In response to the high number of Cincinnati players with numerous fouls, Jucker ordered his team to play more conservatively on offense, stalling to keep their lead intact; they were not required to shoot due to the lack of a shot clock. Hunter later cited this decision as a turning point, saying that it took the Bearcats out of their offensive rhythm. Cincinnati turned the ball over repeatedly, as Loyola made a scoring run that put them back into the game. After more than 35 minutes without a basket, Harkness made two in under 10 seconds, the second following a Bearcats turnover. The Ramblers' 18–3 run brought them to within 48–45. Cincinnati then stretched their lead back to five with 3:42 left in regulation, before the Ramblers made the score 50–48.
Although Loyola had closed their deficit, the Bearcats continued to stall on offense. A field goal by Hunter cut Cincinnati's advantage to one point, 51–50, entering the final minute. The Bearcats came out of their stall and ran a fast break, which was capped by a Thacker basket. With 17 seconds on the clock, Hunter responded by scoring again, bringing the Ramblers back within one point. Harkness fouled Shingleton with 12 seconds on the clock, sending him to the free throw line for two attempts. Making both would put the Bearcats on the verge of winning the NCAA championship, as there were no three-point field goals at the time. After making one free throw, Shingleton was off on his second try, and Hunter secured the rebound for Loyola. Miller received the ball and juggled it briefly; Ireland and Fimrite believed that he had been guilty of traveling, but it was not called a violation on the court. Miller passed the ball to Harkness, who attempted a 12-foot jumper. His shot was good, tying the game at 54–54. Jucker attempted to call a timeout, but the referees did not hear his request due to crowd noise and the clock expired with the game still tied. A five-minute overtime period was required to break the deadlock. Three previous NCAA finals had needed one, including the Bearcats' 1961 title game.
The extra period was described as "a cautious game of cat-and-mouse" by Mal Florence of the Los Angeles Times. The opening tip of overtime was won by Rouse and controlled by Hunter. Harkness received a pass from Hunter and scored on a layup, giving the Ramblers the lead. Wilson responded with a basket for the Bearcats, before a long-distance shot by Miller restored a two-point lead for the Ramblers. Loyola later had an opportunity to extend their advantage, but missed a field goal attempt; after coming down with the rebound, Thacker made a long pass to Shingleton, and a resulting layup evened the score at 58–58. The game remained tied with under two minutes on the clock, as the Ramblers called a timeout with possession of the ball and subsequently went into a slow-paced offense themselves. Play was stopped with 1:21 remaining, as a jump ball was required to determine possession; Egan and Shingleton jumped against each other. Egan earned possession for Loyola, and the Ramblers held the ball to attempt the last shot of the overtime period. Harkness drove to the basket with about seven seconds on the clock, but elected to pass to Hunter, who attempted a shot. Hunter's effort bounced off the rim, but Rouse rebounded the ball and scored. One second was left on the clock. It expired before Cincinnati could inbound the ball, as the Ramblers won their first national championship in men's basketball, 60–58.
Statistical summary
The Ramblers won despite shooting around 27% from the field (23 of 84). Hunter led Loyola in scoring with 16 points. Rouse contributed 15 points; both Hunter and Rouse made six of 22 field goal attempts. In addition, Rouse led the Ramblers had 12 rebounds, one more than Hunter. Harkness scored 14 points on 5-of-18 shooting. All five starters for Loyola played the entire game without being substituted.
Cincinnati made 22 field goals in the game, but attempted only 45, 39 fewer than Loyola. Turnovers hindered the Bearcats; the Ramblers' defense forced 16 in the game, many more than Cincinnati typically had and 13 more than the Ramblers committed. Bonham led all scorers with 22 points, making half of his 16 shots. In the final 17 minutes, though, he did not attempt a field goal as the Bearcats went into their stall offense. Thacker added 13 points and a game-high 15 rebounds, while Wilson had 10 points and 13 rebounds. Among the Bearcats' starters, only Wilson was substituted.
Legacy
In 2013, author Tom Hager listed the 1963 NCAA championship game as the best ever played in the event. The game has received attention as the first national title contest to feature a majority of black starters; according to Ireland, an "unspoken" rule existed at the time that led to most teams starting only one or two African-Americans at most. However, over time the 1966 championship game, in which an all-African-American Texas Western team defeated an all-white Kentucky squad, became more widely recognized as a key moment in college basketball history. Regardless, Loyola's Miller later said that he believed the game was significant, as it encouraged college coaches to increase their recruiting efforts to black players. He said that the players of the 1963 title game "helped a little, [and] maybe gave some people an opportunity that wasn't there prior to that."
The contest was broadcast on national television on Sports Network Incorporated. It was part of a six-year contract to televise the NCAA championship game annually. In national television ratings, it finished higher than episodes of the shows Gunsmoke and Have Gun – Will Travel'' that aired during the telecast. In the Ramblers' home market of Chicago, however, the game was broadcast on tape delay, after multiple other sporting events.
The Bearcats had a 17–9 record in the 1963–64 season, but did not play in the 1964 NCAA Tournament. Cincinnati has participated in numerous NCAA Tournaments since 1963, but as of 2020 the program has not reached another national championship game. The team has advanced as far as the national semifinals only once, in 1992. Loyola began the 1963–64 season ranked first in the AP Poll and ended up winning 22 games. The Ramblers were again invited to the NCAA Tournament, but their title defense ended in the regional semifinals. They appeared in two more NCAA Tournaments in the 1960s, but never advanced past the first round. The Ramblers made it to the Sweet Sixteen in 1985. After a 33-year drought, Loyola reached the tournament in 2018, advancing to the Final Four for the first time since 1963. The 1962–63 Ramblers are the only NCAA Division I men's basketball champions from the state of Illinois.
References
Bibliography
NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game
NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game
Basketball in Kentucky
Cincinnati Bearcats men's basketball
College sports in Kentucky
Loyola Ramblers men's basketball
NCAA University Division Basketball Championship Game
NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship Games
Sports competitions in Louisville, Kentucky |
53576939 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security%20and%20Privacy%20in%20Your%20Car%20Study%20Act | Security and Privacy in Your Car Study Act | The Security and Privacy in Your Car Study Act of 2017, short title "SPY Car Study Act of 2017", is a bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. Joe Wilson and Ted Lieu in January 2017 and referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. It built upon a previous bill introduced in the House in 2015. In 2015, another bill was introduced in the Senate directing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create standards for automakers regarding cybersecurity. The SPY Car Study Act of 2017 does not introduce any new regulations, but mandates a study done by the NHTSA into the safety of cars against technological threats.
Provisions
This bill requires the NHTSA to conduct a study to determine and recommend standards for the regulation of the cybersecurity of motor vehicles manufactured or imported for sale in the United States. The study shall identify:
Isolation measures that are necessary to separate critical software systems that can affect the driver's control of the movement of the vehicle from other software systems;
Measures that are necessary to detect and prevent or minimize anomalous codes, in vehicle software systems, associated with malicious behavior;
Techniques that are necessary to detect and prevent, discourage, or mitigate intrusions into vehicle software systems and other cybersecurity risks in motor vehicles;
Best practices to secure driving data about a vehicle's status or about the owner, lessee, driver, or passenger of a vehicle that is collected by the electronic systems of motor vehicles;
A timeline for implementing systems and software that reflect such measures, techniques, and best practices.
References
Proposed legislation of the 115th United States Congress |
22332556 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VERSAdos | VERSAdos | VERSAdos is an operating system dating back to the early 1980s for use on the Motorola 68000 development system called the EXORmacs which featured the VERSAbus and an array of option cards. They were typically connected to CDC Phoenix disk drives running one to four 14-inch platters. The EXORmacs was used to emulate a 680xx processor in-circuit, speeding development of 680xx based systems. It also hosted several compilers and assemblers.
VERSAdos and the EXORmacs were produced by Motorola's Microsystems Division.
Overview
VERSAdos was a real-time, multi-user operating system. It was the follow on product to the single user MDOS that ran the 6800 development system called the EXORciser.
Both systems features a harness with a CPU socket compatible connector.
A Modula 2 compiler was ported to VERSAdos.
Commands
The following list of commands and utilities are supported by VERSAdos.
^
ACCT
ARGUMENTS
ASSIGN
BACKUP
BATCH
BSTOP
BTERM
BUILDS
BYE
CANCEL
CHAIN
CLOSE
CONFIG
CONNECT
CONTINUE
COPY
CREF
DATE
DEFAULTS
DEL
DIR
DMT
DUMP
DUMPANAL
ELIMINATE
EMFGEN
END
FREE
HELP
INIT
LIB
LIST
LOAD
LOGOFF
MBLM
MERGEOS
MIGR
MT
NEWS
NOARGUMENTS
NOVALID
OFF
OPTION
PASS
PASSWORD
PATCH
PROCEED
PRTDUMP
QUERY
R?
RENAME
REPAIR
RETRY
SCRATCH
SECURE
SESSIONS
SNAPSHOT
SPL
SPOOL
SRCCOM
START
STOP
SWORD
SYSANAL
TERMINATE
TIME
TRANSFER
UPLOADS
USE
VALID
See also
CP/M-68K
References
External links
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/motorola/versados/
Discontinued operating systems
Motorola |
27647722 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%20ConnectSafe | Norton ConnectSafe | Norton ConnectSafe was a free public DNS service offered by Symantec Corporation that claimed to offer a faster and more reliable web browsing experience while blocking undesirable websites. The service was retired on November 15, 2018.
History
The service was opened to the public in June 2010. Norton ConnectSafe retirement has been announced and is planned to occur November 15, 2018.
Functionality
It provides protection from web threats in three protection policies. It automatically blocks known unsafe, fraudulent, phishing and infected websites which can cause harm to a device. It also blocks unwanted content, which is not suitable for children. Users can use Norton ConnectSafe by setting their DNS server addresses to those of the Norton ConnectSafe servers. Client software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Android is available to automatically configure devices to use Norton ConnectSafe.
DNS queries routed through Norton ConnectSafe are checked using the Norton Safe Web database to ensure that they do not point to malicious or inappropriate websites. Symantec thus seeks to block malware and phishing attempts, as well as pornographic and inappropriate websites if the user desires. Norton ConnectSafe will also intercept misspelled domain names and offer suggestions or display advertising. This redirection breaks some non-Web applications that rely on getting an NXDOMAIN response for non-existent domains.
IPv4 addresses
The following addresses are registered to Norton ConnectSafe:
Policy A — Security This policy blocks all sites hosting malware, phishing sites, and scam sites. To choose Policy A, use the following IP addresses as preferred and alternate DNS server addresses:
199.85.126.10
199.85.127.10
Policy B — Security + Pornography In addition to blocking unsafe sites, this policy also blocks access to sites that contain sexually explicit material. To choose Policy B, use the following IP addresses as preferred and alternate DNS server addresses:
199.85.126.20
199.85.127.20
Policy C — Security + Pornography + Non-Family Friendly This policy is ideal for families with young children. In addition to blocking unsafe sites and pornography sites, this policy also blocks access to sites that feature mature content, abortion, alcohol, crime, cults, drugs, gambling, hate, sexual orientation, suicide, tobacco, or violence. To choose Policy C, use the following IP addresses as preferred and alternate DNS server addresses
199.85.126.30
199.85.127.30
See also
Domain Name System
Public recursive name server
Name server
OpenDNS
Google Public DNS
Quad9
References
NortonLifeLock software
Alternative Internet DNS services |
31088323 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bplats | Bplats | Bplats, Inc. is an application service provider (ASP) based in Tokyo, Japan. The company offers software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) solutions. It runs web portals on ASP, SaaS and cloud computing and an online store to sell software and hardware, such as the VY Vocaloid series.
Services
The SaaS and PaaS services of the company include:
SaaSplats: a SaaS consultancy and distribution network
eCPlats: an electronic commerce platform
RightsPlats: a business process outsourcing service to report music sales to JASRAC
License-V: a business process management service to control licensing business
Products
Bplats sells the Vocaloid series VY planned and developed by Yamaha Corporation, along with related software and hardware. The VY series of Vocaloids are different from other Vocaloids as their considered as having no form of avatar and were designed to be a high quality professional voicebank as well as to act as the intended standard for the Vocaloids products themselves. Though each voicebank has a gender type voice (feminine, masculine) the Vocaloid series itself is void of such restrictions and are designed with the intention of allowing those using them to be able to manipulate the voice as they please. The avatarless look was intended to encourage creativity with the series. VY1, the first of the series, was released with a demo album containing songs by various producers from Nico Nico Douga and their interpretation of the Vocaloid along with the settings used for the song. Bplats focused on their high quality Vocaloids, even delaying VY2 for quality related issue; VY2 was created with the intention of being realistic and stable. Bplats is looking to produce male and female English Vocaloid products, with improvements to the standard of English used by the software, another Vocaloid is already under production.
Vocaloid 2 products
Released products
Vocaloid 3 products
Released products
Vocaloid 4 products
Released products
Upcoming products
References
External links
Bplats Vocaloid Store
Vocaloid Music Publishing (rights management for creators)
SaaSplats (SaaS distribution network)
ASP-SaaS Navi (ASP and SaaS portal)
Cloud News (cloud computing news portal)
Software companies based in Tokyo
Vocaloid production companies
Software companies of Japan |
149289 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence%20alignment | Sequence alignment | In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are typically represented as rows within a matrix. Gaps are inserted between the residues so that identical or similar characters are aligned in successive columns.
Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences, such as calculating the distance cost between strings in a natural language or in financial data.
Interpretation
If two sequences in an alignment share a common ancestor, mismatches can be interpreted as point mutations and gaps as indels (that is, insertion or deletion mutations) introduced in one or both lineages in the time since they diverged from one another. In sequence alignments of proteins, the degree of similarity between amino acids occupying a particular position in the sequence can be interpreted as a rough measure of how conserved a particular region or sequence motif is among lineages. The absence of substitutions, or the presence of only very conservative substitutions (that is, the substitution of amino acids whose side chains have similar biochemical properties) in a particular region of the sequence, suggest that this region has structural or functional importance. Although DNA and RNA nucleotide bases are more similar to each other than are amino acids, the conservation of base pairs can indicate a similar functional or structural role.
Alignment methods
Very short or very similar sequences can be aligned by hand. However, most interesting problems require the alignment of lengthy, highly variable or extremely numerous sequences that cannot be aligned solely by human effort. Instead, human knowledge is applied in constructing algorithms to produce high-quality sequence alignments, and occasionally in adjusting the final results to reflect patterns that are difficult to represent algorithmically (especially in the case of nucleotide sequences). Computational approaches to sequence alignment generally fall into two categories: global alignments and local alignments. Calculating a global alignment is a form of global optimization that "forces" the alignment to span the entire length of all query sequences. By contrast, local alignments identify regions of similarity within long sequences that are often widely divergent overall. Local alignments are often preferable, but can be more difficult to calculate because of the additional challenge of identifying the regions of similarity. A variety of computational algorithms have been applied to the sequence alignment problem. These include slow but formally correct methods like dynamic programming. These also include efficient, heuristic algorithms or probabilistic methods designed for large-scale database search, that do not guarantee to find best matches.
Representations
Alignments are commonly represented both graphically and in text format. In almost all sequence alignment representations, sequences are written in rows arranged so that aligned residues appear in successive columns. In text formats, aligned columns containing identical or similar characters are indicated with a system of conservation symbols. As in the image above, an asterisk or pipe symbol is used to show identity between two columns; other less common symbols include a colon for conservative substitutions and a period for semiconservative substitutions. Many sequence visualization programs also use color to display information about the properties of the individual sequence elements; in DNA and RNA sequences, this equates to assigning each nucleotide its own color. In protein alignments, such as the one in the image above, color is often used to indicate amino acid properties to aid in judging the conservation of a given amino acid substitution. For multiple sequences the last row in each column is often the consensus sequence determined by the alignment; the consensus sequence is also often represented in graphical format with a sequence logo in which the size of each nucleotide or amino acid letter corresponds to its degree of conservation.
Sequence alignments can be stored in a wide variety of text-based file formats, many of which were originally developed in conjunction with a specific alignment program or implementation. Most web-based tools allow a limited number of input and output formats, such as FASTA format and GenBank format and the output is not easily editable. Several conversion programs that provide graphical and/or command line interfaces are available , such as READSEQ and EMBOSS. There are also several programming packages which provide this conversion functionality, such as BioPython, BioRuby and BioPerl. The SAM/BAM files use the CIGAR (Compact Idiosyncratic Gapped Alignment Report) string format to represent an alignment of a sequence to a reference by encoding a sequence of events (e.g. match/mismatch, insertions, deletions).
CIGAR Format
Ref. : GTCGTAGAATA
Read: CACGTAG—TA
CIGAR: 2S5M2D2M
where:
2S = 2 soft clipping (could be mismatches, or a read longer than the matched sequence)
5M = 5 matches or mismatches
2D = 2 deletions
2M = 2 matches or mismatches
The original CIGAR format from the exonerate alignment program did not distinguish between mismatches or matches with the M character.
The SAMv1 spec document defines newer CIGAR codes. In most cases it is preferred to use the '=' and 'X' characters to denote matches or mismatches rather than the older 'M' character, which is ambiguous.
“Consumes query” and “consumes reference” indicate whether the CIGAR operation causes the alignment to step along the query sequence and the reference sequence respectively.
H can only be present as the first and/or last operation.
S may only have H operations between them and the ends of the CIGAR string.
For mRNA-to-genome alignment, an N operation represents an intron. For other types of alignments, the interpretation of N is not defined.
Sum of lengths of the M/I/S/=/X operations shall equal the length of SEQ
Global and local alignments
Global alignments, which attempt to align every residue in every sequence, are most useful when the sequences in the query set are similar and of roughly equal size. (This does not mean global alignments cannot start and/or end in gaps.) A general global alignment technique is the Needleman–Wunsch algorithm, which is based on dynamic programming. Local alignments are more useful for dissimilar sequences that are suspected to contain regions of similarity or similar sequence motifs within their larger sequence context. The Smith–Waterman algorithm is a general local alignment method based on the same dynamic programming scheme but with additional choices to start and end at any place.
Hybrid methods, known as semi-global or "glocal" (short for global-local) methods, search for the best possible partial alignment of the two sequences (in other words, a combination of one or both starts and one or both ends is stated to be aligned). This can be especially useful when the downstream part of one sequence overlaps with the upstream part of the other sequence. In this case, neither global nor local alignment is entirely appropriate: a global alignment would attempt to force the alignment to extend beyond the region of overlap, while a local alignment might not fully cover the region of overlap. Another case where semi-global alignment is useful is when one sequence is short (for example a gene sequence) and the other is very long (for example a chromosome sequence). In that case, the short sequence should be globally (fully) aligned but only a local (partial) alignment is desired for the long sequence.
Fast expansion of genetic data challenges speed of current DNA sequence alignment algorithms. Essential needs for an efficient and accurate method for DNA variant discovery demand innovative approaches for parallel processing in real time. Optical computing approaches have been suggested as promising alternatives to the current electrical implementations, yet their applicability remains to be tested .
Pairwise alignment
Pairwise sequence alignment methods are used to find the best-matching piecewise (local or global) alignments of two query sequences. Pairwise alignments can only be used between two sequences at a time, but they are efficient to calculate and are often used for methods that do not require extreme precision (such as searching a database for sequences with high similarity to a query). The three primary methods of producing pairwise alignments are dot-matrix methods, dynamic programming, and word methods; however, multiple sequence alignment techniques can also align pairs of sequences. Although each method has its individual strengths and weaknesses, all three pairwise methods have difficulty with highly repetitive sequences of low information content - especially where the number of repetitions differ in the two sequences to be aligned.
Maximal unique match
One way of quantifying the utility of a given pairwise alignment is the 'maximal unique match' (MUM), or the longest subsequence that occurs in both query sequences. Longer MUM sequences typically reflect closer relatedness. in the multiple sequence alignment of genomes in computational biology. Identification of MUMs and other potential anchors, is the first step in larger alignment systems such as MUMmer. Anchors are the areas between two genomes where they are highly similar. To understand what a MUM is we can break down each word in the acronym. Match implies that the substring occurs in both sequences to be aligned. Unique means that the substring occurs only once in each sequence. Finally, maximal states that the substring is not part of another larger string that fulfills both prior requirements. The idea behind this, is that long sequences that match exactly and occur only once in each genome are almost certainly part of the global alignment.
More precisely:
"Given two genomes A and B, Maximal Unique Match (MUM) substring is a common substring of A and B of length longer than a specified minimum length d (by default d= 20) such that
it is maximal, that is, it cannot be extended on either end without incurring a mismatch; and
it is unique in both sequences"
Dot-matrix methods
The dot-matrix approach, which implicitly produces a family of alignments for individual sequence regions, is qualitative and conceptually simple, though time-consuming to analyze on a large scale. In the absence of noise, it can be easy to visually identify certain sequence features—such as insertions, deletions, repeats, or inverted repeats—from a dot-matrix plot. To construct a dot-matrix plot, the two sequences are written along the top row and leftmost column of a two-dimensional matrix and a dot is placed at any point where the characters in the appropriate columns match—this is a typical recurrence plot. Some implementations vary the size or intensity of the dot depending on the degree of similarity of the two characters, to accommodate conservative substitutions. The dot plots of very closely related sequences will appear as a single line along the matrix's main diagonal.
Problems with dot plots as an information display technique include: noise, lack of clarity, non-intuitiveness, difficulty extracting match summary statistics and match positions on the two sequences. There is also much wasted space where the match data is inherently duplicated across the diagonal and most of the actual area of the plot is taken up by either empty space or noise, and, finally, dot-plots are limited to two sequences. None of these limitations apply to Miropeats alignment diagrams but they have their own particular flaws.
Dot plots can also be used to assess repetitiveness in a single sequence. A sequence can be plotted against itself and regions that share significant similarities will appear as lines off the main diagonal. This effect can occur when a protein consists of multiple similar structural domains.
Dynamic programming
The technique of dynamic programming can be applied to produce global alignments via the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm, and local alignments via the Smith-Waterman algorithm. In typical usage, protein alignments use a substitution matrix to assign scores to amino-acid matches or mismatches, and a gap penalty for matching an amino acid in one sequence to a gap in the other. DNA and RNA alignments may use a scoring matrix, but in practice often simply assign a positive match score, a negative mismatch score, and a negative gap penalty. (In standard dynamic programming, the score of each amino acid position is independent of the identity of its neighbors, and therefore base stacking effects are not taken into account. However, it is possible to account for such effects by modifying the algorithm.)
A common extension to standard linear gap costs, is the usage of two different gap penalties for opening a gap and for extending a gap. Typically the former is much larger than the latter, e.g. -10 for gap open and -2 for gap extension.
Thus, the number of gaps in an alignment is usually reduced and residues and gaps are kept together, which typically makes more biological sense. The Gotoh algorithm implements affine gap costs by using three matrices.
Dynamic programming can be useful in aligning nucleotide to protein sequences, a task complicated by the need to take into account frameshift mutations (usually insertions or deletions). The framesearch method produces a series of global or local pairwise alignments between a query nucleotide sequence and a search set of protein sequences, or vice versa. Its ability to evaluate frameshifts offset by an arbitrary number of nucleotides makes the method useful for sequences containing large numbers of indels, which can be very difficult to align with more efficient heuristic methods. In practice, the method requires large amounts of computing power or a system whose architecture is specialized for dynamic programming. The BLAST and EMBOSS suites provide basic tools for creating translated alignments (though some of these approaches take advantage of side-effects of sequence searching capabilities of the tools). More general methods are available from open-source software such as GeneWise.
The dynamic programming method is guaranteed to find an optimal alignment given a particular scoring function; however, identifying a good scoring function is often an empirical rather than a theoretical matter. Although dynamic programming is extensible to more than two sequences, it is prohibitively slow for large numbers of sequences or extremely long sequences.
Word methods
Word methods, also known as k-tuple methods, are heuristic methods that are not guaranteed to find an optimal alignment solution, but are significantly more efficient than dynamic programming. These methods are especially useful in large-scale database searches where it is understood that a large proportion of the candidate sequences will have essentially no significant match with the query sequence. Word methods are best known for their implementation in the database search tools FASTA and the BLAST family. Word methods identify a series of short, nonoverlapping subsequences ("words") in the query sequence that are then matched to candidate database sequences. The relative positions of the word in the two sequences being compared are subtracted to obtain an offset; this will indicate a region of alignment if multiple distinct words produce the same offset. Only if this region is detected do these methods apply more sensitive alignment criteria; thus, many unnecessary comparisons with sequences of no appreciable similarity are eliminated.
In the FASTA method, the user defines a value k to use as the word length with which to search the database. The method is slower but more sensitive at lower values of k, which are also preferred for searches involving a very short query sequence. The BLAST family of search methods provides a number of algorithms optimized for particular types of queries, such as searching for distantly related sequence matches. BLAST was developed to provide a faster alternative to FASTA without sacrificing much accuracy; like FASTA, BLAST uses a word search of length k, but evaluates only the most significant word matches, rather than every word match as does FASTA. Most BLAST implementations use a fixed default word length that is optimized for the query and database type, and that is changed only under special circumstances, such as when searching with repetitive or very short query sequences. Implementations can be found via a number of web portals, such as EMBL FASTA and NCBI BLAST.
Multiple sequence alignment
Multiple sequence alignment is an extension of pairwise alignment to incorporate more than two sequences at a time. Multiple alignment methods try to align all of the sequences in a given query set. Multiple alignments are often used in identifying conserved sequence regions across a group of sequences hypothesized to be evolutionarily related. Such conserved sequence motifs can be used in conjunction with structural and mechanistic information to locate the catalytic active sites of enzymes. Alignments are also used to aid in establishing evolutionary relationships by constructing phylogenetic trees. Multiple sequence alignments are computationally difficult to produce and most formulations of the problem lead to NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems. Nevertheless, the utility of these alignments in bioinformatics has led to the development of a variety of methods suitable for aligning three or more sequences.
Dynamic programming
The technique of dynamic programming is theoretically applicable to any number of sequences; however, because it is computationally expensive in both time and memory, it is rarely used for more than three or four sequences in its most basic form. This method requires constructing the n-dimensional equivalent of the sequence matrix formed from two sequences, where n is the number of sequences in the query. Standard dynamic programming is first used on all pairs of query sequences and then the "alignment space" is filled in by considering possible matches or gaps at intermediate positions, eventually constructing an alignment essentially between each two-sequence alignment. Although this technique is computationally expensive, its guarantee of a global optimum solution is useful in cases where only a few sequences need to be aligned accurately. One method for reducing the computational demands of dynamic programming, which relies on the "sum of pairs" objective function, has been implemented in the MSA software package.
Progressive methods
Progressive, hierarchical, or tree methods generate a multiple sequence alignment by first aligning the most similar sequences and then adding successively less related sequences or groups to the alignment until the entire query set has been incorporated into the solution. The initial tree describing the sequence relatedness is based on pairwise comparisons that may include heuristic pairwise alignment methods similar to FASTA. Progressive alignment results are dependent on the choice of "most related" sequences and thus can be sensitive to inaccuracies in the initial pairwise alignments. Most progressive multiple sequence alignment methods additionally weight the sequences in the query set according to their relatedness, which reduces the likelihood of making a poor choice of initial sequences and thus improves alignment accuracy.
Many variations of the Clustal progressive implementation are used for multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction, and as input for protein structure prediction. A slower but more accurate variant of the progressive method is known as T-Coffee.
Iterative methods
Iterative methods attempt to improve on the heavy dependence on the accuracy of the initial pairwise alignments, which is the weak point of the progressive methods. Iterative methods optimize an objective function based on a selected alignment scoring method by assigning an initial global alignment and then realigning sequence subsets. The realigned subsets are then themselves aligned to produce the next iteration's multiple sequence alignment. Various ways of selecting the sequence subgroups and objective function are reviewed in.
Motif finding
Motif finding, also known as profile analysis, constructs global multiple sequence alignments that attempt to align short conserved sequence motifs among the sequences in the query set. This is usually done by first constructing a general global multiple sequence alignment, after which the highly conserved regions are isolated and used to construct a set of profile matrices. The profile matrix for each conserved region is arranged like a scoring matrix but its frequency counts for each amino acid or nucleotide at each position are derived from the conserved region's character distribution rather than from a more general empirical distribution. The profile matrices are then used to search other sequences for occurrences of the motif they characterize. In cases where the original data set contained a small number of sequences, or only highly related sequences, pseudocounts are added to normalize the character distributions represented in the motif.
Techniques inspired by computer science
A variety of general optimization algorithms commonly used in computer science have also been applied to the multiple sequence alignment problem. Hidden Markov models have been used to produce probability scores for a family of possible multiple sequence alignments for a given query set; although early HMM-based methods produced underwhelming performance, later applications have found them especially effective in detecting remotely related sequences because they are less susceptible to noise created by conservative or semiconservative substitutions. Genetic algorithms and simulated annealing have also been used in optimizing multiple sequence alignment scores as judged by a scoring function like the sum-of-pairs method. More complete details and software packages can be found in the main article multiple sequence alignment.
The Burrows–Wheeler transform has been successfully applied to fast short read alignment in popular tools such as Bowtie and BWA. See FM-index.
Structural alignment
Structural alignments, which are usually specific to protein and sometimes RNA sequences, use information about the secondary and tertiary structure of the protein or RNA molecule to aid in aligning the sequences. These methods can be used for two or more sequences and typically produce local alignments; however, because they depend on the availability of structural information, they can only be used for sequences whose corresponding structures are known (usually through X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy). Because both protein and RNA structure is more evolutionarily conserved than sequence, structural alignments can be more reliable between sequences that are very distantly related and that have diverged so extensively that sequence comparison cannot reliably detect their similarity.
Structural alignments are used as the "gold standard" in evaluating alignments for homology-based protein structure prediction because they explicitly align regions of the protein sequence that are structurally similar rather than relying exclusively on sequence information. However, clearly structural alignments cannot be used in structure prediction because at least one sequence in the query set is the target to be modeled, for which the structure is not known. It has been shown that, given the structural alignment between a target and a template sequence, highly accurate models of the target protein sequence can be produced; a major stumbling block in homology-based structure prediction is the production of structurally accurate alignments given only sequence information.
DALI
The DALI method, or distance matrix alignment, is a fragment-based method for constructing structural alignments based on contact similarity patterns between successive hexapeptides in the query sequences. It can generate pairwise or multiple alignments and identify a query sequence's structural neighbors in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). It has been used to construct the FSSP structural alignment database (Fold classification based on Structure-Structure alignment of Proteins, or Families of Structurally Similar Proteins). A DALI webserver can be accessed at DALI and the FSSP is located at The Dali Database.
SSAP
SSAP (sequential structure alignment program) is a dynamic programming-based method of structural alignment that uses atom-to-atom vectors in structure space as comparison points. It has been extended since its original description to include multiple as well as pairwise alignments, and has been used in the construction of the CATH (Class, Architecture, Topology, Homology) hierarchical database classification of protein folds. The CATH database can be accessed at CATH Protein Structure Classification.
Combinatorial extension
The combinatorial extension method of structural alignment generates a pairwise structural alignment by using local geometry to align short fragments of the two proteins being analyzed and then assembles these fragments into a larger alignment. Based on measures such as rigid-body root mean square distance, residue distances, local secondary structure, and surrounding environmental features such as residue neighbor hydrophobicity, local alignments called "aligned fragment pairs" are generated and used to build a similarity matrix representing all possible structural alignments within predefined cutoff criteria. A path from one protein structure state to the other is then traced through the matrix by extending the growing alignment one fragment at a time. The optimal such path defines the combinatorial-extension alignment. A web-based server implementing the method and providing a database of pairwise alignments of structures in the Protein Data Bank is located at the Combinatorial Extension website.
Phylogenetic analysis
Phylogenetics and sequence alignment are closely related fields due to the shared necessity of evaluating sequence relatedness. The field of phylogenetics makes extensive use of sequence alignments in the construction and interpretation of phylogenetic trees, which are used to classify the evolutionary relationships between homologous genes represented in the genomes of divergent species. The degree to which sequences in a query set differ is qualitatively related to the sequences' evolutionary distance from one another. Roughly speaking, high sequence identity suggests that the sequences in question have a comparatively young most recent common ancestor, while low identity suggests that the divergence is more ancient. This approximation, which reflects the "molecular clock" hypothesis that a roughly constant rate of evolutionary change can be used to extrapolate the elapsed time since two genes first diverged (that is, the coalescence time), assumes that the effects of mutation and selection are constant across sequence lineages. Therefore, it does not account for possible difference among organisms or species in the rates of DNA repair or the possible functional conservation of specific regions in a sequence. (In the case of nucleotide sequences, the molecular clock hypothesis in its most basic form also discounts the difference in acceptance rates between silent mutations that do not alter the meaning of a given codon and other mutations that result in a different amino acid being incorporated into the protein). More statistically accurate methods allow the evolutionary rate on each branch of the phylogenetic tree to vary, thus producing better estimates of coalescence times for genes.
Progressive multiple alignment techniques produce a phylogenetic tree by necessity because they incorporate sequences into the growing alignment in order of relatedness. Other techniques that assemble multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees score and sort trees first and calculate a multiple sequence alignment from the highest-scoring tree. Commonly used methods of phylogenetic tree construction are mainly heuristic because the problem of selecting the optimal tree, like the problem of selecting the optimal multiple sequence alignment, is NP-hard.
Assessment of significance
Sequence alignments are useful in bioinformatics for identifying sequence similarity, producing phylogenetic trees, and developing homology models of protein structures. However, the biological relevance of sequence alignments is not always clear. Alignments are often assumed to reflect a degree of evolutionary change between sequences descended from a common ancestor; however, it is formally possible that convergent evolution can occur to produce apparent similarity between proteins that are evolutionarily unrelated but perform similar functions and have similar structures.
In database searches such as BLAST, statistical methods can determine the likelihood of a particular alignment between sequences or sequence regions arising by chance given the size and composition of the database being searched. These values can vary significantly depending on the search space. In particular, the likelihood of finding a given alignment by chance increases if the database consists only of sequences from the same organism as the query sequence. Repetitive sequences in the database or query can also distort both the search results and the assessment of statistical significance; BLAST automatically filters such repetitive sequences in the query to avoid apparent hits that are statistical artifacts.
Methods of statistical significance estimation for gapped sequence alignments are available in the literature.
Assessment of credibility
Statistical significance indicates the probability that an alignment of a given quality could arise by chance, but does not indicate how much superior a given alignment is to alternative alignments of the same sequences. Measures of alignment credibility indicate the extent to which the best scoring alignments for a given pair of sequences are substantially similar. Methods of alignment credibility estimation for gapped sequence alignments are available in the literature.
Scoring functions
The choice of a scoring function that reflects biological or statistical observations about known sequences is important to producing good alignments. Protein sequences are frequently aligned using substitution matrices that reflect the probabilities of given character-to-character substitutions. A series of matrices called PAM matrices (Point Accepted Mutation matrices, originally defined by Margaret Dayhoff and sometimes referred to as "Dayhoff matrices") explicitly encode evolutionary approximations regarding the rates and probabilities of particular amino acid mutations. Another common series of scoring matrices, known as BLOSUM (Blocks Substitution Matrix), encodes empirically derived substitution probabilities. Variants of both types of matrices are used to detect sequences with differing levels of divergence, thus allowing users of BLAST or FASTA to restrict searches to more closely related matches or expand to detect more divergent sequences. Gap penalties account for the introduction of a gap - on the evolutionary model, an insertion or deletion mutation - in both nucleotide and protein sequences, and therefore the penalty values should be proportional to the expected rate of such mutations. The quality of the alignments produced therefore depends on the quality of the scoring function.
It can be very useful and instructive to try the same alignment several times with different choices for scoring matrix and/or gap penalty values and compare the results. Regions where the solution is weak or non-unique can often be identified by observing which regions of the alignment are robust to variations in alignment parameters.
Other biological uses
Sequenced RNA, such as expressed sequence tags and full-length mRNAs, can be aligned to a sequenced genome to find where there are genes and get information about alternative splicing and RNA editing. Sequence alignment is also a part of genome assembly, where sequences are aligned to find overlap so that contigs (long stretches of sequence) can be formed. Another use is SNP analysis, where sequences from different individuals are aligned to find single basepairs that are often different in a population.
Non-biological uses
The methods used for biological sequence alignment have also found applications in other fields, most notably in natural language processing and in social sciences, where the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm is usually referred to as Optimal matching. Techniques that generate the set of elements from which words will be selected in natural-language generation algorithms have borrowed multiple sequence alignment techniques from bioinformatics to produce linguistic versions of computer-generated mathematical proofs. In the field of historical and comparative linguistics, sequence alignment has been used to partially automate the comparative method by which linguists traditionally reconstruct languages. Business and marketing research has also applied multiple sequence alignment techniques in analyzing series of purchases over time.
Software
A more complete list of available software categorized by algorithm and alignment type is available at sequence alignment software, but common software tools used for general sequence alignment tasks include ClustalW2 and T-coffee for alignment, and BLAST and FASTA3x for database searching. Commercial tools such as DNASTAR Lasergene, Geneious, and PatternHunter are also available. Tools annotated as performing sequence alignment are listed in the bio.tools registry.
Alignment algorithms and software can be directly compared to one another using a standardized set of benchmark reference multiple sequence alignments known as BAliBASE. The data set consists of structural alignments, which can be considered a standard against which purely sequence-based methods are compared. The relative performance of many common alignment methods on frequently encountered alignment problems has been tabulated and selected results published online at BAliBASE. A comprehensive list of BAliBASE scores for many (currently 12) different alignment tools can be computed within the protein workbench STRAP.
See also
Sequence homology
Sequence mining
BLAST
String searching algorithm
Alignment-free sequence analysis
UGENE
Needleman–Wunsch algorithm
Smith-Waterman alogrithm
References
External links
Bioinformatics algorithms
Computational phylogenetics
Evolutionary developmental biology
Algorithms on strings |
51695563 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab%20%28social%20network%29 | Gab (social network) | Gab is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service known for its far-right userbase. Widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, the alt-right, antisemites, supporters of Donald Trump, and conspiracy theorists like QAnon, it has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms.
Gab says it promotes free speech, individual liberty, and the "free flow of information online", though these statements have been criticized by researchers as being a cover-up for its alt-right and extremist ecosystem. Gab also says it promotes "technology that powers a parallel Christian economy". Antisemitism is prominent in the site's content, and the company itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Researchers note that Gab has been "repeatedly linked to radicalization leading to real-world violent
events".
The site received extensive public scrutiny following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, after it was found that the sole suspect of the attack, Robert Gregory Bowers, had posted a message on Gab indicating an immediate intent to cause harm before the shooting. Bowers had a history of making extreme, antisemitic postings on the site. After the shooting, Gab briefly went offline when it was dropped by its hosting provider and denied service by several payment processors. In 2021, Gab was among the platforms used to plan the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6.
Gab was founded in 2016 and launched publicly in May 2017. A microblogging platform, Gab has been described as similar to Twitter. Gab also maintains an email service, a text messaging service, a news aggregate website, a news website, a video sharing platform, and a web browser and browser extension to allow commenting on third-party websites. In July 2019, Gab switched its software infrastructure to a Mastodon fork, a free and open-source social network platform. Mastodon released a statement in protest, denouncing Gab as trying to "monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech".
History
2016–2018
Gab was founded in 2016 by chief executive officer (CEO) Andrew Torba and chief technology officer (CTO) Ekrem Büyükkaya, who had previously worked together at advertising technology company Automate Ads (formerly Kuhcoon). Torba started working on the site in May 2016 and on August 15, 2016, Gab launched in private beta, billing itself as a "free speech" alternative to social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. Torba has cited "the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly", "social justice bullying", and an alleged bias against conservative articles by Facebook as his reasons for creating Gab. Gab AI, Inc. was incorporated on September 9, 2016. Utsav Sanduja later joined Gab as chief operating officer (COO).
Torba said in November 2016 that the site's user base had expanded significantly following censorship controversies involving major social media companies, including the permanent suspensions of several prominent alt-right accounts from Twitter after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. During November 2016, Gab gained 5,000 new users per week. By mid-December 2016, there were 200,000 people on Gab's waiting list. At the time, Torba claimed that Gab had about 130,000 registered users.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Hanna|first1=Rew|last2=Bender|first2=Bryan|date=December 8, 2016|title='Alt-rights favored social network: Fake news welcome here|url=https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/alt-right-social-network-fake-news-232398|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161210124340/https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/alt-right-social-network-fake-news-232398|archive-date=2016-12-10|access-date=January 27, 2021|website=Politico|language=en}}</ref>
On May 8, 2017, Gab exited private beta.
During August and September 2017, immediately following the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Gab experienced another increase in new users, gaining around 3,300 per week.
In early September 2017, Gab faced pressure from its domain registrar Asia Registry to take down a post by The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, giving Gab 48 hours to do so. Gab later removed the post. Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation commented that this pressure was part of an increase in politically motivated domain name seizures.
On August 9, 2018, Torba announced that Microsoft Azure, Gab's host, had threatened to suspend the site for "weeks/months" if they failed to remove two antisemitic posts made by Patrick Little, a U.S. Senate candidate who had been ejected from the Republican Party for his antisemitism. According to The Verge, the posts "express intense anti-Semitism and meet any reasonable definition of hate speech". Little said in the posts that Jews should be raised as "livestock" and that he intended to destroy a "holohoax memorial". In response to Azure's threat, Little posted on Gab that "I'll delete the posts, but this is a violation of our rights as Americans". Gab's Twitter account also asserted that Little had self-deleted the posts, but this was contradicted by Torba who said Gab itself had deleted the posts which "unquestionably" broke their "user guidelines". On the same day, Alex Jones interviewed Torba on The Alex Jones Show during his coverage of his own permanent ban from YouTube. Little was suspended indefinitely from Gab in late November 2018 for encouraging harassment of private individuals; Gab claimed that although Little's account had posted hate speech, it was not the cause of the ban.
According to Gab's filings with the SEC, around 635,000 users were registered on Gab by September 10, 2018. On September 12, 2018, Gab purchased the Gab.com domain name from Sedo for $220,000 on Flippa, an online business marketplace; it had previously been using the domain Gab.ai.
During the 2018 Brazilian presidential election from September to October 2018, many right-wing Brazilian political pages were banned from Facebook for breaching the site's hate speech rules. In response, many administrators of these pages began promoting Gab as an alternative platform; subsequently, Brazilians became the second-largest demographic of Gab users. Jair Bolsonaro's party, the Social Liberal Party, has an official Gab account.
In December 2018, Gab sponsored Turning Point USA's 2018 "Student Action Summit" in Palm Beach, Florida. Days before the event, Turning Point USA removed Gab from the list of sponsors without explanation. Gab later posted a press release protesting the unexplained removal.
2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
Robert Gregory Bowers, the suspected shooter in the attack against a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, 2018, maintained an active, verified Gab account where he displayed the neo-Nazi code-phrase "1488" and a bio that said, "jews are the children of satan". Just prior to the shooting, he used this account to post "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in".
After Bowers was arrested, Gab suspended his profile, gathered all user data for the account, and contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On October 27, 2018, the day of the shooting, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium terminated their relationship with Gab, and PayPal released a statement that it had it done so based on its review of accounts that may engage in the "perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance". Later on the same day, Gab announced on Twitter that Joyent, Gab's hosting provider, would terminate their service on October 29 at 9:00 am ET. The tweet said that the site expected to be down for weeks. Stripe and Backblaze also terminated their services with Gab after the shooting. On October 29, Gab claimed in a tweet that they "took the site down early on purpose last night because we knew the media would take the bait and have stories on it for this morning".
Following the shooting, Gab received substantial media attention, having been relatively unknown by the general public prior to the attack. The New Republic noted that prior to the shooting "Despite some attention in the mainstream tech press, Gab was essentially considered a sideshow, an also-ran in the social media wars, destined to fade away like Yo, Ello, or other mostly forgotten platforms that could never hope to compete with Silicon Valley monopolies".
Gab had defended itself from criticism as a result of the shooting, saying that they: "refuse to be defined by the media's narratives about Gab and our community. Gab's mission is very simple: to defend free expression and individual liberty online for all people. Social media often brings out the best and the worst of humanity". Torba called the shooting "a clear act of terror", adding that he "fundamentally believed in freedom of expression", but did not tolerate threats of violence. Torba also said that "I do think that more speech is always going to be the answer to combat bad speech or hate speech".
Ekrem Büyükkaya, Gab's co-founder and CTO, announced his resignation on October 28, citing "attacks from the American press" that "have taken a toll on me personally".
After the site was taken down, Gab's homepage was changed to a message saying it was down due to being "under attack" and being "systematically no-platformed", adding that Gab would be inaccessible for a "period of time". Also after the site was taken down, Torba accused the media of demonizing Gab while ignoring similar problems on mainstream social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Gab returned online on November 4, 2018, after Epik agreed to register the domain. Rob Monster, the CEO of Epik, had defended Gab's neo-Nazi users and also baselessly claimed that neo-Nazis on Gab are "liberal trolls" looking to "give enemies of freedom an excuse". On Gab, Christopher Cantwell replied to Monster's claims, stating: "We're not liberals, nor are the people trying to get us censored. The people trying to censor Gab are (((communists))), and the Nazis are the only ones willing to take them on... Eventually, everyone will have to pick a side". Monster also said of Gab that "I do believe the guys that are on the site are vigilant".
After Gab returned online, the site was immediately flooded with antisemitic posts and comments, including one comment in response to a post from Torba welcoming back users of Gab and asking users to be nice to each other that said "Fuck that, name the Jews who are trying to shut us down". The comment was later deleted. Torba then claimed in response to these posts and comments that "a lot of people are creating brand new accounts and breaking our guidelines on purpose tonight". Torba also called on users of Gab to help police the site for posts that break Gab's user guidelines, including threats of violence.
2019
Gab turned to cryptocurrency payment processing services after being rejected from PayPal and Stripe in the aftermath of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In January 2019, Coinbase and Square, Inc.'s Cash App closed the accounts held by Gab and Andrew Torba. On January 22, 2019, Gab announced that it had partnered with Second Amendment Processing (SAP), a Michigan-based payment processor. Gab removed SAP's credit card payment functionalities in March 2019, only accepting payment via cryptocurrency or check. The same month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published an investigation that found that SAP's founder had been convicted of financial crimes in 2007. Gab has not said why it removed the payment processor.
The SPLC reported on January 24, 2019, that Gab had been misrepresenting its services and bloating its user count in its filings and promotional materials. The GabTV service advertised on its StartEngine crowdfunding page was only active very briefly in early 2018, and also , the dedicated page for the service was blank. Unlike other social media companies, Gab did not publish the count of its active users in 2018 and only reported registered accounts. Social media intelligence company Storyful found 19,526 unique usernames had posted content during a seven-day period between January 9 and 16, 2019, far lower than Gab's claimed 850,000 registered users. Users of the site commonly mocked Torba for the site's emptiness, with some accusing him of inflating user numbers. In a December 2018 filing, the company reported that 5,000 users were paying for its subscription services.
Shortly after the SPLC published its January report on Gab's misleading statements and financial struggles, the site made its Twitter account private until January 30, 2019, and switched to an invitation-only mode for new user registrations on January 30. Gab stated that switching to an invitation-only mode was an experiment to improve user experience. Gab previously had intermittent service outages for a week. Gab said that the outages were caused by bot attacks and blamed state actors along with paid "activist bloggers". Torba shared a post from another user that suggested that the "deep state" was responsible. The Daily Beast opined that this was an attempt to further obfuscate its numbers in response to reports that it had inflated its user count.
, Gab paid Sibyl Systems Ltd. $1,175 a month for web hosting. The SPLC reported on February 14, 2019, that a software engineer for Sibyl Systems had rejected Gab's claim of having more than 835,000 users and estimated the count to be in the range of a few thousands to a few tens of thousands. Sibyl Systems denied the statement via Twitter, saying that the employee did not have access to that secure data and that the employee had been dismissed.
On July 4, Gab switched its software infrastructure to run on a forked version of Mastodon, a free and open-source decentralized social network platform. The change attempted to circumvent the rejection of Gab's mobile app from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, as Gab users gained access to the social network through third-party Mastodon apps that did not subsequently block Gab. Mastodon released a statement the same day denouncing Gab as "seek[ing] to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech" and "attempt[ing] to hijack our infrastructure", and said that they had "already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate speech off the fediverse". Mastodon stated that most Mastodon instances had blocked Gab's domains, preventing interactions between these instances and Gab, and that Tusky and Toot!, two popular Mastodon mobile apps, had already blacklisted Gab's domains and banned Gab users from using their app. Mastodon also stated that by paywalling features that are otherwise freely accessible in other instances, Gab "offer[s] users no incentive to choose their platform" and "puts itself at a disadvantage compared to any Mastodon instance".
According to SimilarWeb, Gab's website traffic grew almost 200% between January and July 2019, and unique visitors to the site increased 180%. In August 2019, Vice News reported that traffic to Gab's website and the rate of new users joining Gab had both significantly increased during the first half of 2019. Also in August 2019, Torba claimed that Gab had over 1 million registered users.
In late 2019, Gab launched Gab Trends, a news aggregate website described by KNTV as being similar to the Drudge Report.
2020
In early 2020, Gab launched Gab Chat in beta, an encrypted text messaging service described by Mashable as an alternative to Discord. In late June 2020, hackers leaked a May 26 law enforcement bulletin that was distributed by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a whistleblower site that publishes leaked documents. The bulletin was created by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange Fusion Center, who speculated that Gab Chat's encryption and privacy features for private chatting, such as the service automatically deleting text messages after 30 days of them being sent, could entice white supremacists to use the platform instead of Discord, a platform on which white supremacist groups have been frequently infiltrated by anti-fascists. When reached for a comment by Mashable, Torba responded to the bulletin in an email saying "Encryption does not render law enforcement totally blind" and that "Encryption doesn't cause a user to simply disappear. It doesn't prevent a service provider from seeing who is using its service or when that person is using the service". Torba also deflected from the concern of white supremacists using Gab Chat, saying that law enforcement should instead focus on stopping child exploitation on mainstream text messaging services.
In April 2020, Gab claimed that it had over 1.1 million registered users and that their website was receiving 3.7 million monthly visitors globally.
In July 2020, Slate reported that after Gab was connected to the 2018 Pittsburgh shooting, "Gab never quite recovered". The service's popularity diminished following the attack and the site's subsequent downtime.
In September 2020, Torba wrote that "Gab isn't just building an alternative social network", "We're building an alternative internet".
On October 1, 2020, Reuters broke a story that people associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, a group known for their interference in the 2016 presidential election, had been operating social media accounts on both mainstream and alt-tech platforms. One of the accounts, which was identified in an FBI probe as a "key asset in an alleged Russian disinformation campaign", had been spreading "familiar—and completely false" information including claims that mail-in voting is prone to fraud, that then-U.S. President Donald Trump was infected with COVID-19 by leftist activists, and that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is a "sexual predator". Axios noted that the account had not found much of an audience on mainstream platforms but had caught on among the alt-tech platforms; the Twitter account had fewer than 200 followers, but the Gab account had 3,000 and the Parler account had 14,000. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all took actions to suspend the accounts from their platforms. The Washington Post reported on October 7 that Gab had declined to terminate the account after being informed of its connections to the disinformation organization. Torba said to Reuters: "It looks like a blog sharing news stories and opinions. It's irrelevant to us who runs it or why". Speaking to The Washington Post, Torba said: "They can speak freely on Gab just like anyone else".
During the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November, Gab claimed that they experienced record user growth.
In December 2020, Engineering & Technology reported that Gab and other similar platforms could face "huge fines" for spreading misinformation under a new online safety bill in the United Kingdom that was planning on being introduced in 2021.
In late 2020, Torba posted on Gab's blog that the company "Welcomes QAnon Across Its Platforms".
2021
Storming of the United States Capitol
Although early claims were made that Gab was among the platforms used to plan the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, a later investigation by the FBI said it "found scant evidence that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result", and that "ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases".
Posts about which streets to take in order to run from police, which tools to use to pry open doors, and carrying guns into the halls of Congress, were exchanged on Gab in advance of the storming. During the storming, users of Gab recorded entering offices of members of Congress, including the office of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Users of Gab also posted about searching for then-Vice President Mike Pence. Following the storming and then-President Trump's subsequent permanent suspension from Twitter, Torba said that Gab had experienced a 40% increase in traffic and that Gab was also gaining 10,000 new users per hour as of January 9. After Parler, another alt-tech social network, was pulled offline by its host Amazon Web Services on January 11, former users of that site started migrating to Gab. On January 14, Gab claimed on Twitter that the platform had gained 2.3million new users in the past week. Gab's website experienced an 800% increase in traffic, which forced Torba to order emergency servers to handle the increase in traffic.
On January 12, ABC News reported that experts said that conservative-leaning social networks, including Gab, helped create echo chambers for extremist and violent views, which contributed to the Capitol storming.
After the Capitol storming, on January 13, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in an open letter to the United States Department of Justice called for a federal investigation into Gab and Torba to determine if they "intentionally aided" the individuals who were involved in the storming. ADL cited posts from Torba telling users of Gab "heading to DC" to record "video footage in landscape mode" in anticipation of "communist violence" and also posted on Gab that it "would be a real shame if the people outside stormed the Senate".
In response, Torba denied he and his platform were responsible for the storming, saying that Gab did a "phenomenal job" of mitigating violent content. He also stated that Gab had been removing offending posts and reporting them to federal law enforcement leading up to the storming, saying that "Public safety is our top priority", but declined to say which law enforcement agency they were working with, citing an "ongoing investigation". Torba also deflected attention away from Gab and towards Facebook, saying that the storming was "organized using Facebook's technology, not Gab's".
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in response, "It's ironic that, when called out for enabling extremist rhetoric, Gab's response is to craft" a letter "containing thinly veiled antisemitism", adding that "As our open letter makes clear, Gab is not moderating this extremist content, and their CEO seems to be encouraging users to upload it".
Subsequent events
On January 19, Rachel E. Greenspan from Business Insider observed that Gab had tweeted a direct quote from a post by Q, the anonymous individual or group whose messages form the basis of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. The tweet was later deleted. She also noted that Gab's Twitter account had posted multiple tweets referencing Jesus, including one tweet posted on January 18 featuring an image of Jesus walking with Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character used by the alt-right.
On February 9, Matt Field from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that RT, a media outlet owned by the Russian government that Field claims helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election, had created an account on Gab right before the start of Trump's second impeachment trial. Field noted that RT had posted several articles on their Gab account, including one article criticizing The Lincoln Project, an organization run by anti-Trump Republicans.
On August 27, the U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the storming of the Capitol demanded records from Gab (alongside 14 other social media companies) going back to the spring of 2020. On September 1, Torba responded by refusing to cooperate with the investigation, saying that Gab does not track misinformation or disinformation, has no retention policies, keeps no records of internal discussion about concerns of an insurrection, and has no way of knowing that an account is run by a foreign government. Torba and Gab also refused to hand over private user communications to the select committee (communications that Gab has already shared with law enforcement), arguing that the U.S. Congress would need a subpoena or warrant under the Stored Communications Act (SCA). Also in September 2021, Whitney Kimball of Gizmodo noted that Gab "might not even agree that an insurrection happened at all". noting an email from the company titled "New Video From Jan 6th Destroys 'Insurrection' Hoax".
In late September, the Federal Office of Justice in Bonn, Germany imposed a fine of €30,000 on Gab for not naming a contact person for questions about the deletion of criminal content, despite a provision from the Network Enforcement Act. Gab has objected to the fine. In a blog post, Torba accused the German authorities of having no intention of removing criminal content and did not mention that the fine was imposed for not naming a contact person. Torba also asked for financial support to combat the fine.
Also in late September, Torba announced that the Gab website's online infrastructure would be upgraded to "preserve a parallel Christian society on the internet for generations to come".
Hacks and data leaks
On the evening of February 19, Gab's website briefly went offline, originally without explanation. In response, several Twitter users posted images showing Gab accounts run by right-wing media outlets, such as The Gateway Pundit and National File, asking people to donate funds to a suspicious URL. After the site was restored, Torba responded in a blog post saying that Gab themselves had taken the site offline at around 6:25 pm EST, sixteen minutes after they "became aware of several accounts that were posting bitcoin wallet spam and related content". According to Torba, fewer than 20 accounts were affected, Gab "have no indication that any sensitive account information was breached or accessed by any unauthorized users", and that "Because of our quick action zero bitcoin was sent". Torba did not specify which accounts were affected. Torba also said that Gab had "identified and patched a security vulnerability in our codebase" and that "Our engineering team is conducting a full audit of our logs and infrastructure".
On February 26, around a week after Gab briefly went offline, the company published a blog post denying a data breach had taken place. In the post, they wrote that they had been contacted by unnamed reporters who asked about a data breach that may have exposed an archive of posts, direct messages, profiles, and hashed passwords on Gab. Torba wrote in the blog post that there was no independent confirmation that a breach had taken place, and that Gab collects "very little from our users in terms of personal information". He also accused the reporters of working with a hacker to hurt the company and its users. However, a reporter linked to DDoSecrets tweeted "Yes, we have the data" and promised more information "soon enough".
On February 28, DDoSecrets revealed "GabLeaks", a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of data from Gab, including more than 40 million posts, passwords, private messages, and other leaked information. The data was given to the group by a hacktivist self-identifying as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project", who retrieved the data from Gab's back-end databases to expose the platform's largely right-wing userbase. DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best called GabLeaks "another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon and everything surrounding January 6". DDoSecrets said that they would not release the data publicly due to the data containing a large amount of private and sensitive information and will instead share the data with select journalists, social scientists, and researchers. Andy Greenberg from Wired confirmed that the data "does appear to contain Gab users' individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords".
In response, Torba acknowledged the data breach, said that his Gab account had been "compromised", and that "the entire company is all hands investigating what happened and working to trace and patch the problem". He also used a transphobic slur to insult the hackers "attacking" Gab and referred to them as "demon hackers". On March 1, Torba revealed in a post on Gab's blog that the company had received a ransom demand of $500,000 in Bitcoin for the data, and wrote in response that they would not be paying it. Also on March 1, Torba said in a Gab post that "I want to make clear that we have zero tolerance for any threats of violence including against the wicked people who are attacking Gab. We need to pray for these people. I am".
Dan Goodin reported in Ars Technica on March 2 that Gab's CTO, Fosco Marotto, had in February introduced a SQL vulnerability that may have led to the data breach, and that Gab had subsequently scrubbed the commit from Git history. The company had previously open sourced Gab's source code in a Git repository which included all historical commits; on March 1, they took the repository offline and replaced it with a zipfile that did not include commit history.
On March 8, JaXpArO again compromised verified accounts on Gab, posting a message to their feeds addressed to Torba, which said the service had been "fully compromised" the previous week and accused him of lying to Gab's users. Gab briefly went offline again the same day, and the company wrote on Twitter that they had taken their site offline "to investigate a security breach". Torba posted a statement in response to the attack, claiming that "The attacker who stole data from Gab harvested OAuth2 bearer tokens during their initial attack" and that "Though their ability to harvest new tokens was patched, we did not clear all tokens related to the original attack. By reusing these old tokens, the attacker was able to post 177 statuses in an 8-minute period today".
In May, The Intercept used GabLeaks to solicit donations. Former Intercept reporter Glenn Greenwald criticized the publication for exploiting what he called an invasion of privacy, which he said contrasted with The Intercept's origins during the Snowden leaks. In response, a spokesperson for The Intercept said that "We do not apologize for our interest in reporting on fascist activity."
In early December, Torba claimed that Gab's back-end system was under a cyberattack by "porn bots". Torba called it "the most sophisticated attack we have seen in five years", adding that "the timing of it is incredibly interesting given that Truth Social and Rumble both raised a boatload of cash this week from hedge funds to compete with Gab". On December 4, Torba said that "All new Gab accounts must now be manually approved by our team until further notice". According to The Daily Beast, "It is unclear whether such a cyberattack took place or what specific "bots" the Gab CEO was referring to but a casual search of the platform does show numerous accounts advertising "escort" services."
2022
On January 24, 2022, Torba announced that Gab would sponsor the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) run by white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes. Torba also criticized the Conservative Political Action Conference and Turning Point USA, saying that "CPAC is sponsored by Facebook and Google among other billionaires" and "TPUSA is sponsored by atheist libertarian billionaires." Torba has also entered into a partnership with Fuentes' livestreaming service. Torba received backlash from Gab users over the sponsorship, with many pointing out that Fuentes had recently made harsh comments about Gab users, including one comment calling users "fucking retarded" and another comment stating: "Average IQ on Gab is like 50". Many of Gab's donors said that they would stop funding Gab. In response to the backlash, Torba said that "Controversy is attention. Attention is influence" and that "The point of marketing is to influence people to get off Big Tech and get on Gab. In order to do that I need their attention." It was later announced that Torba would be a guest speaker at the AFPAC. Torba also created an account on Fuentes' livestreaming service.
Dissenter
On February 24, 2019, Gab launched a browser extension called Dissenter, an aggregation and discussion service which allows Gab users to make comments about any webpage including news articles, YouTube videos, and individual social media posts. Comments made using the Dissenter extension are outside of the webpage owner's control, and the extension can be used to comment on websites with no comment feature or where comment sections have been closed. Gab also has a web browser called Dissenter.
Dissenter describes itself as "a free, open-source utility that allows people to dissent from orthodoxy and express what they are really thinking, without fear of reprisal". It was developed as a response to multiple social media platforms' and online news sites' moderation practices, which involve removal of individual comments or deleting or disabling comment sections altogether. Users with registered Gab accounts may submit content to Dissenter in the form of a URL to a page on which they want to comment. This creates a discussion page where users can post a comment (or "Dissent"), and the comments can be up- or down-voted by other users of the site. By using the Dissenter browser extension, users may read and post comments in an overlay while viewing page content. The Dissenter website also features a news ticker on which users can follow current events.
Shortly after its launch, fans of British far-right activist Tommy Robinson began using Dissenter to comment on a BBC News article about Robinson's ban from social media websites following the removal of Mohammed's Koran, by Robinson and Peter McLoughlin, from Amazon. After Rotten Tomatoes announced that it would be removing its comment section on their review page for the Captain Marvel film due to concerns that trolls had planned to flood it with negative reviews, users of Dissenter used the extension to comment about the movie and about Rotten Tomatoes' decision to remove comments.
In a 20-minute Periscope video accompanying the launch, Andrew Torba said that he expected Dissenter to be banned from extension stores and mentioned that Gab might build its own web browser in the future that has Dissenter built-in. In April 2019, Mozilla removed the Dissenter extension from the Firefox Add-ons website for violating the hate speech portion of Mozilla's acceptable use policy. In a statement to the Columbia Journalism Review, a Mozilla spokesperson said: "Mozilla does not endorse hate speech, and we do not permit our platforms to be used to promote such content". On April 11, Google removed the Dissenter extension from the Chrome Web Store. Later in April, the Gab team forked the Brave web browser in order to bundle Dissenter. Brave CEO Brendan Eich criticized the decision to fork Brave as unnecessary and "parasitic".
Following the extension's launch, Ana Valens of The Daily Dot described it as an "extension for the alt-right" to "mobilize against journalists, critics, and progressive websites". Saqib Shah of Engadget called Dissenter "a far-right comments section on every site" and Gab's "latest attempt at attracting fringe voices". Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times called Dissenter a "shadow layer" of the Internet.
Users and content
Users
The site has attracted far-right or alt-right users who have been banned or suspended from other services. Since its foundation in 2016, high-profile participants have included former Breitbart News writer and polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos; citizen journalist Tim Pool; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; former British National Party leader Nick Griffin; Australian neo-Nazis Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson and Australian MP George Christensen; Republican Party representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar; former Republican Party of Texas chairman Allen West; former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon; Dutch politician and Leader of the Party for Freedom Geert Wilders; and white supremacists Richard B. Spencer, Tila Tequila, Vox Day, and Christopher Cantwell. Far-right political parties and party candidates, including Britain First and UKIP candidates such as Mark Meechan and Carl Benjamin, have also been participants.
Following the Christchurch mosque shootings and a reduced tolerance on other social media for hate speech, several members of United Patriots Front, an Australian far-right extremist organization, urged their supporters to follow them on Gab after being banned from Twitter and Facebook. On January 24, 2021, the Republican Party of Texas made a post on its Twitter account asking their followers to join Gab. In March 2021, the Republican Party of Texas voted to delete their Gab account.
Former Gab users include white nationalist political candidate Paul Nehlen, who was removed from the site for doxing the man behind the "Ricky Vaughn" Twitter account; and hacker, internet troll, and former Daily Stormer writer Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, who was banned for calling for genocide against Jews and endorsing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Auernheimer's activity prompted threats from Gab's then webhost Asia Registry to remove the comments or they would refuse to host the site. Christopher Cantwell, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi activist who "once drove a significant amount of interaction on the small site", was banned from the site in March 2019 after using the site to advocate in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch shootings that future mass killers should target and murder left-wing activists, instead of "random people in mosques and synagogues", in order to effectively silence left-wing activism.
Torba has described the average Gab user as "a Conservative Christian with a family and interests in hunting, fishing, cars, camping, news, politics, rural living, homeschooling, privacy, free speech, cryptocurrency, guns, and cooking". Torba stated in 2016 that Gab is "not designed specifically for conservatives" and has stated that "we welcome everyone and always will" and "We want everyone to feel safe on Gab, but we're not going to police what is hate speech and what isn't", although he admitted that Gab was attracting "a lot of people on the right because they are being censored, so it's understandable they are migrating over". In November 2016, Torba told The Washington Post that "I didn't set out to build a 'conservative social network' by any means... but I felt that it was time for a conservative leader to step up and to provide a forum where anybody can come and speak freely without fear of censorship". In filings made with the SEC in March 2018, Gab stated that its target market is "conservative, libertarian, nationalists, and populist internet users around the world" "who are seeking alternative news media platforms like Breitbart.com, DrudgeReport.com, Infowars.com". In an interview with Vice News in August 2019, Torba acknowledged that Gab was right-leaning, saying that "any online community that is explicitly pro-free speech will inevitably become right-leaning" and claimed that "this is because in the free market of ideas right-leaning ideas win".
In early 2018, a cross-university group released a research study on posts made to the site. According to that study, the site hosted a high volume of racism and hate speech, and primarily "attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls". The study listed Carl Benjamin, Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, and Paul Joseph Watson as some of the more popular users of the site. The authors also performed an automated search using Hatebase and found "hate words" in 5.4% of Gab posts, which they stated was 2.4 times higher than their occurrence on Twitter but less than half that found on /pol/, a political discussion board on 4chan. The authors of the study stated in their conclusion that while anyone can join Gab, the site is aligned with the alt-right and its use of free speech rhetoric "merely functions as a shield for its alt-right users to hide behind".
A 2018 paper authored by behavioral researchers that was presented at the 2018 SBP-BRiMS collected and analyzed "several million Gab messages" posted on the Gab website from the platform's launch in August 2016 to February 2018. The researchers then divided the posts into 33 groups, including topics such as pop culture. The researchers found that the largest category of posts on Gab was politics, comprising 56% of all posts collected and analyzed. The researchers also found that the largest subcategory within politics was "Ideology, religion and race", comprising 10.23% of all posts. According to paper co-author William D. Adler, a political science professor at Northeastern Illinois University, the subcategory "Ideology, religion, and race" "includes topics such as changing racial demographics, threats to Christianity, and concerns about Jewish influence", adding "It's a lot of what you might think of as white nationalism". Other subcategories within politics included conversations about "Trump, Clinton and conspiracies", comprising 5.10% of all posts, and "Globalism", a dog whistle for antisemitic conspiracy theories, comprising 1.95% of all posts. The researchers also linked Gab's growth to the far-right. According to Alder, Gab's free speech rhetoric is "part of the game here, of course", adding that "They don't want to say [what they're really doing] out loud, so they say 'free speech, free speech.'" Based on the results of the paper, Noah Berlatsky of The Forward noted "In contrast, there is little discussion of left topics that might be considered to push the edges of acceptable discourse. There are no Stalinist apologia, for example, nor calls for violent Communist revolution. More, there is not an equivalent on the left for Gab, or for the other right wing social media networks like WrongThink (modeled on Facebook) or GoyFundMe (a right wing Kickstarter, which even has an implicitly anti-Semitic name.) Extremist social media bubbles are not a both sides problem; they are a right-wing phenomenon".
A report issued by the ADL and the Network Contagion Research Institute on March 12, 2019, found that when Twitter bans "extremist voices", Gab's user base grows. Researchers from Northeastern Illinois University publishing in First Monday wrote in August 2019 that many of the sites shared by Gab's users "are associated with state-sponsored propaganda from foreign governments". Researchers publishing in e-Extreme wrote in October 2020 that many of Gab's users are Trump supporters who feel they are being censored on mainstream platforms, and "this sense of persecution is the reason why many join the platform, while an overarching shared sense of victimhood – whether as members of a 'white race', free-speech absolutists, or Trump supporters – unites the broader community". In 2021, a study published by an international team of researchers titled "Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks". found that being banned on Twitter or Reddit led those users who were banned to join alternative platforms such as Gab or Parler, which have more lax content moderation. The study also found that while users who move to these platforms have their audience potentially reduced, the users exhibit increased activity and toxicity than they did previously. Also in 2021, researchers found that Gab users are "united by a shared sense of techno-social persecution at the hands of 'Big Tech', a commitment to the ultra-libertarian values of the platform, and in many cases, a material investment in Gab as an Alt-Tech project."
In June 2021, the Lowy Institute noted of Gab's userbase that "Regardless of which narrative a user in Gab's far-right community ascribes to, a shared sense of techno-social persecution is what draws them in and unites them. These users feel safe in the knowledge that they can "speak freely" on the platform, with little fear of being banned or even critiqued, regardless of how extreme their views are".
On October 11, 2021, researcher Sefa Ozalp published a report for the ADL's Center on Extremism (COE) titled "For Twitter Users, Gab's Toxic Content is Just a Click Away", which analyzed how many links to Gab's website were shared on Twitter between June 7, 2021, and August 22, 2021. The report found that, during this time period, more than 112,000 tweets were posted that linked to Gab's website (shared by more than 32,700 users) with a potential reach of more than 254 million views. The report also found that the fifty most shared links to Gab on Twitter "were rife with conspiratorial content and misinformation, some promoted by Gab itself via its verified Twitter account". Out of these fifty most shared links, sixteen "promoted misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19" and twenty-one "contained conspiratorial content by Japanese-language accounts", including false claims about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and QAnon. Ozalp said that the ADL was not advocating for Twitter to completely ban Gab or links to Gab from its platform, instead advocating in favor of Twitter more effectively enforcing its current policies against misinformation and hate speech. Ozalp also said of Twitter that "Even if they are not acting like a knowing or willing contributor to anti-vax or anti-Semitism stuff, they are still playing a part in [the] dissemination of these conspiracy theories or hate, probably without wanting to do so". Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby responded to the report by claiming that Twitter takes action against links to third-party websites that "would otherwise violate our policies if their content were posted directly on Twitter", including COVID-19 misinformation. Busby also said that "As ADL's report acknowledges, we continue to improve our approach to mis- and disinformation". Later on October 11, Torba criticized the ADL's report in a blog post, claiming that it was created in an attempt to "pressure Twitter to censor us". He also accused the organization of being an "anti-Christ, Anti-American, and Anti-White hate organization". In a statement, the ADL said that Torba's response "is consistent with other statements from Gab" and that they "speak for themselves". According to Ozalp, the report is part of a "longer running research series" by the ADL that will include more studies on other social media platforms.
In December 2021, researchers at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences found that Gab users who shared similar moral values and beliefs with members of their immediate groups were more vulnerable to radicalization, including a higher likelihood of dissemination of hate speech and the use of language intended to dehumanize or threaten violence against users outside of their immediate groups.
Donald Trump
In early February 2021, multiple media outlets falsely reported that former-President Trump had joined Gab under the handle @realdonaldtrump. The Independent speculated "that confusion arose from the presence of a blue check mark indicating the account was verified" and Vice News speculated that the bio of the account, which read "45th President of the United States of America. Uncensored posts from the @realDonaldTrump Feed", had also caused confusion.
The Gab post that was mistaken to be from Trump was actually from Torba and featured a copy of a genuine letter sent by Trump's lawyers to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who had called on Trump to testify at his second impeachment hearing. Thousands of users on Gab were also led to believe after the post was made that Trump had joined the platform under the handle. Torba responded to the false reports in a blog post, saying that "@realdonaldtrump is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS' tweets and statements that we've run for years. We've always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it". He also criticized the media outlets that falsely reported that Trump had joined the platform. Also in response to the false reports, the @realdonaldtrump Gab account made a post that was pinned saying that the account is reserved for Trump and urged users of Gab to send messages to Trump asking him to join the platform.
In March 2021, Forbes reported that representatives of former Senior Advisor Jared Kushner in January had asked for equity in Gab in exchange for Kushner's father-in-law Trump joining the platform. Torba declined the offer, saying "No, I'm not entertaining that".
In a June 2021 interview with far-right conspiracy theory website TruNews, Torba claimed that Kushner wanted Gab to remove antisemitic content and users from its platform before Trump could join, saying that "He called them Jew-haters, I called them Jew criticizers" and that "It's a free-speech platform, so as long as you're not saying anything illegal, as long as you're not making threats of violence, you're allowed to speak your mind and have an opinion about things, and I was not going to compromise on that position". No independent confirmation has been made that such a negotiation took place.
COVID-19 vaccine avoidance and disinformation
In late July 2021, Torba claimed in a Gab post that he was "getting flooded" with text messages from members of the U.S. military who claimed that they would be court-martialed if they refused a COVID-19 vaccine. The post amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Torba also posted documents on Gab's news site that contain misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine and claimed in an email in response to The New York Times that "I'm telling the truth" and "Your Facebook-funded 'fact checkers' like Graphika are wrong and are the people peddling disinformation here". Torba also posted a conversation he had with the Times reporter, saying "I am sharing this all with you now to let you know how these wicked people operate and to shine a light on their lies, deception, and anti-Christian attacks. They aren't just attacking me, they are attacking any and all dissent and opposition to their libido dominandi (lust for power)".
In August 2021, Alex Kaplan of Media Matters for America noted that Torba "is trying to use his platform to sabotage coronavirus vaccination efforts".
In October 2021, John Gallagher of LGBTQ Nation wrote that "A visitor to Gab will find misinformation about COVID, calls to arrest NIH head Dr. Anthony Fauci, and lies about the 2020 presidential election. One post, liked by more than 4,000 people, shows a gloating Trump under the line, 'Show me a pic of pregnant Michelle Obama, and I'll concede the 2020 election.'"
Userbase estimates
In November 2021, when asked by The Washington Post about Gab's Brazilian user base, Torba responded in an email on November 8, saying "Ya my comment is 'God bless Jair Bolsonaro and Jesus Christ is King.' No further comment."
, Gab has 4million registered users. According to Micah Lee writing for The Intercept, the "vast majority" of registered Gab accounts are inactive, and the number of active users on the site is closer to 100,000. In 2021, Torba claimed that Gab has 15 million unique monthly visitors. As of August 2021, Torba has more than 3 million followers on Gab, with all Gab users following him by default.
Antisemitic content
Rita Katz, a researcher and analyst of terrorism and extremism, wrote in Politico Magazine in October 2018 that Robert Bowers' extreme antisemitic postings were "anything but an anomaly" on the website, and, "[they highlight] concerns about its growing facilitation of white nationalism and other far-right movements". She found that Gab user profiles often contained Nazi symbolism, and Stormfront users had praised the site as a place to post antisemitic content. Katz found that many Gab users were celebrating immediately after Bowers' massacre against the Tree of Life synagogue, and wrote that far-right communities' rise to popularity on Gab is "remarkably similar" to the rise of ISIS on social media. In November 2018, Twitter user Jason Baumgartner, who owns a website dedicated to detecting hate speech on social media, found that using the search term "oven" on Gab brought up the terms "Jews", "Holocaust", and "Hitler" the most among thousands of analyzed comments.
Joshua Fisher-Birch of the Counter Extremism Project said in 2019: "Gab has always been attractive to fascist and neo-Nazi groups that advocate violence". The same month, non-profit left-wing media collective Unicorn Riot discovered that individual Gab users led by alt-right figure Brittany Pettibone organized on the video game chat and VoIP platform Discord and that some of the discussions centered on antisemitism and achieving "ethno-nationalism". The Jewish Chronicle reported in January 2019 that they had found material on the site accusing Jews of responsibility for the September 11 attacks. After setting up a fake account on Gab, the newspaper's journalist Ben Weich was quickly "presented with a steady stream of Holocaust denial, antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories – as well as those venerating Adolf Hitler". Posts he discovered included at least one user who used a swastika as their profile picture and stated: "The parasitic Jews will fully deserve the genocide that's coming upon them" and "They do not deserve mercy, expulsion will never fix a rat problem, extermination does".
In addition to allowing Holocaust denial and other forms of antisemitism, Gab has been used as a recruitment tool by several neo-Nazi and alt-right groups, including Identity Evropa, Patriot Front, and the Atomwaffen Division, a terrorist organization tied to a number of murders.
Cultural Marxism, a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory, is a popular topic on Gab.
By Gab
Gab itself has engaged in antisemitic commentary. Torba has repeatedly praised Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
On August 9, 2018, in response to a post from Jewish political activist Brian Krassenstein calling for the shutdown of the site, Gab's Twitter account responded with a post suggesting that it is unsurprising for a person with a Jewish last name to oppose "free speech", followed by a tweet from the platform calling for "open borders for Israel", a quote from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and posted another tweet the same hour with a citation to a Bible verse (Revelation 3:9) that referred to Jewish non-believers of Jesus as members of the "synagogue of Satan". The company's Twitter account also posted a tweet on August 9 alluding to the antisemitic trope of Jewish global control, saying "At some point you have to ask yourself: just who is pushing for the censorship?". On October 31, 2018, The Washington Post pointed to two messages on Gab's Twitter account and wrote that they "raise questions about whether they cross the line into impropriety". One captioned a photo of two men, one with Jewish sidelocks, with "These two guys show up at your front door. Who do you let in and who do you call the cops on?" before following it up with "I mean I'm calling the cops on both and getting my shotgun ready, just saying", and another argued for opposition to immigration by saying: "Let a bunch of Somalians migrate to your neighborhood and see if you change your mind". Torba initially questioned the authenticity of the posts, suggesting they might be doctored images, later saying the posts were "clearly satire/comedy... to get people discussing the importance of free expression for satire, comedy, political discourse, and legitimate criticism", and then later saying they were "a few edgy tweets posted by interns". The tweets were later deleted.
On January 14, 2021, Molly Boigon from The Forward noted that Gab's Twitter account had recently posted multiple tweets about Senior Adviser Jared Kushner's supposed influence on then-President Trump, which she described as a nod to the antisemitic trope about global Jewish puppet masters. Gab's Twitter account had also recently posted a tweet questioning the legitimacy of antisemitism falling under hate speech. In February 2021, Gab posted on their Twitter account that going forward, they would only respond to press inquiries from "Christian media compan[ies]", describing other publications as "pagan propogandists". In March 2021, Ali Breland reported in Mother Jones on private messages leaked in that month's data breach, which showed Torba welcoming Iranian-American alt-right personality Roosh V and praising another Gab user, the antisemitic writer E. Michael Jones. Oren Segal of the ADL said that the messages seemed "to show that Torba has a direct appreciation for individuals that promote antisemitism and hate". In June 2021, Torba criticized video hosting platform Rumble for changing its terms of service to prohibit antisemitic hate speech and questioned why the platform did not also prohibit "Anti-White hatred". Also in June 2021, Tom McKay from Gizmodo wrote that "Torba is perhaps best known for furious diatribes in which he characterizes claims that he or his shitty site is racist or anti-Semitic as left-wing media smears, despite bounteous evidence suggesting that is exactly what they are".
On October 13, 2021, Torba used Gab's Twitter account to praise E. Michael Jones, an antisemitic Catholic writer, calling him a "brilliant and faithful Christian man" who will be "one of the most respected thinkers of our time" when "we win." Jones has claimed that Jews are dedicated to attacking the Catholic Church and western civilization.
On October 17, 2021, Torba used Gab's Twitter account to tweet a screenshot of a post from a Gab user named "Kitler". The post states that "if you're a White person living in America today and you don't know what happened to the kulaks in russia [sic] 100 years ago, you should look it up. Something very similar is happening to you right now, and the same group of people is behind it." The Gab post alludes to the belief that Jews were responsible for the 1917 Russian Revolution and communism while also implying that Jews were responsible for the subsequent efforts by the Bolsheviks to seize land from kulaks (wealthy farmers) and deport kulaks to the remote regions of the Soviet Union. One user replied to Gab's tweet with a screenshot of a page from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
On October 19, 2021, Torba used the Gab Twitter account to post a series of tweets which The Daily Dot characterized as a "wildly antisemitic tirade" with "several antisemitic canards related to Judeo–Bolshevism". Torba also promoted the creation of a "parallel Christian society." After receiving criticism for these remarks, Torba responded by saying that "Sadly many Christians today are so afraid of being called a silly meaningless name by the world (bigot, antisemite, homophobe) that they refuse to even remotely share or discuss the Gospel in their daily lives, let alone live it" and that "You reveal your anti-Christian hatred when you refer to Biblical Truth as 'antisemitism.'" Shortly after making these comments, Torba shared a comic from far-right illustrator StoneToss, which promotes the antisemitic myth that Jews were responsible for crucifying Jesus. Torba also retweeted a meme claming that the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, instructs Jews to hate Christians. Shortly after posting these tweets, Torba deactivated Gab's Twitter account. Torba has deactivated the account multiple times in the past, which some researchers have said is a strategy to avoid being suspended from Twitter. Gab's Twitter account was reactivated around late November 2021. The ADL "found dozens of examples of antisemitic tweets in the replies to Gab's tweets from" October. "These replies promoted various tropes about Jews, including that Jews are 'degenerate' and the 'synagogue of Satan.'" The ADL also criticized Twitter for continuing "to allow content that violates its own policies via links to Gab's website, where harmful disinformation and offensive content run rampant."
According to the ADL, "Throughout October and early November 2021, Torba used his own platform, Gab, which has considerably fewer content guardrails and restrictions than mainstream sites, to disseminate a plethora of antisemitic content. These posts often include vague references to "them" or "the enemy" and are framed by Torba's Christian faith." On November 2, 2021, Torba posted on Gab that "Zionists" created the Federal Reserve for the "subversion of American Christianity." One user responded by claiming that non-Jews became "slaves of the [Jewish] tribe" due to a plot orchestrated by the Jewish Rothschild family. On November 4, 2021, Torba reposted Gab user Jacob Wohl's "suggestion" that all Jews should decorate their home with Christmas decorations during Christmas to assimilate into America's Christian heritage. One user responded by suggested that Jews control the Federal Reserve and that Jewish banker Jacob Schiff funded and orchestrated the Russian Revolution, both referencing antisemitic tropes.
In January 2022, Mira Fox from The Forward noted that Gab "has weaponized antisemitism and Christian extremism to foment insurrection". Fox also noted that "Torba himself has authored numerous articles demonizing Jews for a variety of ills, including a piece on the Ukrainian Holodomor famine that opens by wondering, speciously, why it is not considered a tragedy at the level of the Holocaust, and ends by implying the Holodomor was a Jewish attempt to wipe out Ukrainian Christians – and, in a pointed aside, noting that Biden's cabinet also includes many Jews."
Violence and terrorism policy
Gab's official policy states that the company has a "zero-tolerance policy towards threats of violence and use of our platform for criminal purposes".
Terrorism researcher and Queen's University in Kingston, professor Amarnath Amarasingam has said that Gab's position as neither extremely mainstream nor obscure service has allowed extremists to permeate the website and access an audience they would not be able to have on a more popular service, where they would be more likely to be banned.
Gab has denied that terror groups flourish on the website, saying in a statement to Motherboard in July 2019: "We don't want them, we strongly discourage them from joining and we ban them when they cross the line, as they often do". However, Ben Makuch of Motherboard wrote that neo-Nazi terrorist groups have "enjoyed months-long, unfettered stints posting their content on Gab to a significant audience". In addition to calls for terrorist attacks, mass killings against minorities, offline armed training recruitments and white supremacist propaganda accumulated on Gab, Makuch pointed to one Gab post, from a user who is a member of an multinational militant network on Gab connected to the Atomwaffen Division, that had explicitly called for its followers to attack electric grids. Other content posted by the network included explicit calls for sympathizers to join local neo-Nazi organizations and commit violence against Muslim and Jewish communities. In June 2019, two British men were arrested on terror offences for posting propaganda on Gab calling for their followers to assassinate Prince Harry.
Moderation policy
Gab claims that its platform does not restrict content unless the content is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Restrictions on content on Gab include illegal activity, credible threats of violence, promotion of terrorism, obscenity, pornography, spamming, selling weapons or drugs, child exploitation, impersonation, and doxing.
In January 2021, Jazmin Goodwin of CNN described Gab's moderation as "lax" and that this "approach on content has made way for a slew of QAnon conspiracy theories, misinformation and anti-Semitic commentary on the platform, among lots of vile hatred and racist posts – much of wouldn't be allowed on today's well-known social apps". In October 2021, Cristiano Lima of The Washington Post described Gab's moderation as "laissez-faire".
In a 2022 email, Torba said that "We tolerate 'offensive' but legal speech" and that "We believe that a moderation policy which adheres to the First Amendment, thereby permitting offensive content to rise to the surface, is a valuable and necessary utility to society."
Hosting and termination of services by web services providers
On December 14, 2016, Apple Inc. declined Gab's submission of its app to the Apple App Store, citing pornographic content as the reason. Also on December 14, Twitter cut off Gab's access to the Twitter API after Gab introduced a feature to its social network that allowed users to share their Gab posts directly to Twitter. In response, Torba said in a December 15 Periscope livestream that "This is targeted, and we believe that we're being singled out" and that "This is the nonsense from Silicon Valley. This is the monopoly and level of control that they have". On January 21, 2017, a revised version of the app that blocked pornography by default was also rejected due to "objectionable content" including "references to religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other targeted groups that could be offensive to many users". In response, Torba accused Apple of "double standards and extreme scrutiny" "while allowing Big Social apps to display the same and arguably worse content in their own apps". Gab launched its Android app for the Google Play Store in May 2017. Later that year, on August 17, Google removed Gab's app from the Play Store for violating its policy against hate speech, stating that the app did not "demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people". On September 14, 2017, Gab filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, but dropped the suit on October 22, 2017, in favor of lobbying Congress to take action against "monopolized tech giants". In early October 2018, Gab's Stripe account was suspended due to adult content on Gab. On October 3, Gab tweeted in response: "We've had this content and a NSFW setting for two years with no issues from them until now".
On October 27, 2018, the day of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium terminated their relationship with Gab, and PayPal released a statement that it had done so based on its review of accounts that may engage in the "perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance". Later on the same day, Gab announced on Twitter that Joyent, Gab's hosting provider, would terminate their service on October 29 at 9:00 am ET. Gab also said on Twitter that they expected their site to be down for weeks. Stripe and Backblaze also terminated their services with Gab after the shooting. On October 29, Gab claimed in a tweet that they "took the site down early on purpose last night because we knew the media would take the bait and have stories on it for this morning". After the site was taken down, Gab's homepage was changed to a message saying it was down due to being "under attack" and being "systematically no-platformed", adding that Gab would be inaccessible for a "period of time".
Gab returned online on November 4, 2018, after Epik agreed to register the domain, and Sibyl Systems Ltd. began to provide webhosting. Epik is an American company that provides domain registration and other web services, and is known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Sibyl Systems was founded on October 22, 2018, days before the shooting that resulted in Gab's termination from their previous webhost, and according to the SPLC, was possibly based in Norway or England. Sibyl was later acquired by Epik in the second quarter of 2019.
In August 2019, Amazon Web Services ceased serving Gab's fundraising site due to Gab violating Amazon's policy on hateful content. In response, Torba said he welcomed Amazon's decision, claiming that media coverage of the decision had only brought more attention to Gab and resulted in investment offers.
, Gab was still using Epik as a domain registrar. Instead of hosting its service in the cloud, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gab had been renting hardware in an undisclosed data center. Gab was also using services from Cloudflare.
Reception
Gab has been described as "Twitter for racists" by Salon, a "hate-filled echo chamber of racism and conspiracy theories" by The Guardian, an "online cesspool of anti-Semitism" by Politico Magazine, a "safe haven for banned Twitter trolls, Gamergaters, Pizzagaters and high-profile white nationalists" by Mic, "the far-right's favorite social network" by The Verge and "the Make America Great Again of social sites" by The New York Times. Wired criticized Gab for not explicitly prohibiting hate speech. Scholars have described Gab as "hateful", and named Gab along with 4chan and 8chan as directly radicalizing men who went on to commit violent acts. The SPLC characterized Gab as a site where its users are "radicalized aggressively". Heidi Beirich, a director of the center, stated that the site is "the number one place nowadays where white supremacists gather". The ADL called Gab a "fringe online community" and "a bastion of hatred and bigotry".
Harrison Kaminsky of Digital Trends questioned the site's longevity in September 2016, writing: "While the site's initial popularity is impressive, the potential is most likely short-lived, following the life cycle of social networks like Ello or Peach, which faded over time". Maya Kosoff of Vanity Fair wrote in September 2016: "the point of Gab may not be to grow to be a Twitter competitor... it's providing a 'safe space' for people who want to express themselves without consequence". Amanda Hess, a critic at The New York Times, opined in November 2016 that the site is: "a throwback to the freewheeling norms of the old internet, before Twitter started cracking down on harassment and Reddit cleaned out its darkest corners. And since its debut in August, it has emerged as a digital safe space for the far right, where white nationalists, conspiracy-theorist YouTubers, and minivan majority moms can gather without liberal interference". BBC News wrote in December 2016 that Gab has "become the go-to social network for an extreme group of activists who have been chucked off of Twitter". and that "Its top hashtags list is a conservative dream. It's peppered with trends like #Trump, #MAGA ("Make America Great Again" - Trump's campaign slogan) along with far-right obsessions like Dump Star Wars and the Pizzagate conspiracy hoax".
Jeremy Carl of National Review opined in August 2017: "Contrast the free hand given to left-wing offensive speech to the strict controls put on right-wing speech. As just one of many examples, Gab— a free-speech social network that has grown rapidly to almost a quarter million users since its public launch just a few months ago, was just yesterday kicked off the Android app store (it has already been repeatedly denied at Apple) for "hate speech". To be clear, not all the voices on Gab are mellifluous, they have accepted a number of folks, often from the far right, who have been banned from other social networks (though this is a small portion of Gab's user base)" and "If Google and Apple are banning Gab, mainstream conservatives are crazy to think they are safe". Cheryl K. Chumley of The Washington Times opined in October 2018: "with help from like-minded free thinkers, Gab can beat the leftists running these Internet sites at their own game — and in so doing, become the model for "what could one day be" for the conservative world on social media". Joe Setyon reviewed the social network for Reason in October 2018, writing: "in fighting the alleged left-leaning political bias of the legacy social media platforms, Gab ran into the opposite problem". He suggested that the website was only for those who "subscribe to a certain radical subset of right-wing beliefs or are interested in seeing the feeds of those who do". Nicholas Thompson of Wired questioned the sincerity of the site's claim to be a defender for "free speech" in October 2018, writing: "To many people, Torba's First Amendment absolutism is just a talking point. The site exists less to defend the ideals of Benjamin Franklin than those of Christopher Cantwell. It chose as its logo a creature that looks rather like Pepe, the alt-right attack frog. It courted people on the far right, and it became a haven for them. Free speech can be less a principle than a smokescreen". Thompson noted that Robert Bowers likely expected affirmation from his last message that indicated his intent to carry out the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, leading Thompson to the conclusion: "if it's a platform where someone can expect affirmation for threatening slaughter, then why should anyone help it exist?"
Kelly Weill of The Daily Beast wrote in January 2019: "Gab has always been a bad website. Nothing loads, the search function is a joke, and its member rolls are riddled with porn bots. And that's even without the neo-Nazis posting racist memes and goading each other to murder". In February 2020, Tanya Basu of MIT Technology Review characterized Gab as being frequented by "fringe far-right hate groups". In January 2021, Travis M. Andrews of The Washington Post said that Gab "has welcomed extremist right-wing figures and believers of QAnon, the loose collection of conspiracy theories that touch on everything from politics to COVID-19". In August 2021, Jacob Silverman of The New Republic wrote that Torba is "Trying to Build a White, Christian, Secessionist Tech Industry" and that Torba "represents the new, even more right-wing alternative to Silicon Valley". In September 2021, Whitney Kimball of Gizmodo wrote that Gab is "currently fashioning itself as an anti-mask LinkedIn with a job board and guidelines for getting vaccine exemptions". In December 2021, David Gilbert of Vice News called Gab "a Christian-focused social network".
In February 2022, the Associated Press wrote that "Offensive content is easy to find on Gab. A search turns up user names featuring racial epithets, as well as antisemitic screeds, neo-Nazi fantasies and homophobic rants."
Michael Edison Hayden, an open-source intelligence analyst and investigative reporter on extremism and disinformation, opined in a Gizmodo interview in October 2018: "Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, will get angry when people... call his site a white nationalist website or an alt-right website but anyone who spends time on it knows that it's a haven for extremists.... Violent white supremacist groups like Patriot Front and Atomwaffen Division organize out in the open on Gab. Users frequently call for the murder of women, Jews and other minorities on Gab, and are rewarded with likes and reposts.... Dylann Roof is treated as a hero by many Gab users". Hayden noted that Gab was "rife with" content similar to that posted by Robert Bowers', with many users posing in his support using the hashtag #HeroRobertBowers. In August 2019, director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, Matthew Feldman, said of Gab's stance on free speech that "'free speech' in Gab's context has too often meant 'free to engage in hate speech and incitement' with minimal curation by site moderators or, it seems, owners". In March 2021, Nathalie Van Raemdonck, a doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels who researches platform architecture, said of Gab's launch that "It's not necessarily that Gab rewarded the best content, or punished the worst, but does it reward what the group thinks" and that "Because the people on the platform were already terrible, they needed engaging conversations to stimulate each other, so it became a circlejerk to the bottom". Van Raemdonck also noted of Gab that "The fact that they portrayed themselves as a free-speech platform attracts a certain crowd".
Milo Yiannopoulos, an active user of Gab who joined after being deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter, complained in September 2019 about the low number of users on Gab, Parler, and Telegram. He wrote on Telegram that, after losing his large fanbases on Facebook and Twitter, he was having difficulty sustaining his career due to the relatively small number of users on the alternative social networks. He described Gab as "relentlessly, exhaustingly hostile and jam packed full of teen racists who totally dictate the tone and discussion".
In March 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott condemned Gab, stating "anti-Semitic platforms like Gab have no place in Texas".
In October 2021, pro-Trump Republican pundit Bill Mitchell ran a poll on Gab asking if people would attend a Christian church where the pastor uses the word "nigger" in their sermons. More than 2,000 voted and nearly two-thirds answered "Yes", prompting Mitchell to say on Gab that "As you can see from this poll so far, there are A LOT of racists on Gab" and that "It's not just a small noisy group." He also complained of having to block "over 100 accounts a day.", claimed that big accounts on Gab are "flatlining because of all the hate speech", and encouraged people to join Gettr, a conservative social media platform. Mitchell called on Torba to ban racist users on Gab "or Gab will never be taken seriously by the general public." In response, Torba said "Go over to dopey Jason Miller's Chinese billionaire-funded AI-censored hugbox for Israel-first RINO losers if you want a safe space to shout into the wind of bot accounts and Chinese nationals posing as Americans that make up the community over there". Mitchell later announced that he would leave Gab before changing his mind, saying "I think I'll just stay on Gab forever", "But from here on out, no more Mr. Nice Guy."
Gab is one of a number of alternative social network platforms, including Minds, MeWe, Parler, and BitChute, that are popular with people banned from mainstream networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram. Deen Freelon and colleagues writing in Science characterized Gab as among alt-tech sites that are "dedicated to right-wing communities", and listed the site along with 4chan, 8chan, BitChute, and Parler. They noted there are also more ideologically neutral alt-tech platforms, such as Discord and Telegram. Joe Mulhall of the UK anti-racism group Hope Not Hate has categorized Gab among the "bespoke platforms" for the far-right, which he defines as platforms which were created by people who themselves have "far-right leanings". He distinguishes these from "co-opted platforms" such as DLive and Telegram, which were adopted by the far-right due to minimal moderation but not specifically created for their use.
Company
Gab was founded by CEO Andrew Torba and CTO Ekrem Büyükkaya and the company was incorporated on September 9, 2016.
Torba, who described himself in 2016 as a lifelong "conservative Republican Christian", was previously removed from the Y Combinator alumni network in 2016 because of harassment concerns, starting when he used "build the wall" on Twitter alongside a screenshot of a post by a Latino startup founder that read: "being a black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary". He also made a post on Facebook that said "All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it" and "I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks". Until 2016, Torba was registered as a Democrat, although he voted Republican in presidential elections. Torba has also described himself as a "cultural libertarian", a classical liberal, and an "American nationalist patriot". As of 2021, Torba says that he lives in a "forest in Pennsylvania", where he is plotting a "Silent Christian Secession". As of 2021, Torba has a policy of "not communicating with non-Christian and/or communist journos".
Utsav Sanduja later joined Gab as COO. Sanduja left the company in June 2018. In an interview with ABC News, Sanduja said that his wife, who works at a synagogue, had been doxed and received death threats while he worked at Gab: "apparently some of her personal information was found out and my family and I went through quite a lot of abuse, a systemic targeting from really vicious people, and honestly it just took a toll on us mentally". On October 28, Büyükkaya announced his resignation from Gab the day after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, citing "attacks from the American press" that "ha[d] taken a toll on [him] personally". In November 2020, former Facebook software engineer Fosco Marotto joined Gab as CTO.
In December 2016, Gab was headquartered in Austin, Texas. In September 2017, Gab moved its headquarters to Pennsylvania. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, as late as March 2018, stated that Torba operated Gab out of a WeWork coworking space in Philadelphia. A WeWork spokesperson said that Torba had become a member under his own name, not Gab's, and that his time there had been brief. In late October 2018, a Gab spokesperson told The Philadelphia Inquirer'' that Gab was no longer based in Philadelphia. As of January 2019, Gab is headquartered in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.
Revenue
Gab earns revenue through premium subscriptions, donations, and affiliate partnerships. Gab has been refused service by several payment processors including PayPal and Stripe, causing the site to at various times rely on payments by postal mail, cryptocurrency, and "obscure" payment processors to receive payment for its subscription service. From 2017 to 2018, Gab raised $2 million from the sale of speculative securities through the crowdfunding platform StartEngine. Gab sought approval from the SEC for a Regulation A exempt offering of $10 million in 2017, but it remained pending until March 2019 when Gab withdrew the request. In a 2020 SEC filing, Gab said that "We may not be able to obtain adequate financing to continue our operations" and that Gab has yet "to earn a substantial profit or substantial operating revenue", putting into question the company's "business prospects".
2016–2018
Gab originally did not use advertising, describing itself as an "ad-free social network". The site began offering a subscription service for Gab named "GabPro" in mid March 2017. In November 2017, Gab launched a new tier of subscriptions called "GabPro Premium", which was targeted at content creators who wished to charge a subscription fee for their content and collect tips.
Gab lost more than $350,000 in the period from its foundation through June 30, 2018. The company relied on the online crowdfunding broker StartEngine starting in 2017. In July 2017, Gab started an investment project which met its goal of $1.07 million on August 19, 2017. In February 2018, Gab announced that it had raised $4.8 million and was planning a $10 million initial coin offering (ICO). From 2017 to 2018, Gab raised $2 million through StartEngine.
Gab reported in a December 2018 filing that removal from PayPal and Stripe following the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting had caused a 90% drop in its subscription revenue. Following its removal, the site relied on mail and cryptocurrency for subscription payment processing.
2019–present
Gab partnered with the "obscure" Second Amendment Processing for credit card payment processing in January 2019, but removed credit card payment options in March of the same year. This removal came after an SPLC investigation published in early March 2019 found that Thomas Michael Troyer, founder of Second Amendment Processing, had been convicted of financial crimes in 2007.
The SPLC reported in January 2019 that the company's Regulation A exempt offering of $10 million had been pending approval by the SEC since 2017. Two analysts contacted by the SPLC commented that this might suggest that "the SEC has concerns about allowing the sale to go forward". Heidi Beirich noted an unusual lack of communication records with the SEC regulators in Gab's financial filings, unlike those of similar companies. In a March 2019 SEC filing, Gab "abruptly" withdrew its request for stock sales, explaining that "[the company] has decided to seek other capital raising alternatives". Torba did not respond to SPLC inquiries regarding the withdrawal.
As of August 2019, purchasing the GabPro subscription gave users the ability to upload videos of larger file sizes, the option to be verified on Gab, and a free email address from Gab's email service. Gab had previously launched affiliate marketing with Virtual Private Network Service Providers and Gab had also previously launched its own merchandise.
In September 2019, Gab began showing "promoted posts" from affiliate partners. Users who purchase the GabPro subscription do not see the promoted posts.
On June 19, 2020, Torba claimed that him, his wife, and Gab had been "blacklisted" by Visa for "promoting hate speech". Gab was also deplatformed from PayPal.
In response to user growth on Gab during the 2020 presidential election in November, Torba claimed in an email to Gab users on November 11 that "Gab isn't growing because of 'celebrity' endorsements, sponsorships, or big paid advertising budgets, but rather from the most powerful form of advertising on the planet: word of mouth".
As of August 2021, Gab accepts donations. As of October 2021, Gab accepts donations in Bitcoin.
As of 2021, purchasing the GabPro subscription gave users "access to additional features such as the ability to apply for verification, schedule posts, get their own Gab TV channel and set posts to automatically delete after a specified period of time."
Design
In 2016, Gab's color theme was a minimalist combination of black text on white panels with pink hashtags and usernames. Pro users had a contrasted top bar in dark blue. The interface displayed messages in a Twitter-like vertical scroll timeline with an option to upvote or downvote each post. The site also aggregated popular posts and trending topic hashtags. As of 2017, users could sort comments and posts in a subject by time or score. Default biographies for new users displayed a randomly chosen quotation about the importance of free speech. Users also had the option to "mute" other users and terms. , Gab's user interface was similar to that of Twitter, having a dashboard in the middle of the page with trending content on the left and menus on the right. As of 2021, posts on Gab are limited to 3,000 characters.
In early 2017, the option to downvote posts was temporarily removed from Gab, with the company's then-COO Sanduja explaining that they were removed due to them being used to troll and to harass women, and also stated that: "there were a lot of social justice warriors and members of the far left coming into our site essentially trying to start a brouhaha". In July 2017, Gab implemented a system where people who downvoted others (through spamming) would have their accounts downvoted as well and their ability to leave downvotes would be revoked. As of 2019, Gab uses a scoring system, which allows users with more than 250 points to downvote posts, but users must "spend points" in order to do so.
In 2018, the default profile picture for new users to the site featured NPC Wojak, a meme popular on far-right websites.
A frog named "Gabby" was Gab's logo from 2016 to 2018. The logo has been compared to Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character used by the alt-right. Torba denied that the frog logo was a reference to Pepe and stated that the logo was inspired by Bible verses (Exodus 8:1–12 and Psalms 78:45) and various other traditional symbolic meanings. Sanduja said that the frog was meant to symbolize the "revenge against those who went against mainstream conservative voices on the internet". As of September 2018, the frog logo is no longer used.
See also
List of social networking websites
8chan
DLive
Frank (social network)
Minds
Parler
Voat
References
External links
Official source code repository
GAB AI INC Website Terms of Service April 10, 2020 (archived January 10, 2021)
Alt-right websites
Alt-tech
Antisemitism in the United States
American social networking websites
Internet properties established in 2016
Mastodon (software) instances
Microblogging services
Multilingual websites
Neo-Nazism in the United States
Online companies of the United States
Proprietary cross-platform software
Racism in the United States
Real-time web
Websites with far-right material
Delisted applications
Conspiracist media |
3884978 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGPDisk | PGPDisk | PGP Virtual Disk is a disk encryption system that allows one to create a virtual encrypted disk within a file.
Older versions for Windows NT were freeware (for example, bundled with PGP v6.0.2i; and with some of the CKT builds of PGP). These are still available for download, but no longer maintained. Today, PGP Virtual Disk is available as part of the PGP Desktop product family, running on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, and Mac OS X.
See also
Disk encryption software
Comparison of disk encryption software
United States v. Boucher – federal criminal case involving PGPDisk-protected data
Cryptographic software
Disk encryption |
38514481 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seavus | Seavus | Seavus is an international software development and consulting company based in Lund, Sweden. Seavus Group provides enterprise-wide business products to large organisations and government agencies. Seavus covers over 30 million mobile subscribers through its clients.
History
Seavus was founded in 1999 in Malmö, Sweden with the aim to provide clients with advanced business software products. It was founded by Igor Lestar and Gligor Dacevski.
In 2003, it released the first version of Seavus Project Viewer.
In 2004, the company opened its first office in the United States, expanding outside Europe to cover the markets in North and South America.
In 2009, it launched the first versions of Seavus Project Planner and Savus DropMind; the latter was rebranded in iMindQ in 2014.
In 2011 and 2012, the company was nominated by TM Forum for the "Solution Excellence Award".
In 2012, Seavus introduced Crystal Qube at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. In the same year, BestAppEver ranked Seavus' iOS games Yatzy Ultimate and Black Jack Ultimate third place for best dice game and best casino game, respectively.
In 2013 the latest solution on gaming platforms and payment methods, Seavus Guardians, was presented on the 12th European iGaming Congress&Expo (EiG) 2013 - the largest European gaming event in Barcelona. Further, in only one month, additional 6 more games were launched by the Seavus Gaming team.
In 2015, Seavus Gaming team launched Yatzi Ultimate for Android.
The same year Seavus continued its growth on the Scandinavian market through acquisition of OnTrax AB, a Stockholm-based IT Consultancy Company.
In 2016, the Seavus incubator launched its operation for accelerating visionary young startup companies.
The same year, iThink, the first technology academy for children in Macedonia started working as part of Seavus Education and Development Center
Also, in 2016, the first version of ScheduleReader is launched.
In 2017, Seavus DOOEL has been certified as a Cisco Select Certified Partner Partner in EUROPE EAST.
January 2017, Ontrax AB has changed its name to Seavus Stockholm AB.
In 2018, Seavus AB Ranked Among Top 501 Global Managed Service Providers by msp-501 Channel Futures.
In 2019, Seavus became Youth Employer of the year.
The same year, Seavus has been ranked among top 50 global managed service providers by Channel Futures.
In 2019, Seavus was awarded EMEA Premier Partner status by Cherwell.
Also, Seavus became Gold Solution Partnership.
Seavus Managed Services division won 2nd place on the Channel Futures European Partners 51 (EP 51) rankings.
In 2019 Seavus celebrated its 20 years Anniversary.
In 2020, Seavus is finalist for the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2020.
In 2021, Seavus became partners with Salesforce.
Operations
Seavus has 15 operating offices located in 8 countries - Sweden, the United States, North Macedonia, Belarus, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova, with continuous growth strategy.
Seavus serves a multinational client base that includes over 3,000 organisations. It is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has also partnerships with Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Serena Software, ABBYY, Atlassian, Salesforce.
Products and services
Seavus Group delivers BSS/OSS for Telcos, customer relationship management, customer experience management, Billing systems, enterprise software for Banks, Financial, Trading and Fin-Tech industry, Insurance, DWH & business intelligence, Application lifecycle management (ALM), Embedded programming and managed services.
Seavus is the producer of Crystal Qube — customer experience solution that transforms all customer data into business intelligence.
Seavus is now a globally authorized master distributor for the following software products:
Seavus Project Viewer — project management software that is designed to assist users (team members, team leads, project stakeholder and other project participant) to review their project assignments, print the project information and follow the overall project status. It reads .mpp file format.
iMindQ — mind mapping and brainstorming software application that supports users in creative idea capturing, memorization and thought process improvements, meeting management and management information overload, as well as task and project management through the use of concept maps, flowcharts and mind maps. The non-linear and logical approach in outlining ideas with mind maps assists in individual and group brainstorming sessions.
References
External links
Software companies of Sweden |
1926240 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext | Teletext | Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipped television sets. Teletext sends data in the broadcast signal, hidden in the invisible vertical blanking interval area at the top and bottom of the screen. The teletext decoder in the television buffers this information as a series of "pages", each given a number. The user can display chosen pages using their remote control.
In broad terms, it can be considered as Videotex, a system for the delivery of information to a user in a computer-like format, typically displayed on a television or a dumb terminal, but that designation is usually reserved for systems that provide bi-directional communication, such as Prestel or Minitel.
Teletext was created in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s by John Adams, Philips' Lead Designer for video display units. Public teletext information services were introduced by major broadcasters in the UK, starting with the BBC's Ceefax service in 1974. It offered a range of text-based information, typically including news, weather and TV schedules. Also, paged subtitle (or closed captioning) information was transmitted using the same system. Similar systems were subsequently introduced by other television broadcasters in the UK and mainland Europe in the following years. Meanwhile, the UK's General Post Office introduced the Prestel system using the same display standards but run over telephone lines using bi-directional modems rather than the send-only system used with televisions.
Teletext formed the basis for the World System Teletext standard (CCIR Teletext System B), an extended version of the original system. This standard saw widespread use across Europe starting in the 1980s, with almost all televisions sets including a decoder. Other standards were developed around the world, notably NABTS (CCIR Teletext System C) in the United States, Antiope (CCIR Teletext System A) in France and JTES (CCIR Teletext System D) in Japan, but these were never as popular as their European counterpart and most closed by the early 1990s. Most European teletext services continued to exist in one form or another until well into the 2000s when the expansion of the Internet precipitated a closure of some of them. However, many European television stations continue to provide teletext services and even make teletext content available via web and dedicated apps.
The recent availability of digital television has led to more advanced systems being provided that perform the same task, such as MHEG-5 in the UK, and Multimedia Home Platform.
History
Teletext is a means of sending text and simple geometric shapes to a properly equipped television screen by use of one of the "vertical blanking interval" lines that together form the dark band dividing pictures horizontally on the television screen. Transmitting and displaying subtitles was relatively easy. It requires limited bandwidth; at a rate of perhaps a few words per second. However, it was found that by combining even a slow data rate with a suitable memory, whole pages of information could be sent and stored on the TV for later recall.
In the early 1970s work was in progress in Britain to develop such a system. The goal was to provide UK rural homes with electronic hardware that could download pages of up-to-date news, reports, facts and figures targeting UK agriculture. The original idea was the brainchild of Philips (CAL) Laboratories in 1970.
In 1971, CAL engineer John Adams created a design and proposal for UK broadcasters. His configuration contained all the fundamental elements of classic teletext including pages of 24 rows with 40 characters each, page selection, sub-pages of information and vertical blanking interval data transmission. A major objective for Adams during the concept development stage was to make teletext affordable to the home user. In reality, there was no scope to make an economic teletext system with 1971 technology. However, as the low cost was essential to the project's long term success, this obstacle had to be overcome.
Meanwhile, the General Post Office (GPO), whose telecommunications division later became British Telecom, had been researching a similar concept since the late 1960s, known as Viewdata. Unlike Teledata, a one-way service carried in the existing TV signal, Viewdata was a two-way system using telephones. Since the Post Office owned the telephones, this was considered to be an excellent way to drive more customers to use the phones.
In 1972 the BBC demonstrated its system, now known as Ceefax ("seeing facts", the departmental stationery used the "Cx" logo), on various news shows. The Independent Television Authority (ITA) announced its own service in 1973, known as ORACLE (Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics). Not to be outdone, the GPO immediately announced a 1200/75 baud videotext service under the name Prestel (this system was based on teletext protocols, but telephone-based as mentioned before).
The TV-broadcast based systems were originally incompatible; Ceefax displayed pages of 24 lines with 32 characters each, while ORACLE offered pages of 22 lines with 40 characters each. In other ways the standards overlapped; for instance, both used 7-bit ASCII characters and other basic details. In 1974 all the services agreed on a standard for displaying the information. The display would be a simple grid of text, with some graphics characters for constructing simple graphics. The standard did not define the delivery system, so both Viewdata-like and Teledata-like services could at least share the TV-side hardware (which at that point in time was quite expensive).
Rollout in the United Kingdom
Following test transmissions in 1973–74, towards the end of 1974 the BBC news department put together an editorial team of nine, including and led by Editor Colin McIntyre, to develop a news and information service. Initially limited to 30 pages, the Ceefax service was later expanded to 100 pages and was launched formally in 1976. It was followed quickly by ORACLE and Prestel. Wireless World magazine ran a series of articles between November 1975 and June 1976 describing the design and construction of a teletext decoder using mainly TTL devices; however, development was limited until the first TV sets with built-in decoders started appearing in 1977.
The "Broadcast Teletext Specification" was published in September 1976 jointly by the IBA, the BBC and the British Radio Equipment Manufacturers' Association. The new standard also made the term "teletext" generic, describing any such system. The standard was internationalised as World System Teletext (WST) by CCIR.
By 1982 there were two million such sets, and by the mid-1980s they were available as an option for almost every European TV set, typically by means of a plug-in circuit board. It took another decade before the decoders became a standard feature on almost all sets with a screen size above 15 inches (Teletext is still usually only an option for smaller "portable" sets). From the mid-1980s both Ceefax and ORACLE were broadcasting several hundred pages on every channel, slowly changing them throughout the day.
In 1986 WST was formalised as an international standard as CCIR Teletext System B. It was also adopted in many other European countries.
Development in other countries
Besides the US and UK developments, a number of similar teletext services were developed in other countries, some of which attempted to address the limitations of the initial British-developed system, by adding extended character sets or improving graphic abilities. For example, state-owned RAI launched its teletext service, called Televideo, in 1984, with support for Latin character set. Mediaset, the main commercial broadcaster, launched its Mediavideo Teletext in 1997. These developments are covered by the different World System Teletext Levels.
In France, where the SECAM standard is used in television broadcasting, a teletext system was developed in the late 1970s under the name Antiope. It had a higher data rate and was capable of dynamic page sizes, allowing more sophisticated graphics. It was phased out in favour of World System Teletext in 1991.
In North America NABTS, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification, was developed to encoding NAPLPS teletext pages, as well as other types of digital data. NABTS was the standard used for both CBS's ExtraVision and NBC's very short-lived NBC Teletext services in the mid-1980s.
Japan developed its own JTES teletext system with support for Chinese, Katakana and Hiragana characters. Broadcasts started in 1983 by NHK.
In 1986 the four existing teletext systems were adopted into the international standard CCIR 653 (now ITU-R BT.653) as CCIR Teletext System A (Antiope), B (World System Teletext), C (NABTS) and D (JTES).
Decline
The World Wide Web began to take over some of the functions of teletext from the late 1990s and many broadcasters have ceased broadcast of Teletext — CNN in 2006 and the BBC in 2012. In the UK the decline of Teletext was hastened by the introduction of digital television, though an aspect of teletext continues in closed captioning. In other countries the system is still widely used on standard-definition DVB broadcasts.
A number of broadcast authorities have ceased the transmission of teletext services.
International broadcasters: A live teletext is no longer available on CNN International. Although many pages are still available, they have not been updated since 31 October 2006.
United Kingdom: the founder of the world's first teletext service, the BBC, closed its Ceefax service in 2012 when Britain adopted a fully digital television broadcast system. The BBC maintains a Red Button service on digital TV which includes access to the latest text news; that text news service is accessible on the BBC News Channel and during BBC One newscasts. Plans to shut it down in 2020 were changed and a reduced service is planned into 2021. Many channels on Sky still broadcast teletext subtitles and may still have a small number of active pages. Analog teletext ended in each region after analog broadcasts finished: see Digital switchover dates in the United Kingdom.
Australia: the Seven Network shut down the Austext service on 30 September 2009. They said that the technology has come to the end of its useful service life and is not commercially viable to replace.
New Zealand: TVNZ Access Services announced the discontinuation of the service on April 2, 2013. A claim about equipment failures and that web sites have been used instead has been given as the reason.
Italy: Some nation-wide teletext services were switched off; for example, MTV Video was active between 2000 and 2010, while "LA7 Video", the teletext service of La7, was launched in 2001 but discontinued in 2014.
Singapore: MediaCorp announced that they will discontinue its eponymously titled service Teletext, with effect from 30 September 2013.
Subtitling still continues to use teletext in these three countries with some providers switching to using image-based DVB subtitling for HD broadcasts. New Zealand solely uses DVB subtitling on terrestrial transmissions despite teletext still being used on internal SDI links.
Technology
Teletext information is broadcast in the vertical blanking interval between image frames in a broadcast television signal, in numbered "pages". For example, a list of news headlines might appear on page 110; a teletext user would type "110" into the TV's remote control to view this page. The broadcaster constantly sends out pages in a sequence. There will typically be a delay of a few seconds from requesting the page and it being broadcast and displayed, the time being entirely dependent on the number of pages being broadcast. More sophisticated receivers use a memory buffer to store some or all of the teletext pages as they are broadcast, allowing almost instant display from the buffer. This basic architecture separates teletext from other digital information systems, such as the Internet, whereby pages are 'requested' and then 'sent' to the user – a method not possible given the one-way nature of broadcast teletext. Unlike the Internet, teletext is broadcast, so it does not slow down further as the number of users increases, although the greater number of pages, the longer one is likely to wait for each to be found in the cycle. For this reason, some pages (e.g. common index pages) are broadcast more than once in each cycle.
Teletext proved to be a reliable text news service during events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, during which the webpages of major news sites became inaccessible because of the high demand. Teletext is also used for carrying special packets interpreted by TVs and video recorders, containing information about subjects such as channels and programming.
Teletext allows up to eight 'magazines' to be broadcast, identified by the first digit of the three-digit page number (1–8). Within each magazine there may theoretically be up to 256 pages at a given time, numbered in hexadecimal and prefixed with the magazine number – for example, magazine 2 may contain pages numbered 200-2FF. In practice, however, non-decimal page numbers are rarely used as domestic teletext receivers will not have options to select hex values A-F, with such numbered pages only occasionally used for 'special' pages of interest to the broadcaster and not intended for public view.
The broadcaster constantly sends out pages in sequence in one of two modes: Serial mode broadcasts every page sequentially whilst parallel mode divides VBI lines amongst the magazines, enabling one page from each magazine to be broadcast simultaneously. There will typically be a delay of a few seconds from requesting the page and it being broadcast and displayed, the time is entirely dependent on the number of pages being broadcast in the magazine (parallel mode) or in total (serial mode) and the number of VBI lines allocated. In parallel mode, therefore, some magazines will load faster than others.
More sophisticated systems use a memory buffer to store some or all of the teletext pages as they are broadcast, allowing instant display from the buffer.
The greater number of pages, the longer one is likely to wait for each to be found in the cycle. For this reason, some pages (e.g. common index pages) are broadcast more than once in each cycle.
Data transmission
A standard PAL signal contains 625 lines of video data per screen, broken into two "fields" containing half the lines of the whole image, divided as every odd line, then every even line number. Lines near the top of the screen are used to synchronize the display to the signal and are not seen on-screen. Data formatted in accordance with CEPT presentation layer protocol and data syntax standard is stored in these lines, where they are not visible, using lines 6–22 on the first field and 318–335 on the second field. The system does not have to use all of these lines; a unique pattern of bits allows the decoder to identify which lines contain data. Some teletext services use a great number of lines, others, for reasons of bandwidth and technical issues, use fewer.
Teletext in the PAL B system can use the VBI lines 6–22 in first half image and 318–334 in the other to transmit 360 data bits including clock run-in and framing code during the active video period at a rate of using binary NRZ line coding. The amplitude for a "0" is black level ±2% and a "1" is 66±6% of the difference between black and peak white level. The clock run in consist of of "10" and the framing code is "11100100". The two last bits of the clock-run in shall start within from the negative flank of the line synchronization pulse.
The rate is , i.e. the TV line frequency. Thus 625 × 25 × 444 = 6,937,500 Hz. Each bit will then be 144 ns long. The bandwidth amplitude is 50% at 3.5 MHz and 0% at 6 MHz.
If the horizontal sync pulse during the vertical synchronization starts in the middle of the horizontal scan line. Then first interlace frame will be sent, otherwise, if vertical synchronization let the full video line complete the second interlace frame is sent.
Like EIA-608 bits are transmitted in the order of LSB to MSB with odd parity coding of 7-bit character codes. However unlike EIA-608, the DVB version is transmitted the same way. For single bit error recovery during transmission, the packet address (page row and magazine numbers) and header bytes (page number, subtitle flag, etc.) use hamming code 8/4 with extended packets (header extensions) using hamming 24/18, which basically doubles the bits used.
The commonly used standard B uses a fixed PAL subtitling bandwidth of 8,600 (7,680 without page/packet header) bits/s per field for a maximum of 32 characters per line per caption (maximum three captions – lines 19 – 21) for a 25 frame broadcast. While the bandwidth is greater than EIA-608, so is the error rate with more bits encoded per field. Subtitling packets use a lot of non-boxed spacing to control the horizontal positioning of a caption and to pad out the fixed packet. The vertical caption position is determined by the packet address.
In the case of the Ceefax and ORACLE systems and their successors in the UK, the teletext signal is transmitted as part of the ordinary analog TV signal but concealed from view in the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) television lines which do not carry picture information. The teletext signal is digitally coded as 45-byte packets, so the resulting rate is 7,175 bits per second per line (41 7-bit 'bytes' per line, on each of 25 frames per second).
A teletext page comprises one or more frames, each containing a screen-full of text. The pages are sent out one after the other in a continual loop. When the user requests a particular page the decoder simply waits for it to be sent, and then captures it for display. In order to keep the delays reasonably short, services typically only transmit a few hundred frames in total. Even with this limited number, waits can be up to 30 seconds, although teletext broadcasters can control the speed and priority with which various pages are broadcast.
Modern television sets, however, usually have built-in memory, often for a few thousand different pages. This way, the teletext decoder captures every page sent out and stores it in memory, so when a page is requested by the user it can be loaded directly from memory instead of having to wait for the page to be transmitted. When the page is transmitted again, the decoder updates the page in memory.
The text can be displayed instead of the television image, or superimposed on it (a mode commonly called mix). Some pages, such as subtitles (closed captioning), are in-vision, meaning that text is displayed in a block on the screen covering part of the television image.
The original standard provides a monospaced 40×24 character grid. Characters are sent using a 7-bit codec, with an 8th bit employed for error detection. The standard was improved in 1976 (World System Teletext Level 1) to allow for improved appearance and the ability to individually select the color of each character from a palette of eight. The proposed higher resolution Level 2 (1981) was not adopted in Britain (in-vision services from Ceefax & ORACLE did use it at various times, however, though even this was ceased by the BBC in 1996), although transmission rates were doubled from two to four lines a frame.
Levels
In the early 1980s, a number of higher extension levels were envisaged for the specification, based on ideas then being promoted for worldwide videotex standards (telephone dial-up services offering a similar mix of text and graphics).
The most common implementation is Level 1.5, which supports languages other than English. Virtually any TV sold in Europe since the 1990s has support for this level. After 1994 some stations adopted Level 2.5 Teletext or Hi-Text, which allows for a larger color palette and higher resolution graphics.
The proposed higher content levels included geometrically-specified graphics (Level 4), and higher-resolution photographic-type images (Level 5), to be conveyed using the same underlying mechanism at the transport layer. No TV sets currently implement the two most sophisticated levels.
Decoders
The Mullard SAA5050 was a character generator chip used in the UK teletext-equipped television sets. In addition to the UK version, several variants of the chip existed with slightly different character sets for particular localizations and/or languages. These had part numbers SAA5051 (German), SAA5052 (Swedish), SAA5053 (Italian), SAA5054 (Belgian), SAA5055 (U.S. ASCII), SAA5056 (Hebrew) and SAA5057 (Cyrillic). The type of decoder circuitry is sometimes marked on televisions as CCT (Computer-Controlled Teletext), or ECCT (Enhanced Computer-Controlled Teletext).
Besides the hardware implementations, it is also possible to decode teletext using a PC and video capture or DVB board.
The Acorn BBC Micro's default graphics mode (mode 7) was based on teletext display, and the computer could be used to create and serve teletext-style pages over a modem connection. With a suitable adapter, the computer could receive and display teletext pages, as well as software over the BBC's Ceefax service, for a time. The Philips P2000 home computer's video logic was also based on a chip designed to provide teletext services in TVs.
Uses
Interactive teletext
Some TV channels offer a service called interactive teletext to remedy some of the shortcomings of standard teletext. To use interactive teletext, the user calls a special telephone number with a push-button telephone. A computer then instructs them to go to a teletext page which is assigned to them for that session.
Usually, the page initially contains a menu of options, from which the user chooses using the telephone keypad. When a choice has been made, the selected page is immediately broadcast for viewing. This is in contrast with usual teletext where the user has to wait for the selected page to be broadcast.
This technology enables teletext to be used for games, chat, access to databases, etc. It overcomes the limitations on the number of available pages. On the other hand, only a limited number of users can be serviced at the same time, since one page number is allocated per user. Some channels solve this by taking into account where the user is calling from and by broadcasting different teletext pages in different geographical regions. In that way, two different users can be assigned the same page number at the same time as long as they do not receive the TV signals from the same source. Another drawback to the technology is the privacy concerns in that many users can see what a user is doing because the interactive pages are received by all viewers. Also, the user usually has to pay for the telephone call to the TV station.
Bulletin boards
Spanish prisons have banned or disabled TV sets with teletext capabilities, after finding that the inmates received coded messages from accomplices outside through the bulletin board sections.
Legacy and successors
While the basic teletext format has remained unchanged in more than 30 years, a number of improvements and additions have been made.
Standard electronic program guide (EPGs), like NexTView, are based on teletext, using a compact binary format instead of preformatted text pages.
Various other kinds of information are sent over the teletext protocol. For instance, Programme Delivery Control (PDC) signals—used by video recorders for starting/stopping recording at the correct time even during changes in programming—are sent as Teletext packets. A similar, but different, standard Video Programming System is also used for this purpose.
Teletext pages may contain special packages allowing VCRs to interpret their contents. This is used in relation to the Video Programming by Teletext (also known as startext) system which allows users to program their videos for recording by simply selecting the program on a teletext page with a listing of programs.
Other standards define how special teletext packets may contain information about the name of the channel and the program currently being shown.
Internet services
Prestel was a British information-retrieval system based on teletext protocols. However, it was essentially a different system, using a modem and the phone system to transmit and receive the data, comparable to systems such as France's Minitel. The modem was asymmetric, with data sent at 75-bit/s, and received at 1200-bit/s. This two-way nature allowed pages to be served on request, in contrast to the TV-based systems' sequential rolling method. It also meant that a limited number of extra services were available such as booking events or train tickets and a limited amount of online banking.
A number of teletext services have been syndicated to web viewers, which mimic the look and feel of broadcast teletext. RSS feeds of news and information from the BBC are presented in Ceefax format in the web viewer.
In 2016, the Teefax teletext service was launched in the United Kingdom to coverage by the BBC, ITV and others. Using a Raspberry Pi computer card as a set-top box, it feeds its service to standard televisions. Teefax content is a mix of crowdsourcing, syndication and contributions from media professionals who contributed heavily to broadcast teletext services. Teefax is also syndicated to a web viewer.
Digital teletext
With the advent of digital television, some countries adopted the name "digital teletext" for newer standards, despite the older teletext standards' digital nature. Digital teletext is encoded with standards including MHEG-5 and Multimedia Home Platform (MHP).
Other countries use the same teletext streams as before on DVB transmissions, due to the DVB-TXT and DVB-VBI sub-standards. Those allow the emulation of analogue teletext on digital TV platforms, directly on the TV or set-top box, or by recreating analog output, reproducing the vertical blanking interval data in which teletext is carried.
Similar systems
A closely related service is the Video Program System (VPS), introduced in Germany in 1985. Like teletext, this signal is also broadcast in the vertical blanking interval. It consists only of 32 bits of data, primarily the date and time for which the broadcast of the currently running TV programme was originally scheduled. Video recorders can use this information (instead of a simple timer) in order to automatically record a scheduled programme, even if the broadcast time changes after the user programmes the VCR. VPS also provides a PAUSE code; broadcasters can use it to mark interruptions and pause the recorders, however, advertisement-financed broadcasters tend not to use it during their ad breaks. VPS (line 16) definition is now included in the Programme Delivery Control (PDC) standard from ETSI.
See also
Antiope - French teletext standard (CCIR Teletext System A)
NABTS – North American Broadcast Teletext Specification (CCIR Teletext System C)
JTES - Japanese Teletext Specification (CCIR Teletext System D)
NAPLPS – North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax
Park Avenue (teletext soap)
Radio Data System
Teletext character set
Text semigraphics
Digitiser
InfoChammel
References
External links
Broadcast Teletext Specification, September 1976 (scanned copy of original document, MS-Word and Postscript files)
History of Teletext
ORF (Austria) web-based Teletext service
News in Focus: 40 Years of Teletext in Germany - by TARA Systems
BBC Research & Development
Legacy systems |
42890785 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OrionVM | OrionVM | OrionVM Wholesale Pty Limited (trading as OrionVM)
is an Australian infrastructure as a service provider and white-label cloud platform. Resellers present customers with a rebranded interface for deploying virtual machine instances, which are only billed for what their customers use. Cloud Harmony benchmarked the OrionVM Cloud Platform's InfiniBand-backed network storage as the world's fastest in 2011.
The company was founded and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia,
with offices in San Francisco, California.
History
OrionVM was founded in a dorm by Sheng Yeo,
Alex Sharp
and Joseph Glanville in 2010.
The company's cloud platform was developed while the founders were still students at the University of Technology, Sydney and University of Sydney. After fifteen months of development, their cloud platform entered a Public Beta programme, with a full launch on 1 April 2011.
In 2011, the company received angel investments from Australian entrepreneur and PIPE Networks co-founder Stephen Baxter
and American Gordon Bell of DEC and Microsoft Research.
For his work at OrionVM, CEO Sheng Yeo was nominated for the 2012 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year and the 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
In 2014, OrionVM received a State Merit award and a National Finalist nomination in the 2014 iAwards, with CTO Alex Sharp winning the Hills YIA Cloud award. The company was nominated for a Stevie Award for New Product or Service of the Year in Cloud Infrastructure Software, and an Australian Startup Awards nomination.
In 2016, Yeo and Sharp were named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.
Products
OrionVM sells a wholesale cloud infrastructure platform for public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. Vendors can white-label the platform for resale, or for internal use. Prominent resellers include:
Australian telephone company AAPT
BizCloud
IT broker StrataCore.
Technology
OrionVM uses the Xen hypervisor to virtualise multiple machines (referred to as "instances") on the same hardware. Linux instances use paravirtualisation for reduced overhead by default, with Windows Server being deployed using hardware-assisted virtualisation (HVM).
Traditional virtual private server and infrastructure as a service providers consolidate storage into a storage area network, which is limited by Ethernet network speeds and best-effort reliability. OrionVM's platform took design cues from supercomputers by placing hypervisor storage and compute on the same physical servers. These are backed by a decentralised InfiniBand fabric. This improves network reliability and performance, and allows for rapid rollover between physical hosts for high availability.
Features
Rebranded panel
To end users, the base of the platform consists of a web panel, where customers are able to deploy virtual machines. For resellers, the logos and theme can be modified to suit their own branding.
Instances
From the panel, users can deploy preconfigured instances with their chosen operating system and required memory. Additional storage disks and IP addresses can be created separately, then assigned to new or existing instances. After shutting down, further resources can be allocated or scaled down.
Access
Instances can be accessed out-of-band via a web-based serial console or VNC session. Access is also available via ovm_ctl, an open source command line interface available from GitHub and the pip package manager.
Linux machines come preconfigured with SSH, and Windows with RDP for remote access.
Templates
Instances can be provisioned from a series of predefined templates, which can be customised if required. They include:
CentOS
Debian Linux
FreeBSD
Slackware Linux
Ubuntu Server (long-term support releases)
Microsoft Windows Server
Vyatta templates are officially supported for software-defined logical networking between instances.
API
A public API exists for controlling instances. Open source Python bindings are available on GitHub.
See also
Cloud computing
InfiniBand
References
External links
Cloud infrastructure
Cloud computing providers
Companies based in Sydney
Australian companies established in 2010
Internet hosting
Web services
Internet technology companies of Australia
Cloud platforms
Australian brands |
223463 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeGEM | FreeGEM | FreeGEM released in 1999 is a windowing system based on Digital Research's GEM which was first released in 1985. GEM stands for "Graphics Environment Manager".
Overview
FreeGEM is the free software/open source version of GEM developed after Caldera Thin Clients released the GEM code under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-only free software license in April 1999. Caldera Thin Clients owned the source code to GEM through Caldera's purchase of the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996, who had acquired Digital Research in June 1991.
FreeGEM code works on almost every version of DOS, and runs on almost every IBM compatible PC. One can download all the FreeGEM binaries and source code in one package through the OpenGEM SDK. The OpenGEM SDK also contains language bindings, documentation, and compilers. There are additional FreeGEM resources available through John C. Elliott's GEM website.
OpenGEM is a popular FreeGEM distribution. Other distributions include Owen's FreeGEM Distribution.
OpenGEM
OpenGEM is a non-multitasking 16-bit graphical user interface (GUI) for DOS. It is an extended distribution of FreeGEM that includes features of the original Digital Research GEM.
OpenGEM is intended to provide a simple to install and use GUI system and windowing framework for the FreeDOS operating system.
Caldera Thin Clients (later known as Lineo), who owned the source code to GEM through Caldera's purchase of the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996, released the source to GEM under the terms of GPL-2.0-only in April 1999. OpenGEM was developed by Shane Martin Coughlan in collaboration with the FreeGEM Developer team, and is free software released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-only. OpenGEM versions 3 through 6 are hosted on SourceForge and on the FreeDOS website.
OpenGEM has not been actively developed since 2008 but is feature-complete as a basic GUI and includes a full SDK for future third-party development or extension.
Compatibility
OpenGEM works with FreeDOS Beta 9 and above, DR DOS 5.0 and above, MS-DOS 3.3 and above, PC DOS 3.3 and above, REAL/32, and DOSBox 0.65. OpenGEM will function on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, and Windows ME. It is not known to work with Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP or later.
See also
ViewMAX
QEMU
GEM character set
References
External links
GEM Development mailing list
John C. Elliott's GEM site
FreeGEM file site
Owen's FreeGEM Distribution
OpenGEM on GitHub
OpenGEM on the FreeDOS site
OpenGEM on the SourceForge site
1985 software
DOS software
File managers
Free windowing systems
GEM software
Windowing systems |
31172189 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron%20Data | Neuron Data | Neuron Data is an American software development company
that was founded June 1985 by Alain Rappaport, Patrick Perez and Jean-Marie Chauvet. Their first product, Nexpert, was a C-based forward chaining expert system shell for the Macintosh in 1985. The product was ported to the PC, one of the first programs to run under the then nascent Windows. Under the name Nexpert Object, it was ported to VAX VMS and all flavors of UNIX workstations, as well as on IBM mainframes. In 1991, Neuron Data released a GUI building tool named Open Interface. The Open Interface Elements development tool won the 1995 Editor's Choice Award from X Journal for the Best Cross-Platform Toolkit.
Neuron Data produced a client-server software development environment named C/S Elements in 1993. The following year, they released Smart Elements, which incorporated support for business rules, enhanced GUI design tools and direct support of external C++ libraries. In 1995 they released Elements Environment, a middleware suite of object-oriented tools that can be used to build distributed applications. Web Element, a component of the version 2.0 Elements Environment, allowed interaction of developed applications with the World Wide Web.
In order to improve their Java interface development skills, in 1997 Neuron Data acquired the software component company Microline Software. On March 23, 2000, the company was taken public by CEO Thomas F. Kelly; the company name was changed to Blaze Software, with Nasdaq code BLZE. It was then acquired by German software company Brokat. They were sold to HNC, Inc., which, in turn, merged with FICO in 2002.
Products
Nexpert
Nexpert Object
NExtra
Open Interface
Elements Environment
Blaze Advisor
References
External links
Neuron Data website, archive.org
Neuron Data as aired on Discovery Channel, October 2nd, 1991
Neuron Data timeline and Web site replica
Defunct software companies of the United States |
53747111 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurypylus%20of%20Thessaly | Eurypylus of Thessaly | In Greek mythology, Eurypylus ( Eurypylos) was a Thessalian king.
Family
Eurypylus was the son of Euaemon and Ops. Another source gives his mother's name as either Deipyle or Deityche. Alternate genealogies made him a son of Hyperochus and father of Ormenus.
Mythology
Eurypylus led the Thessalians during the Trojan War being a former suitor of Helen. He led one of the larger contingents of ships, 40. He fought valiantly and is often listed amongst the first rank of Greek heroes such as Idomeneus, Diomedes, Ajax, etc. In the Iliad he was one of several to accept Hector's challenge to single combat, but was eliminated in the drawing of lots. He went to the aid of Ajax the Great when the latter was wounded and tired from hard fighting and was compelled to withdraw from combat: in defending Ajax he killed Apisaon but was wounded in the thigh and put out of action by one of Paris' arrows. This happened in the same book that all the other major Achaean warriors were wounded and put out of action. When he withdrew from battle, his wounds were tended by Patroclus, just after Nestor had convinced Patroclus either to convince Achilles to return to the fight or don his armor himself. Eurypylus slew no less than four opponents, including the aforementioned Apisaon, Hypsenor, Melanthius and Axion: this makes the account of Hyginus wrong in informing that Eurypylus killed only one defender of Troy. He was also one of the Greeks to enter the Trojan Horse.
Eurypylus survived the Trojan War; his further destiny as described by Pausanias was as follows. After the war, Eurypylus got a chest as part of his victory spoils. The chest was abandoned by Aeneas when he fled from Troy, or was intentionally left behind by Cassandra who placed a curse on it to whichever Greek would open the chest. Inside the chest was an image of Dionysus, made by Hephaestus and given to the Trojans by Zeus. When Eurypylus opened the chest he went mad. During a period of sanity he went to Delphi to seek a cure for his malady. The priestess told him to find a people making an unusual sacrifice and settle there. Eventually he came to Aroe (later Patrae), where he found people sacrificing a youth and a maiden to Artemis, to propitiate the goddess for the crime of Comaetho and Melanippus, who had polluted her shrine. The people of the town recognised him as a leader an oracle had said would come to them and bring about an image and cult of a foreign deity, at which point the sacrifices were to cease. After this Eurypylus regained his sanity and the people of Patrae no longer needed to make human sacrifices. His tomb was in the city, and he was honored as a hero at the festival of Dionysus.
Namesake
4501 Eurypylos, Jovian asteroid
References
Achaean Leaders
Mythological kings of Thessaly
Kings in Greek mythology
Characters in Greek mythology |
24659135 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer%20Pioneer%20Award | Computer Pioneer Award | The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier.
The recognition is engraved on a silver medal specially struck for the Society.
This award has now been renamed to "Women of the ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award".
Award types
The award has two type of recipients:
Computer Pioneer Charter Recipients - At the inauguration of this award the individuals who already meet the Computer Pioneer Award criteria, and also have received IEEE Computer Society awards prior to 1981.
Computer Pioneer Recipients - Awarded annually since 1981.
Computer Pioneer Charter Recipients
Howard H. Aiken - Large-Scale Automatic Computation
Samuel N. Alexander - SEAC
Gene M. Amdahl - Large-Scale Computer Architecture
John W. Backus - FORTRAN
Robert S. Barton - Language-Directed Architecture
C. Gordon Bell - Computer Design
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - Compatible Computer Family System/IBM 360
Wesley A. Clark - First Personal Computer
Fernando J. Corbato - Timesharing
Seymour R. Cray - Scientific Computer Systems
Edsger W. Dijkstra - Multiprogramming Control
J. Presper Eckert - First All-Electronic Computer: ENIAC
Jay W. Forrester - First Large-Scale Coincident Current Memory
Herman H. Goldstine - Contributions to Early Computer Design
Richard W. Hamming - Error-correcting code
Jean A. Hoerni - Planar Semiconductor Manufacturing Process
Grace M. Hopper - Automatic Programming
Alston S. Householder - Numerical Methods
David A. Huffman - Sequential Circuit Design
Kenneth E. Iverson - APL
Tom Kilburn - Paging Computer Design
Donald E. Knuth - Science of Computer Algorithms
Herman Lukoff - Early Electronic Computer Circuits
John W. Mauchly - First All-Electronic Computer: ENIAC
Gordon E. Moore - Integrated Circuit Production Technology
Allen Newell - Contributions to Artificial Intelligence
Robert N. Noyce - Integrated Circuit Production Technology
Lawrence G. Roberts - Packet Switching
George R. Stibitz - First Remote Computation
Shmuel Winograd - Efficiency of Computational Algorithms
Maurice V. Wilkes - Microprogramming
Konrad Zuse - First Process Control Computer
See external list of Computer Pioneer Charter Recipients
Computer Pioneer Recipients
Source: IEEE Computer Society
Nomination process
All members of the profession are invited to nominate a colleague who they consider most eligible to be considered for this award. The nomination deadline is 15 October of each year.
Nomination process
See also
List of pioneers in computer science
List of computer science awards
List of computer-related awards
List of awards named after people
References
External links
IEEE Computer Society Awards
IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
Awards established in 1981
Computer science awards
Systems sciences awards
IEEE society and council awards
Systems sciences organizations |
3852459 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptovirology | Cryptovirology | Cryptovirology is a field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software. The field was born with the observation that public-key cryptography can be used to break the symmetry between what an antivirus analyst sees regarding malware and what the attacker sees. The antivirus analyst sees a public key contained in the malware, whereas the attacker sees the public key contained in the malware as well as the corresponding private key (outside the malware) since the attacker created the key pair for the attack. The public key allows the malware to perform trapdoor one-way operations on the victim's computer that only the attacker can undo.
Overview
The field encompasses covert malware attacks in which the attacker securely steals private information such as symmetric keys, private keys, PRNG state, and the victim's data. Examples of such covert attacks are asymmetric backdoors. An asymmetric backdoor is a backdoor (e.g., in a cryptosystem) that can be used only by the attacker, even after it is found. This contrasts with the traditional backdoor that is symmetric, i.e., anyone that finds it can use it. Kleptography, a subfield of cryptovirology, is the study of asymmetric backdoors in key generation algorithms, digital signature algorithms, key exchanges, pseudorandom number generators, encryption algorithms, and other cryptographic algorithms. The NIST Dual EC DRBG random bit generator has an asymmetric backdoor in it. The EC-DRBG algorithm utilizes the discrete-log kleptogram from kleptography, which by definition makes the EC-DRBG a cryptotrojan. Like ransomware, the EC-DRBG cryptotrojan contains and uses the attacker's public key to attack the host system. The cryptographer Ari Juels indicated that
NSA effectively orchestrated a kleptographic attack on users of the Dual EC DRBG pseudorandom number generation algorithm and that, although security professionals and developers have been testing and implementing kleptographic attacks since 1996, "you would be hard-pressed to find one in actual use until now." Due to public outcry about this cryptovirology attack, NIST rescinded the EC-DRBG algorithm from the NIST SP 800-90 standard.
Covert information leakage attacks carried out by cryptoviruses, cryptotrojans, and cryptoworms that, by definition, contain and use the public key of the attacker is a major theme in cryptovirology. In "deniable password snatching," a cryptovirus installs a cryptotrojan that asymmetrically encrypts host data and covertly broadcasts it. This makes it available to everyone, noticeable by no one (except the attacker), and only decipherable by the attacker. An attacker caught installing the cryptotrojan claims to be a virus victim. An attacker observed receiving the covert asymmetric broadcast is one of the thousands, if not millions of receivers, and exhibits no identifying information whatsoever. The cryptovirology attack achieves "end-to-end deniability." It is a covert asymmetric broadcast of the victim's data. Cryptovirology also encompasses the use of private information retrieval (PIR) to allow cryptoviruses to search for and steal host data without revealing the data searched for even when the cryptotrojan is under constant surveillance. By definition, such a cryptovirus carries within its own coding sequence the query of the attacker and the necessary PIR logic to apply the query to host systems.
History
The first cryptovirology attack, invented by Adam L. Young and Moti Yung, is called "cryptoviral extortion" and it was presented at the 1996 IEEE Security & Privacy conference. In this attack, a cryptovirus, cryptoworm, or cryptotrojan contains the public key of the attacker and hybrid encrypts the victim's files. The malware prompts the user to send the asymmetric ciphertext to the attacker who will decipher it and return the symmetric decryption key it contains for a fee. The victim needs the symmetric key to decrypt the encrypted files if there is no way to recover the original files (e.g., from backups). The 1996 IEEE paper predicted that cryptoviral extortion attackers would one day demand e-money, long before Bitcoin even existed. Many years later, the media relabeled cryptoviral extortion as ransomware. In 2016, cryptovirology attacks on healthcare providers reached epidemic levels, prompting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to issue a Fact Sheet on Ransomware and
HIPAA.
The fact sheet states that when electronic protected health information is encrypted by ransomware, a breach has occurred, and the attack therefore constitutes a disclosure that is not permitted under HIPAA, the rationale being that an adversary has taken control of the information. Sensitive data might never leave the victim organization, but the break-in may have allowed data to be sent out undetected. California enacted a law that defines the introduction of ransomware into a computer system with the intent of extortion as being against the law.
Examples
Tremor virus
While viruses in the wild have used cryptography in the past, the only purpose of such usage of cryptography was to avoid detection by antivirus software. For example, the tremor virus used polymorphism as a defensive technique in an attempt to avoid detection by anti-virus software. Though cryptography does assist in such cases to enhance the longevity of a virus, the capabilities of cryptography are not used in the payload. The One-half virus was amongst the first viruses known to have encrypted affected files.
Tro_Ransom.A virus
An example of a virus that informs the owner of the infected machine to pay a ransom is the virus nicknamed Tro_Ransom.A. This virus asks the owner of the infected machine to send $10.99 to a given account through Western Union.
Virus.Win32.Gpcode.ag is a classic cryptovirus. This virus partially uses a version of 660-bit RSA and encrypts files with many different extensions. It instructs the owner of the machine to email a given mail ID if the owner desires the decryptor. If contacted by email, the user will be asked to pay a certain amount as ransom in return for the decryptor.
CAPI
It has been demonstrated that using just 8 different calls to Microsoft's Cryptographic API (CAPI), a cryptovirus can satisfy all its encryption needs.
Other uses of cryptography-enabled malware
Apart from cryptoviral extortion, there are other potential uses of cryptoviruses, such as deniable password snatching, cryptocounters,
private information retrieval, and in secure communication between different instances of a distributed cryptovirus.
References
External links
Cryptovirology Labs - site maintained by Adam Young and Moti Yung
Cryptography and cryptovirology articles at VX Heavens Computer viruses
Cryzip Trojan Encrypts Files, Demands Ransom
Can a virus lead an enterprise to court?
A student report entitled Superworms and Cryptovirology
Next Virus Generation: an Overview (cryptoviruses) by Angelo P. E. Rosiello
Cryptography
Computer viruses |
30865562 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted%20Morton | Ted Morton | Frederick Lee Morton (born 1949), known commonly as Ted Morton, is an American-Canadian politician and former cabinet minister in the Alberta government. As a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, he represented the constituency of Foothills-Rocky View as a Progressive Conservative from 2004 to 2012 (in the 26th and 27th Alberta Legislative Assemblies). He did not win reelection in the 2012 Alberta general election. Morton was a candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Association in its 2006 and 2011 leadership elections. Morton is currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgary.
Personal life
Morton was born in Los Angeles on 1949. In 1952, Morton moved with his parents to Casper, Wyoming, where his father, Warren A. Morton (1924–2002), worked in the oil and natural gas exploration business and was the Republican Speaker of the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1979–1980 and his party's gubernatorial nominee in 1982. Morton's mother, Katharine Allen Morton (born 1926), was the daughter of former US Representative Robert G. Allen, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania.
Morton moved to Canada in 1981 and became a Canadian citizen in 1991. He received dual citizenship in 1993. Morton and his wife Patricia have three children.
Political views
In 2001 Ted Morton (who at the time was considered by some to be an "Alberta Senator-elect" despite that status not being legally recognized), Stephen Harper (then-President of the National Citizens’ Coalition), Tom Flanagan, and Ken Boessenkool, (Chief of Staff to Premier Christy Clark's) sent a letter to Alberta's former Premier Ralph Klein, now known as the "Firewall Letter", in which they called for Alberta to exercise its constitutional provincial powers including: "withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, ending the provincial contract with the RCMP, a provincial take-over of health care decision-making, and collecting revenue for the province from income tax" in order to "limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach on legitimate provincial jurisdiction."
Academic career
Morton obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from Colorado College and earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in political economy from the University of Toronto. During his time in college, Morton was involved in protests against the Vietnam War. In 1981, Morton joined the faculty of the University of Calgary as a political science professor.
He has published several books, often focusing on criticisms of the role of the judiciary and Charter of Rights jurisprudence, including The Charter Revolution and the Court Party co-authored with Rainer Knopff in 2000, Morgentaler v. Borowski: Abortion, the Charter and the Courts (1992, winner of the 1993 Writer Guild of Alberta's Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, and Law, politics, and the Judicial Process in Canada (1984). Morton has published more than fifty scholarly articles and his columns have appeared in the National Post, the Calgary Herald, The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Sun.
According to Morton and Knopff, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms allows interest groups to use litigation and mass media to avoid the democratic process and achieve their own ends. In The Charter Revolution, Morton embraced the practice of judicial restraint, claiming that the Charter has become a political instrument and that the locus of policy should move away from activist courts back to elected officials. Much of the analysis is devoted to questions of symbolism and ideology that were embedded in the Charter's introduction. By changing both the symbolic framework and the institutional structures of Canadian politics, the Charter of Rights has permanently altered the way Canadians organize their political life.
Calgary School
By the late 1990s, Morton along with conservatively inclined University of Calgary colleagues (many of whom were also in the Political Science Department) Tom Flanagan, Barry F. Cooper, Rainer Knopff, Roger Gibbins and history professor David Bercuson, became known as the Calgary School, a phrase coined by Johns Hopkins University political science professor David Rovinsky, Morton is "pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, anti-deficit at all costs and open to more private health care." in a 1998 The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) paper. At that time Western Canada was of heightened importance to Americans, not only for its increasing political weight but also because of its population and economic growth. The Washington, DC–based (CSIS) was investigating Western Canada's increasing weight in forming Canadian national public policy.
By 1998, CSIS, a public policy research institution based in Washington, DC had already observed the ascendancy of the role of Calgary-based academics on Canadian public policy, specifically the Calgary School of political science.
In his December 2010 letter entitled, "Advice to progressives from the Calgary School", Tom Flanagan cited Knopff and Morton as examples of academics who "tackle controversial topics that people care about". "In The Court Party, Knopff and Morton took on judicial activism. Cooper and Bercuson’s Deconfederation undermined the Meech Lake agenda of endless concessions to Quebec. In First Nations? Second Thoughts, I stood up against the juggernaut of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. All these books were widely discussed in the media and have had some impact on the course of public affairs."
Political career
Morton was elected as a Reform Party senator-in-waiting in the 1998 Alberta Senate nominee election.
In 2001, Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day appointed him Parliamentary Director of Policy and Research for the party. That same year, he was one of a group of six Albertans (including Stephen Harper—later to become prime minister in 2006) who authored the "Alberta Agenda," also known as the Firewall Letter, a manifesto that called on the government of Alberta to use all of its constitutional powers to reduce the influence of the Federal government in the province, including the creation of a provincial police force to replace the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan in favour of a provincial pension plan.
MLA for Foothills-Rocky View
In the 2004 Alberta general election, Morton won the newly created seat of Foothills-Rocky View and now sits as an MLA for the Progressive Conservatives. In that role, he has advocated for tax cuts, for increased saving of energy revenues, for a lobbyist registry, for fixed election dates, against the 2005 Prosperity Bonus, and against same-sex marriage. He introduced Bill 208 (2006), which would have legislated protections for individuals who oppose gay marriage, allowed provincial marriage commissioners to refuse to perform same-sex marriages, and added an opt-out clause for students and teachers where same-sex marriage is included in the curriculum. This Bill was criticized by some public figures as legalizing discrimination against gays and lesbians, and failed to come to a vote due to procedural tactics employed by opposition members.
PC leadership candidate, 2006
As a candidate in the 2006 PC leadership election to replace Ralph Klein, Morton placed second to front runner Jim Dinning on the first ballot, and third behind Dinning and winner Ed Stelmach on the second ballot. His platform included implementing the components of the Firewall Letter, opposing judicial activism, implementing the provision of Bill 208, introducing fixed election dates, lowering taxes and capping public spending growth, and introducing private health insurance and clinics.
Minister of Sustainable Resource Development
On December 15, 2006, Morton was named Minister of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD).
Métis Harvesting in Alberta policy, 2007
In 2007 the Government of Alberta unilaterally cancelled the Interim Métis Harvesting Agreement. The SRD adopted a replacement policy which Morton contended complied with Métis hunting rights as set out in the Supreme Court of Canada's R v Powley decision.
In September 2011, CBC revealed that Norton had been using a "nom de plume" – his first and middle names – Frederick Lee – as "covert email" while serving as minister of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD).
According to a former ministry staff member who spoke with the CBC, the SRD's communications director explained at a July 2007 meeting, to SRD staff that Morton used the email address "when he didn't want people to know it was him doing the writing." In a November 15, 2008 email, "Frederick Lee" directed his SRD staff to revise legislation relating to the potential land rights of Métis people. Morton explained in the email that, "'Metis settlements' have never been considered 'private lands' in the conventional sense of the term in Alberta, and now is not the time to start ... If the Metis settlements suddenly want to share in some of the potential benefits of private land ownership, do they also want to be subject to all the other restrictions and duties that attach to private land ownership in Alberta? I doubt it. They cannot have their cake and eat it too."
Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA) said that the 2007 policy is a violation of their constitutional harvesting rights. In 2018, the Government of Alberta and the MNA are reviewing the policy collaboratively to advance reconciliation.
Alberta Land Stewardship Act, 2009
In this position, Morton developed a land use framework in 2008
According to the CBC 2011 investigation of Morton "covert" email, he used his "nom de plume" when he was working with SRD staff on "new land-use legislation that subsequently caused many rural Albertans to question whether their private land rights had been undermined".
2008
Morton also introduced an online licensing system and community website for fishing and hunting, and expanded youth hunting opportunities by allowing Sunday hunting and introducing an official Provincial Hunting Day and Waterfowler Heritage Days. He also oversaw the opening of the Bow Habitat Station, an aquatic ecosystem interpretive centre that promotes the education of stewardship to youth.
Minister of Finance
On January 15, 2010, Morton was sworn in as minister of finance and enterprise by Premier Ed Stelmach in a major cabinet shuffle. In this position, Morton discussed plans for dealing with Alberta's large deficit, criticized the Canada Health Transfer, and released a joint statement with Quebec Minister of Finances and Revenue Raymond Bachand opposing the creation of a federal securities regulator.
PC leadership candidate, 2011
On January 27, 2011 he resigned his cabinet post as minister of finance to seek the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party. His renewed leadership bid coupled with his 2006 support for bringing private health care into Alberta's public health care system has raised concerns by Friends of Medicare, and others about the negative consequences of American-style health care being brought to Alberta. He finished fourth out of six candidates on the ballot with 11.7% of the vote and was eliminated from the second round ballot.
Energy Minister
On October 12, 2011, he was sworn in as Energy Minister and served in that role until the provincial election that was called for April 23, 2012. He lost his seat in that election to Bruce McAllister of the Wildrose Party.
After politics
Morton is currently an Executive-in-Residence at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary and Senior Fellow, Energy and Environment, at the Manning Foundation. He also serves on the Board of the Alberta Land Institute and was a member of the Board of Governors of the Council of Canadian Academies from 2013 to 2016. In 2017, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he was student in 1969-70.
In 2018, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation gave its annual tax fighter award to "the Calgary School", Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff and Ted Morton at the Calgary Petroleum Club.
Alberta separatism, 2018
In 2018, Ted Morton said that while he did not support Alberta leaving Canada, "the status quo is just as unacceptable...And if the powers-that-be refuse to address the status quo then the case for separation, of course, becomes stronger. The failure of Ottawa and other provinces to address this issue is going to push more and more Albertans to the separation option, which would be unfortunate because there are solutions in between....If you just isolate the economics, a separate Alberta would be financially better off." In 2020, Morton co-edited a volume of essays laying out a plan for greater self-determination for Alberta, with separation as a "viable last resort."
Election results
Notes
References
External links
Ted Morton's web page
1949 births
American expatriate academics
American expatriates in Canada
American emigrants to Canada
Canadian political scientists
Colorado College alumni
Living people
Politicians from Casper, Wyoming
Politicians from Los Angeles
Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta MLAs
University of Calgary faculty
University of Toronto alumni
Canadian senators-in-waiting from Alberta
Members of the Executive Council of Alberta
21st-century Canadian politicians
Finance ministers of Alberta |
277010 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock%20%28macOS%29 | Dock (macOS) | The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of macOS. It is used to launch applications and to switch between running applications. The Dock is also a prominent feature of macOS's predecessor NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP operating systems. The earliest known implementations of a dock are found in operating systems such as RISC OS and NeXTSTEP. iOS has its own version of the Dock for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as does iPadOS for the iPad.
Apple applied for a US patent for the design of the Dock in 1999 and was granted the patent in October 2008, nearly a decade later. Any application can be dragged and dropped onto the Dock to add it to the dock, and any application can be dragged from the dock to remove it, except for Finder and Trash, which are permanent fixtures as the leftmost and rightmost items (or highest and lowest items if the Dock is vertically oriented), respectively. Part of the macOS Core Services, is located at .
Overview
In NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, the Dock is an application launcher that holds icons for frequently used programs. The icon for the Workspace Manager and the Recycler are always visible. The Dock indicates if a program is not running by showing an ellipsis below its icon. If the program is running, there isn't an ellipsis on the icon. In macOS, running applications have been variously identified by a small black triangle (Mac OS X 10.0-10.4) a blue-tinted luminous dot (Mac OS X 10.5-10.7), a horizontal light bar (OS X 10.8 and 10.9), and a simple black or white dot (OS X 10.10-present).
In macOS, however, the Dock is used as a repository for any program or file in the operating system. It can hold any number of items and resizes them dynamically to fit while using magnification to better view smaller items. By default, it appears on the bottom edge of the screen, but it can also instead be placed on the left or right edges of the screen if the user wishes. Applications that do not normally keep icons in the Dock will still appear there when running and remain until they are quit. These features are unlike those of the dock in the NeXT operating systems where the capacity of the Dock is dependent on display resolution. This may be an attempt to recover some Shelf functionality since macOS inherits no other such technology from NeXTSTEP. (Minimal Shelf functionality has been implemented in the Finder.)
The changes to the dock bring its functionality also close to that of Apple's Newton OS Button Bar, as found in the MessagePad 2x00 series and the likes. Applications could be dragged in and out of the Extras Drawer, a Finder-like app, onto the bar. Also, when the screen was put into landscape mode, the user could choose to position the Button Bar at the right or left side of the screen, just like the Dock in macOS.
The macOS Dock also has extended menus that control applications without making them visible on screen. On most applications it has simple options such as Quit, Keep In Dock, Remove From Dock, and other options, though some applications use these menus for other purposes, such as iTunes, which uses this menu as a way for a user to control certain playback options. Other Applications include changing the status of an online alias (MSN, AIM/iChat etc.) or automatically saving the changes that have been made in a document (There is no current application with this feature made available for macOS). Docklings (in Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier) can also be opened by using the right-mouse button, if the mouse has one, but most of the time either clicking and holding or control-click will bring the menu up.
In Mac OS X Leopard, docklings were replaced by Stacks. Stacks "stack" files into a small organized folder on the Dock, and they can be opened by left-clicking.
Stacks could be shown in three ways: a "fan", a "grid", or a "list", which is similar to docklings. In grid view, the folders in that stack can be opened directly in that stack without the need to open Finder.
In iOS, the dock is used to store applications and, since iOS 4, folders containing applications. Unlike the macOS dock, a maximum of 4 icons can be placed in the dock on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The maximum for the iPad however is 16 icons (13 apps and 3 recently opened apps). The size of the dock on iOS cannot be changed.
When an application on the Dock is launched by clicking on it, it will jump until the software is finished loading. Additionally, when an application requires attention from a user, it will jump even higher until its icon is clicked and the user attends to its demands.
Design
The original version of the dock, found in Mac OS X Public Beta to 10.0, presents a flat white translucent interface with the Aqua styled pinstripes. The dock found in Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.4 removes the pinstripes, but otherwise is identical. Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.7 presents the applications on a three-dimensional glassy surface from a perspective instead of the traditional flat one, resembling Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass application dock. OS X 10.8 to 10.9 changes the look to resemble frosted glass with rounded corners. OS X 10.10 and later revert to a two-dimensional appearance, similar to Mac OS X 10.4, although more translucent and with a iOS 7 blur effect.
In iPhone OS 1 to 3, the dock used a metal look which looks similar to the front of the Power Mac G5 (2003-2005) and Mac Pro(2006-2012 or 2019-). iPhone OS 3.2 for iPad and iOS 4 to 6 adopted the dock design from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.7 which was used until iOS 7, which uses a similar dock from Mac OS X Tiger but with iOS 7 styled blur effects. In iOS 11, the dock for the iPad and iPhone X is redesigned to more resemble the macOS dock.
Related software
The classic Mac OS does have a dock-like application called Launcher, which was first introduced with Macintosh Performa models in 1993 and later included as part of System 7.5.1. It performs the same basic function. Also, add-ons such as DragThing added a dock for users of earlier versions.
MacOS was not the first operating system to implement dock-like features. RISC OS contains a feature called the Icon bar, which is remarkably similar to the macOS Dock. The Icon Bar was first implemented in 1987 for the first version of RISC OS, named Arthur.
Microsoft implemented a simplified dock feature in Windows 98 with the Quick Launch toolbar and this feature remained until Windows 7, where it was replaced by the Superbar, which implements functionality similar to the macOS Dock.
Various docks are also used in Linux and BSD. Some examples are Window Maker (which emulates the look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI), Docky, and Avant Window Navigator, KXDocker (amongst others) for KDE and various other gdesklet/adesklets docks, AfterStep's Wharf (a derivation from the NeXTstep UI), iTask NG (a module used with some Enlightenment-based Linux distributions such as gOS) and Blackbox's Slit.
Criticism
Bruce Tognazzini, a usability consultant who worked for Apple in the 1980s and 1990s before Mac OS X was developed, wrote an article in 2001 listing ten problems he saw with the Dock. This article was updated in 2004, removing two of the original criticisms and adding a new one. One of his concerns was that the Dock uses too much screen space. Another was that icons only show their labels when the pointer hovers over them, so similar-looking folders, files, and windows are difficult to distinguish. Tognazzini also criticized the fact that when icons are dragged out of the Dock, they vanish with no easy way to get them back; he called this behavior "object annihilation".
John Siracusa, writing for Ars Technica, also pointed out some issues with the Dock around the releases of Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. He noted that because the Dock is centered, adding and removing icons changes the location of the other icons. In a review of Mac OS X v10.0 the following year, he also noted that the Dock does far too many tasks than it should for optimum ease-of-use, including launching apps, switching apps, opening files, and holding minimized windows. Siracusa further criticized the Dock after the release of Mac OS X v10.5, noting that it was made less usable for the sake of eye-candy. Siracusa criticized the 3D look and reflections, the faint blue indicator for open applications, and less distinguishable files and folders.
Thom Holwerda, a managing editor OSNews, stated some concerns with the Dock, including the facts that it grows in both directions, holds the Trash icon, and has no persistent labels. Holwerda also criticized the revised Dock appearance in Mac OS X v10.5.
See also
Taskbar
References
Application launchers
NeXT
Graphical user interface elements |
39949312 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%E2%80%93Shannon%E2%80%93Reeds%20model | Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model | In the mathematics of shuffling playing cards, the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model is a probability distribution on riffle shuffle permutations that has been reported to be a good match for experimentally observed outcomes of human shuffling, and that forms the basis for a recommendation that a deck of cards should be riffled seven times in order to thoroughly randomize it. It is named after the work of Edgar Gilbert, Claude Shannon, and J. Reeds, reported in a 1955 technical report by Gilbert and in a 1981 unpublished manuscript of Reeds.
The model
The Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model may be defined in several equivalent ways.
Most similarly to the way humans shuffle cards, it can be defined as a random cut and riffle. The deck of cards is cut into two packets; if there are a total of n cards, then the probability of selecting k cards in the first deck and n − k in the second deck is . Then, one card at a time is repeatedly moved from the bottom of one of the packets to the top of the shuffled deck, such that if x cards remain in one packet and y cards remain in the other packet, then the probability of choosing a card from the first packet is x/(x + y) and the probability of choosing a card from the second packet is y/(x + y).
An alternative description can be based on a property of the model, that it generates a permutation of the initial deck in which each card is equally likely to have come from the first or the second packet. To generate a random permutation according to this model, begin by flipping a fair coin n times, to determine for each position of the shuffled deck whether it comes from the first packet or the second packet. Then split into two packets whose sizes are the number of tails and the number of heads flipped, and use the same coin flip sequence to determine from which packet to pull each card of the shuffled deck.
Another alternative description is more abstract, but lends itself better to mathematical analysis. Generate a set of n values from the uniform continuous distribution on the unit interval, and place them in sorted order. Then the doubling map from the theory of dynamical systems maps this system of points to a permutation of the points in which the permuted ordering obeys the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model, and the positions of the new points are again uniformly random.
Among all of the possible riffle shuffle permutations of a card deck, the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model gives almost all riffles equal probability, 1/2n, of occurring. However, there is one exception, the identity permutation, which has a greater probability (n + 1)/2n of occurring.
Inverse
The inverse permutation of a random riffle may be generated directly. To do so, start with a deck of n cards and then repeatedly deal off the bottom card of the deck onto one of two piles, choosing randomly with equal probability which of the two piles to deal each card onto. Then, when all cards have been dealt, stack the two piles back together.
The effect of repeated riffles
analyzed mathematically the total variation distance between two probability distributions on permutations: the uniform distribution in which all permutations are equally likely, and the distribution generated by repeated applications of the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model. The total variation distance measures how similar or dissimilar two probability distributions are; it is zero only when the two distributions are identical, and attains a maximum value of one for probability distributions that never generate the same values as each other. Bayer and Diaconis reported that, for decks of n cards shuffled times, where θ is an arbitrary constant, the total variation distance is close to one when θ is significantly less than zero, and close to zero when θ is significantly greater than zero, independently of n. In particular their calculations showed that for n = 52, five riffles produce a distribution whose total variation distance from uniform is still close to one, while seven riffles give total variation distance 0.334. This result was widely reported as implying that card decks should be riffled seven times in order to thoroughly randomize them.
Similar analyses have been performed using the Kullback–Leibler divergence, a distance between two probability distributions defined in terms of entropy; the divergence of a distribution from uniform can be interpreted as the number of bits of information that can still be recovered about the initial state of the card deck. The results are qualitatively different: rather than having a sharp threshold between random and non-random at shuffles, as occurs for total variation distance, the divergence decays more gradually, decreasing linearly as the number of shuffles ranges from zero to (at which point the number of remaining bits of information is linear, smaller by a logarithmic factor than its initial value) and then decreasing exponentially until, after shuffles, only a constant number of bits of information remain.
References
Card shuffling
Stochastic models |
353202 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria%20Corporation | Claria Corporation | Claria Corporation (formerly Gator Corporation) was a software company based in Redwood City, California that invented “Behavioral Marketing”, a highly effective but controversial new form of online advertising. It was founded in 1998 by Denis Coleman (co-founder of Symantec), Stanford MBA Sasha Zorovic, and engineer Mark Pennell, based on work Zorovic had done at Stanford. In March 1999 Jeff McFadden was hired as CEO and Zorovic was effectively forced out.
Its name was later used interchangeably with its Gain advertising network, which it claimed serviced over 50 million users. Claria exited the adware business at the end of second quarter 2006, and eventually shut down completely in October 2008.
The "Gator" (also known as Gain AdServer) products collected personal information from its unknowing users, including all websites visited and portions of credit card numbers to target and display ads on the computers of web surfers. It billed itself as the "leader in online behavioral marketing". The company changed its name to Claria Corporation on October 30, 2003 in an effort to "better communicate the expanding breadth of offerings that [they] provide to consumers and advertisers", according to CEO and President Jeff McFadden.
Products
Gator
Originally released in 1999, Gator was most frequently installed together with programs being offered free of charge, such as Go!Zilla, or Kazaa. The development of these programs was partially funded by revenue from advertising displayed by Gator. By mid-2003 Gator was installed on an estimated 35 million PCs.
Even though Gator was installed with an uninstall available via Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel on Microsoft Windows, many spyware removal tools can also detect and remove it. Gator's end user license agreement attempts to disallow its manual removal by prohibiting "unauthorized means" of uninstallation.
The Gator software undercut the fundamental ad-supported nature of many Internet publishers by replacing banner ads on web sites with its own, thereby depriving the content provider of the revenue necessary to continue providing that content. In June 2002 a number of large publishers, including the New York Post, The New York Times, and Dow Jones & Company, sued Gator Software for its practice of replacing ads.
Most of the lawsuits were settled out of court in February 2003.
Gator attempted to combat spyware labels with litigation. In September 2003 the company threatened sites such as PC Pitstop with libel lawsuits.
As part of a settlement signed Sept. 30, (2003), PC Pitstop--which scans computers for hostile and otherwise undesirable code--removed pages from its Spyware Information Center with such titles as "Is Gator Spyware?" and the "Gator Boycott List."
In February 2004, Gator made a confidential settlement of litigation brought against it by seven top newspaper publishers, including The Washington Post, the New York Post, The New York Times, and Dow Jones. The Washington Post, L.L. Bean and Extended Stay America suits were similarly settled.
Other defunct applications
Gator corporation released a suite of "free" Internet applications that performed various tasks. However, after installing the applications, a user would continually be shown ads from the Gain network, even when the programs were not running in the foreground. This suite included:
eWallet - a program that will automatically fill in personal information on webpages from a stored set of data entered by the user.
GotSmiley
Dashbar - an advertisement supported search toolbar by Claria. Intrusive in that it displays pop up ads during an Internet browsing session.
Date Manager
Precision Time
Screenscenes
Weatherscope
WebSecureAlert
While using the software, a user was shown advertisements. According to Computer Associates' spyware information center, all applications in the suite are classified as both adware and spyware, as they both display ads unrelated to the product while the primary user interface is not visible. These programs all employ the user's Internet connection to report behavior information back to Claria. Although the user's explicit consent is always required to install these applications, Claria took advantage of the fact that most users choose not bothering to educate themselves about what they are installing. In most cases, during the install process, users must choose whether to install the "free" version (which serves lots of ads as described above) or to pay the $30 for a version that serves no ads. Since the announcement to shut the ad network down, Claria has stopped accepting payment for "ad free" versions.
Backers
Despite their unpopular reputation, Claria Corporation had received backing from major venture capital firms, including Greylock, Technology Crossover Ventures, and U.S. Venture Partners. Andy Bechtolsheim was an early investor.
They filed for a $150 million IPO in April 2004, stating income of $35 million on revenues of $90 million in 2003.
Investors were concerned that its practices might be illegal, at least in Utah at the time.
Another concern was that most revenue came from one partner: Yahoo Overture.
Claria withdrew the filing in August 2004.
Recent news
In July 2005, Microsoft Corporation came under fire when it revealed that their anti-spyware product would no longer quarantine Claria software as "spyware" (though it still offered users the option to remove the software). Microsoft was reportedly contemplating the purchase of Claria, which many consumers felt to be a conflict of interest. Other spyware-reporting agencies, such as Computer Associates and Panda Software's TruPrevent Technologies, still label Claria products as both adware and spyware.
In March 2006, Claria claimed that it would be exiting the adware business and focusing on personalized search technology.
On July 1, 2006, Claria ceased displaying pop-up ads. Around this time, a new company NebuAd was formed with some former Claria employees with another approach to targeted advertisements.
On April 21, 2008, Claria sold the gator.com domain.
In October, 2008, rebranded as Jelly Cloud, the company quietly shut down.
Today, Claria's former senior management team occupy a variety of leadership roles throughout the online marketing industry. Scott VanDeVelde, Claria's last CEO and former Chief Revenue Officer, is now Chief Revenue Officer at Dotomi, an online advertising firm specializing in personalized media. Scott Eagle, Claria's former Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, joined eHarmony, an online dating company, as Chief Marketing Officer. Former CEO Jeff McFadden is now a VP of Business Development at
Zen Marketing. The former VP of Business Development Mitchell Weisman is now part of the leadership team at LifeStreet Corporation, the largest ad network on Facebook. Tony Martin, Claria's former VP of Engineering, ran engineering and operations at Project Playlist. Claria's former VP Engineering and Analytics, Dominic Bennett, and Claria's Senior Director of Finance Dennis Jang, are now part of the leadership team at Turn, a leading online advertising DSP, as VP Engineering and VP Finance respectively. Co-founder and former Claria CTO Mark Pennell is now a senior software engineer at Apple.
As of 2016, most of Claria's core engineering team works for Apple.
References
External links
Gator Information Center (Claria) - PC Pitstop
claria.com - Web Safety Rating from McAfee
Spyware companies
Windows adware
1998 establishments
2008 disestablishments
Software companies based in California |
26734995 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonido | Tonido | Tonido is remote access and home server software for network-attached storage. Once installed on a computer, Tonido software makes that computer's files available remotely via the internet through the web browser or through native mobile apps. This allows access to files stored on the computer, including music and videos, to any computing device connected to the Internet in possession of login credentials. Data is by default transmitted via Tonido's servers, with no port forwarding required, but can be transmitted without using Tonido's servers by setting up port forwarding. Data transfer speed cannot exceed that of the slowest link in the data path, including USB 2.0 for USB-connected storage.
Tonido stores all user information including login credentials locally, enabling login into Tonido software without the requirement of an internet connection.
Tonido allows different computing devices to synchronise files via a Tonido server, without using the public computing "cloud". Synchronisation uses Tonido's servers; the company provides 2Gb of synchronised storage free of charge, and 100Gb for Pro users.
Tonido runs on x86, ARM, PowerPC and MIPS architectures, and is available as binary packages for popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, and for Mac OS X and Windows.
Tonido sell a small computer that runs Tonido software. The TonidoPlug is based on the SheevaPlug, running Ubuntu Linux.
References
External links
Linux-based devices
Computer storage devices
File sharing software for Linux
Home servers |
34466 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 | ZX80 | The Sinclair ZX80 is a home computer launched on 29 January 1980 by Science of Cambridge Ltd. (later to be better known as Sinclair Research). It is notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than a hundred pounds. It was available in kit form for £79.95, where purchasers had to assemble and solder it together, and as a ready-built version at £99.95. The ZX80 was very popular straight away, and for some time there was a waiting list of several months for either version of the machine.
Description
Name
The ZX80 was named after the Z80 processor with the 'X' meaning "the mystery ingredient".
Hardware
Internally, the machine was designed by Jim Westwood around a Z80 central processing unit with a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, and was equipped with 1 KB of static RAM and 4 KB of read-only memory (ROM). It had no sound output.
The ZX80 was designed around readily available TTL chips; the only proprietary technology was the firmware. The successor ZX81 used a semi-custom chip (a ULA or Uncommitted Logic Array) which combined the functions of much of the earlier hardware onto a single chip reducing the chip-count from 21 to 4. However this was mainly a cost-reduction effort; the hardware functionality and system programs were very similar, with the only significant difference being the NMI-generator necessary for slow mode in the ZX81 (see ZX81 for technical details), and the 4K integer-only Sinclair BASIC upgraded to 8K floating-point-capable, with the upgraded ROM also available as upgrade for the ZX80. Both computers can be made by hobbyists using commercially available discrete logic chips or FPGAs.
Firmware
The ROM contained the Sinclair BASIC programming language, editor, and operating system. BASIC commands were not entered by typing them out but were instead selected somewhat similarly to a programmable graphing calculator - each key had a few different functions selected by both context and modes as well as with the shift key.
Case
The machine was mounted in a small white plastic case, with a one-piece blue membrane keyboard on the front. There were problems with durability, reliability and overheating (despite appearances, the black stripes visible on the top rear of the case are merely cosmetic, and are not ventilation slots).
Video output
Display was over an RF connection to a household television, and simple offline program storage was possible using a cassette recorder. The video display generator of the ZX80 used minimal hardware plus a combination of software to generate a video signal. This was an idea that was popularised by Don Lancaster in his 1978 book The TV Cheap Video Cookbook and his "TV Typewriter". As a result of this approach the ZX80 could only generate a picture when it was idle, i.e. waiting for a key to be pressed. When running a BASIC program, or even when pressing a key for any input, the display would, therefore, blank out momentarily while the processor was busy. This made moving graphics difficult since the program had to introduce a pause for input to display the next change in graphical output. The later ZX81 improved on this somewhat because it could run in a "slow" mode while creating a video signal, or in a "fast" mode without generating a video signal (typically used for lengthy calculations). Another issue was that the main RAM was used to store the screen display, with the result that the available screen size would gradually decrease as the size of a program increased (and vice versa); with 1 KB RAM, running a 990 byte program would result in only one row of characters being visible on the screen; a full screen (32×24) would leave only 384 bytes to the programmer.
Video output was black-and-white, character-based. However, the ZX80 character set included some simple block-based graphics glyphs, allowing basic graphics to be accomplished, with some effort. One advantage to using monochrome video is that different colour broadcast standards (e.g. PAL, SECAM) simply weren't an issue when the system was sold outside the UK.
Expansion
Other than the built-in cassette and video ports, the only provided means of expansion was a slot opening at the rear of the case, which exposed an expansion bus edge connector on the motherboard. The same slot bus was continued on the ZX81, and later the ZX Spectrum, which encouraged a small cottage industry of expansion devices, including memory packs, printers and even floppy drives. The original Sinclair ZX80 RAM Pack held either 1, 2 or 3 KB of static RAM and a later model held 16 KB of dynamic RAM (DRAM).
Following the ZX81's release, a ZX81 8 KB ROM was available to upgrade the ZX80 at a cost of around 20% of a real ZX81. It came with a thin keyboard overlay and a ZX81 manual. By simply taking off the top cover of the ZX80 and prying the old ROM from its socket and carefully inserting the new ROM and adding the keyboard overlay, the ZX80 would now function almost identically to the proper ZX81 – except for SLOW mode, due to the differences in hardware between the two models. The process was easily reversed to return the ZX80 to its original configuration.
One common modification by hobbyist users was to attach a full-size keyboard, optionally moving the motherboard into a larger case. This had the dual advantages of making the machine easier to type on, while increasing ventilation to the motherboard.
Versions
The UK version of the machine was the standard, and only changes that were absolutely necessary to sell units in other markets were made. In fact, the only real change made in most markets involved the video output frequency (the ZX80 used an external power transformer, so differences in AC line frequency and outlet were not an issue to the machine itself). One outcome of this is that the machine had some keyboard keys and characters that were distinctly British: was used instead of , instead of or , and the character set and keyboard included the Pound symbol.
Reception
The ZX80 was widely advertised as the first personal computer for under £100 GBP (US$200.) Kilobaud Microcomputing liked the design of the preassembled version, and said that the screen flickering during input or output was annoying but was useful as an indicator of the computer functioning correctly. It praised the documentation as excellent for novices, and noted that purchasing the computer was cheaper than taking a college class on BASIC. The magazine concluded, "The ZX-80 is a real computer and an excellent value", but only for beginners who could learn from the documentation or programmers experienced with writing Z-80 software. BYTE called the ZX80 a "remarkable device". It praised the real-time, interactive BASIC syntax checking, and reported that the computer performed better on benchmarks than some competitors, including the TRS-80 Model I. The screen blanking during program execution, the small RAM size and inadequate built-in Sinclair BASIC, and the keyboard received criticism, and the review recommended against buying the kit version of the computer given the difficulty of assembly and because purchasers did not save money. BYTE concluded that "the ZX80 might be summarized as a high-performance, very low-cost, portable personal computer system ... the ZX80 is a good starting point".
Sales of the ZX80 reached about 50,000, which contributed significantly to the UK leading the world in home computer ownership through the 1980s. Owing to the unsophisticated design and the tendency for the units to overheat, surviving machines in good condition are sought after and can fetch high prices by collectors.
Clones
There were also clones of the ZX80, such as the MicroAce, and from Brazil the Nova Eletrônica/Prológica NE-Z80 and the Microdigital TK82.
Notes
External links
Planet Sinclair:ZX80
Scot's ZX80 site via archive.org
ZEsarUX – ZX Second-Emulator And Released for UniX (GPL)
Sinclair computers and derivatives
English inventions
Computers designed in the United Kingdom
Early microcomputers
Z80-based home computers
Computer-related introductions in 1980
Home video game consoles |
58390644 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter%20Abbeel | Pieter Abbeel | Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder of covariant.ai, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills, and co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system that has been implemented in over 500 universities nationwide. He is best known for his cutting-edge research in robotics and machine learning, particularly in deep reinforcement learning.
Early life and education
Abbeel was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1977. He grew up in nearby suburb Brasschaat.
As a high school student at Sint-Michielscollege (Brasschaat), Abbeel played on the club basketball team. He went on to play on the basketball team of KU Leuven University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering in 2000.
Abbeel received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. He specialized in artificial intelligence research, noting that his interest in AI sparked from the realization that AI can help build tools for other disciplines and that intelligence sets humans apart from other species. Originally, Abbeel intended to pursue a master's degree in computer science, but decided to stay for his Ph.D. due to the abundance of AI projects happening at Stanford. He was the first PhD student of AI Professor Andrew Ng, who was a first-year professor at Stanford at the time. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2008, Abbeel became an assistant professor in Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department.
Career
Upon his arrival at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor, Abbeel founded the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. Additionally, in 2014, he co-founded Gradescope with other UC Berkeley-affiliated engineers Arjun Singh, Sergey Karayev, Ibrahim Awwal, which was acquired by TurnItIn in 2018. In 2016, Abbeel joined OpenAI, where he has published numerous articles on reinforcement learning, robot learning, and unsupervised learning. Also in 2016, he became co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, which consists of post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students interested in machine learning and robotics. He also founded Berkeley Open Arms, which has licenses the IP on the Blue Robot project from Berkeley. In 2017, he became a full-time professor with tenure at UC Berkeley.
In October 2017, Abbeel and three of his students, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, co-founded Covariant (formerly named Embodied Intelligence). Based in Emeryville, California, Covariant launched in January 2020 and was covered in, among others, New York Times, Wired, MIT Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum. The company currently has $147M in funding. The website discloses that the team is building a universal AI to help robots see, reason, and on the world around them using deep imitation learning and deep reinforcement learning. Currently, in addition to his research, Abbeel teaches upper-division and graduate classes on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Deep Unsupervised Learning. Abbeel also hosts a weekly podcast, The Robot Brains, featuring experts in AI and robotics.
References
External links
Google Scholar Profile
Living people
American roboticists
Sloan Research Fellows
UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty
Stanford University School of Engineering alumni
KU Leuven alumni
1977 births
Belgian men's basketball players
American men's basketball players |
53472600 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayne%20Bryant%20%28engineer%29 | Jayne Bryant (engineer) | Jayne Bryant FWES, is Engineering Director for BAE Systems, Applied Intelligence. She has over 40 years’ experience in engineering.
Early life and education
Bryant was educated at Maidstone Girls Grammar School, when she decided on a career in software engineering. She began working for Marconi Avionics as a trainee software engineer, undertaking a day release HNC Computing course at Medway College and after two years was offered the opportunity to do an Advanced Avionics Computing Certificate course, which ran for a further year. By the time Bryant completed her training she has a team of 12 graduates working for her.
Career
Bryant's career as a Software Engineer grew into software management, becoming responsible for a major software development with over 300 engineers before she reached 30. From that point on, her scope increased beyond software and took a more general Engineering and Project Management direction.
Bryant continued to progress through roles with various defence organisations including Chief Engineer at GEC - Marconi Avionics Maritime Aircraft Systems Division; Head of Engineering Strategy and CMMI at SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems; Engineering Director for BAE Systems, Platform Solutions at Rochester, chair of the EPWG (Engineering Process Working Group) at BAE Systems Performance Excellence and Engineering Director for BAE Systems Defence Information.
Bryant heads up a team of 1400 engineers as Engineering Director for BAE Systems, Applied Intelligence.
Bryant's career is highlighted in the publication "Championing Women Leaders".
Awards
Bryant was elected a Fellow of the IET June 2005 and a Fellow of WES in May 2015.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in July 2010 and has served on the IET Board of Trustees.
She was also named as one of the Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering in the UK by the Daily Telegraph and Women's Engineering Society (WES) 2016
Personal life
Bryant is married and has adult triplets.
References
Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Female Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
21st-century British engineers
21st-century women engineers
20th-century British engineers
20th-century women engineers
British women engineers |
4990355 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open%20%28process%29 | Open (process) | open is a NeXTSTEP & macOS command line process that opens files, folders or URLs in the GUI as though the user had double clicked on them. Files will be opened in the default application for their type, folders will be opened in the Finder or file system GUI, and URLs will be opened in the default browser.
It is based on the AppKit API , which is stubbed to other OS alternatives on GNUstep if a GS application is not registered for a file.
Other OS alternatives
Microsoft Windows:
X11 (Unix-like systems):
xdg-utils:
KDE:
GNOME:
References
External links
MacOS
NeXT
Unix windowing system-related software
Utilities for macOS |
1439333 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspyr | Aspyr | Aspyr Media, Inc. (pronounced "aspire") is an American video game developer and publisher founded by Michael Rogers and Ted Staloch in Austin, Texas. Originally founded to bring top gaming titles to macOS, the company, since 2005, has become a publisher and developer of entertainment for multiple gaming platforms.
Aspyr was acquired by Embracer Group in February 2021 and placed within Saber Interactive.
History
In 1996, Aspyr Media, Inc., was established by Michael Rogers and Ted Staloch in Austin, Texas. Staloch, who had a background in sales and marketing and Rogers, who worked with TechWorks, noticed that there was a lack of gaming titles available to Mac owners and set out to change it. According to Rogers, when naming the company, they “wanted something meaning ‘to aspire and be great’” and also “memorable and unique.” Aspyr made its name specializing in porting video games from Microsoft Windows to macOS.
By 2003, they owned 60 percent of the Mac entertainment market. In 2005, Aspyr partnered with Alex Seropian of Wideload Games and released their first originally-published AAA game, Stubbs The Zombie, to Mac OS, Windows and Xbox. In 2015, Aspyr Media expanded their platform catalog again by releasing an iOS port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and later, Bioware's classic-action RPG, Jade Empire - a title they extended to Android as well. In 2015, Aspyr updated Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (native widescreen resolutions up to 5K, Steam Workshop, support for controllers, 57 achievements, etc.) and also ported it to macOS and Linux. In 2015, Aspyr developed and published Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered, a remaster of a game developed by Quantic Dream, to a worldwide audience with enhanced game features, updated visuals and controls, as well as content that was censored in the original North American release.
According to Elizabeth Howard, vice president of publishing at Aspyr Media, the company's current focus is less on internal IP and more on company growth, establishing bigger undertakings with big brands. Aspyr has published over 190 games, and have added 90 plus members to their team since 1996.
In February 2021, Aspyr was acquired by Embracer Group. The company was added as a studio under the Saber Interactive label within Embracer. In September 2021, it was announced that Aspyr was developing a remake of Knights of the Old Republic for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 5 as a timed exclusive.
Games
Currently, Aspyr's catalog includes popular games such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI, developed in 2018 on Mac, Linux, iOS and Nintendo Switch, Torn, and the re-releases of LucasArts titles: Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.
References
External links
American companies established in 1996
Companies based in Austin, Texas
Video game companies established in 1996
1996 establishments in Texas
Linux companies
Linux game porters
Macintosh software companies
Video game companies of the United States
Video game companies based in Texas
Video game development companies
Video game publishers
Saber Interactive
2021 mergers and acquisitions |
2709092 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup%20%28web%20application%20hybrid%29 | Mashup (web application hybrid) | A mashup (computer industry jargon), in web development, is a web page or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. For example, a user could combine the addresses and photographs of their library branches with a Google map to create a map mashup. The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open application programming interfaces (open API) and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data.
The term mashup originally comes from creating something by combining elements from two or more sources.
The main characteristics of a mashup are combination, visualization, and aggregation. It is important to make existing data more useful, for personal and professional use. To be able to permanently access the data of other services, mashups are generally client applications or hosted online.
In the past years, more and more Web applications have published APIs that enable software developers to easily integrate data and functions the SOA way, instead of building them by themselves. Mashups can be considered to have an active role in the evolution of social software and Web 2.0. Mashup composition tools are usually simple enough to be used by end-users. They generally do not require programming skills and rather support visual wiring of GUI widgets, services and components together. Therefore, these tools contribute to a new vision of the Web, where users are able to contribute.
The term "mashup" is not formally defined by any standard-setting body.
History
The broader context of the history of the Web provides a background for the development of mashups. Under the Web 1.0 model, organizations stored consumer data on portals and updated them regularly. They controlled all the consumer data, and the consumer had to use their products and services to get the information.
The advent of Web 2.0 introduced Web standards that were commonly and widely adopted across traditional competitors and which unlocked the consumer data. At the same time, mashups emerged, allowing mixing and matching competitors' APIs to develop new services.
The first mashups used mapping services or photo services to combine these services with data of any kind and therefore to produce visualizations of data.
In the beginning, most mashups were consumer-based, but recently the mashup is to be seen as an interesting concept useful also to enterprises. Business mashups can combine existing internal data with external services to generate new views on the data.
Types of mashup
There are many types of mashup, such as business mashups, consumer mashups, and data mashups. The most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public.
Business (or enterprise) mashups define applications that combine their own resources, application and data, with other external Web services. They focus data into a single presentation and allow for collaborative action among businesses and developers. This works well for an agile development project, which requires collaboration between the developers and customer (or customer proxy, typically a product manager) for defining and implementing the business requirements. Enterprise mashups are secure, visually rich Web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.
Consumer mashups combine data from multiple public sources in the browser and organize it through a simple browser user interface. (e.g.: Wikipediavision combines Google Map and a Wikipedia API)
Data mashups, opposite to the consumer mashups, combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. The combination of all these resources create a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.
By API type
Mashups can also be categorized by the basic API type they use but any of these can be combined with each other or embedded into other applications.
Data types
Indexed data (documents, weblogs, images, videos, shopping articles, jobs ...) used by metasearch engines
Cartographic and geographic data: geolocation software, geovisualization
Feeds, podcasts: news aggregators
Functions
Data converters: language translators, speech processing, URL shorteners...
Communication: email, instant messaging, notification...
Visual data rendering: information visualization, diagrams
Security related: electronic payment systems, ID identification...
Editors
Mashup enabler
In technology, a mashup enabler is a tool for transforming incompatible IT resources into a form that allows them to be easily combined, in order to create a mashup. Mashup enablers allow powerful techniques and tools (such as mashup platforms) for combining data and services to be applied to new kinds of resources. An example of a mashup enabler is a tool for creating an RSS feed from a spreadsheet (which cannot easily be used to create a mashup). Many mashup editors include mashup enablers, for example, Presto Mashup Connectors, Convertigo Web Integrator or Caspio Bridge.
Mashup enablers have also been described as "the service and tool providers, [sic] that make mashups possible".
History
Early mashups were developed manually by enthusiastic programmers. However, as mashups became more popular, companies began creating platforms for building mashups, which allow designers to visually construct mashups by connecting together mashup components.
Mashup editors have greatly simplified the creation of mashups, significantly increasing the productivity of mashup developers and even opening mashup development to end-users and non-IT experts. Standard components and connectors enable designers to combine mashup resources in all sorts of complex ways with ease. Mashup platforms, however, have done little to broaden the scope of resources accessible by mashups and have not freed mashups from their reliance on well-structured data and open libraries (RSS feeds and public APIs).
Mashup enablers evolved to address this problem, providing the ability to convert other kinds of data and services into mashable resources.
Web resources
Of course, not all valuable data is located within organizations. In fact, the most valuable information for business intelligence and decision support is often external to the organization. With the emergence of rich web applications and online Web portals, a wide range of business-critical processes (such as ordering) are becoming available online. Unfortunately, very few of these data sources syndicate content in RSS format and very few of these services provide publicly accessible APIs. Mashup editors therefore solve this problem by providing enablers or connectors.
Mashups versus portals
Mashups and portals are both content aggregation technologies. Portals are an older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic Web applications, in which the process of converting data content into marked-up Web pages is split into two phases: generation of markup "fragments" and aggregation of the fragments into pages. Each markup fragment is generated by a "portlet", and the portal combines them into a single Web page. Portlets may be hosted locally on the portal server or remotely on a separate server.
Portal technology defines a complete event model covering reads and updates. A request for an aggregate page on a portal is translated into individual read operations on all the portlets that form the page ("render" operations on local, JSR 168 portlets or "getMarkup" operations on remote, WSRP portlets). If a submit button is pressed on any portlet on a portal page, it is translated into an update operation on that portlet alone (processAction on a local portlet or performBlockingInteraction on a remote, WSRP portlet). The update is then immediately followed by a read on all portlets on the page.
Portal technology is about server-side, presentation-tier aggregation. It cannot be used to drive more robust forms of application integration such as two-phase commit.
Mashups differ from portals in the following respects:
The portal model has been around longer and has had greater investment and product research. Portal technology is therefore more standardized and mature. Over time, increasing maturity and standardization of mashup technology will likely make it more popular than portal technology because it is more closely associated with Web 2.0 and lately Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). New versions of portal products are expected to eventually add mashup support while still supporting legacy portlet applications. Mashup technologies, in contrast, are not expected to provide support for portal standards.
Business mashups
Mashup uses are expanding in the business environment. Business mashups are useful for integrating business and data services, as business mashups technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces.
Business mashups differ from consumer mashups in the level of integration with business computing environments, security and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using business mashups in commercial software as a service (SaaS) offering.
Many of the providers of business mashups technologies have added SOA features.
Architectural aspects of mashups
The architecture of a mashup is divided into three layers:
Presentation / user interaction: this is the user interface of mashups. The technologies used are HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml (Ajax).
Web Services: the product's functionality can be accessed using API services. The technologies used are XMLHTTPRequest, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, SOAP, REST.
Data: handling the data like sending, storing and receiving. The technologies used are XML, JSON, KML.
Architecturally, there are two styles of mashups: Web-based and server-based. Whereas Web-based mashups typically use the user's web browser to combine and reformat the data, server-based mashups analyze and reformat the data on a remote server and transmit the data to the user's browser in its final form.
Mashups appear to be a variation of a façade pattern. That is: a software engineering design pattern that provides a simplified interface to a larger body of code (in this case the code to aggregate the different feeds with different APIs).
Mashups can be used with software provided as a service (SaaS).
After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt service-oriented architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making them available as discrete Web services. Web services provide open, standardized protocols to provide a unified means of accessing information from a diverse set of platforms (operating systems, programming languages, applications). These Web services can be reused to provide completely new services and applications within and across organizations, providing business flexibility.
See also
Mashup (culture)
Mashup (music)
Open Mashup Alliance
Open API
Webhook
Web portal
Web scraping
References
Further reading
Ahmet Soylu, Felix Mödritscher, Fridolin Wild, Patrick De Causmaecker, Piet Desmet. 2012 . “Mashups by Orchestration and Widget-based Personal Environments: Key Challenges, Solution Strategies, and an Application.” Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems 46 (4): 383–428.
Endres-Niggemeyer, Brigitte ed. 2013. Semantic Mashups. Intelligent Reuse of Web Resources. Springer. (Print)
Software architecture
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 neologisms
Web development
World Wide Web |
67099824 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft%20Power%20Platform | Microsoft Power Platform | Microsoft Power Platform is a line of business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity software applications. Microsoft developed the Power Fx low-code programming language for expressing logic across the Power Platform. It also provides integrations with GitHub and Teams.
Products
The Power Platform family of products includes:
Power BI, a software for visualizing data with different kinds of charts. It competes with tools like Tableau.
Power Apps (known as PowerApps until 2019), graphical software for writing low-code custom business applications
Power Automate, formerly Microsoft Flow, a toolkit similar to IFTTT and Zapier for implementing business workflow products.
Power Automate Desktop (PAD), a RPA software for automating graphical user interfaces (via the acquisition of Softomotive in May 2020). This product uses a Robin Script based language to achieve RPA.
Power Virtual Agents, software for writing chatbots
Microsoft Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse, formerly called Microsoft Common Data Service, is a cloud based storage and data management engine used along with other Microsoft products such as Power Apps and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. One example of use could be to use Dataverse as a form of data lake together with Microsoft Power Apps. Dataverse is based on Microsoft's Common Data Model principles and built on Microsoft Azure SQL. In November 2020, Microsoft's Common Data Service was rebranded into Dataverse.
See also
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Office
List of Microsoft software
References
Further reading
External links
Microsoft Power Platform documentation
Power Platform
Bundled products or services
Business software
Microsoft development tools
2018 software |
59028771 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarine%20%28company%29 | Sarine (company) | Sarine Technologies Ltd is a publicly traded company that develops, produces and sells technologies for the diamond industry, including devices for the planning, analysis and grading of rough and polished diamonds. Company headquarters are located in Hod Hasharon, Israel. The company operates subsidiaries in Dalton, Israel, India, New York and Hong Kong. In 2017, Sarin India, the Indian subsidiary, opened “Sarin House” in Surat, consolidating the company's Surat-based activities in one facility.
The company is publicly traded on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and was the first Israeli company to be listed there. In 2018, Sarine opened the Sarine Technology Lab at the Israel Diamond Exchange, and later that year opened a lab in Mumbai, India. The Sarine labs are the first diamond laboratories in the world to use diamond grading technologies based on artificial intelligence.
History
Sarin Technologies was established in 1988. On January 21, 2014, the name was officially changed to Sarine Technologies.
The company's first product was the Robogem, an automated device for gemstone processing, as part of an initiative promoted by the Israel Emerald Cutters Association.
In the early 1990s, the company released DiaMension®, one of the world's first diamond cut grading software that could accurately measure a rough diamond's measurements within seconds. This transformed the way the industry approached the process of diamond cutting and fueled consumer demand for a wider range of cuts. In the mid-1990s, the company released the DiaExpert® hardware and Advisor® software for automated rough diamond planning via 3D diamond scanning.
In 2005, the company released the first green laser diamond sawing machine, called Quazer®, based on proprietary technology purchased from CNC Laser, a Belgian company. New versions of the Quazer® were released in 2010 and 2014.
In 2012, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group, part of the Chow Tai Fook conglomerate in Hong Kong, implemented Sarin's Solaris® 100 and DiaExpert® Eye systems for inclusion mapping and rough planning at their diamond manufacturing facilities in China and South Africa.
In 2014, Sarine launched Sarine Loupe™, a diamond imaging device that enables 360-degree viewing of diamonds. In the same year, RapNet® announced that it was incorporating Sarine Loupe imagery on its diamond trading platform. In November, a Sarine Loupe™ service center was opened in the Diamond District of New York.
In 2014, Sarine signed a cooperation agreement with Tiffany & Co. to develop an automated system for the grading of symmetry of polished diamonds based on grading standards set by Tiffany.
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) adopted Sarine Instructor® as its standard software for diamond grading and analysis in 2015, updating from the DiaVision software by Sarine that it had been using in its labs since 2010.
In 2016, the company acquired Diamining, a developer of point-of-sale apps for the diamond and jewelry industry, for $1.2 million. The Diamining technology was used as the basis for the development of Sarine Connect™, a diamond inventory search and display app for traders and retailers.
In February 2017, Sarine and GTTL Laboratories of Switzerland signed a collaboration agreement to research new approaches to diamond grading and authentication, as well as other industry challenges.
In 2017, three Indian nationals were arrested on suspicion of attempting to execute a $1 million bribe in exchange for the intellectual property of Sarine's diamond planning software. That same year, the company filed a lawsuit in India against a diamond manufacturer in Surat. Citing fraud and breach of contract, Sarine accused the manufacturer of allegedly hacking and manipulating the Sarine Galaxy® technology, and under-reporting the weight of diamonds scanned in the system.
In August 2018, Sarine entered into an agreement with Lucara Diamond Corp to provide Advisor® rough planning and Galaxy® inclusion mapping technologies for the Clara rough diamond trading platform, developed by Lucara.
Notable products & technological services
Sarine Galaxy
In 2008, Sarin Technologies purchased Galatea Ltd, an Israeli company that developed scanning and mapping technology for the detection of inclusions in rough diamonds, at a cost of $10.77 million. Following the development of the prototype to commercial application, Sarine released the Galaxy® in 2009, the world's first fully automated inclusion mapping device for rough diamonds. In early 2018, the company announced that Galaxy® systems scanned over 10 million rough stones worldwide during 2017, out of a total 30 million stones scanned by the technology since it first launched in 2009. In 2018, the first Galaxy® service center in China was opened, in the Sha Wan Jewellery Park in Guangzhou.
Sarine Light
In 2011, the company launched the Sarine Light™ light performance grading device. The technology that forms the basis of the Sarine Light™ was purchased by Sarine Technologies in 2010. The first version of the Sarine Light™ was known as Sarin D-Light. The first Sarine Light™ system was sold to diamond manufacturer EXELCO in 2013.
Sarine Profile
In early 2015, Sarine announced the launch of the Sarine Profile™ platform that provides a digital visual story of the diamond, with the aim of increasing efficiency in the diamond trade and retail sector. In 2017, the Sarine Profile™ platform was expanded to include 4Cs grading based on new color and clarity technologies developed by the company. In August 2018, the first Sarine Profile™ service center was opened in Japan.
Sarine Color and Sarine Clarity
In 2016, Sarine announced that it was developing new devices for automated grading of diamond color and clarity. Known as Sarine Clarity™ and Sarine Color™, the devices are based on machine learning, and are regarded as creating the first standardized and automated approach to diamond grading and gem labs.
Diamond Journey
In February 2018, Sarine announced the launch of the Diamond Journey™, a digital platform that displays information about a polished diamond throughout the manufacturing process from rough status to polished state. The Canadian mining company Dominion Diamond Mines was the first company to adopt the Diamond Journey for its CanadaMark diamond brand.
Sarine Advisor
Many diamond manufacturers use Sarine Advisor software for mapping, planning and scanning of rough/polish diamond. The software take input from different diamond scanning machines of Sarine. Final output integrates internal inclusion scanning information and geometrical 3D analyses. Current Sarine Advisor software's major release version is 7.0 which was released on 21 June 2017.
Sarine Loupe
Sarine Loupe allows a user to view the actual details of a diamond as if holding the diamond in hand and viewing through an eye loupe.
References
Diamond industry in Israel
Companies listed on the Singapore Exchange
Technology companies of Israel
Diamond cutting
Companies established in 1988 |
228547 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla%20Thunderbird | Mozilla Thunderbird | Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla's Firefox web browser.
Features
Thunderbird is an email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP/IRC) client with personal information manager (PIM) functionality, inbuilt since version 78.0 and previously available from the Lightning calendar extension. Additional features are available from extensions.
Message management
Thunderbird manages multiple email, newsgroup, and news feed accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts. Features such as quick search, saved search folders ("virtual folders"), advanced message filtering, message grouping, and tags help manage and find messages. On Linux-based systems, system mail (movemail) accounts were supported until version 91.0. Thunderbird provides basic support for system-specific new email notifications and can be extended with advanced notification support using an add-on.
Junk filtering
Thunderbird incorporates a Bayesian spam filter, a whitelist based on the included address book, and can also understand classifications by server-based filters such as SpamAssassin.
Extensions and themes
Extensions allow the addition of features through the installation of XPInstall modules (known as "XPI" or "zippy" installation) via the add-ons website that also features an update functionality to update the extensions.
Thunderbird supports a variety of themes for changing its overall look and feel. These packages of CSS and image files can be downloaded via the add-ons website at Mozilla Add-ons.
Standards support
Thunderbird follows industry standards for email:
POP. Basic email retrieval protocol.
IMAP. Thunderbird has implemented many of the capabilities in IMAP, in addition to adding their own extensions and the de facto standards by Google and Apple.
LDAP address auto-completion.
S/MIME: Inbuilt support for email encryption and signing using X.509 keys provided by a centralised certificate authority.
OpenPGP: Inbuilt support for email encryption and signing since version 78.2.1, while older versions used extensions such as Enigmail.
For web feeds (e.g. news aggregators), it supports Atom and RSS.
For chat, it supports the IRC and XMPP protocol.
For newsfeeds, it uses NNTP and supports NNTPS.
File formats supported
Thunderbird provides mailbox format support using plugins, but this feature is not yet enabled due to related work in progress. The mailbox formats supported are:
mbox – Unix mailbox format (one file holding many emails)
maildir – known as maildir-lite (one file per email). "there are still many bugs", so this is disabled by default.
Thunderbird also uses Mork and (since version 3) MozStorage (which is based on SQLite) for its internal database. Mork was due to be replaced with MozStorage in Thunderbird 3.0, but the 8.0 release still uses the Mork file format.
Big file linking
Since version 38, Thunderbird has integrated support for automatic linking of large files instead of attaching them directly to the mail message.
HTML formatting and code insertion
Thunderbird provides a wysiwyg editor for composing messages formatted with HTML (default). The delivery format auto-detect feature will send unformatted messages as plain text (controlled by a user preference). Certain special formatting like subscript, superscript and strikethrough is available from the Format menu. The Insert > HTML menu provides the ability to edit the HTML source code of the message. There is basic support for HTML template messages, which are stored in a dedicated templates folder for each account.
Limitations and known issues
As with any software, there may be limitations to the number and sizes of files and objects represented. For example, POP3 folders are subject to filesystem design limitations, such as maximum file sizes on filesystems that do not have large-file support, as well as possible limitations of long filenames, and other issues.
Cross-platform support
Thunderbird runs on a variety of platforms. Releases available on the primary distribution site support the following operating systems:
Linux
Windows
macOS
Unofficial ports are available for:
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
Ports for older versions available for OS/2 (including ArcaOS and eComStation).
The source code is freely available and can be compiled to be run on a variety of other architectures and operating systems.
Internationalization and localization
With contributors all over the world, Thunderbird has been translated into more than 65 languages, although email addresses are currently limited to ASCII local parts. Thunderbird does not yet support SMTPUTF8 (RFC 6531) or Email Address Internationalization.
Security
Thunderbird provides security features such as TLS/SSL connections to IMAP and SMTP servers. It also offers inbuilt support for secure email with digital signing and message encryption through OpenPGP (using public and private keys) or S/MIME (using certificates). Any of these security features can take advantage of smartcards with the installation of additional extensions.
Other security features may be added through extensions. Up to version 68, the Enigmail extension was required for OpenPGP support (now inbuilt).
Optional security protections also include disabling loading of remote images within messages, enabling only specific media types (sanitizer), and disabling JavaScript.
The French military uses Thunderbird and contributes to its security features, which are claimed to match the requirements for NATO's closed messaging system.
History
Originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix (the original name for Mozilla Firefox), the project failed to gain momentum. With the success of Firefox, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.
On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received more than 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in ten days.
Significant work on Thunderbird restarted with the announcement that from version 1.5 onward the main Mozilla suite would be designed around separate applications using this new toolkit. This contrasts with the previous all-in-one approach, allowing users to mix and match the Mozilla applications with alternatives. The original Mozilla Suite continues to be developed as SeaMonkey.
On December 23, 2004, Project Lightning was announced which tightly integrated calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. Lightning supports the full range of calendar mechanisms and protocols supported by the Mozilla Calendar infrastructure, just as with modern (post-0.2) Sunbird.
On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation announced that "future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program." The project was code-named Penelope.
In late 2006, Debian rebranded Thunderbird as Icedove due to trademark and copyright reasons. This was the second product to be rebranded.
On July 26, 2007, the Mozilla Foundation announced that Thunderbird would be developed by an independent organization, because the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the foundation) was focusing on Mozilla Firefox development.
On September 17, 2007, the Mozilla Foundation announced the funding of a new internet communications initiative with David Ascher of ActiveState. The purpose of this initiative was "to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird product, code, and brand".
On February 19, 2008, Mozilla Messaging started operations as a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation responsible for the development of email and similar communications. Its initial focus was on the then upcoming version of Thunderbird 3. Alpha Preview releases of Thunderbird 3 were codenamed "Shredder". On April 4, 2011, Mozilla Messaging was merged into the Mozilla Labs group of the Mozilla Foundation.
On July 6, 2012, a confidential memo from Jb Piacentino, the Thunderbird Managing Director at Mozilla, was leaked and published to TechCrunch. The memo indicated that Mozilla would be moving some of the team off the project and further development of new features would be left up to the community. The memo was slated for release on July 9, 2012. A subsequent article by the Executive Chair of Mozilla, Mitchell Baker, stated Mozilla's decision to make a transition of Thunderbird to a new release and governance model. On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features.
On November 25, 2014, Kent James of the volunteer-led Thunderbird Council announced on the Thunderbird blog that active contributors to Thunderbird gathered at the Mozilla office in Toronto and discussed the future of the application. They decided that more staff were required working full-time on Thunderbird so that the Thunderbird Team could release a stable and reliable product and make progress on features that had been frequently requested by the community.
On December 1, 2015, Mitchell Baker suggested in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird should be uncoupled from Firefox's infrastructure. She referred to Thunderbird as being a tax on Firefox and said that she did not believe Thunderbird had the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox did. Mozilla remained interested in having a role in Thunderbird, but sought more assistance to help with development. On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needed to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation would provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project.
On May 9, 2017, Philipp Kewisch announced that the Mozilla Foundation would continue to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but that Thunderbird would migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project. Mozilla brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continued to support its development. The Thunderbird development team expanded by adding several new members and overhauled security and the user interface.
The interim/beta versions Thunderbird 57 and 58, released in late 2017, began to make changes influenced by Firefox Quantum, including a new "Photon" user interface.
Despite the removal in Firefox Quantum of support for XUL-based legacy add-ons in favor of WebExtensions, the stable/ESR release of Thunderbird 60 in mid-2018 continued to support them, although most would require updates, and it did not support WebExtensions except for Themes.
In 2018, work was underway for planned support in Thunderbird 63 of WebExtensions and to continue to "somewhat" support legacy addons, according to Mozilla.
With the release of Thunderbird 68 in August 2019 it now only supports WebExtension addons. Legacy Addons can still be used if a special "legacy mode" is enabled, but even for this, the legacy Addon has to be converted.
Instead of upgrading to WebExtension technology, the Thunderbird version of the popular OpenPGP addon Enigmail was retired and its functionality was largely integrated into Thunderbird instead. Mainly for licensing reasons, this is no longer based on GnuPG, but on the RNP library, which has more liberal licensing terms.
On January 28, 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced that the project would henceforth be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, in order to explore offering products and services that were not previously possible and to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations.
As of version 78.7.1, Thunderbird will no longer allow installation of addons that use Legacy WebExtensions. Only MailExtensions are now compatible with Thunderbird. MailExtensions are WebExtensions but with "some added features specific to Thunderbird".
With version 91. The main improvements and new features of Thunderbird are: User interface improvements to Calendar display, message compose window, message composer, and customized the order of accounts; Improved the performance, New context menu in the compose window; Updated printing UI; Major revamped account setup wizard; Import or Export Thunderbird profiles; Automatically suggesting replacements for discontinued or incompatible add-ons; Supports CardDAV address books; PDF.js viewer is now included by default; Updates the enterprise policies and the printing dialog; Defaults the IRC server for new chat accounts to Libera Chat; Encrypt emails to BCC recipients; Native support for Apple Silicon CPUs.
Releases
Thunderbird development releases occur in three stages, called Beta, Earlybird, and Daily, which correspond to Firefox's Beta, Aurora, and Nightly stages. The release dates and Gecko versions are exactly the same as Firefox; for example, Firefox 7 and Thunderbird 7 were both released on September 27, 2011, and were both based on Gecko 7.0.
References
External links
2003 software
Cross-platform free software
Email client software for Linux
Free email software
Free multilingual software
Free software programmed in C++
Free Usenet clients
News aggregator software
MacOS email clients
OS/2 software
Portable software
Software that uses XUL
Software using the Mozilla license
Unix Internet software
Windows email clients
Software that uses SQLite |
51315186 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore%20Knowledge%20Park | Lahore Knowledge Park | Lahore Knowledge Park (LKP) is an under-construction science park located on a 852 acres located on Bedian Road in Lahore District, Pakistan.
Owned and managed by the Lahore Knowledge Park Company with an initial investment of $1 billion, of which $200 million is invested by Government of Punjab. The project is designed by Frost & Sullivan. The park include's universities, science and innovation hubs, a retail and central business district, a residential district, an entertainment zone and green areas.
Pakistan Kidney and Liver Institute and Research Center is under construction in the park.
Masterplan
The park's masterplan divides it into five categories:
life sciences and bio-technology,
design and creative industry,
information technology,
computer sciences
and science and engineering
As of 2016, the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology and Lancaster University will jointly set up a graduate school in the park. Information Technology University will also move its campus to the park.
References
Science parks in Pakistan
Information technology in Pakistan
Science and technology in Punjab, Pakistan |
27681799 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocuSign | DocuSign | DocuSign, Inc. is an American company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that allows organizations to manage electronic agreements. As part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature, a way to sign electronically on different devices. DocuSign has over 1 million customers and hundreds of millions of users in more than 180 countries. Signatures processed by DocuSign are compliant with the US ESIGN Act and the European Union's eIDAS regulation, including EU Advanced and EU Qualified Signatures.
In April 2018, DocuSign filed for an initial public offering. At the time of the IPO, the largest shareholders were venture investment firms Sigma Partners, Ignition Partners, Frazier Technology Ventures, and former CEO Keith Krach was the largest individual shareholder. None of the original founders, or current CEO Daniel Springer, are major shareholders. The company went public on the NASDAQ on April 27, 2018.
History
DocuSign was founded in 2003 by Court Lorenzini, Tom Gonser and Eric Ranft. Tom Gonser came up with the idea when he was at NetUpdate, a company he founded in 1998 and where he served as CEO. Through its history, NetUpdate had acquired several companies, including an e-signature start-up in Seattle called DocuTouch that had been funded by Timberline Venture Partners, Bill Kallman and Jeff Tung with $4M. Timberline invested another $1 M in the merger into Netupdate. DocuTouch held patents on Web-based digital signatures and collaboration. With internal support from Gonser, Lorenzini negotiated the purchase of certain DocuTouch assets from NetUpdate and started DocuSign. Gonser then left the NetUpdate Board to focus on DocuSign full-time.
The firm began sales in 2005 when zipForm, now zipLogix, integrated DocuSign into its virtual real estate forms. Mock trials featuring licensed attorneys and real judges highlighted the admissibility of DocuSign contracts in court based on encrypted audit logs of signature events, as well as the impossibility of changing contracts.
In January 2007, Court Lorenzini stepped down as CEO and Chairman of the Board and took on the role of Executive Vice President of Business Development. He was replaced as CEO by Matthew Schiltz, who served in that role until January 2010. Steven King replaced Schultz as CEO and moved the corporate headquarters from Seattle to San Francisco. Keith Krach became DocuSign's chairman of the board in January 2010 and its CEO in August 2011.
In June 2010, DocuSign added support for iPhone, iPad and phone-based user authentication. DocuSign also began referring to its service as “eSignature Transaction Management”. By the end of 2010, the company handled 73 percent of the Saas-based electronic signature market with 80 million signatures processed. Scale Venture Partners led an investment round of $27 million in December 2010.
DocuSign opened an office in London, England, in September 2011. In the same year, DocuSign opened an office in San Francisco that now functions as its global headquarters.
DocuSign signed an agreement with PayPal in April 2012 that allowed users to capture signatures and payments in a single transaction with DocuSign Payment. Similar partnerships with Salesforce.com, and Google Drive preceded the PayPal agreement.
In July 2012, Business Insider reported that about 90% of Fortune 500 companies had signed up to use DocuSign.
On January 10, 2013, DocuSign and Equifax announced a partnership to simplify electronic delivery of the Requests for Transcript of Tax Return Form 4506-T to the United States Internal Revenue Service. Under the partnership, Equifax allows lenders to use DocuSign to securely send requests to loan applicants. DocuSign and Equifax were among 14 firms that participated in a nine-month feasibility study of electronic signatures for 4506-T forms in 2011.
In October 2015, Keith Krach announced he would step down as CEO once a search for a new CEO was completed . In 2016, DocuSign was ranked #3 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.
In January 2017, veteran software executive Daniel Springer was named as the new CEO. Also in 2017, DocuSign was ranked #4 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.
In July 2018, DocuSign acquired SpringCM for $220 million.
In March 2019, DocuSign announced the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, a suite of products and integrations for automating and connecting the entire agreement process digitally. This marked the company's transition from their former position in digital transaction management.
In February 2020, DocuSign acquired Seal Software for $188 million.
Funding
In 2004, DocuSign raised $4.6 million in a Series A financing from Ignition Partners and Frazier Technology Ventures. In 2006, Sigma Partners led Series A1 and Series B financings, becoming the largest shareholder, a position it held at the time of the IPO, with returns over $700 million. Between 2006 and 2009 DocuSign raised $30 million that allowed the firm to add corporate clients and process 48 million signatures.
In July 2012, DocuSign raised $47.5 million in venture funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; the round later grew closer to $56 million. In March 2014, the company announced it had raised $85 million in a new funding round. Though unconfirmed, The Wall Street Journal reported the round was based on a company valuation of $1.6 billion.
In May 2015, the company announced it had raised $233 million in a new funding round, with some estimating a $3 billion company valuation.
In 2018, the company announced plans for an initial public offering on the NASDAQ, with the goal of raising up to $543 million when the company goes public. Neither the original founders nor current CEO Daniel Springer were major shareholders at that time. Former CEO Keith Krach was the largest individual shareholder at 5.5%, about 8.5 million shares at the time of the IPO. Venture capital firms Sigma Partners, Ignition Partners, and now-defunct company Frazier Technology Ventures were the largest shareholders.
Products and structure
DocuSign's services are offered either by subscription or free of charge as a mobile device app. Signatures and documents are uploaded, then encrypted and a unique hash created. If a signed document is later changed, the hash will not match the information stored by DocuSign if a document has been tampered with or compromised. By 2018, more than 20 billion pieces of paper and 608,000 barrels of oil had been saved by the company through avoidance of wasted printouts for signatures.
DocuSign Professional emails recipients an electronically signed document requesting review of a document after it is uploaded. Each party must agree to complete business electronically, review the document, and apply a signature. Signatures may be added from a stored copy of a signature or generated automatically by the software. Phone confirmation and background checks are offered as premium services.
DocuSign released its mobile app DocuSign Ink in November 2011. It is available free of charge, and runs on Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone operating systems. DocuSign Ink allows users to sign and annotate documents by attaching a stored signature, which may be created in graphic design software, captured from an image of a paper document or selected from a variety of prefabricated signatures based on the user's legal name. The saved signature can be applied to PDFs, word processing documents and images. To complete a document, participants apply their signatures and send completed documents to cloud storage for review.
See also
Adobe Sign
Electronic signature
Handwriting recognition
Title 21 CFR Part 11
Uniform Electronic Transactions Act
References
External links
Business software companies
Electronic signature providers
Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in San Francisco
2003 establishments in California
Software companies established in 2003
Companies listed on the Nasdaq
2018 initial public offerings
Software companies of the United States
American companies established in 2003 |
4160442 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne%20Polytechnic | Melbourne Polytechnic | Melbourne Polytechnic, formerly NMIT, is a vocational education (TAFE) and higher education institute located in Melbourne, Australia predominantly in the northern suburbs but also in the south with a campus at Prahran. It has seven campuses located at Preston, Collingwood, Epping, Fairfield, Heidelberg, Prahran, Greensborough, training sites at Broadmeadows, and country training facilities at Eden Park, Yan Yean and Ararat.
In October 2014, NMIT repositioned itself in the tertiary education market under the Melbourne Polytechnic brand, appointing Publicis Mojo to coordinate the change. The change was facilitated by a $19 million grant from the Victorian Government.
A wide selection of study options in vocational education are offered from short courses, pre-apprenticeships, apprenticeships and traineeships through to certificates, diplomas, advanced diplomas, and onto higher education, tertiary degrees under the Australian Qualifications Framework. In 2013, there were 511 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) teaching staff and 348.5 (FTE) support staff employed by Melbourne Polytechnic delivering over 500 courses. There were 50,203 total enrolments as at November 2014 including 6,284 off-shore students at overseas partner institutions.
Melbourne Polytechnic is the largest provider of primary industry training in Victoria and one of the largest in Australia offering a diverse range of courses from practical short-courses to a Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology focusing on Viticulture, Agronomy and Agribusiness.
Management and organisation structure
Melbourne Polytechnic is managed by a board of eleven directors appointed by the Victorian State Government with the Chief Executive appointed by the board. Recent Chief Executives (CE) appointments have included Brian MacDonald (1988 - March 2012), Dr Andrew Giddy (March 2012 to March 2014), Ron Gauci (March 2014 - April 2015) and Rob Wood (from May 2015 - September 2017). On 20 October 2017, Frances Coppolillo was appointed as Chief Executive.
Currently, the CE has six direct reports comprising Academic Operations; Curriculum Innovation and Teaching Excellence; Student Engagement, International and Community Partnerships; Strategy, Performance and Governance; People and Corporate Services; and Infrastructure, Sustainability and Precincts.
Faculties
Melbourne Polytechnic is structured with four faculties each containing a number of Vocational education and training (VET) Teaching Departments and Higher Education (Master, Bachelor and associate degrees and higher education diploma) programs. During 2014, under the interim CEO leadership of Ron Gauci, the Institute undertook a major restructure reducing the teaching faculties from six to four. An International Office coordinates enrolment and services provided to international students studying at Melbourne Polytechnic. Many of the bachelor's degree courses have associate degrees embedded within them for an interim qualification and exit point after 2 years study.
Courses
Short courses
Short vocational courses are offered in a wide variety of areas including: Beauty, Drafting, Multimedia, Hospitality, HR, IT, massage, Office Administration, Welding, Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Computer Aided Drafting (CAD), and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP). Courses in IELTS - International English Language Testing system - are constantly being run from Preston and Collingwood campuses to enhance the English skills of students from non-English speaking backgrounds, particularly international students.
Certificate and diploma courses
As a major vocational education provider in Melbourne Melbourne Polytechnic offers a large variety of Certificate, Diploma and Advanced Diploma Courses across all Faculties and teaching departments with many of the courses open for international students to enrol.
Degree courses
In 2002 the Victorian Education Minister, Lynne Kosky, announced that TAFEs would be able to offer bachelor's degrees in specialised vocational areas not catered for by universities. Legislation was passed in 2003 and NMIT became the first Victorian TAFE to offer an undergraduate degree in 2004: The Bachelor of Applied Aquaculture course with the first students enrolling at the start of 2005.
Melbourne Polytechnic has since added undergraduate degree courses in Viticulture and Winemaking (2006), Equine Studies (2006), Australian Popular Music (2007), Hospitality Management (2008), Illustration (2008), Accounting (2011), and two in Early Years Education (2011). In 2012 new bachelor's degrees are being launched in Business, Information Technology, and Music Industry.
Associate Degrees are also offered in Accounting, Agriculture and Technology, Business, Early Years Studies, Equine Studies, Illustration, Information Technology, International Business, and International Business Management, Music, Music Industry, Writing and Publishing, and Tertiary Studies.
The 2014 Annual report states that two new master's degree courses have been accredited by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) for delivery: in Creative Industries, and Practising and Professional Accounting.
Bachelor of Accounting
Bachelor and associate degree program in Accounting started in 2011, with a particular focus on a sustainability and environmental management.
Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology - Aquaculture
The Bachelor of Aquaculture at Melbourne Polytechnic was the first full-time course in applied aquaculture and aquatic environmental management at the bachelor's degree level to be offered by a Victorian TAFE institute. Aquaculture research has included captive breeding of Murray Cod and biodiesel from microalgae as part of this degree program. In 2014 this degree became the Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology, delivered by Melbourne Polytechnic, but accredited by La Trobe University.
Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology - Viticulture and Winemaking
Melbourne Polytechnic has been running wine training at its Epping campus since 1993 and in the Yarra Valley since 1994. The Bachelor of Viticulture and Winemaking degree commenced in February 2006 using the marketing label of Australian College of Wine, established by NMIT in 2001 to enable state-of-the-art training in viticulture, winemaking and hospitality. This label was discontinued in favour of the Northern Estates label, launched in 2010. In 2014 this degree became the Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology, delivered by Melbourne Polytechnic, but accredited by La Trobe University.
Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology - Agronomy, Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology - Agribusiness
The former Bachelor of Agriculture and Land Management degree was reformulated in 2014 as the Bachelor of Agriculture and Technology, delivered by Melbourne Polytechnic, but accredited by La Trobe University. It has majors in Agronomy and Agribusiness.
Bachelor of Built Environment
A new degree in architecture launched in the second semester of 2015.
Bachelor of Business
The Bachelor of Business commenced enrolments in 2012.
Bachelor of Education (Early Years), Bachelor of Early Years Studies
In 2011 the Institute offered 2 Bachelor's degrees in early childhood education: a 4-year Bachelor of Education (Early Years) degree, a 3-year Bachelor of Early Years Studies, and a 2-year associate degree in Early Years Studies. They are the first training courses run by a TAFE Institute in Victoria that has achieved registration with the Victorian Institute of Teaching.
Bachelor of Equine Studies
The degree in Equine studies has been hailed as the first course of its kind in Australia and a forerunner in higher education needed to professionalise the equine industry. Previous courses were only available at the Certificate or Diploma level at a variety of regional TAFEs. The course is based at Melbourne Polytechnic's thoroughbred stud, Northern Lodge, north of Melbourne, which has sold its yearlings for up to $125,000 as part of its commercial activities. Northern Lodge was established in 1993 comprising plus an adjoining property on a long term-lease for the stud farm, training track and a vineyard.
Bachelor of Engineering Technology (Civil)
Civil Engineering bachelor and associate degree course program delivered from 2014.
Bachelor of Hospitality Management
The Bachelor of Hospitality Management commenced in 2008. The course integrates hospitality management and business management, and utilises Melbourne Polytechnic's specialist hospitality industry facilities and resources in conjunction with Hospitality Certificate and Diploma level courses.
Bachelor of Information Technology
The Bachelor of Information Technology commenced enrolments in 2012.
Bachelor of Music
The 3-year bachelor's degree include studies in jazz, classical, pop/rock, and world music and is structured around four strands : music tools and language; music practice; applying music technology and music and culture; and creativity and the music business. The course is taught by accomplished musicians and music educators: Eugene Ball and Adrian Sherriff. It joins the other music industry courses at the Certificate, Diploma and Advanced Diploma levels that have been offered by Melbourne Polytechnic since 1986 in sound production, music business, and music performance. Melbourne Polytechnic has also introduced online courses in Songwriting, Arranging and Copyright for musicians which are units in its National Music Training Package.
Bachelor of Music Industry
The three-year Bachelor of Music Industry degree was launched in 2011, with ARIA award-winning musician Greg Arnold as the first academic program head. The degree attracts a mixture of mature age and students straight from school. Students are able to select a major to specialise in including songwriting, sound production or music management.
Associate Degree of Veterinary Nursing
In 2015 Melbourne Polytechnic launched an associate degree of Veterinary Nursing based at the Epping campus, with new state of the art Veterinary training facilities. While Veterinary Nursing degrees have been offered for about 14 years in Great Britain, this is the first of its type to be presented in Australia.
Myerscough College in the UK advised upon and reviewed the degree program materials for the course. An agreement with the Lort Smith Animal Hospital in North Melbourne provides clinical placements and an end of course internship program for students.
Master of Creative Industries
The Master of Creative Industries curriculum model is based upon three thematic streams. These are (1) Entrepreneurship and Commercialisation (2), Applied Creative Research and (3) Creative Practice and Interdisciplinarity.
Official/authorised test centres
Melbourne Polytechnic has two official test centres.
IELTS (International English Language Testing System) for IELTS-General and IELTS-Academic English proficiency tests at the Preston campus, with offsite some offsite testing..
Pearson VUE - offering tests in PTE-Academic, CPA, CCNA, ICND1, ICND2, MSCE . Other tests are offered from time to time.
Graduation colours
At the yearly graduation ceremony graduates (Diploma and above) are presented their qualification in academic dress. The Melbourne Polytechnic board approved the following colours to represent the different fields of study (colour samples are approximate):
International partnerships
Melbourne Polytechnic is a global vocational education and training provider and offers qualifications in partnership with institutions in China, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, The Republic of Korea, India, Pakistan, Columbia and New Zealand. Students graduated in 2009 from NMIT programs at the following partner universities and colleges: Dalian Jiaotong University, Hangzhou Vocational and Technology College, Insurance Professional College, IEN-Start Institute Minjiang University, Jiyuan Vocational College, Luoyang University, Nanchang Hangkong University, Ocean University of China, Shandong Economic University, Sichuan College of Architectural Technology, Suzhou Vocational College, Taiyuan University of Technology, Xi'an Polytechnic University, Yunnan Institute of Information Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Zhongshan College, Huainan Normal University, Hong Kong Universal Education, Ansan College of Technology, Changshin College, Kunjang College, Suncheon Cheongam College, Saekyung College.
In 2014, 2,617 students graduated from offshore partner institutes in China, Hong Kong and Korea. In 2015, offshore graduates numbered 2,293.
History
The direct antecedents of Melbourne Polytechnic are Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE, and further back in time Preston College of TAFE and Collingwood College of TAFE which amalgamated in 1988. The new organisation was called Northern Metropolitan College of TAFE. Initial campuses were at Preston, Collingwood and Parkville with the Institute developing new campuses at Heidelberg, Greensborough and Epping. Other organisations have sometimes taken the NMIT acronym to mean Northern Metropolitan Institute of Technology, however this has never been an official title.
The Epping Campus was developed and built in 1992. At the time the Institute were planning delivery of part-time, night-time horticulture programs. The Victorian Government, as part of a policy direction, stipulated courses needed to be also delivered in agriculture. From that point NMIT developed the resources to become the pre-eminent agricultural training
organisation in Victoria by 2005.
Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE
A further name change to Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE occurred in 1996, with the NMIT acronym adopted in 1999. Training centres at Eden Park and Yan Yean were developed. In 2002 a campus was opened in Ararat on the site of the Aradale Mental Hospital, and a new training centre at Yarra Glen in the Yarra Valley region. In 2004 the Parkville campus closed and a new campus opened at Fairfield on the site of the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital.
In 2005 NMIT upgraded its telephone system from a Fujitsu telephone branched exchange to a full internet telephony network at a cost of about A$5 million. To enhance its negotiating power and technical support base for implementing a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) system, NMIT lead a consortium of regional TAFEs (Gordon Institute of TAFE from Geelong, Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE, Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE and Wodonga Institute of TAFE) in migrating to the new telephony system.
The first Higher Education graduates from NMIT Bachelor's degree programs were awarded their bachelor's degrees in Applied Aquaculture, Viticulture and Winemaking and Equine Studies at the 2009 NMIT Graduation Ceremony.
In the wake of the shakeup in Government funding to TAFE Victoria in 2012, NMIT is negotiating sale of its Greensborough campus and purchase of Swinburne University's Prahran campus in 2013. In the agreement signed with Swinburne University on 2 August 2013, NMIT will develop the campus as a precinct for creative arts. NMIT plans an initial 60 courses to be run from the campus from 2014. The National Institute of Circus Arts and Gymnastics Australia will remain as tenants on the site.
With the continued delivery of a range of Associate and bachelor's degree programs to complement its vocational education courses, NMIT indicated in 2013 that it is moving toward Polytechnic University status. In August 2013 NMIT and La Trobe University announced the establishment of Melbourne Polytechnic based at Prahan Campus.
Collingwood Technical School
The antecedents of Melbourne Polytechnic date back to a trade skills crisis in Victoria in the initial years of the twentieth century resulting in the passing of the 1910 Education Act No 2301 in the Victorian Parliament. This act allowed the establishment of technical schools.
Collingwood Technical School was established in July 1912 at 35 Johnston street. The bluestone buildings were originally built during the gold rush period in 1853 as the Collingwood Town Hall and Court House. Initial subjects studied included preliminary carpentry and pattern-making, plumbing, engineering, sheet iron work and bricklaying with students studying 2 hours per night, 3 nights a week.
Juniors enrolled at the start of 1913, and the school was classified as a trades school by the Victorian Education Department, offering courses in carpentry, fitting and turning, plumbing, bricklaying and plastering. Two years later electrical wiring and electrical and mechanical engineering were introduced.
During the First World War the school was also used for retraining returning servicemen.
In 1935, the junior school was the largest technical school in Melbourne with 788 enrolments, and with a total enrolment of 1769, but the establishment of Preston Technical School in 1937 reduced subsequent demand.
The school was renamed Collingwood Technical College in 1968.
To address a shortage of skilled gardeners, the college started its horticultural studies program at Parkville in 1979, with an initial 96 apprentices enrolled. The following year, 1980, the new nine-story Otter Street Campus building was completed. The school had 8000 full-time and part-time students enrolled in TAFE courses at Collingwood.
The Minister of Education announced the closure of the school at the end of 1987 citing falling enrolments from 800 in 1963 to 200 in 1985, to 100 in 1987.
Preston Technical School
The Victorian Government opened the Preston Technical School in 1937 on land provided by Preston Council on St Georges Rd, and also supported by Northcote Council. After World War Two substantial expansion occurred with new workshop premises opened in 1947, followed by a Girls' Technical School in the mid 1950s. In 1951 Preston was the largest technical school in Victoria.
The 1950s also saw the introduction of the Preston Diploma School offering tertiary Diploma courses in engineering and science. By 1977 the combined school offered 100 courses. By 1987 the school was known as Preston College of TAFE and had 17,000 students enrolled prior to its amalgamation with Collingwood Technical College in 1988 to form the Northern Metropolitan College of TAFE.
Building B on Preston Campus, that fronts St Georges Road, has been listed on the Victorian Heritage Database for its local historic, aesthetic and social significance to Darebin City. The listing states:
Historically, the school provides evidence of the educational faciliies established to meet the educational needs of the growing municipalities of Northcote and Preston in the Inter-war years. It is also significant as a place that illustrates the development of technical colleges during the inter-war period. It is significant as an example of a school designed under the direction of notable Chief Architect, Percy Everett. Architecturally, the former Preston Technical College is a relatively intact and good example of a substantial Education Department secondary school building from the Inter-war years. The Stripped Classical composition of its east (St Georges Road) elevation is of note, which is layered with materials and embellishment that are found on Moderne and Mediterranean style buildings, creating an interesting hybrid of styles."
Campuses
The institute's main campus and administration is located at Preston on St Georges Road.
Preston
Set on the site of Preston Technical School, this campus offers a variety of courses and facilities, including a Gym and football oval. Courses include information technology, hospitality and tourism, business and office administration, massage and hairdressing. The Hospitality Department runs a Tourism and Hospitality Training Centre which provides training bars, commercial kitchens and a simulated hotel foyer, front desk, hotel suite and the St Georges Restaurant and bistro which is run as a successful commercial venture.
The Centre of Excellence for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing is based at the Preston Campus. The centre was set up in 1993 by the Office of Training and Further Education (OTFE), later renamed Skills Victoria. The Centre's aim is to provide leadership, support and research to the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector on the needs of Deaf and hard of hearing students in Victoria.
An Official IELTS Test centre is based at Preston to test English language proficiency for academic and general purpose. The IELTS Test Centre is located in Building Q, off Cramer Street, Preston with office hours open Monday to Friday. Tests are conducted on Saturdays in Building F, 71-91 St Georges Road, Preston, in modern small class rooms of up to 25 candidates. Free parking is available right next to the testing venue. Accommodations continue to be made for candidates with special consideration needs.
Collingwood
Located in an 8-story tower in Otter Street, close to Smith Street, the Collingwood campus offers courses in information technology, multimedia, video production, hairdressing and contains the International Students office. A Cafeteria is located on the 3rd floor along with the Level 3 Bistro which hospitality students run during term times. IELTS testing was conducted at Collingwood until 2016, off-site testing is conducted on market demand. The campus also features an industry standard high definition television broadcast studio. The campus temporarily shares its space with the Academy of Design Australia, a privately owned design college belonging to LaSalle College, before its relocation to Oxford Street, Collingwood.
Fairfield
Fairfield Campus is located on the site of the former Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, and many of the hospital's original buildings converted for student use. Facilities at the Fairfield Campus include photography studios and darkrooms, recording studios and fully equipped computer laboratories. Courses in illustration, visual arts, performing arts, Music Business and horticulture are based at Fairfield.
The Fairfield plant nursery, run by horticulture students, is open to the public for sales Monday to Saturday 9 - 4 pm, near the Fairfield Nursery Cafe.
In 2008 and 2009 work was undertaken in redeveloping the old nurses quarters for student residential accommodation. Yarra House on Fairfield campus was officially opened for residential student accommodation in 2010. A common room is named after Vivian Bullwinkel, an Australian Army nurse and later the Director of Nursing at the Fairfield Hospital.
There is an AIDS Memorial Garden located in parklands adjacent to the campus where the ashes of at least 50 people are scattered. The garden was established on 22 April 1988 as a
place of tranquillity and respite for patients in the AIDS Ward at the former Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and their families and friends.Fairfield Campus Parkland and AIDS Memorial Garden Management Plan, NMIT website. Retrieved 7 October 2009
Greensborough
Greensborough Campus has a hilltop position which offers sweeping views of the distant city and surrounding area. Located in the heart of a residential growth area 25 kilometres north east of Melbourne, the Greensborough Campus caters to a diverse student base. The Greensborough Campus has gardens which are developed and maintained by students of the Landscape Gardening course.
The campus was closed in 2013 with management citing declining enrolments at the campus as the reason. Labor leader Daniel Andrews promised to re-open the campus during the 2014 Victorian state election, either by Melbourne Polytechnic or another training provider.
Heidelberg
The Heidelberg campus contains the Manufacturing, Engineering and Building Industry Training Centre which was custom built in 1994. The technologically advanced training facilities provides workshops for each trade area allowing students to learn in an environment similar to real work situations using equipment and fittings donated by industry. The plumbing training facilities are recognised as a national industry benchmark including a plumbing sandpit, simulated house stations and an advanced gas training laboratory.
Melbourne Polytechnic provides the only locksmithing apprenticeship course in Victoria at its Heidelberg campus which attracts students from as far a field as Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory and New Zealand. The Heidelberg Technical Education Centre (TEC), one of four in Victoria, opened at NMIT Heidelberg campus in May 2010.
Epping
The campus was initially developed in 1992 with State Government funding. NMIT has become the largest provider in Victoria of training to the agriculture sector with courses delivered from the Epping Campus located on Melbourne's northern rural fringe. Epping Campus is home to award-winning courses in beef, goat, sheep and grain production. The campus also has welding workshops, a forklift training area, glass houses for herb production, a winery and hosts one of Victoria's few indoor recirculating aquaculture facilities. Students at courses at Epping also use the training facilities of a farm at Yan Yean and Northern Lodge, a 60 hectare horse stud and 8 hectare vineyard at Eden Park.
Green Skills Centre
The Epping campus has been home to Melbourne Polytechnic's centre for Renewable Energy and Sustainability with state-of-the-art facilities for courses in renewable energy. In 2009/2010 a Green Skills Centre of Excellence was constructed on the Campus with $9.5million of Federal Government funding.NMIT announces new $9.5 million training centre for ‘Green Collar’ workers. , Media Release, NMIT website. 1 July 2009. Retrieved 7 October 2009
The building was opened in November 2010 and features green building design; renewable energy sources including Geothermal heat pump for heating and cooling and solar panels (25 kW); Rainwater harvesting and recycling; green concrete with low cement content; and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) timber. Eighty per cent of the construction waste was recycled. The building has a Green Building Council of Australia GreenStar rating of 5 signifying 'Australian Excellence' in sustainable building design. The building is used for a range of courses teaching sustainable practices and technologies including in "carbon trading, solar power and solar water heating, wind power generation, geothermal exchange heating and cooling, blackwater and greywater treatment, rainwater harvesting, waste management and waste recycling, water resources management for horticulture, and agricultural and horticultural land conservation."
Prahran
In the wake of the reduction in Government funding support for the TAFE sector during 2012, Swinburne University of Technology indicated it wished to sell its Prahran and Lilydale campuses. After a period of due diligence, on 2 August 2013, NMIT signed an agreement to effect the transfer of the Prahran Campus from Swinburne University with in-principle state Government agreement, and to develop the site as a creative industries training precinct. As part of the agreement the National Institute of Circus Arts and Gymnastics Australia will remain as tenants on the site. According to NMIT CEO Andy Giddy, a teaching hotel offering student residential accommodation may be incorporated in the campus redevelopment.
Ararat
In November 2002 a new campus and 30 hectare vineyard and 10 hectare olive grove and olive processing facility was opened at the former Aradale Mental Hospital site near Ararat, near the Pyrenees wine region. The campus was established to provide in Victoria a world-class wine and hospitality training facility. The campus accommodates up to 120 students, focusing on practical aspects of Wine Making, Marketing, Vineyard management and Food Processing (wine) subjects for its Certificate, Diploma and bachelor's degree courses.
Rural training centres
Eden Park
Northern Lodge is Melbourne Polytechnic's 320 hectare farm and horse stud at Eden Park located 40 kilometres north of Melbourne in the foothills of Victoria's Great Dividing Range. The farm provides dedicated training for thoroughbred racing and viticulture. Northern Lodge was established in 1993 and includes irrigated pastures, stables, barn, a 1400 metres running track, and other facilities to enable a high standard of thoroughbred training. The first vineyard was planted by students in 1996 which has grown to 10 hectares including the varieties chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, semillon, riesling, pinot noir, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and merlot.
During 2011 there have been community protests to stop the Eden Park Kangaroo Cull on the Melbourne Polytechnic Eden Park property.Cheryl Balfour, Eden Park roo activists still hopping mad , Whittlesea Leader, 13 September 2011. Retrieved 17 September 2011.
Yan Yean
Melbourne Polytechnic operates a fully operational farming property at Yan Yean which is located 25 kilometres north of Melbourne. The 200 hectare property is dedicated to training students in cattle and deer farming, aquaculture and the production of medicinal herbs and essential oils.
Yarra Glen
Melbourne Polytechnic has 12 hectares of Vineyards located at the Yarra Valley Racing Centre, with a 100-tonne winery constructed there in 2003.
Northern Estates wine
In 2001 the Victorian Government provided $7.4 million to NMIT to establish the Australian College of Wine, announcing a new teaching facility with 12 hectares of vines in the Yarra Valley wine region and a new campus and vineyard and olive grove and olive processing facility at the former Aradale Mental Hospital site near Ararat, near the Pyrenees wine region. The College was established to provide in Victoria a world-class wine and hospitality training facility.
Some within the wine industry, such as the Yarra Valley Wine Growers Association, objected to the establishment of the Australian College of Wine, on the grounds that existing institutions: Charles Sturt University at Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Adelaide University in South Australia and Swinburne University of Technology campus at Lilydale, produced enough graduates for the industry.
The NMIT Australian College of Wine campus at Aradale was officially opened by Education and Training Minister, Lynne Kosky in November 2002. The college accommodates up to 120 students, focusing on practical aspects of Wine Making, Marketing, Vineyard management and Food Processing (wine) subjects for its Certificate, Diploma and bachelor's degree courses.
Melbourne Polytechnic has taught various courses associated with winemaking and viticulture at its Epping campus since 1993 which has a 100 tonne winery a and a licence to market and sell wine. NMIT students planted vines in 1996 at the NMIT owned 470-hectare thoroughbred stud, Northern Lodge, at Eden Park 40 km north of Melbourne. The first vintage was bottled in 1998. The first Gold Medal, for a 2002 Shiraz, was awarded in 2003 at the prestigious Royal Adelaide Wine Show. Numerous wine show awards have since been won for wines produced by NMIT students with the Australian College of Wine.
In 2003 new wineries of 100-tonne at both Eden Park and Yarra Glen and 250-tonne at Aradale were constructed as part of the development of the Australian College of Wine. State and Regional Development Minister John Brumby announced that NMIT would run a $1 billion viticulture training project at Panzhihua University in China's south-west from 2004.
The college was a member of the Grampians Winemakers Association and also was a major sponsor of the annual Grampians Gourmet Food and Wine Festival.
Last mention of the Australian College of Wine was in the 2006 Annual report. The Institute has since stopped marketing under this wine label, instead adopting the Northern Estates wine Label in 2010 when the Institute won a silver medal for a staff/student processed Northern Estates Riesling entered into the 2010 Canberra International Riesling Challenge. The new Northern Estates label was publicly launched at the Cellar Door and Farm Gate event at Southbank Wharf Precinct at Melbourne Food Week during 2010.
Institute awards
2011 - A team of four NMIT cookery students won the Victorian Tafe Cookery Challenge 2010 - Australian Institute of Professional Photography Tertiary Institution of the Year Award
2008 - Australian Institute of Professional Photography Tertiary Institution of the Year Award
2007 Victorian Tourism Awards - Winner of Tourism Education and Training Award, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism and Personal Services
2006 Best New Centre Award - IELTS Australia
2006 Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) Tertiary Institute Award
Wines produced by NMIT students have won medals in the Australian Small Winemakers Show, Royal Hobart Wine Show, Royal Melbourne Wine Show, Victorian Wines Show, Royal Adelaide Show.
Alumni
Some of the noteworthy people who have attended NMIT or its antecedents:
Ron Barassi - Australian rules footballer and coach - student at Preston Technical School
Basic shape - folk/pop/indie band whose members attended NMIT music courses
John Englart - citizen journalist
Amy Findlay of Stonefield is a 2010 Music Degree graduate.
Jon Faine - ABC broadcaster
Chris Frangou - Bass player, composer and producer
Frank Gibson - Professor of Biochemistry, Melbourne University, ANU - student at Collingwood Technical College
Neil Harvey - vice-captained Australian cricket team - student at Collingwood Technical School
Phil Heuzenroeder - musician and creative music director
Bill Lawry - captained Australian cricket team - student at Preston Technical School
Chris Lewis - Circus Oz music director
Arthur Mather (born 1925) cartoonist and novelist - student at Collingwood Technical School
John O'Hagan - Circus Oz music director
Edmond Amendola, David Williams, Adam Donovan - founding members of band Augie March''
Michael Pratt recipient of the George Cross for bravery - student at Preston Technical School
Jasmine Rae - country singer and songwriter
Lou Richards - Australian rules footballer - student at Collingwood Technical School
Ron Richards - Australian rules footballer - student at Collingwood Technical School
Stan Rofe - influential rock'n'roll disc jockey - student at Collingwood Technical School
Tony Spizzica - Australian bass, piano accordion player and music teacher from Elmore in country Victoria
Paul Stoddart - airline magnate - studied at Preston Technical School
Frank Wilkes - politician and Victorian parliamentary Labor leader - student at Preston Technical School
Marcel Yammouni - musical director of Vanessa Amorosi
Deepak Vinayak- Indian Australian Community Leader, Melbourne
References
Australian vocational education and training providers
1912 establishments in Australia
Educational institutions established in 1912
Technical universities and colleges in Australia
TAFE Colleges in Melbourne
Heidelberg, Victoria |
3874922 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conary%20%28package%20manager%29 | Conary (package manager) | Conary is a free software package management system created by rPath (now SAS) and distributed under the terms of the Apache License Version 2.0. It was relicensed from the GPLv3 in 2013. It focuses on installing packages through automated dependency resolution against distributed online repositories, and providing a concise and easy-to-use Python-based description language to specify how to build a package. It is used by Foresight Linux and rPath Linux.
Conary updates only those specific files in packages which need to be updated; this behavior minimizes bandwidth and time requirements for updating software packages. Conary also features rollbacks of package installation as well as derived packages.
The Conary toolchain includes , a build server for conary packages, which builds packages inside chroot environments containing only the package's explicitly listed build requirements and some other fundamental packages. This is very useful for packagers, because it means that package builds can be done inside a reproducible environment, and packagers cannot accidentally introduce dependencies on peculiarities of their machine's environment (such as custom configuration files, or undocumented extra packages).
See also
Foresight Linux
rPath
SAS
References
External links
Conary: An innovative second-generation package manager
Issue Tracker
Free package management systems
Free software programmed in Python
Linux package management-related software
Linux-only free software
Software using the Apache license |
526999 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL%20injection | SQL injection | SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.
SQL injection attacks allow attackers to spoof identity, tamper with existing data, cause repudiation issues such as voiding transactions or changing balances, allow the complete disclosure of all data on the system, destroy the data or make it otherwise unavailable, and become administrators of the database server.
In a 2012 study, it was observed that the average web application received four attack campaigns per month, and retailers received twice as many attacks as other industries.
History
The first public discussions of SQL injection started appearing around 1998; for example, a 1998 article in Phrack Magazine.
Form
SQL injection (SQLI) was considered one of the top 10 web application vulnerabilities of 2007 and 2010 by the Open Web Application Security Project. In 2013, SQLI was rated the number one attack on the OWASP top ten. There are four main sub-classes of SQL injection:
Classic SQLI
Blind or Inference SQL injection
Database management system-specific SQLI
Compounded SQLI
SQL injection + insufficient authentication
SQL injection + DDoS attacks
SQL injection + DNS hijacking
SQL injection + XSS
The Storm Worm is one representation of Compounded SQLI.
This classification represents the state of SQLI, respecting its evolution until 2010—further refinement is underway.
Technical implementations
Incorrectly constructed SQL statements
This form of injection relies on the fact that SQL statements consist of both data used by the SQL statement and commands that control how the SQL statement is executed. For example, in the SQL statement select * from person where name = 'susan' and age = 2 the string 'susan' is data and the fragment and age = 2 is an example of a command (the value 2 is also data in this example).
SQL injection occurs when specially crafted user input is processed by the receiving program in a way that allows the input to exit a data context and enter a command context. This allows the attacker to alter the structure of the SQL statement which is executed.
As a simple example, imagine that the data 'susan' in the above statement was provided by user input. The user entered the string 'susan' (without the apostrophes) in a web form text entry field, and the program used string concatenation statements to form the above SQL statement from the three fragments select * from person where name=', the user input of 'susan', and ' and age = 2.
Now imagine that instead of entering 'susan' the attacker entered ' or 1=1; --.
The program will use the same string concatenation approach with the 3 fragments of select * from person where name=', the user input of ' or 1=1; --, and ' and age = 2 and construct the statement select * from person where name='' or 1=1; -- and age = 2. Many databases will ignore the text after the '--' string as this denotes a comment. The structure of the SQL command is now select * from person where name='' or 1=1; and this will select all person rows rather than just those named 'susan' whose age is 2. The attacker has managed to craft a data string which exits the data context and entered a command context.
A more complex example is now presented.
Imagine a program creates a SQL statement using the following string assignment command :
var statement = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = '" + userName + "'";
This SQL code is designed to pull up the records of the specified username from its table of users. However, if the "userName" variable is crafted in a specific way by a malicious user, the SQL statement may do more than the code author intended. For example, setting the "userName" variable as:
' OR '1'='1
or using comments to even block the rest of the query (there are three types of SQL comments). All three lines have a space at the end:
' OR '1'='1' --
' OR '1'='1' {
' OR '1'='1' /*
renders one of the following SQL statements by the parent language:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = '' OR '1'='1';
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = '' OR '1'='1' -- ';
If this code were to be used in authentication procedure then this example could be used to force the selection of every data field (*) from all users rather than from one specific user name as the coder intended, because the evaluation of '1'='1' is always true.
The following value of "userName" in the statement below would cause the deletion of the "users" table as well as the selection of all data from the "userinfo" table (in essence revealing the information of every user), using an API that allows multiple statements:
a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM userinfo WHERE 't' = 't
This input renders the final SQL statement as follows and specified:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM userinfo WHERE 't' = 't';
While most SQL server implementations allow multiple statements to be executed with one call in this way, some SQL APIs such as PHP's mysql_query() function do not allow this for security reasons. This prevents attackers from injecting entirely separate queries, but doesn't stop them from modifying queries.
Blind SQL injection
Blind SQL injection is used when a web application is vulnerable to an SQL injection but the results of the injection are not visible to the attacker. The page with the vulnerability may not be one that displays data but will display differently depending on the results of a logical statement injected into the legitimate SQL statement called for that page.
This type of attack has traditionally been considered time-intensive because a new statement needed to be crafted for each bit recovered, and depending on its structure, the attack may consist of many unsuccessful requests. Recent advancements have allowed each request to recover multiple bits, with no unsuccessful requests, allowing for more consistent and efficient extraction. There are several tools that can automate these attacks once the location of the vulnerability and the target information has been established.
Conditional responses
One type of blind SQL injection forces the database to evaluate a logical statement on an ordinary application screen. As an example, a book review website uses a query string to determine which book review to display. So the URL https://books.example.com/review?id=5 would cause the server to run the query
SELECT * FROM bookreviews WHERE ID = '5';
from which it would populate the review page with data from the review with ID 5, stored in the table bookreviews. The query happens completely on the server; the user does not know the names of the database, table, or fields, nor does the user know the query string. The user only sees that the above URL returns a book review. A hacker can load the URLs https://books.example.com/review?id=5 OR 1=1 and https://books.example.com/review?id=5 AND 1=2, which may result in queries
SELECT * FROM bookreviews WHERE ID = '5' OR '1'='1';
SELECT * FROM bookreviews WHERE ID = '5' AND '1'='2';
respectively. If the original review loads with the "1=1" URL and a blank or error page is returned from the "1=2" URL, and the returned page has not been created to alert the user the input is invalid, or in other words, has been caught by an input test script, the site is likely vulnerable to an SQL injection attack as the query will likely have passed through successfully in both cases. The hacker may proceed with this query string designed to reveal the version number of MySQL running on the server: https://books.example.com/review?id=5 AND substring(@@version, 1, INSTR(@@version, '.') - 1)=4, which would show the book review on a server running MySQL 4 and a blank or error page otherwise. The hacker can continue to use code within query strings to achieve their goal directly, or to glean more information from the server in hopes of discovering another avenue of attack.
Second order SQL injection
Second order SQL injection occurs when submitted values contain malicious commands that are stored rather than executed immediately. In some cases, the application may correctly encode an SQL statement and store it as valid SQL. Then, another part of that application without controls to protect against SQL injection might execute that stored SQL statement. This attack requires more knowledge of how submitted values are later used. Automated web application security scanners would not easily detect this type of SQL injection and may need to be manually instructed where to check for evidence that it is being attempted.
Mitigation
An SQL injection is a well known attack and easily prevented by simple measures. After an apparent SQL injection attack on TalkTalk in 2015, the BBC reported that security experts were stunned that such a large company would be vulnerable to it.
Object Relational Mappers
Developers can use ORM frameworks such as Hibernate to create database queries in a safe and developer-friendly way. Since database queries are no longer constructed as strings, there is no danger of an injection vulnerability.
Web Application Firewalls
While WAF products such as ModSecurity CRS cannot prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities from creeping into a codebase, they can make discovery and exploitation significantly more challenging to an attacker.
Detection
SQL injection filtering works in similar way to emails spam filters. Database firewalls detect SQL injections based on the number of invalid queries from host, the presence of OR and UNION blocks inside of the request, or other characteristics.
Parameterized statements
With most development platforms, parameterized statements that work with parameters can be used (sometimes called placeholders or bind variables) instead of embedding user input in the statement. A placeholder can only store a value of the given type and not an arbitrary SQL fragment. Hence the SQL injection would simply be treated as a strange (and probably invalid) parameter value. In many cases, the SQL statement is fixed, and each parameter is a scalar, not a table. The user input is then assigned (bound) to a parameter.
Easily put, using parameterized queries can definitely prevent SQL injection. This mainly means that your variables aren't query strings that would accept arbitrary SQL inputs, however, some parameters of given types are definitely necessary. Parameterized queries require the developer to define all the code. Therefore, without parameterized queries, anyone could put any kind of SQL code into the field, and have the database erased. But if the parameters were to set to '@username' then the person would only be able to put in a username without any kind of code.
Enforcement at the coding level
Using object-relational mapping libraries avoids the need to write SQL code. The ORM library in effect will generate parameterized SQL statements from object-oriented code.
Escaping
A popular, though error-prone and ultimately doomed way to prevent injections is to attempt to escape all characters that have a special meaning in SQL. The manual for an SQL DBMS explains which characters have a special meaning, which allows creating a comprehensive blacklist of characters that need translation. For instance, every occurrence of a single quote (') in a parameter must be replaced by two single quotes ('') to form a valid SQL string literal. For example, in PHP it is usual to escape parameters using the function mysqli_real_escape_string(); before sending the SQL query:
$mysqli = new mysqli('hostname', 'db_username', 'db_password', 'db_name');
$query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM `Users` WHERE UserName='%s' AND Password='%s'",
$mysqli->real_escape_string($username),
$mysqli->real_escape_string($password));
$mysqli->query($query);
This function prepends backslashes to the following characters: \x00, \n, \r, \, ', " and \x1a.
This function is normally used to make data safe before sending a query to MySQL. PHP has similar functions for other database systems such as pg_escape_string() for PostgreSQL. The function addslashes(string $str) works for escaping characters, and is used especially for querying on databases that do not have escaping functions in PHP. It returns a string with backslashes before characters that need to be escaped in database queries, etc. These characters are single quote ('), double quote ("), backslash (\) and NUL (the NULL byte).
Routinely passing escaped strings to SQL is error prone because it is easy to forget to escape a given string. Creating a transparent layer to secure the input can reduce this error-proneness, if not entirely eliminate it.
Pattern check
Integer, float or boolean, string parameters can be checked if their value is valid representation for the given type. Strings that must follow some strict pattern (date, UUID, alphanumeric only, etc.) can be checked if they match this pattern.
Database permissions
Limiting the permissions on the database login used by the web application to only what is needed may help reduce the effectiveness of any SQL injection attacks that exploit any bugs in the web application.
For example, on Microsoft SQL Server, a database logon could be restricted from selecting on some of the system tables which would limit exploits that try to insert JavaScript into all the text columns in the database.
deny select on sys.sysobjects to webdatabaselogon;
deny select on sys.objects to webdatabaselogon;
deny select on sys.tables to webdatabaselogon;
deny select on sys.views to webdatabaselogon;
deny select on sys.packages to webdatabaselogon;
Examples
In February 2002, Jeremiah Jacks discovered that Guess.com was vulnerable to an SQL injection attack, permitting anyone able to construct a properly-crafted URL to pull down 200,000+ names, credit card numbers and expiration dates in the site's customer database.
On November 1, 2005, a teenaged hacker used SQL injection to break into the site of a Taiwanese information security magazine from the Tech Target group and steal customers' information.
On January 13, 2006, Russian computer criminals broke into a Rhode Island government website and allegedly stole credit card data from individuals who have done business online with state agencies.
On March 29, 2006, a hacker discovered an SQL injection flaw in an official Indian government's tourism site.
On June 29, 2007, a computer criminal defaced the Microsoft UK website using SQL injection. UK website The Register quoted a Microsoft spokesperson acknowledging the problem.
On September 19, 2007 and January 26, 2009 the Turkish hacker group "m0sted" used SQL injection to exploit Microsoft's SQL Server to hack web servers belonging to McAlester Army Ammunition Plant and the US Army Corps of Engineers respectively.
In January 2008, tens of thousands of PCs were infected by an automated SQL injection attack that exploited a vulnerability in application code that uses Microsoft SQL Server as the database store.
In July 2008, Kaspersky's Malaysian site was hacked by the "m0sted" hacker group using SQL injection.
On April 13, 2008, the Sexual and Violent Offender Registry of Oklahoma shut down its website for "routine maintenance" after being informed that 10,597 Social Security numbers belonging to sex offenders had been downloaded via an SQL injection attack
In May 2008, a server farm inside China used automated queries to Google's search engine to identify SQL server websites which were vulnerable to the attack of an automated SQL injection tool.
In 2008, at least April through August, a sweep of attacks began exploiting the SQL injection vulnerabilities of Microsoft's IIS web server and SQL Server database server. The attack does not require guessing the name of a table or column, and corrupts all text columns in all tables in a single request. A HTML string that references a malware JavaScript file is appended to each value. When that database value is later displayed to a website visitor, the script attempts several approaches at gaining control over a visitor's system. The number of exploited web pages is estimated at 500,000.
On August 17, 2009, the United States Department of Justice charged an American citizen, Albert Gonzalez, and two unnamed Russians with the theft of 130 million credit card numbers using an SQL injection attack. In reportedly "the biggest case of identity theft in American history", the man stole cards from a number of corporate victims after researching their payment processing systems. Among the companies hit were credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, and supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers.
In December 2009, an attacker breached a RockYou plaintext database containing the unencrypted usernames and passwords of about 32 million users using an SQL injection attack.
In July 2010, a South American security researcher who goes by the handle "Ch Russo" obtained sensitive user information from popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. He gained access to the site's administrative control panel and exploited an SQL injection vulnerability that enabled him to collect user account information, including IP addresses, MD5 password hashes and records of which torrents individual users have uploaded.
From July 24 to 26, 2010, attackers from Japan and China used an SQL injection to gain access to customers' credit card data from Neo Beat, an Osaka-based company that runs a large online supermarket site. The attack also affected seven business partners including supermarket chains Izumiya Co, Maruetsu Inc, and Ryukyu Jusco Co. The theft of data affected a reported 12,191 customers. As of August 14, 2010 it was reported that there have been more than 300 cases of credit card information being used by third parties to purchase goods and services in China.
On September 19 during the 2010 Swedish general election a voter attempted a code injection by hand writing SQL commands as part of a write-in vote.
On November 8, 2010 the British Royal Navy website was compromised by a Romanian hacker named TinKode using SQL injection.
On February 5, 2011 HBGary, a technology security firm, was broken into by LulzSec using an SQL injection in their CMS-driven website
On March 27, 2011, www.mysql.com, the official homepage for MySQL, was compromised by a hacker using SQL blind injection
On April 11, 2011, Barracuda Networks was compromised using an SQL injection flaw. Email addresses and usernames of employees were among the information obtained.
Over a period of 4 hours on April 27, 2011, an automated SQL injection attack occurred on Broadband Reports website that was able to extract 8% of the username/password pairs: 8,000 random accounts of the 9,000 active and 90,000 old or inactive accounts.
On June 1, 2011, "hacktivists" of the group LulzSec were accused of using SQLI to steal coupons, download keys, and passwords that were stored in plaintext on Sony's website, accessing the personal information of a million users.
In June 2011, PBS was hacked by LulzSec, most likely through use of SQL injection; the full process used by hackers to execute SQL injections was described in this Imperva blog.
In May 2012, the website for Wurm Online, a massively multiplayer online game, was shut down from an SQL injection while the site was being updated.
In July 2012 a hacker group was reported to have stolen 450,000 login credentials from Yahoo!. The logins were stored in plain text and were allegedly taken from a Yahoo subdomain, Yahoo! Voices. The group breached Yahoo's security by using a "union-based SQL injection technique".
On October 1, 2012, a hacker group called "Team GhostShell" published the personal records of students, faculty, employees, and alumni from 53 universities including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Zurich on pastebin.com. The hackers claimed that they were trying to "raise awareness towards the changes made in today's education", bemoaning changing education laws in Europe and increases in tuition in the United States.
In February 2013, a group of Maldivian hackers, hacked the website "UN-Maldives" using SQL Injection.
On June 27, 2013, hacker group "RedHack" breached Istanbul Administration Site. They claimed that, they've been able to erase people's debts to water, gas, Internet, electricity, and telephone companies. Additionally, they published admin user name and password for other citizens to log in and clear their debts early morning. They announced the news from Twitter.
On November 4, 2013, hacktivist group "RaptorSwag" allegedly compromised 71 Chinese government databases using an SQL injection attack on the Chinese Chamber of International Commerce. The leaked data was posted publicly in cooperation with Anonymous.
On February 2, 2014, AVS TV had 40,000 accounts leaked by a hacking group called @deletesec
On February 21, 2014, United Nations Internet Governance Forum had 3,215 account details leaked.
On February 21, 2014, Hackers of a group called @deletesec hacked Spirol International after allegedly threatening to have the hackers arrested for reporting the security vulnerability. 70,000 user details were exposed over this conflict.
On March 7, 2014, officials at Johns Hopkins University publicly announced that their Biomedical Engineering Servers had become victim to an SQL injection attack carried out by an Anonymous hacker named "Hooky" and aligned with hacktivist group "RaptorSwag". The hackers compromised personal details of 878 students and staff, posting a press release and the leaked data on the internet.
In August 2014, Milwaukee-based computer security company Hold Security disclosed that it uncovered a theft of confidential information from nearly 420,000 websites through SQL injections. The New York Times confirmed this finding by hiring a security expert to check the claim.
In October 2015, an SQL injection attack was used to steal the personal details of 156,959 customers from British telecommunications company TalkTalk's servers, exploiting a vulnerability in a legacy web portal.
In August 2020, an SQL injection attack was used to access information on the romantic interests of many Stanford students, as a result of insecure data sanitization standards on the part of Link, a start-up founded on campus by undergraduate Ishan Gandhi.
In early 2021, 70 gigabytes of data was exfiltrated from the far-right website Gab through a SQL injection attack. The vulnerability was introduced into the Gab codebase by Fosco Marotto, Gab's CTO. A second attack against Gab was launched the next week using OAuth2 tokens stolen during the first attack.
In popular culture
Unauthorized login to websites by means of SQL injection forms the basis of one of the subplots in J.K. Rowling's 2012 novel The Casual Vacancy.
A 2007 xkcd cartoon involved a character Robert'); DROP TABLE students;-- named to carry out an SQL injection. As a result of this cartoon, SQL injection is sometimes informally referred to as "Bobby Tables".
In 2014, an individual in Poland legally renamed his business to Dariusz Jakubowski x'; DROP TABLE users; SELECT '1 in an attempt to disrupt operation of spammers' harvesting bots.
The 2015 game Hacknet has a hacking program called SQL_MemCorrupt. It is described as injecting a table entry that causes a corruption error in an SQL database, then queries said table, causing an SQL database crash and core dump.
In the 2019 Star Trek: Discovery episode If Memory Serves Commander Airiam discovered that a probe that attacked a data store on one of the ship's shuttlecraft had made a number of SQL injections, but that she couldn't find any compromised files.
See also
Code injection
Cross-site scripting
Metasploit Project
OWASP Open Web Application Security Project
SGML entity
Uncontrolled format string
w3af
Web application security
References
External links
SQL Injection Knowledge Base, by Websec.
WASC Threat Classification - SQL Injection Entry, by the Web Application Security Consortium.
Why SQL Injection Won't Go Away , by Stuart Thomas.
SDL Quick security references on SQL injection by Bala Neerumalla.
How security flaws work: SQL injection
Injection exploits
SQL
Articles with example SQL code |
23474774 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker%20%28disambiguation%29 | Hacker (disambiguation) | A hacker is a highly skilled computer expert, including:
Security hacker, someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network
Hacker may also refer to:
Computing and technology
Hacker culture, a computer programmer and security hacker subculture focused on intellectual and creative aspects of hacking
HackerNest, a nonprofit organization and movement that builds local technology communities worldwide
People
Hacker (surname), includes a list of people with the name
Michael Amato or The Hacker (born 1972), French electrocrash and tech producer
Arts, media, and entertainment
Fictional characters
Hacker, cyborg sidekick character in TV series The Centurions
Hacker T. Dog, puppet character on Scoop and CBBC links
Hacker Republic, Lisbeth Salander aka Wasp, Plague, and Trinity, hacker friends and colleagues in the series which includes The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Jim Hacker, title character in Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister
Staff Sergeant Hacker, a character on the US TV series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
The Nameless Hacker, the main protagonist of the game System Shock (1994)
The Hacker, a character on the US TV series Cyberchase
Films
Hacker (film), a 2016 crime thriller
Hackers (film), 1995 MGM film starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie
Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age, a 1985 video documentary inspired by Stephen Levy's 1984 book
Games
Hacker (card game), 1992 Steve Jackson Games release
Hacker (video game), 1985 puzzle/strategy computer game by Activision
Hackers (video game), 2016 strategy video game by Trickster Arts
Literature
Hacker, a children's novel by Malorie Blackman
Hackers (anthology), a 1996 anthology of short stories edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a 1984 book by Stephen Levy
Music
"Hacker", a song on Death Grips's 2012 album The Money Store
"The Hacker", a song by British industrial group Clock DVA
Brands and enterprises
Hacker Brewery, and its beer, since 1972 merged into Hacker-Pschorr Brewery
Hacker Radio Ltd, a British manufacturer of consumer electronics products
Hacker-Craft, boats made by the Hacker Boat Company
See also
Hack (disambiguation)
Hacking (disambiguation)
Hacks (disambiguation)
Haka (disambiguation)
Hakka (disambiguation)
fi:Hakkeri |
35594037 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessageNet%20systems | MessageNet systems | MessageNet systems is a privately held company which sells a primarily software-based product called "Connections" for facilitating an organization's emergency and routine communications.
Company overview
MessageNet systems is located in Carmel, Indiana, United States, and is active in much of the country. It markets itself as providing a broad ranging solution that could be used for communications in several types of organizations, and in varying ways. The company's slogan (as stated on its website) connotes that by touting "Everyday & Emergency Communications — Unified." Its primary product is called "Connections", which may consist of any combination of several features and capabilities (which are outlined and explained briefly, later in this article), depending on the organization's needs.
Mission
According to the company's website, the mission of MessageNet systems is to provide impactful and life changing communication solutions to resolve the daily and emergency communication challenges organizations face.
Culture
The company claims to have a long-standing culture of innovation and openness about software development and adopting new technologies. For example, according to an interview, its founders take particular pride in being among the first entities to utilize a web-browser as a user interface for its web application-based product in 1995, when the practice was not yet in widespread use. The company's software development team purports to also be involved with many open-source software projects. One aspect of its involvement and utilization of open-source technologies is exemplified in the usage of Linux-based products, including text-to-speech technology.
Market involvement
MessageNet systems participates in the marketplace via direct sales, partnerships with resellers, and agreements with other third parties. As part of its sales efforts and expansion goals, the company recently participated in the Channel Partners Conference and Expo, in Las Vegas.
Timeline
1991 - Founded with the name "Orchid Systems."
1996 - Changed name to "MessageNet Systems" and adopted a corresponding logo.
2011 - Recognizing the complexity of organizational communications, and in helping organizations understand those complexities, MessageNet became more active in education-oriented video production (in addition to marketing), and started a company YouTube channel.
2012 - Changed branding with an updated logo, color scheme, and slightly modified its name (as represented in its logo, visible right) to be "MessageNet systems" rather than "MessageNet Systems" (the difference being the lower-case "s" in "systems").
Product
MessageNet's main (and only) offering is an all-encompassing product called "Connections."
Connections
Connections is a broad product that may include several different features & capabilities, depending on the customer's needs. Notable environments that this product may be well-suited for, include:
Noisy manufacturing environments, where traditional PA systems may not be effective
Sprawling campus settings which require a mass notification capability, as well as discrete room or location-based ability to focus specific communications
Schools for the deaf and blind, where equal access to education, everyday, and emergency information is challenging to achieve
Connections is an example of an emergency communication system. According to the company's marketing materials, "MessageNet Connections is a browser-based, integrated system that unifies private and public, everyday and emergency communications into one powerful system. Connections integrates your existing communication systems to create communication bridges between people, places, and things. One of the unique advantages of the MessageNet Connections system is scalability: you can start with your specific needs now, and later uniquely upgrade your system to include additional functionality."
MediaPort — A digital signage system, using high-definition flat panel displays to display many types of media, including presentation-style slide-shows, high-definition video, emergency evacuation routing, two-way video-conferencing, photographs, text messages, and scrolling news tickers, for both daily and emergency uses.
Visual PA — A system designed to deliver visual public address messages from any authorized PC running a browser to electronic LED sign boards in one room, throughout an entire campus, or across a WAN.
PC Alert — Delivers alert and emergency messages to any, or all, PCs on a network by popping a message up as a window and scrolling it until a person or an event terminates it.
PageStation — An advanced text messaging software system that provides real-time text messaging to pagers, PDAs, Twitter, and cell phones, from any authorized computer on a network.
MESA — Enterprise Security & Alerting features that integrate and enhance an existing building's automation, fire safety, and security systems. It adapts and prioritizes alerts from a variety of safety and security systems for delivery to any of the spectrum of communication devices used in the enterprise.
CallVista — A voice communication system that integrates desk phones, home phones, cell phones, wireless phones and videophones. It includes an autodialing phone directory, in/out whiteboard functionality, and more.
SecurePA — The software interface that extends the utility, security, and ease-of-use of Overhead Paging, Intercom, Mass Notification and PA systems.
Alternative product names
Throughout the company's history and growth their main product has evolved, and consequently, undergone several name changes. Following are some of these:
Silent Messenger
Visual Intercom
EMACS (Emergency Management and Communications System)
Customer service
MessageNet systems' primary focus is in offering its Connections product; however, the company does provide some services to customers who have purchased, or are in the process of purchasing Connections. MessageNet provides customer service as well as installation and upgrade support.
Primary markets
MessageNet systems' solutions are currently deployed in these markets:
Industrial manufacturing environments
Retail establishments
Universities and higher education
A MessageNet-derivative system is currently being used at Gulf Coast Community College.
Deaf and blind schools
Mississippi School for the Deaf — According to the Tech Bytes newsletter, this school has implemented Connections to serve as an Emergency System with the following features:
Allow staff to react more quickly to incidents;
A Security System that will monitor students, as well as reduce misconduct, vandalism, and theft;
An Electronic School Bulletin Board that will display schools events, lunch menus, or a calendar of events to any TV on campus;
A Virtual Media Cart that will play and control tapes, and/or DVDs in a classroom without a player, media, or remote control;
A Video Contact System that will enable real-time video conversations with staff members;
An Off-Campus Control and Monitoring System that allows responsible parties to view cameras and control devices remotely via the Internet;
A Broadcast System in which announcements can be made for both the hearing and sight-impaired student;
A Professional Development System that will allow teaching of a class to multiple classrooms simultaneously, or connect the classroom to an existing distance learning class or learning lab.
Hospitals and medical facilities
References
External links
Company YouTube channel
Video examples of Connections implemented at Mississippi School for the Deaf
Fire detection and alarm companies
Emergency population warning systems
Emergency services equipment makers
Carmel, Indiana
Articles containing video clips |
230157 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic%20Free%20License | Academic Free License | The Academic Free License (AFL) is a permissive free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, a former general counsel of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
The license grants similar rights to the BSD, MIT, UoI/NCSA and Apache licenses licenses allowing the software to be made proprietary but was written to correct perceived problems with those licenses:
The AFL makes clear what software is being licensed by including a statement following the software's copyright notice;
The AFL includes a complete copyright grant to the software;
The AFL contains a complete patent grant to the software;
The AFL makes clear that no trademark rights are granted to the licensor's trademarks;
The AFL warrants that the licensor either owns the copyright or is distributing the software under a license;
The AFL is itself copyrighted, with the right granted to copy and distribute without modification.
The Free Software Foundation consider all AFL versions through 3.0 as incompatible with the GNU GPL. though Eric S. Raymond (a co-founder of the OSI) contends that AFL 3.0 is GPL compatible. In late 2002, an OSI working draft considered it a "best practice" license. In mid-2006, however, the OSI's License Proliferation Committee found it "redundant with more popular licenses", specifically version 2 of the Apache Software License.
See also
License proliferation
Open Software License – similar, but reciprocal license by the same author
Software using the Academic Free License (category)
References
External links
Text of the Academic Free License v3.0
Allocation of the Risk by Lawrence Rosen (PDF) – reasoning behind the Academic Free License
Free and open-source software licenses
Permissive software licenses |
34030529 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egor%20%28software%29 | Egor (software) | Egor (also called Egor the Animator) was an early computer animation program for making animations in Java released by Sausage Software on February 6, 1996, as the first commercial Java applet. The software allowed for the creation of animated graphics with sounds to be deployed as a java applet for use through a web browser. Egor featured a user-friendly interface, tutorials, and sample images and designed for use by non programmers with minimal knowledge of HTML. The software is named after Igor, the mad scientist.
Egor used non-standard HTML tags which were meant to be used with Netscape 2.
Egor was designed for use with Netscape as Internet Explorer did not fully support java at the time.
Egor is no longer supported or sold by Sausage Software.
Features
The program allowed creation of animations by specifying a sequence of images. The animations could have sounds associated with them. Egor also supported uploading files.
The program created java animations for Netscape 2.
Reception
Egor had mixed reception. It was described as "fast and flexible" though it suffered from bugs as the JAVA SDK was not stable at the time. Egor had 5 cows from Tucows.
Versions
Egor was a 32-bit application written for Windows 95 released in February 6, 1996. Fourthnet, the European distributor for HotDog, began marketing all of Sausage Software's software including Egor in June 1996. Version 3 was released on September 10, 1996 and allowed for multiple sprites, sprite collision, and mouse over events. The 32-bit edition originally sold for with the upgrade price being .
When purchased on a CD-ROM, Egor was bundled with a trial edition of Hot Dog Professional, Paint Shop Pro, Sound Gadget Pro, the EarthLink Network TotalAccess membership kit and the Netscape Navigator browser.
Egor was also available at Tucows. Download versions came with a 14-day evaluation period.
Notes
Books
References
Further reading
Animation software
1996 software |
63180762 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions%20to%20the%20Boeing%20737%20MAX%20groundings | Reactions to the Boeing 737 MAX groundings | The drew mixed reactions from multiple organizations.
The first authority to ground the MAX, Civil Aviation Administration of China said the accidents "had certain similarities" because both aircraft were newly delivered and crashed shortly after takeoff.
Boeing expressed its sympathy to the relatives of the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash victims, while simultaneously defending the aircraft against any faults until rebutted by evidence. Boeing provided several outdated return to service timelines, the soonest of which was "in the coming weeks" following the March 2019 grounding. On October 11, 2019, David L. Calhoun replaced Dennis Muilenburg as chairman of Boeing, then succeeded Muilenburg's role as chief executive officer in January 2020.
Congressman Sam Graves of the House Transportation Committee had blamed the 737 MAX crashes on substandard-quality training of the Indonesian and Ethiopian pilots; stating that "pilots trained in the U.S. would have been successful" in handling the emergencies on both jets, at the House Aviation subcommittee hearing in Washington D.C.
Airbus downplayed that it is "winning" in any way due to the MAX grounding, citing its own logistical and supplier capacity to fulfill orders for the A320 family aircraft.
Pilots' and flight attendants' opinions are mixed as some expressed confidence in the certification renewal, while others are disappointed as Boeing had hidden an important safety feature to their knowledge. Mica Endsley of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society testified that "The cues received by the pilots [...] were significantly different than the cues received with a runaway stabilizer trim".
Most airlines sought compensation from Boeing to cover costs of the disruption, while the 737 MAX received some support when International Airlines Group (IAG) announced at the June 2019 Paris Air Show it could order 200 jets.
Opinion polls suggested most passengers are reluctant to fly again aboard the 737 MAX when it will be reintroduced, while most should be comfortable boarding it again after some time passes to prove its safe operations. Chesley Sullenberger commented upon the "cozy relationship" that exists between the industry and its regulators.
Boeing
Boeing issued a brief statement after each crash, saying it was "deeply saddened" by the loss of life and offered its "heartfelt sympathies to the families and loved ones" of the passengers and crews. It said it was helping with the Lion Air investigation and sending a technical team to assist in the Ethiopia investigation. Boeing dedicated a fountain adjacent to its aviation museum on its corporate campus in memory of those on board the accident flights.
After the grounding, Boeing suspended 737 MAX deliveries to customers, but continued production at a rate of 52 aircraft per month. In mid-April, the production rate was reduced to 42 aircraft per month. In May 2019, Boeing reported a 56% drop in plane deliveries year on year. In July 2019, after reporting its financial results, Boeing stated that it would consider further reducing or even shutting down production if the grounding lasts longer than expected. On December 15, the Boeing board considered a management proposal to suspend production for several months, until the MAX is cleared by the FAA to return to commercial service. Production was suspended from January 2020, to prioritize the delivery of more than 400 new aircraft from storage bases. Boeing is unlikely to resume its pre-grounding production target of 57 aircraft per month until 2022.
In April 2019, lawyers, analysts and experts criticized Muilenburg's delivery of Boeing's public statements as contradictory and unconvincing. They said Boeing refused to answer tough questions and accept responsibility, defended the airplane design and certification while "promising to fix the plane's software", delayed to ground planes and issue an apology, and yet was quick to assign blame towards pilot error. Muilenburg's handling of the 737 MAX crisis only added to the frustration between Boeing and its stakeholders, resulting in his removal from office in October 2019, as well as the retirement of Boeing's senior legal counsel, J. Michael Luttig.
Executive changes
On October 11, 2019, Boeing's board removed Dennis Muilenburg as chairman and replaced him with David L. Calhoun, a former boss of GE Aviation. Boeing had resisted earlier calls from shareholder activists to split the roles. Some critics of corporate governance have said that Calhoun is a prime example of "overboarding" due to his multiple positions held concurrently on many boards. On December 23, 2019, the Boeing board had voted unanimously for David Calhoun to replace Dennis Muilenburg as chairman and president effective January 2020. Muilenburg reportedly departed Boeing with stock options and additional assets worth about $80 million, but no severance. Congressman Peter DeFazio, Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, commented: "Based on what we've discovered so far in our investigation into the design, development and certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, it's clear Dennis Muilenburg's ouster was long overdue. Under his watch, a long-admired company made a number of devastating decisions that suggest profit took priority over safety. Furthermore, reports that Muilenburg attempted to pressure FAA into rushing the MAX back into service are highly troubling and I commend Administrator Dickson for making it known that FAA will take as much time as it needs to ensure safety comes first".
Other staff members
In July 2019, Boeing announced the retirement of 737 program leader Eric Lindblad, the second person to depart that post in two years. He held the job less than a year, but was not involved in development of the MAX. His predecessor, Scott Campbell, retired in August 2018, amid late deliveries of 737 MAX engines and other components. Lindblad assumed the role shortly before the program became embattled in two accidents and ongoing groundings. He will be succeeded by Mark Jenks, vice president of the Boeing New Midsize Airplane program and previously in charge of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
On October 22, Boeing named Stan Deal to succeed Kevin McAllister, who has faced a number of problems beyond the MAX crisis during his three years as president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA).
On December 4, 2019, Boeing Commercial Airplanes announced the retirement of its chief engineer John Hamilton, age 58, who had been appointed as the leader of Boeing's response to the crashes.
On December 26, 2019, Boeing announced that J. Michael Luttig, a senior adviser to Boeing's board of directors and former general counsel for the company, is retiring at the end of 2019.
He was one of the highest paid general counsels of publicly traded companies; he helped to establish Boeing's defense over the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.
Investigation feedback
Between the Ethiopian accident and US groundings, Boeing stated that upgrades to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control software, cockpit displays, operation manuals and crew training were underway due to findings from the Lion Air crash.
As non-U.S. countries and airlines began grounding the 737 MAX, Boeing stated: "at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators." Boeing said "in light of" the Ethiopian Airlines crash, the company would privatize the roll-out ceremony for the first completed Boeing 777X.
When the FAA grounded the MAX aircraft on March 13, Boeing stated it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. However, after consultation with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and aviation authorities and its customers around the world, Boeing has determinedout of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safetyto recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 737 MAX aircraft."
Boeing anticipated software deployment before April, and said the upgrade would be made mandatory by an FAA Airworthiness Directive. The FAA stated it anticipated clearing the software update by March 25, 2019, allowing Boeing to distribute it to the grounded fleets. On April 1, the FAA announced the software upgrade was delayed because more work was necessary.
On March 14, Boeing reiterated that pilots can always use manual trim control to override software commands, and that both its Flight Crew Operations Manual and November 6 bulletin offer detailed procedures for handling incorrect angle-of-attack readings.
On April 4, 2019, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg acknowledged that MCAS played a role in both crashes. His comments came in response to public release of preliminary results of the Ethiopian Airlines accident investigation, which suggested pilots performed the recovery procedure. Muilenburg stated it was "apparent that in both flights" MCAS activated due to "erroneous angle of attack information". He said the MCAS software update and additional training and information for pilots would "eliminate the possibility of unintended MCAS activation and prevent an MCAS-related accident from ever happening again". Boeing reported that 96 test flights were flown with the updated software.
In an earnings call that took place on April 24, 2019, Muilenburg said the aircraft was properly designed and certificated, and denied that any "technical slip or gap" existed. He said there were "actions or actions not taken that contributed to the final outcome". On April 29, he claimed that the pilots did not "completely" follow the procedures that Boeing had outlined. He said Boeing was working to make the airplane even safer.
On August 4, 2019, Boeing stated they conducted around 500 test flights with updated software, and Wired reported that one test flight involved multiple altitude changes.
On October 20, 2019, in response to harsh reactions to the publication of Forkner's controversial messages about MCAS simulation during development, Boeing issued a statement about misinterpretations and how it informed the FAA of the expansion of MCAS to low speeds. On December 26, 2019, after the dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing turned over to the FAA a new set of "disturbing" messages written in part by Forkner regarding MCAS development. On January 9, 2020, Boeing released the conversation details to the House Transportation Committee, stating that it "regret[s] the content of these communications, and apologize to the [Federal Aviation Administration], Congress, our airline customers, and to the flying public for them."
On March 6, 2020, the House Transportation Committee said that a "culture of concealment" at the company and poor oversight by federal regulators contributed to the crashes. In a preliminary summary of its nearly yearlong investigation, the committee said multiple factors had led to the crashes, but focused on the MCAS which Boeing had failed to classify as safety critical, part of a strategy designed to avoid closer scrutiny by regulators as the company developed the plane. The panel said that Boeing had undue influence over the Federal Aviation Administration, and that FAA managers rejected safety concerns raised by their own technical experts.
It was also revealed that the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau was planning to publish an interim report, before the March 10 anniversary of the crash. Investigators have tentatively concluded that the crash was caused by the aircraft's design.
FAA Administrator Dickson defended the omission of MCAS: "The FAA therefore decided to remove the MCAS reference from the draft AD so that flight crews would focus on runaway stabilizer recognition instead of attempting to troubleshoot MCAS".
The Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure report cited the strong disagreement of Dr. Mica Endsley, a senior officer at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force, who testified that when MCAS is triggered by incorrect sensor data, the pilot cues are "significantly different than the cues received with a runaway stabilizer trim".
Corporate structure and new safety practices
Following panel review recommendations, Boeing has strengthened its engineering oversight. As of August 2019, Muilenburg receives weekly reports of potential safety issues from rank-and-file engineersthousands will report to chief engineers rather than to separate programs, helping them reach senior management more effectively.
In September 2019, The New York Times reported that Boeing board will call for structural changes after the 737 MAX crashes: changing corporate reporting structures, a new safety group, future plane cockpits designed for new pilots with less training. The committee, established in April, did not investigate the Max crashes, but produced the first findings for a reform of Boeing's internal structures since then. It will recommend that engineers report to the chief engineer rather than business management, to avoid pressure from business leaders against engineers who identify safety issues. The committee found that inter-group communication was lacking within engineering and between the Seattle offices and corporate headquarters during the certification work. The safety group will ensure information is shared and the certification work is independent. The group will report to senior leadership and a new permanent committee on the board.
The board said in September that Boeing should also work with airlines to "re-examine assumptions around flight deck design and operation" and recommend pilot training criteria beyond traditional training programs "where warranted".
Current and former employees
In May 2019, engineers said that Boeing pushed to limit safety testing to accelerate planes certification, including 737 MAX. FAA said it has "received no whistleblower complaints or any other reports ... alleging pressure to speed up 737 MAX certification." Former engineers at Boeing blamed company executives of cost-cutting, over more than a decade, yielding to low morale and reduced engineering staffing, which "they argue contributed to two recent deadly crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets."
In June 2019, Boeing's software development practices came under criticism from current and former engineers. Software development work for the MAX was reportedly complicated by Boeing's decision to outsource work to lower-paid contractors though these contractors did not work on MCAS or the AoA disagree alert. Management pressure to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost was also highlighted.
In December 2019, former Boeing manager Ed Pierson testified to Congress that he had previously alerted the Boeing leadership before the second crash that the 737 Max factory was unsafe. He did not report concerns about MCAS, but rather an unsafe working environment and a workforce that was critically overworked that could lead to critical mistakes. According to Pierson, Boeing had ramped up monthly production to the point where some employees were working seven days a week for weeks on end. This harried process led to parts being installed out of sequence and debris being left in aircraft. This increased risk for human error became so apparent that Pierson sent an email to the chief of the 737 program stating "for the first time in my life, I'm sorry to say that I'm hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane." The day before Pierson testified, NBC Nightly News aired an interview with Pierson revealing the whistleblower's repeated attempts to contact Boeing executives and the FAA.
In January 2021, Pierson raised further safety concerns and published a new report in which he claims that quality problems at the Renton plant and electrical issues have not been satisfactorily investigated.
Boeing's former Chief Technical pilot Mark Forkner has invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, to avoid submitting documents to federal prosecutors investigating the crashes. He managed pilots in the Flight Technical and Safety group within Boeing's customer services division. On October 17, Boeing turned over some 10 pages of Forkner's correspondence showing concern with MCAS in simulator sessions in 2016. The next day, FAA Administrator Dickson, in a strongly worded letter, ordered Muilenburg to give an "immediate" explanation for delaying disclosure of these documents for months.
Airbus
The 737 MAX's primary competitor is Airbus's bestseller aircraft, the A320neo. The A320neo continued to win orders in the wake of the Boeing 737 MAX grounding, booking over in orders, with additional orders from airlines that are either canceling their 737 MAX orders altogether, or reducing quantities. However, Airbus cannot take advantage of the situation because the A320's production slots are limited. The Airbus A320's backlog is sold out through 2025.
Deliveries for the A320 family and the B737 series have been as follows:
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The A320neo and the 737 MAX both use engines from the CFM LEAP family, with different thrust requirements. After EASA issued an airworthiness directive regarding potential excess pitch during specific maneuvers, Airbus made a preemptive change to the A320neo flight manual to protect the aircraft in such situations. In response to the EASA recommendations, Lufthansa temporarily blocked the rearmost row of seats until a flight computer update increases the effectiveness of the aircraft's AoA protection.
In May 2019, executives of Airbus told reporters they do not view the relationship between Boeing and the FAA as having been corrupted. They compared the EASA and the FAA, saying "EASA has a slightly different mandate than the FAA. EASA is a purely safety orientated agency." Airbus Chief Commercial Officer Christian Scherer did not feel the 737 MAX is a variant that has stretched the original 737 too far: "The MAX is not one stretch too many, in my humble opinion". Airbus leader Remi Maillard stated: "We work hand in hand with the regulators, and with the OEMs to adopt the safety standards. But, to be clear, our internal safety standards are even more stringent than what is required by the regulators". Scherer remarked on the way manufacturers can learn from accidents: "Whenever there is an accident out there, the first question that gets asked in an Airbus management meeting is: can we learn from it?"
On April 30, 2019, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said the 737 MAX grounding "is not changing the mid- to long-term picture" as "[Airbus is] limited by the supply chain": it should reach a monthly A320 production rate of 60 by mid-2019 before 63 in 2021 while Boeing reduced MAX monthly output to 42 from 52.
On November 17, 2019, at the Dubai Air Show, Airbus Chief Commercial Officer, Christian Scherer, firmly rejected the notion that Airbus was benefiting from the grounding of Boeing 737 Max. Speaking to CNBC, he said, "I really need to correct that cultural belief. This does not benefit anyone in this industry, the least of which would be Airbus. It's a tragedy, it is an issue for Boeing to resolve, but it is not good for competitors to see problems on any one particular airplane type."
Flight crew
U.S. labor unions representing pilots and flight attendants had different opinions on whether or not to ground the aircraft. Two flight attendant unions, AFA and the APFA, favored groundings, while pilot unions such as the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, APA, and ALPA, expressed confidence in continued operation of the aircraft.
Cockpit crew
In a private meeting on November 27, 2018, American Airlines pilots pressed Boeing managers to develop an urgent fix for MCAS and suggested that the FAA require a safety review which in turn could have grounded the airplanes. A recording of the meeting revealed pilots' anger that they were not informed about MCAS. One pilot was heard saying, "We flat out deserve to know what is on our airplanes." Another US pilot asked for more training prior to his first flight on the 737 MAX several months before the first crash of Lion Air Flight 610. Afterwards, in June 2019, the American Airlines pilot union openly criticized Boeing for not fully explaining the existence or operation of MCAS: "However, at APA we remained concerned about whether the new training protocol, materials and method of instruction suggested by Boeing are adequate to ensure that pilots across the globe flying the MAX fleet can do so in absolute complete safety" Boeing vice president Mike Sinnett explained that the company did not want to make changes in a rush, because of uncertainty whether the Lion Air accident was related to MCAS. Sinnett said Boeing expected pilots to be able to handle any control problems.
The U.S. Aviation Safety Reporting System received messages about the 737 MAX from U.S. pilots in November 2018, including one from a captain who expressed concern that systems such as the MCAS are not fully described in the aircraft flight manual. Captain Mike Michaelis, chairman of the safety committee of the Allied Pilots Association at American Airlines said "It's pretty asinine for them to put a system on an airplane and not tell the pilots … especially when it deals with flight controls".
U.S. pilots also complained about the way the 737 MAX performed, including claims of problems similar to those reported about the Lion Air crash. Pilots of at least two U.S. flights in 2018, reported the nose of the 737 MAX pitched down suddenly when they engaged the autopilot. The FAA stated in response that "Some of the reports reference possible issues with the autopilot/autothrottle, which is a separate system from MCAS, and/or acknowledge the problems could have been due to pilot error."
On October 7, 2019, Southwest Airlines pilots sued Boeing declaring that Boeing misled the pilot union about the plane adding that the planes' grounding cost its pilots more than $100million in lost income, which Southwest labor union wants Boeing to pay. The head of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), Jon Weaks, said in a note to pilots on November 13, 2019, that "Boeing is increasingly publicizing that they may have to shut down their production line due to running out of room to store completed MAX aircraft. There is some concern that this is simply another tactic to push the (return to service) timeline up."
Cabin crew
In a letter dated October 30, 2019, to Boeing's CEO, American Airlines' Association of Professional Flight Attendants President Lori Bassani wrote: "The 28,000 flight attendants working for American Airlines refuse to walk onto a plane that may not be safe and are calling for the highest possible safety standards to avoid another tragedy." She also met with dozens of elected officials in Washington after the congressional testimony of Boeing's CEO.
Flight crew unions at Air Canada, Sunwing and WestJet support the American flight attendant unions who expressed safety concerns about the MAX return. Sections of the Canadian Union of Public Employees called on Transport Canada to take its responsibility in ensuring a safe return of these planes in the air.
In November, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents employees at United Airlines Holdings, said: "We're not good with that, … If we're not confident it's safe, we're not going to work it and the planes don't fly. We've been clear with the FAA, the airlines and with Boeing that we need to see that – we need to see EASA, Canada, Australia, on board. We need all these assurances because there was a break in public trust here." The AFA-CWA represents 50,000 flight attendants at 20 carriers, including United Airlines and Alaska Air Group.
Public
A March 2019 poll suggested that 53% of American adults would not want to fly on a 737 MAX plane if the aircraft were to be cleared by the FAA the following week. In July, Southwest Airlines reprinted aircraft safety cards that were shared between the MAX and the rest of the Southwest 737-800 fleet. A IBD/TIPP Poll surveying Americans in January 2020, found that among the 61% who are closely following news of the MAX, 56% would avoid flying on it once it has reentered service.
Investment company UBS does not "anticipate significant share erosion" as it ran a public poll run showing 8% of the U.S. flying public would never fly the 737 MAX, (dropping to 3% when including that two-thirds seldom or never check the aircraft type before booking a flight), while 60% would fly it after at least six months of safe operations and a tenth would fly it after one to three months, not mattering much as airliner procurement time-frames are five to ten-plus years.
The survey found that 70% would hesitate today to book a flight on the MAX.
A study for Atmosphere Research Group, led by consultant Henry Harteveldt, of U.S. passengers between April 27 to May 1 shown that within six months of its return, 14% would definitely fly on a MAX, at least 20% say they will definitely avoid the plane and over 40% said they'd be willing to take pricier or less convenient flights to stay off the MAX.
Various strategies to reinstate public confidence into the MAX are being proposed.
On September 12, 2019, Boeing started an advertisement campaign, in which employees praise its planes' safety. Information packages for travelers about the safety of the redesigned MAX are being prepared by Boeing with the support of airlines. Boeing also produced video capsules showing support from chief pilot Jennifer Henderson.
For Marian Pistik, head of asset management at International Airfinance Corporation, the case of the MAX is unprecedented due to allegations of wrongdoings. The groundings of the DC-10 and of the Dreamliner could not be directly compared to the global B737 MAX grounding: "there was no suspicion that Boeing or any OEM knew of the problem and tried to disguise it or […] any suspicion of wrongdoing or not being compliant or forthcoming with the issues of the 737 Max."
In November 2020, when the FAA ungrounded the 737 MAX, families and friends of the victims criticized the FAA and Boeing, saying that the process was "rushed" and that the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash was still under investigation.
Airlines
In October 2018, after the crash but before the groundings, Lion Air had replaced its technical director, and the technicians who cleared the flight.
Because the groundings made the aircraft unavailable for service, airlines were forced to cancel thousands of flights, hundreds every day. American Airlines was the first U.S. airline to cancel a route when it stopped service from Dallas, Texas to Oakland, California.
On July 26, Southwest announced it would stop operations out of Newark Liberty International Airport due to the groundings. It removed the MAX name from safety cards for the 737NG to address customer complaints.
In May 2019, United Airlines' CEO Oscar Muñoz said that passengers would still feel uncertain about flying on a Boeing 737 MAX even after the software update. United announced the cancellation of a route between Chicago, Illinois and Leon, Mexico. On October 16, 2019, Muñoz stated that "nobody knows" when the plane will fly again.
Ethiopian Airlines said "These tragedies continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and minds, and we extend our sympathies to the loved ones of the passengers and crew on board Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302". The CEO also pushed back and rejected the notion that his airlines pilots were not fully trained or experienced, a notion intimated in the US House of Representatives in a recent hearing by the FAA director. Ethiopian Airlines rejects the accusation of piloting error. He said: "As far as the training is concerned ... we've gone according to the Boeing recommendation and FAA-approved one. We are not expected to speculate or to imagine something that doesn't exist at all". In June, Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam expressed his confidence in the process for bringing the MAX back into service, and expected Ethiopian to be the last carrier to resume flights.
Ethiopian Airlines' ex-chief engineer filed a whistleblower complaint to the regulators about alleged corruption in Ethiopian Airlines. He is also seeking asylum in the U.S. He said that, a day after the Flight 302 crash, the carrier altered maintenance records of a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. He submits that the alteration was part of a generalized culture of corruption "that included fabricating documents, signing off on shoddy repairs and even beating those who got out of line".
In March 2019, RT reported the indefinite suspension of contracts for the purchase by Russian airlines of dozens of aircraft, including Aeroflot's Pobeda subsidiary, S7 Airlines, Ural Airlines and UTair. Vitaly Savelyev, Aeroflot's CEO, said that "the company would refuse operating MAX planes ordered by Pobeda".
On June 18, International Airlines Group (IAG) announced plans for a fleet comprising 200 Boeing 737 MAX jets. Boeing and IAG signed a letter of intent at the Paris Air Show valued at a list price of over .
Bjorn Kjos, ex-CEO of Norwegian Air Shuttle who stepped down in July, stated in July that the company "has a huge appetite for 737 MAX jets", according to a report from American City Business Journals.
He had said: "It is quite obvious that we will not take the cost... We will send this bill to those who produced this aircraft."
In mid-July, Ryanair warned that some of its bases would be subject to short-term closures in 2020, due to the shortfall in MAX deliveries, and pointed out that the MAX 200 version it has ordered will require separate certification expected to take a further two months after the MAX returns to service. By the end of July, Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary expressed further concerns and frustration with the delays and revealed that, in parallel with discussions with Boeing regarding a potential order for new aircraft to be delivered from 2023, he was also talking to Airbus which was offering very aggressive pricing. In February 2020, O'Leary revealed that Ryanair has an offer "on the table" for an order of 230-seat MAX 10s, and expected to be "at the head of the queue" once Boeing is in a position to sign new purchases.
Observers
Pilot authors
Retired airline captain Chesley Sullenberger, who gained fame in the Miracle on the Hudson accident in 2009, said, "These crashes are demonstrable evidence that our current system of aircraft design and certification has failed us. These accidents should never have happened." He sharply criticized Boeing and the FAA, saying they "have been found wanting in this ugly saga". He said the overly "cozy relationship" between the aviation industry and government was seen when the Boeing CEO "reached out to the U.S. President to try to keep the 737 MAX 8 from being grounded." He also lamented understaffing and underfunding of the FAA. "Good business means that it is always better and cheaper to do it right instead of doing it wrong and trying to repair the damage after the fact, and when lives are lost, there is no way to repair the damage."
Author, journalist, and pilot William Langewiesche wrote his first article in The New York Times Magazine, saying: "What we had in the two downed airplanes was a textbook failure of airmanship." To which, another aviation author, Christine Negroni wrote back "the argument that more competent pilots could have handled the problem is not knowable to Langewiesche and it misses the most basic tenet of air safety anyway." She explains that an accident investigation is not about blame, is not only about what happened, but rather strives to identify the root causes. The counterpoint's essence is that Langewiesche downplays the "failure of systems and processes that put a deeply flawed airplane in the hands of pilots around the world". Captain Chesley Sullenberger also replied to the paper by a letter to the editors, in which he says: "I have long stated, as he does note, that pilots must be capable of absolute mastery of the aircraft and the situation at all times, a concept pilots call airmanship. Inadequate pilot training and insufficient pilot experience are problems worldwide, but they do not excuse the fatally flawed design of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that was a death trap."
Former NTSB members
On March 12, 2019, Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the U.S. agency that investigates airplane crashes, said the FAA should ground the airplane. Engineering experts have pointed out misconceptions of the general public and media concerning the 737 MAX characteristics and the crashes. Andrew Skow, a former Northrop Grumman chief engineer, assessed Boeing as having good track record modernizing of the 737, but, "They may have pushed it too far."
Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB, said: "One of the ways Boeing marketed the 737 Max was the modest amount of training up for current 737 pilots. You didn't have to go back to the Sim [the flight simulator] again and again." James E. (Jim) Hall, chairman of the NTSB from 1994 to 2001, blamed the FAA regulators for giving too much power to the airline industry. In July, Hall and Goelz co-signed an opinion letter to The New York Times, in which they said: "Boeing has found a willing partner in the FAA, which allowed the company to circumvent standard certification processes so it could sell aircraft more quickly. Boeing's inadequate regard for safety and the FAA's complicity display an unconscionable lack of leadership at both organizations." The letter went on to compare the current crisis with Boeing's handling of Boeing 737 rudder issues in the 1990s.
In January 2020, Hall, said in an interview on CNBC: "... we had the example this week of the 2009 Turkish accident where it had similarities that should have been picked up immediately when they had problems with the 737 MAX so it makes you wonder what do they know about safety. Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing? Are these comments that were made and distributed by the employees about the dysfunction still in existence?"
John Goglia, former member of the NTSB, criticized Boeing and the FAA for not protecting FAA-designated oversight engineers from Boeing management pressure. Commenting on the 2016 removal of a senior engineer who had insisted on improved testing of a fire suppression system, he said that management action of this kind produces a chilling effect on others and "negates the whole system." He also criticized Congress for pushing the FAA to delegate even more to the industry, as it passed the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act, which mandated further expansion of the ODA program. "Apparently, Congress didn't think the FAA was delegating enough to ODA holders. [...] many of its members are also accepting campaign donations from aircraft manufacturers, such as Boeing, which clearly have an interest in pushing the FAA to delegate more and more authority to manufacturers with as little oversight as possible".
Consumer advocates
In May 2019, the consumer advocate organization Flyers Rights opposed the FAA's position of not requiring simulator training for 737 MAX pilots. It also asked to extend the comment period to allow independent experts to "share their expertise with the FAA and Boeing". In December 2019, Flyers Rights sued the FAA for its refusal to allow access to the Boeing 737 MAX records. The organization argues for transparency and independent review prior to ungrounding the MAX. It is supported by aviation professionals including Chesley Sullenberger, Michael Goldfarb, an aviation safety consultant and former chief of staff and senior policy adviser to the FAA Administrator, and several other experts.
In June 2019, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who lost a grandniece in one of the accidents, claimed that the Boeing 737 "must never fly again... it's not a matter of software. It's a matter of structural design defect: the plane's engines are too much for the traditional fuselage". Nader also called for Boeing top leaders to resign. In October, Nader called for the replacement of Muilenburg and the complete board of directors as the crisis grows, saying: " They don't want to admit that they really, really performed in a very seriously adverse way to the safety of airline passengers". On December 13, 2019, he appealed to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to not rely on FAA's decision for ungrounding the MAX, but that Transport Canada do their own independent decision: "Obviously the Canadian decision is very important. It's not likely that the FAA will unground the plane unless Canada goes along...We're relying on Canada here … The FAA will not go without Canada". Nader was interviewed on Democracy Now! and covered the safety concerns on his own program, the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
Business analysts
The 737 MAX grounding has drawn historical comparisons with the DC-10 in 1979 and Boeing 787 in 2013. Marian Pistik, head of asset management at International Airfinance Corporation said that in either case, "there was no suspicion that Boeing or any OEM knew of the problem and tried to disguise it, or any suspicion of wrongdoing or not being compliant or forthcoming with the issues of the 737 Max."
In September, aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia said about Boeing: "This is an engineering company, it needs an engineering culture and engineering management; it deviated pretty far from this at the time when the MAX was being developed."
In December 2019, he wrote: "Calhoun is replacing Dennis Muilenburg because the latter CEO's year has been disastrous. The company's communications with Congress, the FAA, international regulators, airline and lessor customers, suppliers, the victims' families, and pretty much the entire outside world were a master class in bad crisis management." He added in January 2020: "It's no longer about MCAS. It's about things that might be discovered.[...] This is going to be the most scrutinized certification in history."
About Boeing's internal employee emails released in January 2020, travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt said: "Not only do they further weaken confidence in the 737 Max, they also paint a pretty caustic picture of Boeing and its culture itself. There's the potential that it could cause some people to be concerned about flying on Boeing airplanes, period.''
Academia
In Harvard Business Review, Amy C. Edmondson writes that Boeing needs a full organizational culture change. "But how telling it is that it takes a cataclysmic event (two, actually) for executives to take culture seriously?"
MIT Sloan senior lecturer Neal Hartman was cited in MIT ideas: "The toxic tone of some of the emails suggests that there are numerous problems at Boeing. [...] Of greatest concern is the fear that employees were either uncomfortable or not empowered – or both – to take their concerns to appropriate levels in the company."
Yale University senior associate dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld went as far as to say that the groundings could become an existential threat to Boeing.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School wrote: "Boeing's new CEO and leadership team must root out arrogance and approach stakeholders with humility and a listening stance. These include government regulators, elected officials, investors, pilot and flight attendant unions, suppliers, maintenance workers, the airlines themselves, and, of course, passengers. [...] A turnaround can't get off the ground without high employee engagement. If the workers who design, build and test the planes don't stand behind the company, no one else will."
News media
On March 11, just after the FAA reaffirmed the MAX's safety, several western media outlets, including the Financial Times, The New York Times, Fox News, and CNBC, questioned China's motives for grounding the aircraft by suggesting the action was either "politically motivated" or that China was "potentially benefiting from the grounding". After the rest of the world followed suit with their own groundings, aviation commentators saw this as having bolstered the global reputation of China's CAAC at the expense of the FAA.
On December 21, 2019, in its 'leaders" section, The Economist wrote: "Over the past decade Boeing has skimped on research, development and capital spending, investing only 7% of its sales on average, compared with around 10% at Airbus. Once the 737 MAX was the future. It is time for a new pilot and a new course."
In January 2020, Quartz Journalist Natasha Frost observed that Boeing inherited its current management culture from its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Dan Catchpole, a journalist covering Boeing and aerospace summarized in Fortune magazine: "Scrutiny from journalists, crash investigators, regulators, Congress, and the Department of Justice has exposed profound flaws in Boeing's corporate culture—shaking its workforce, forcing supplier layoffs, and shattering fliers' trust."
Clive Irving, Condé Nast Traveler aviation expert, said: "One thing is for sure: in the history of air crash investigations, since the beginning of the Jet Age 60 years ago, there has never been such a serious and sustained breakdown in the safeguards intended to keep flying safe. [...] By the time that the FAA certified that the MAX was safe to fly, early in 2017, it was clear that the agency's culture was as steadfastly in denial as Boeing—even though there were already people in the FAA who knew how dangerous the situation was."
In May 2020, The Seattle Times reporters Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the crisis.
Governance experts
About Boeing's board, veteran corporate governance expert Nell Minow said: "This is the quintessential 1990s board. It's CEOs and luminaries, but nobody with the kind of expertise you really need. [...]
The board took no action after the first crash. That's unforgivable."
According to MSCI, a performance analytics research firm, Boeing scored 5.4 on a scale of 1–10 on its quality of governance, ranking in the bottom third of S&P 500 companies.
In April 2019, for a Boeing ballot, shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis recommended voting against Lawrence Kellner, former chairman and CEO of Continental Airlines, citing that "the audit committee should have taken a more proactive role in identifying the risks associated with the 737 Max 8 aircraft." Even with the best companies, performing really well with great profit margins and great growth, a weak board is going to struggle when that company runs into a crisis situation. And that's what we're looking at here." As head of the audit committee, Kellner was technically responsible for the safety risks, but the board was never briefed on the MCAS software before the Lion Air crash. Kellner and Calhoun said that they don't consider it "as part of their job to inspect every technical feature on an airplane".
Politicians
On March 12, 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted a complaint about complex airplane systems, and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg called the president to assure him of the 737 MAX's safety. The FAA stated hours later that it had "no basis to order grounding the aircraft" and no data from other countries to justify such action.
U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mitt Romney, Dianne Feinstein, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker and Richard Blumenthal called for the FAA to temporarily ground all 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 jets. Cruz and Wicker announced plans to hold a hearing in the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation and Space "to investigate these crashes, determine their contributing factors, and ensure that the United States aviation industry remains the safest in the world." Warren went as far as to question if the Trump administration was protecting Boeing.
Kyrsten Sinema among other U.S. Senators at a March 28, 2019, hearing questioned a panel of regulators in the committee responsible for aviation oversight in the US Senate, "Is there more we need to do?" Kyrsten also questioned why more detail was not included in the flight operations manuals given to pilots not offering details of new features and systems like MCAS since the previous models: "Can you talk about why this was not included in pilot training material?"
On April 15, 2019, President Trump tweeted: "What do I know about branding, maybe nothing (but I did become President!), but if I were Boeing, I would FIX the Boeing 737 MAX, add some additional great features, & REBRAND the plane with a new name."
On October 29, before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, senator Richard Blumenthal said: "Boeing came to my office and said this was the result of pilot error, those pilots never had a chance, victims never had a chance, they were in flying coffins".
On December 15, President Trump called Muilenburg, to inquire about the potential shutdown of 737 MAX production. Muilenburg assured Trump that the shutdown, set to begin in January 2020, was temporary and it would not cause any staff layoffs.
President Trump made two executive orders to cut regulatory oversight and shift supervision to industry. His administration's 2019 budget cut 18% of the transportation department budget.
References
2019 in aviation
Boeing |
7475754 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank%20Mountain | Frank Mountain | Frank Henry Mountain (May 17, 1860 – November 19, 1939) was an American baseball player from 1880 to 1886. He played seven seasons in Major League Baseball, principally as a pitcher (143 games), outfielder (36 games) and first baseman (18 games). He played for six different major league clubs and saw his most extensive playing time with the Columbus Buckeyes of the American Association, appearing in 128 games for that club during the 1883 and 1884 seasons.
Over the course of seven major league seasons, Mountain compiled a 58-83 (.411) win–loss record and a 3.47 earned run average (ERA). He had his best season in 1884, pitching a no-hitter and compiling a 23-17 record with a 2.45 ERA.
Early years
Mountain was born in Fort Edward, New York, in 1860. His parents were immigrants from Ireland. His father, David Mountain, was a carpenter from Waterford, Ireland. His mother, Elizabeth, was from Cork.
Mountain attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, although he did not graduate. He played second base on the Union College baseball team in 1880.
Professional baseball career
1880 to 1882 seasons
Mountain began his professional baseball career in July 1880 with the Troy Trojans of the National League. He appeared in only two games for the Trojans and compiled a 1-1 record and 5.29 ERA.
In 1881, Mountain played for the Detroit Wolverines of the National League in the club's inaugural season. He appeared in seven games for the team, all complete games, and compiled a 3-4 record and a 5.25 ERA. He pitched and won both games of a double-header for Detroit in 1881.
Mountain divided his playing time during the 1882 season between the Worcester Worcesters of the National League (18 games) and the Philadelphia Athletics of the American Association (8 games). He compiled a 4-22 (.154) record and a 3.76 ERA with the two clubs in 1882.
Columbus
In 1883, Mountain joined the Columbus Buckeyes of the American Association. He appeared in 128 games, 101 as a pitcher and 29 as an outfielder, for the Buckeyes during the 1883 and 1884 seasons.
Mountain appeared in a career high 59 games as pitcher in 1883. He started all 59 games and threw 57 complete games, four shutouts and 503 innings pitched. He compiled a 26-33 record and led the American Association that season in losses (33), hits allowed (546), earned runs allowed (201), and bases on balls allowed (123).
Mountain's best season was 1884 when he won 23 games, lost 17, pitched 40 complete games, and had a 2.45 ERA for Columbus. His ERA was fifth best in the American Association, and his five shutouts placed him fourth. On June 5 of that season he pitched a no-hitter against the Washington Nationals, winning 12–0.
Pittsburgh
After the 1884 season, Mountain, along with the entire Columbus team, was sold to the Pittsburgh Alleghenys. However, an injury prevented Mountain from appearing in more than five games in 1885, and he compiled a 1-4 record and 4.30 ERA. In August 1885, the Alleghenys "indefinitely laid off" Mountain until he could again pitch "in his old form." In November 1885, The Sporting Life noted that Mountain's "disability" was "a terrible disappointment to the club", rendering him unable to bat effectively despite having been a strong batter in 1884. Mountain's batting average dropped from .238 in 1883 to .100 in 1884. One account reported that Mountain's arm was damaged by a "drop ball" pitch which was thrown in a motion bringing the arm above the head and then releasing the ball with a "sharp downward snap of the wrist."
Mountain returned to Pittsburgh in 1886. His arm was reported to have recovered, but he injured his ankle in June. He was limited to two games as pitcher and lost both games with a 7.88 ERA. He also appeared in 16 games as a first baseman in 1886 and compiled a .319 on-base percentage in 69 plate appearances. He appeared in his final major league game on August 17, 1886. The following week, a newspaper account reported that his career as pitcher was over, a tryout with Pittsburgh having "proved a jonah."
Toledo
Starting in May 1888, Mountain served as a minor league manager for the Toledo Maumees of the Tri-State League. As manager, he "blacklisted several players, who went on a strike, and there was a popular howl against him." He was released as manager in July 1888.
Career statistics
During his seven seasons in the major leagues, Mountain appeared in 194 games (143 as a pitcher). He started 142 games, threw 141 complete games and nine shutouts, and compiled a 58–83 win-loss record with a 3.47 ERA. As a batter, he compiled a .220 batting average with nine home runs and 84 runs scored.
Family and later years
Mountain was married to Sarah Mountain. They had five children: Martin (born 1888), Jennie (born 1890), Rose (born 1894), Raymond (born 1898) and Hugh (born c. 1905). In approximately 1895, Mountain became a clerk for General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. He worked for General Electric for nearly 40 years, serving for many years as the assistant chief of the factory fire department. He retired in 1931. Mountain died at his home in Schenectady in 1939 at age 79. He was buried at the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Schenectady.
See also
List of Major League Baseball annual saves leaders
List of Major League Baseball no-hitters
References
19th-century baseball players
Major League Baseball pitchers
Baseball players from New York (state)
Troy Trojans players
Detroit Wolverines players
Worcester Ruby Legs players
Philadelphia Athletics (AA) players
Columbus Buckeyes players
Pittsburgh Alleghenys players
Union Dutchmen baseball players
1860 births
1939 deaths |
41588664 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela%20Lopker | Pamela Lopker | Pamela Lopker is the founder, chairman of the board, and president of the software company QAD Inc.
Education
In 1972, Lopker started college at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a mathematics and economics major. She is also certified in Product and Inventory Management by the American Production and Inventory Control Society.
Lopker and her husband gave a $500,000 endowment to UCSB in 2005 and are also actively involved with the school through other means such as mentorship and acting as guest lecturers.
Career
After graduating from college in 1977, Lopker worked writing software that provided radar defense systems for a Naval defense contractor in Goleta, California. She eventually left that job and pursued a career in business oriented software development.
In 1979, Karl Lopker, Lopker’s UCSB classmate and boyfriend, asked her to help him find software to track the sales, inventory, and shipments of his sandal company, Deckers Outdoors. After finding a lack of suitable software, she decided to start her own company, QAD, that would develop software to deal with all facets of manufacturing. Lopker says that she named the company using the initials of the nearby Queen Anne Road. Since the name QAR was already in use, Lopker replaced the R with a D. Shortly after QAD was founded, Mr. Lopker sold his company Deckers Outdoors and joined QAD as CEO. Mr. Lopker focused on sales and marketing, while Lopker was responsible for research and development.
In the late 1980s, the Lopkers sued another distributor for allegedly developing a product that had stolen QAD software. The distributor countersued the Lopkers for defamation of character and malicious prosecution. A federal judge in Chicago dismissed the claims, saying that Lopker had lied in her testimony. The case was eventually settled in 1993 with QAD paying several million dollars in damages.
In 2005, QAD was in use in over 90 countries by more than 5,000 manufacturers, had $230 million in revenue, and 1,200 employees.
Fortune magazine has named Lopker “The Hero of U.S. Manufacturing” and “The Queen of Elegant Software.” She has also been called “A Legend of Manufacturing” by Manufacturing Systems. In 1997, Lopker was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.
Personal life
Lopker was born in Japan in 1962 as the second child of three. Her father was an engineer for the U.S. Navy, and as a result, Lopker attended 8 Catholic schools in 12 years; she and her family continue to be active members of the Catholic Church. Lopker’s family eventually settled in Cupertino, California where she was the first student at her school to earn an A in her auto shop class.
In 1981, Lopker married friend and business partner Karl Lopker with whom she has 2 children. In 2018, Karl passed away of prostate cancer.
References
Living people
American technology chief executives
American women chief executives
University of California, Santa Barbara alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
21st-century American women |
68430599 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjen%20Kamphuis | Arjen Kamphuis | Arjen Kamphuis (Groningen, 26 January 1972 – missing since 20 August 2018, last seen in Bodø, Norway) was a cybersecurity expert and hacktivist. He addressed topics like open standards and free software, safe elections and an IT-aware and IT-capable government, eventually to protect free speech and democracy. Ever since Edward Snowden leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, he was especially dedicated to protecting investigative journalists. He wrote the book ‘Information security for investigative journalists’ with co-author Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.
Career
Kamphuis was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Gendo. Kamphuis studied Natural Sciences at Utrecht University and worked for IBM and Twynstra Gudde as IT architect, trainer and IT strategy advisor. He was a certified EDP auditor and information security specialist. Since 2006 he helped to secure the information systems of corporates, national government and NGO's. His work ranges from regular privacy-compliance and security-awareness up to countering espionage against companies, journalists and governments. To keep up technically he was involved with the global hacker-scene. He kept in touch with (former)employees of spy agencies and other professionals who work at the front of critical infrastructure protection. He worked on the strategic impact of new technological developments and the social, economic and geo-political impact of science and technology.
In 2016 Kamphuis started working for Brunel in Amsterdam as Lead Advisor Information Security and from then on he worked closely with William (Bill) Binney and Kirk Wiebe. On 11 August 2017, he was invited with Bill Binney to a press conference in Austria, together with Max Schrems and Thomas Lohninger to talk about mass surveillance in Austria. In late 2017 he started the Brunel daughter company Pretty Good Knowledge as Technical Director. Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe were co-founders and they contribute as Directors of Analytics.
Kamphuis has been involved in formulating public IT policy in the areas of open standards and open source for the government and public sector. He advised senior managers and administrators of companies and public institutions, members of parliament in several European countries and the Dutch Cabinet about the opportunities offered by open standards and open source software for the European knowledge economy and society as a whole. In the expert team of Plasterk he advised about (not) using e-voting for elections.
Personal life
Kamphuis was in a relationship with Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower, between 2007 and 2014, living in Düsseldorf and Berlin. In 2016 he settled in Amsterdam. He was a much sought-after international speaker on technology policy issues. He wrote about his insights and ideas for Huffington Post.
Disappearance
The Norwegian police conclude that Kamphuis probably drowned due to a kayaking incident on the fjord near Rognan, Norway. His body has not been found. After his disappearance, friends of Kamphuis compiled a book of a selection of his articles to which prof. dr. B.P.F. (Bart) Jacobs, Professor Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands wrote the introduction Arjen Kamphuis and the public cause in the digital world.
Bibliography
Kamphuis, A. (2020). Infosecurity (Gran knows why). Gendo; ISBN 9789090328218 -
See also
List of people who disappeared
References
1972 births
2010s missing person cases
Hacktivists
Living people
Missing person cases in Norway |
46808345 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowship%20One | Fellowship One | FellowshipOne, formerly Fellowship Technologies, is church software owned by Ministry Brands.
History
In 1999, Fellowship Church of Grapevine, Texas, began developing software to manage their church operations. Over time, the church decided that they could not continue to develop the software and approached Jeff Hook about taking the product to market.
In 2004, Hook founded Fellowship Technologies to launch Fellowship One's church management software in Irving, Texas.
In February 2011, Fellowship Technologies was acquired by the ACTIVE Network. Soon after, ACTIVE followed up by purchasing Connection Power in July of the same year. ACTIVE executed yet one more acquisition in October 2011 when they purchased ServiceU, allowing the company to expand their service offerings through Fellowship One.
In March 2016, Fellowship One announced that ACTIVE Networks LLC finalized the sale of its Faith division and the Fellowship One brand to Ministry Brands of Knoxville, TN.
References
External links
Software companies established in 2004
Software companies based in Texas
Companies based in Irving, Texas
Software companies of the United States |
48356 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution%20cipher | Substitution cipher | In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encrypting in which units of plaintext are replaced with the ciphertext, in a defined manner, with the help of a key; the "units" may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing the inverse substitution process to extract the original message.
Substitution ciphers can be compared with transposition ciphers. In a transposition cipher, the units of the plaintext are rearranged in a different and usually quite complex order, but the units themselves are left unchanged. By contrast, in a substitution cipher, the units of the plaintext are retained in the same sequence in the ciphertext, but the units themselves are altered.
There are a number of different types of substitution cipher. If the cipher operates on single letters, it is termed a simple substitution cipher; a cipher that operates on larger groups of letters is termed polygraphic. A monoalphabetic cipher uses fixed substitution over the entire message, whereas a polyalphabetic cipher uses a number of substitutions at different positions in the message, where a unit from the plaintext is mapped to one of several possibilities in the ciphertext and vice versa.
Simple substitution
Substitution of single letters separately—simple substitution—can be demonstrated by writing out the alphabet in some order to represent the substitution. This is termed a substitution alphabet. The cipher alphabet may be shifted or reversed (creating the Caesar and Atbash ciphers, respectively) or scrambled in a more complex fashion, in which case it is called a mixed alphabet or deranged alphabet. Traditionally, mixed alphabets may be created by first writing out a keyword, removing repeated letters in it, then writing all the remaining letters in the alphabet in the usual order.
Using this system, the keyword "" gives us the following alphabets:
A message
flee at once. we are discovered!
enciphers to
SIAA ZQ LKBA. VA ZOA RFPBLUAOAR!
Usually the ciphertext is written out in blocks of fixed length, omitting punctuation and spaces; this is done to disguise word boundaries from the plaintext and to help avoid transmission errors. These blocks are called "groups", and sometimes a "group count" (i.e. the number of groups) is given as an additional check. Five-letter groups are often used, dating from when messages used to be transmitted by telegraph:
SIAAZ QLKBA VAZOA RFPBL UAOAR
If the length of the message happens not to be divisible by five, it may be padded at the end with "nulls". These can be any characters that decrypt to obvious nonsense, so that the receiver can easily spot them and discard them.
The ciphertext alphabet is sometimes different from the plaintext alphabet; for example, in the pigpen cipher, the ciphertext consists of a set of symbols derived from a grid. For example:
Such features make little difference to the security of a scheme, however – at the very least, any set of strange symbols can be transcribed back into an A-Z alphabet and dealt with as normal.
In lists and catalogues for salespeople, a very simple encryption is sometimes used to replace numeric digits by letters.
Example: MAT would be used to represent 120.
Security for simple substitution ciphers
Although the traditional keyword method for creating a mixed substitution alphabet is simple, a serious disadvantage is that the last letters of the alphabet (which are mostly low frequency) tend to stay at the end. A stronger way of constructing a mixed alphabet is to generate the substitution alphabet completely randomly.
Although the number of possible substitution alphabets is very large (26! ≈ 288.4, or about 88 bits), this cipher is not very strong, and is easily broken. Provided the message is of reasonable length (see below), the cryptanalyst can deduce the probable meaning of the most common symbols by analyzing the frequency distribution of the ciphertext. This allows formation of partial words, which can be tentatively filled in, progressively expanding the (partial) solution (see frequency analysis for a demonstration of this). In some cases, underlying words can also be determined from the pattern of their letters; for example, attract, osseous, and words with those two as the root are the only common English words with the pattern ABBCADB. Many people solve such ciphers for recreation, as with cryptogram puzzles in the newspaper.
According to the unicity distance of English, 27.6 letters of ciphertext are required to crack a mixed alphabet simple substitution. In practice, typically about 50 letters are needed, although some messages can be broken with fewer if unusual patterns are found. In other cases, the plaintext can be contrived to have a nearly flat frequency distribution, and much longer plaintexts will then be required by the cryptanalyst.
Nomenclator
One once-common variant of the substitution cipher is the nomenclator. Named after the public official who announced the titles of visiting dignitaries, this cipher uses a small code sheet containing letter, syllable and word substitution tables, sometimes homophonic, that typically converted symbols into numbers. Originally the code portion was restricted to the names of important people, hence the name of the cipher; in later years, it covered many common words and place names as well. The symbols for whole words (codewords in modern parlance) and letters (cipher in modern parlance) were not distinguished in the ciphertext. The Rossignols' Great Cipher used by Louis XIV of France was one.
Nomenclators were the standard fare of diplomatic correspondence, espionage, and advanced political conspiracy from the early fifteenth century to the late eighteenth century; most conspirators were and have remained less cryptographically sophisticated. Although government intelligence cryptanalysts were systematically breaking nomenclators by the mid-sixteenth century, and superior systems had been available since 1467, the usual response to cryptanalysis was simply to make the tables larger. By the late eighteenth century, when the system was beginning to die out, some nomenclators had 50,000 symbols.
Nevertheless, not all nomenclators were broken; today, cryptanalysis of archived ciphertexts remains a fruitful area of historical research.
Homophonic substitution
An early attempt to increase the difficulty of frequency analysis attacks on substitution ciphers was to disguise plaintext letter frequencies by homophony. In these ciphers, plaintext letters map to more than one ciphertext symbol. Usually, the highest-frequency plaintext symbols are given more equivalents than lower frequency letters. In this way, the frequency distribution is flattened, making analysis more difficult.
Since more than 26 characters will be required in the ciphertext alphabet, various solutions are employed to invent larger alphabets. Perhaps the simplest is to use a numeric substitution 'alphabet'. Another method consists of simple variations on the existing alphabet; uppercase, lowercase, upside down, etc. More artistically, though not necessarily more securely, some homophonic ciphers employed wholly invented alphabets of fanciful symbols.
The Beale ciphers are another example of a homophonic cipher. This is a story of buried treasure that was described in 1819–21 by use of a ciphered text that was keyed to the Declaration of Independence. Here each ciphertext character was represented by a number. The number was determined by taking the plaintext character and finding a word in the Declaration of Independence that started with that character and using the numerical position of that word in the Declaration of Independence as the encrypted form of that letter. Since many words in the Declaration of Independence start with the same letter, the encryption of that character could be any of the numbers associated with the words in the Declaration of Independence that start with that letter. Deciphering the encrypted text character X (which is a number) is as simple as looking up the Xth word of the Declaration of Independence and using the first letter of that word as the decrypted character.
Another homophonic cipher was described by Stahl and was one of the first attempts to provide for computer security of data systems in computers through encryption. Stahl constructed the cipher in such a way that the number of homophones for a given character was in proportion to the frequency of the character, thus making frequency analysis much more difficult.
The book cipher and straddling checkerboard are types of homophonic cipher.
Francesco I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, used the earliest known example of a homophonic substitution cipher in 1401 for correspondence with one Simone de Crema.
Polyalphabetic substitution
The work of Al-Qalqashandi (1355-1418), based on the earlier work of Ibn al-Durayhim (1312–1359), contained the first published discussion of the substitution and transposition of ciphers, as well as the first description of a polyalphabetic cipher, in which each plaintext letter is assigned more than one substitute. Polyalphabetic substitution ciphers were later described in 1467 by Leone Battista Alberti in the form of disks. Johannes Trithemius, in his book Steganographia (Ancient Greek for "hidden writing") introduced the now more standard form of a tableau (see below; ca. 1500 but not published until much later). A more sophisticated version using mixed alphabets was described in 1563 by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his book, De Furtivis Literarum Notis (Latin for "On concealed characters in writing").
In a polyalphabetic cipher, multiple cipher alphabets are used. To facilitate encryption, all the alphabets are usually written out in a large table, traditionally called a tableau. The tableau is usually 26×26, so that 26 full ciphertext alphabets are available. The method of filling the tableau, and of choosing which alphabet to use next, defines the particular polyalphabetic cipher. All such ciphers are easier to break than once believed, as substitution alphabets are repeated for sufficiently large plaintexts.
One of the most popular was that of Blaise de Vigenère. First published in 1585, it was considered unbreakable until 1863, and indeed was commonly called le chiffre indéchiffrable (French for "indecipherable cipher").
In the Vigenère cipher, the first row of the tableau is filled out with a copy of the plaintext alphabet, and successive rows are simply shifted one place to the left. (Such a simple tableau is called a tabula recta, and mathematically corresponds to adding the plaintext and key letters, modulo 26.) A keyword is then used to choose which ciphertext alphabet to use. Each letter of the keyword is used in turn, and then they are repeated again from the beginning. So if the keyword is 'CAT', the first letter of plaintext is enciphered under alphabet 'C', the second under 'A', the third under 'T', the fourth under 'C' again, and so on. In practice, Vigenère keys were often phrases several words long.
In 1863, Friedrich Kasiski published a method (probably discovered secretly and independently before the Crimean War by Charles Babbage) which enabled the calculation of the length of the keyword in a Vigenère ciphered message. Once this was done, ciphertext letters that had been enciphered under the same alphabet could be picked out and attacked separately as a number of semi-independent simple substitutions - complicated by the fact that within one alphabet letters were separated and did not form complete words, but simplified by the fact that usually a tabula recta had been employed.
As such, even today a Vigenère type cipher should theoretically be difficult to break if mixed alphabets are used in the tableau, if the keyword is random, and if the total length of ciphertext is less than 27.67 times the length of the keyword. These requirements are rarely understood in practice, and so Vigenère enciphered message security is usually less than might have been.
Other notable polyalphabetics include:
The Gronsfeld cipher. This is identical to the Vigenère except that only 10 alphabets are used, and so the "keyword" is numerical.
The Beaufort cipher. This is practically the same as the Vigenère, except the tabula recta is replaced by a backwards one, mathematically equivalent to ciphertext = key - plaintext. This operation is self-inverse, whereby the same table is used for both encryption and decryption.
The autokey cipher, which mixes plaintext with a key to avoid periodicity.
The running key cipher, where the key is made very long by using a passage from a book or similar text.
Modern stream ciphers can also be seen, from a sufficiently abstract perspective, to be a form of polyalphabetic cipher in which all the effort has gone into making the keystream as long and unpredictable as possible.
Polygraphic substitution
In a polygraphic substitution cipher, plaintext letters are substituted in larger groups, instead of substituting letters individually. The first advantage is that the frequency distribution is much flatter than that of individual letters (though not actually flat in real languages; for example, 'TH' is much more common than 'XQ' in English). Second, the larger number of symbols requires correspondingly more ciphertext to productively analyze letter frequencies.
To substitute pairs of letters would take a substitution alphabet 676 symbols long (). In the same De Furtivis Literarum Notis mentioned above, della Porta actually proposed such a system, with a 20 x 20 tableau (for the 20 letters of the Italian/Latin alphabet he was using) filled with 400 unique glyphs. However the system was impractical and probably never actually used.
The earliest practical digraphic cipher (pairwise substitution), was the so-called Playfair cipher, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1854. In this cipher, a 5 x 5 grid is filled with the letters of a mixed alphabet (two letters, usually I and J, are combined). A digraphic substitution is then simulated by taking pairs of letters as two corners of a rectangle, and using the other two corners as the ciphertext (see the Playfair cipher main article for a diagram). Special rules handle double letters and pairs falling in the same row or column. Playfair was in military use from the Boer War through World War II.
Several other practical polygraphics were introduced in 1901 by Felix Delastelle, including the bifid and four-square ciphers (both digraphic) and the trifid cipher (probably the first practical trigraphic).
The Hill cipher, invented in 1929 by Lester S. Hill, is a polygraphic substitution which can combine much larger groups of letters simultaneously using linear algebra. Each letter is treated as a digit in base 26: A = 0, B =1, and so on. (In a variation, 3 extra symbols are added to make the basis prime.) A block of n letters is then considered as a vector of n dimensions, and multiplied by a n x n matrix, modulo 26. The components of the matrix are the key, and should be random provided that the matrix is invertible in (to ensure decryption is possible). A mechanical version of the Hill cipher of dimension 6 was patented in 1929.
The Hill cipher is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack because it is completely linear, so it must be combined with some non-linear step to defeat this attack. The combination of wider and wider weak, linear diffusive steps like a Hill cipher, with non-linear substitution steps, ultimately leads to a substitution–permutation network (e.g. a Feistel cipher), so it is possible – from this extreme perspective – to consider modern block ciphers as a type of polygraphic substitution.
Mechanical substitution ciphers
Between around World War I and the widespread availability of computers (for some governments this was approximately the 1950s or 1960s; for other organizations it was a decade or more later; for individuals it was no earlier than 1975), mechanical implementations of polyalphabetic substitution ciphers were widely used. Several inventors had similar ideas about the same time, and rotor cipher machines were patented four times in 1919. The most important of the resulting machines was the Enigma, especially in the versions used by the German military from approximately 1930. The Allies also developed and used rotor machines (e.g., SIGABA and Typex).
All of these were similar in that the substituted letter was chosen electrically from amongst the huge number of possible combinations resulting from the rotation of several letter disks. Since one or more of the disks rotated mechanically with each plaintext letter enciphered, the number of alphabets used was astronomical. Early versions of these machine were, nevertheless, breakable. William F. Friedman of the US Army's SIS early found vulnerabilities in Hebern's rotor machine, and GC&CS's Dillwyn Knox solved versions of the Enigma machine (those without the "plugboard") well before WWII began. Traffic protected by essentially all of the German military Enigmas was broken by Allied cryptanalysts, most notably those at Bletchley Park, beginning with the German Army variant used in the early 1930s. This version was broken by inspired mathematical insight by Marian Rejewski in Poland.
As far as is publicly known, no messages protected by the SIGABA and Typex machines were ever broken during or near the time when these systems were in service.
The one-time pad
One type of substitution cipher, the one-time pad, is quite special. It was invented near the end of World War I by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne in the US. It was mathematically proven unbreakable by Claude Shannon, probably during World War II; his work was first published in the late 1940s. In its most common implementation, the one-time pad can be called a substitution cipher only from an unusual perspective; typically, the plaintext letter is combined (not substituted) in some manner (e.g., XOR) with the key material character at that position.
The one-time pad is, in most cases, impractical as it requires that the key material be as long as the plaintext, actually random, used once and only once, and kept entirely secret from all except the sender and intended receiver. When these conditions are violated, even marginally, the one-time pad is no longer unbreakable. Soviet one-time pad messages sent from the US for a brief time during World War II used non-random key material. US cryptanalysts, beginning in the late 40s, were able to, entirely or partially, break a few thousand messages out of several hundred thousand. (See Venona project)
In a mechanical implementation, rather like the Rockex equipment, the one-time pad was used for messages sent on the Moscow-Washington hot line established after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Substitution in modern cryptography
Substitution ciphers as discussed above, especially the older pencil-and-paper hand ciphers, are no longer in serious use. However, the cryptographic concept of substitution carries on even today. From a sufficiently abstract perspective, modern bit-oriented block ciphers (e.g., DES, or AES) can be viewed as substitution ciphers on an enormously large binary alphabet. In addition, block ciphers often include smaller substitution tables called S-boxes. See also substitution–permutation network.
Substitution ciphers in popular culture
Sherlock Holmes breaks a substitution cipher in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men". There, the cipher remained undeciphered for years if not decades; not due to its difficulty, but because no one suspected it to be a code, instead considering it childish scribblings.
The Al Bhed language in Final Fantasy X is actually a substitution cipher, although it is pronounced phonetically (i.e. "you" in English is translated to "oui" in Al Bhed, but is pronounced the same way that "oui" is pronounced in French).
The Minbari's alphabet from the Babylon 5 series is a substitution cipher from English.
The language in Starfox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet spoken by native Saurians and Krystal is also a substitution cipher of the English alphabet.
The television program Futurama contained a substitution cipher in which all 26 letters were replaced by symbols and called "Alien Language". This was deciphered rather quickly by the die hard viewers by showing a "Slurm" ad with the word "Drink" in both plain English and the Alien language thus giving the key. Later, the producers created a second alien language that used a combination of replacement and mathematical Ciphers. Once the English letter of the alien language is deciphered, then the numerical value of that letter (0 for "A" through 25 for "Z" respectively) is then added (modulo 26) to the value of the previous letter showing the actual intended letter. These messages can be seen throughout every episode of the series and the subsequent movies.
At the end of every season 1 episode of the cartoon series Gravity Falls, during the credit roll, there is one of three simple substitution ciphers: A -3 Caesar cipher (hinted by "3 letters back" at the end of the opening sequence), an Atbash cipher, or a letter-to-number simple substitution cipher. The season 1 finale encodes a message with all three. In the second season, Vigenère ciphers are used in place of the various monoalphabetic ciphers, each using a key hidden within its episode.
In the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer there are three substitution ciphers; Gnommish, Centaurean and Eternean, which run along the bottom of the pages or are somewhere else within the books.
In Bitterblue, the third novel by Kristin Cashore, substitution ciphers serve as an important form of coded communication.
In the 2013 video game BioShock Infinite, there are substitution ciphers hidden throughout the game in which the player must find code books to help decipher them and gain access to a surplus of supplies.
In the anime adaptation of The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, the language of Ente Isla, called Entean, uses a substitution cipher with the ciphertext alphabet , leaving only A, E, I, O, U, L, N, and Q in their original positions.
See also
Ban (unit) with Centiban Table
Copiale cipher
Leet
Vigenère cipher
Topics in cryptography
References
External links
quipqiup An automated tool for solving simple substitution ciphers both with and without known word boundaries.
CrypTool Exhaustive free and open-source e-learning tool to perform and break substitution ciphers and many more.
Substitution Cipher Toolkit Application that can - amongst other things - decrypt texts encrypted with substitution cipher automatically
SCB Cipher Solver A monoalphabetic cipher cracker.
Monoalphabetic Cipher Implementation for Encrypting File (C Language).
Substitution cipher implementation with Caesar and Atbash ciphers (Java)
Online simple substitution implementation (Flash)
Online simple substitution implementation for MAKEPROFIT code (CGI script: Set input in URL, read output in web page)
Monoalphabetic Substitution Breaking A Monoalphabetic Encryption System Using a Known Plaintext Attack
http://cryptoclub.math.uic.edu/substitutioncipher/sub2.htm
Classical ciphers
Cryptography
History of cryptography |
2133494 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actrix%20%28computer%29 | Actrix (computer) | The Actrix computer, released in 1983 by Actrix Computer Corporation, was a Zilog Z80-based transportable personal computer running CP/M-80 V2.2. It was initially released as the Access Computer, made by Access Matrix Computer Corporation, but both the company and its product changed names after trademark disputes.
Access Computer
Access Computer was the common name for the Access Matrix, a transportable personal computer introduced in 1982 by a United States computer company, Access Matrix Corp (AM CORP on FCC documentation).
Hardware
The Access Computer had dual 5.25-inch floppy drives (either 320k-DS or 168k-SS) a detachable keyboard, a 7" built-in amber CRT monitor, and a built-in 80 CPS Epson MX80 dot matrix printer with GRAFTRAX-80 chipset. It used the CP/M operating system, and also included a Bell-103 300baud modem with both acoustic-coupled and direct connections. Additional connectors for IEEE-488 (external hard disk), composite monitor, RS2-32 serial and Centronics parallel were provided. The mainboard has a 50-pin header designed to support 8-inch disk drives (4 heads on two double-sided disks - drive letters C:/D: and E:/F:)
Software
Access Matrix came bundled with MBASIC, CBASIC, the Perfect-series office software, Personal Pearl database and Fancy Font markup/formatting system. Custom-written software included a disk format/verify/duplication utility (DISKU.COM) that worked with both the internal A:/B: drives as well as optional external 8" disks (C:/D: and E:/F:). A custom-written Telecommunications utility (TELCOMU.COM) offered dialup address book, basic terminal emulation, XMODEM/Modem7 file transfer and other features for connection to BBS and other online systems or to operate as a drone to receive files uploaded from other computers.
Market
Although not truly portable the all-in-one design did allow for quick setup and shut-down. It was rugged and although weighing 15 kg, it was reasonably easy to transport in a car or in an aircraft's coat- locker. The Access Matrix had option of a padded cloth bag with shoulder-strap or a heavier-duty leather/cloth bound protective case with carry handle and shoulder-strap.
Apparently the system was popular with journalists who could use the inbuilt "OFFLINE" type-writer mode to create and print simple ad hoc single-page documents ready for immediate faxing to HQ from their hotel lobby. Another option was to combine the word processing and telecommunications features to create a document using the word processing software and immediately upload the document directly to either an online services such as CompuServe or indeed to another 'waiting' Access Matrix at their head office.
Actrix computer
The rebadged Actrix DS was presented at the Las Vegas Comdex in November 1983. There was another model called the Actrix SS with a 170k 5.25-inch disk drive.
Specifications
Hardware:
NEC D780C-1 (clone of Zilog Z80B) CPU @ 4 MHz
64 KB RAM
Two 320 KB DS-DD floppy disk drives (Actrix-DS model)
or Two 170 KB SS-DD floppy disk drives (Actrix-SS model)
7" amber CRT display
Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer with GRAFTRAX-80 chipset
Bell 103 modem and acoustic coupler
Detachable keyboard
Options
The void to the right of the two floppy drives could either be open, for convenient storage of a handful of floppy diskettes, or blanked to conceal one of two options:
Intel 8088 co-processor board with 256 KB RAM and MS-DOS 1.25
Internal uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
Another option was a 50-pin connector at the rear of the void, for 8" disk drives
If either UPS or 8088 options were present the rear or the void was blanked off with a screw-on plate. If the 50-pin 8" disk cable option is present the rear of the void is changed to a clip-on panel securing the 50-pin cable connector.
If no options were fitted the rear of the floppy void was a blank clip-on panel.
If only the 50-pin option is present the floppy void was modified internally with a plastic jacket to prevent stored diskettes from interfering with the rear of the 50-pin header/cable assembly
Connectors
keyboard
2 X D25F RS232 serial (AUX terminal/console or printer)
1 X Centronics parallel port (printer)
1 x IEEE-488 / GP-IB (hard disk)
1 x composite video (larger/second monitor)
50-pin header on mainboard to optional external 50-pin male IDC connector for external 8" disk drives
IEC power (115 V/220 V dealer-switchable)
Disk assignments
A: first 5.25" floppy to load OS
B: 'other' 5.25" floppy
C: first side of first 8" disk
D: second side of first 8" disk
E: first side of second 8" disk
F: second side of second 8" disk
M: 256 kB RAM disk utilising 256 kB RAM from the 8088 co-processor
Software
Digital Research CP/M-80 2.2 operating system
Microsoft MS-DOS 1.25 (only with optional 8088 co-processor board)
M: Drive utility (to utilise 256KB RAM on optional 8088 co-pro board as M: RAM disk under CP/M)
Personal Pearl database system
FancyFont text markup and layout software
Perfect Series office suite (Filer (database), Calc (spreadsheet), Writer (word processor))
Digital Research CBASIC compiler
Microsoft MBASIC interpreter
Included bespoke utilities
TELCOMU – comms software with phonebook, modem dialling and X-modem file transfer capabilities, useful for connecting to online services such as CompuServe and RCP/M BBS systems. Also TELCOM and TELCOM+ variants (1.05/1.16/x.yy)
DISKU – utility for copying, duplicating, formatting and verifying 5.25" and 8" floppy disks (2.26)
CONFIGU – allowed customisation of various attributes such as monitor, cursor, printer, console redirection, RS232 and Centronics parameters. Once customised settings were saved and could be reloaded manually or used by the WAKEUP program to allow customisations to be set at boot time (1.03)
WAKEUP – used at boot to set date and time and apply configuration profiles created using CONFIGU (1.03)
AMD – Set CP/M to use the 256KB RAM of optional 8088 co-processor board as M: 'ram-drive'
INSTALL – Actrix auto-command installation utility - allowed specification of a .COM file to auto-execute at cold-boot time (1.00)
DAC-DS – Dealer Acceptance Test – a diagnostic utility for dealers to quickly tests memory/clock, floppy disk, video, printer and keyboard (1.01)
International distribution
In Australia, one official distributor of the Actrix Computer range was Richard Carpenter, based in Little Mountain, Queensland. It is believed that Carpenter imported two or three Access Computers as sales tools and demonstrators, but shipped less than a dozen Actrix Computers. In 1986, two demonstrator Actrix machines were repossessed by the financier, NatWest Australia Bank.
Failure
Expensive TV advertising and constant lawsuits concerning the product and company-naming rights were drains on capital that speeded the decline and ultimate stop of sales of Actrix machines. Existing orders were filled by one remaining technician, who built the last remaining machines from spare parts.
References
External links
Link to 'Official' Actrix Computer Systems page
Some pictures and notes by the designer.
History IT History page on Actrix Computer Corp
Old-computers.net — Access Computer incl notes from utility software programmer, Bob Montgomery
Old-computers.net — Actrix DS
Portable computers
Personal computers
Products introduced in 1983 |
3674 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian%20Armed%20Forces | Bulgarian Armed Forces | The Bulgarian Army () is the military of Bulgaria. The commander-in-chief is the president of Bulgaria, who since January 2017 is Rumen Radev. The Ministry of Defense is in charge of political leadership while overall military command remains in the hands of the Defence Staff, headed by the Chief of the Defense (formerly called the Chief of the General Staff). There are three main branches of the Bulgarian military, named literally the Land Forces, the Air Forces and the Naval Forces (the term "Bulgarian Army" refers to them encompassed all together).
Throughout history, the Army has played a major role in defending the country's sovereignty. Only several years after its inception in 1878, Bulgaria became a regional military power and was involved in several major wars – Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885), First Balkan War (1912–13), Second Balkan War (1913), First World War (1915–1918) and Second World War (1941–1945), during which the Army gained significant combat experience. During the Cold War the People's Republic of Bulgaria maintained one of the largest militaries in the Warsaw Pact, numbering an estimated 152,000 troops in 1988. Since the Fall of Communism, the political leadership has decided to pursue a pro-NATO policy, thus reducing military personnel and weaponry. Bulgaria joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on 29 March 2004 and currently maintains a total 776 deployed troops in three countries.
The patron saint of the Bulgarian Army is St. George. The Armed Forces Day or St. George's Day (6 May) is an official holiday in Bulgaria.
History of the Bulgarian Army
Medieval Period
The modern Bulgarian military dates back to 1878. On 22 July 1878 (10 July O.S.) a total of 12 battalions of opalchentsi who participated in the Liberation war, formed the Bulgarian armed forces. According to the Tarnovo Constitution, all men between 21 and 40 years of age were eligible for military service. In 1883 the military was reorganised in four infantry brigades (in Sofia, Pleven, Ruse and Shumen) and one cavalry brigade.
Serbo-Bulgarian war
The Serbo-Bulgarian War was the first armed conflict after Bulgaria's liberation. It was a result of the unification with Eastern Rumelia, which happened on 6 September 1885. The unification was not completely recognised, however, and one of the countries that refused to recognise the act was the Kingdom of Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had been expanding its influence in the Balkans and was particularly opposed. Serbia also feared this would diminish its dominance in the region. In addition, Serbian ruler Milan Obrenović IV was annoyed that Serbian opposition leaders like Nikola Pašić, who had escaped persecution after the Timok Rebellion, had found asylum in Bulgaria. Lured by Austria-Hungary's promises of territorial gains from Bulgaria (in return for concessions in the western Balkans), Milan IV declared war on Bulgaria on 14 November 1885.
Military strategy relied largely on surprise, as Bulgaria had moved most of its troops near the border with the Ottoman Empire, in the southeast. As it happened, the Ottomans did not intervene and the Serbian army's advance was stopped after the Battle of Slivnitsa. The main body of the Bulgarian army travelled from the Ottoman border in the southeast to the Serbian border in the northwest to defend the capital, Sofia. After the defensive battles at Slivnitsa and Vidin, Bulgaria began an offensive that took the city of Pirot. At this point the Austro-Hungarian Empire stepped in, threatening to join the war on Serbia's side if Bulgarian troops did not retreat. Fighting lasted for only 14 days, from 14–28 November. A peace treaty was signed in Bucharest on 19 February 1886. No territorial changes were made to either country, but Bulgarian unification was recognised by the Great Powers.
First Balkan War
Instability in the Balkan region in the early 1900s quickly became a precondition for a new war. Serbia's aspirations towards Bosnia and Herzegovina were thwarted by the Austrian annexation of the province in October 1908, so the Serbs focused their attention onto their historic cradle, Kosovo, and to the south for expansion. Greek officers, revolting in August 1909, had secured the appointment of a progressive government under Eleftherios Venizelos, which they hoped would resolve the Cretan issue in Greece's favor and reverse their defeat of 1897 by the Ottomans. Bulgaria, which had secured Ottoman recognition of its independence in April 1909 and enjoyed the friendship of Russia, also looked to districts of Ottoman Thrace and Macedonia for expansion.
In March 1910 an Albanian insurrection broke out in Kosovo. In August Montenegro followed Bulgaria's precedent by becoming a kingdom. In 1911 Italy launched an invasion of Tripolitania, which was quickly followed by the occupation of the Dodecanese Islands. The Italians' decisive military victories over the Ottoman Empire greatly influenced the Balkan states to prepare for war against Turkey. Thus, in the spring of 1912 consultations among the various Christian Balkan nations resulted in a network of military alliances that became known as the Balkan League. The Great Powers, most notably France and Austria-Hungary, reacted to this diplomatic sensation by trying to dissuade the League from going to war, but failed.
In late September both the League and the Ottoman Empire mobilised their armies. Montenegro was the first to declare war, on 25 September (O.S.)/ 8 October. The other three states, after issuing an impossible ultimatum to the Porte on 13 October, declared war on Turkey on 17 October. The Balkan League relied on 700,000 troops, 370,000 of whom were Bulgarians. Bulgaria, often dubbed "the Prussia of the Balkans", was militarily the most powerful of the four states, with a large, well-trained and well-equipped army. The peacetime army of 60,000 troops was expanded during the war to 370,000, with almost 600,000 men mobilized in total out of a population of 4,300,000. The Bulgarian field army consisted of nine infantry divisions, one cavalry division and 1,116 artillery units. Commander-in-Chief was Tsar Ferdinand, while the actual command was in the hands of his deputy, Gen. Mikhail Savov. The Bulgarians also possessed a small navy of six torpedo boats, which were restricted to operations along the country's Black Sea coast.
Bulgaria's war aims were focused on Thrace and Macedonia. For the latter, Bulgaria had a secret agreement with Serbia to divide it between them, signed on 13 March 1912 during the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Balkan League. However, it was not a secret that Bulgaria's target was the fulfillment of the never-materialized Treaty of San Stefano, signed after the Russo-Turkish War, 1877–78. They deployed their main force in Thrace, forming three armies. The First Army, under Gen. Vasil Kutinchev with three infantry divisions, was deployed to the south of Yambol, with direction of operations along the Tundzha River. The Second Army, under Gen. Nikola Ivanov with two infantry divisions and one infantry brigade, was deployed west of the First and was assigned to capture the strong fortress of Adrianople (now Edirne). According to the plans, the Third Army, under Gen. Radko Dimitriev, was deployed east of and behind the First and was covered by the cavalry division hiding it from the Turkish view. The Third Army had three infantry divisions and was assigned to cross the Stranja mountain and to take the fortress of Lozengrad (Kirk Kilisse). The 2nd and 7th divisions were assigned independent roles, operating in western Thrace and eastern Macedonia, respectively.
The first great battles were at the Adrianople–Kirk Kilisse defensive line, where the Bulgarian 1st and 3rd Armies (together 110,000 men) defeated the Ottoman East Army (130,000 men) near Gechkenli, Seliolu and Petra. The fortress of Adrianople was besieged and Kirk Kilisse was taken without resistance under the pressure of the Bulgarian Third Army. The initial Bulgarian attack by First and Third Army defeated the Turkish forces, numbering some 130,000, and reached the Sea of Marmara. However, the Turks, with the aid of fresh reinforcements from the Asian provinces, established their third and strongest defensive position at the Chataldja Line, across the peninsula where Constantinople is located. New Turkish forces landed at Bulair and Şarköy, but after heavy fighting they were crushed by the newly formed 4th Bulgarian Army under the command of Gen Stiliyan Kovachev. The offensive at Chataldja failed, too. On 11 March the final Bulgarian assault on Adrianople began. Under the command of Gen. Georgi Vazov the Bulgarians, reinforced with two Serb divisions, conquered the "untakeable" city. On 17/30 May a peace treaty was signed between Turkey and the Balkan Alliance. The First Balkan War, which lasted from October 1912-May 1913, strengthened Bulgaria's position as a regional military power, significantly reduced Ottoman influence over the Balkans and resulted in the formation of an independent Albanian state.
Second Balkan War
The peace settlement of the First Balkan War proved unsatisfactory for both Serbia and Bulgaria. Serbia refused to cede a part of the territories in Macedonia, which it occupied and promised to give to Bulgaria according to a secret agreement. Serbia, on its side, was not satisfied with the independence of Albania and sought a secret alliance with Greece. Armed skirmishes between Serbian and Bulgarian troops occurred.
On 16 June 1913, just a few months after the end of the first war, the Bulgarian government ordered an attack on Serbian and Greek positions in Macedonia, without declaring war. Almost all of Bulgaria's 500,000-man standing army was positioned against these two countries, on two fronts—western and southern—while the borders with Romania and the Ottoman Empire were left almost unguarded. Montenegro sent a 12,000-strong force to assist the Serbs. Exhausted from the previous war, which took the highest toll on Bulgaria, the Bulgarian army soon turned to the defensive. Romania attacked from the north and northeast and the Ottoman Empire also intervened in Thrace. Allied numerical superiority was almost 2:1. After a month and two days of fighting, the war ended as a moral disaster for Bulgaria, and at the same time its economy was ruined and its military demoralised.
First World War
The Kingdom of Bulgaria participated in World War I on the side of the Central Powers between 15 October 1915, when the country declared war on Serbia, and 29 September 1918, when the Armistice of Thessalonica was signed. In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Bulgarian opinion turned against Russia and the western powers, whom the Bulgarians felt had done nothing to help them. The government of Vasil Radoslavov aligned the country with Germany and Austria-Hungary, even though this meant also becoming an ally of the Ottomans, Bulgaria's traditional enemy. However, Bulgaria now had no claims against the Ottomans, whereas Serbia, Greece and Romania (allies of Britain and France) were all in possession of lands perceived in Bulgaria as its own.
In 1915 Germany promised to restore the boundaries according to the Treaty of San Stefano and Bulgaria, which had the largest army in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia in October of that year. In the First World War Bulgaria decisively asserted its military capabilities. The second Battle of Doiran, with Gen. Vladimir Vazov as commander, inflicted a heavy blow on the numerically superior British army, which suffered 12,000 casualties against 2,000 from the opposite side. One year later, during the third battle of Doiran, the United Kingdom, supported by Greece, once again suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 3,155 men against just about 500 on the Bulgarian side. The reputation of the French army also suffered badly. The Battle of the Red Wall was marked by the total defeat of the French forces, with 5,700 out of 6,000 men killed. The 261 Frenchmen who survived were captured by Bulgarian soldiers.
Despite the outstanding victories, Germany was near defeat, which meant that Bulgaria would be left without its most powerful ally. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 had a great effect in Bulgaria, spreading antiwar and anti-monarchist sentiment among the troops and in the cities. In June Radoslavov's government resigned. In 1919 Bulgaria officially left the war with the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
The army between the World Wars
The Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine proved to be a severe blow to Bulgaria's military. According to the treaty, the country had no right to organize a conscription-based military. The professional army was to be no more than 20,000 men, including internal forces and border guards. Equipping the army with tanks, submarines, bombers and heavy artillery was strictly prohibited, although Bulgaria managed to get around some of these prohibitions. Nevertheless, on the eve of World War II the Bulgarian army was still well-trained and well-equipped. In fact, the Bulgarian Army had been expanded in 1935.
World War II
The government of the Kingdom of Bulgaria under Prime Minister Bogdan Filov declared a position of neutrality upon the outbreak of World War II. Bulgaria was determined to observe it until the end of the war but it hoped for bloodless territorial gains, especially in the lands with a significant Bulgarian population occupied by neighbouring countries after the Second Balkan War and World War I. However, it was clear that the central geopolitical position of Bulgaria in the Balkans would inevitably lead to strong external pressure by both World War II factions. Turkey had a non-aggression pact with Bulgaria. On 7 September 1940 Bulgaria succeeded in negotiating a recovery of Southern Dobruja with the Treaty of Craiova (see Second Vienna Award). Southern Dobruja had been part of Romania since 1913. This recovery of territory reinforced hopes for resolving other territorial problems without direct involvement in the war. The country joined the Axis Powers in 1941, when German troops preparing to invade Yugoslavia and Greece reached the Bulgarian borders and demanded permission to pass through its territory.
On 1 March 1941, Bulgaria signed the Tripartite Pact and Tsar Boris III officially joined the Axis bloc. After a short period of inaction, the army launched an operation against Yugoslavia and Greece. The goal of reaching the shores of the Aegean Sea and completely occupying the region of Macedonia was successful. Even though Bulgaria did not send any troops to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union, its navy was involved in a number of skirmishes with the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which attacked Bulgarian shipping. Besides this, Bulgarian armed forces garrisoned in the Balkans battled various resistance groups. The Bulgarian government declared a token war on the United Kingdom and the United States near the end of 1941, an act that resulted in the bombing of Sofia and other Bulgarian cities by Allied aircraft.
Some communist activists managed to begin a guerrilla movement, headed by the underground Bulgarian Communist Party. A resistance movement called Otechestven front (Fatherland front, Bulgarian: Отечествен фронт) was set up in August 1942 by the Communist Party, the Zveno movement and a number of other parties to oppose the elected government, after a number of Allied victories indicated that the Axis might lose the War. In 1943 Tsar Boris III died suddenly. In the summer of 1944, after having crushed the Nazi defense around Iaşi and Chişinău, the Soviet Army was approaching the Balkans and Bulgaria. On 23 August 1944 Romania quit the Axis Powers, declared war on Germany and allowed Soviet forces to cross its territory to reach Bulgaria. On 26 August 1944 the Fatherland Front made the decision to incite an armed rebellion against the government, which led to the appointment of a new government on 2 September. Support for the government was withheld by the Fatherland Front, since it was composed of pro-Nazi elements, in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. On 5 September 1944 the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Bulgaria. On 8 September 1944 the Bulgarian army joined the Soviet Union in its war against Germany.
Cold War era
As the Red Army invaded Bulgaria in 1944 and installed a communist government, the armed forces were rapidly forced to reorganise following the Soviet model, and were renamed the Bulgarian People's Army (Bălgarska Narodna Armiya, BNA). Moscow quickly supplied Bulgaria with T-34-85 tanks, SU-100 guns, Il-2 attack planes and other new combat machinery. As the country was a Soviet satellite, it was a part of the Eastern Bloc and entered the Warsaw Pact as one of its founders. By this time the army had expanded to over 200,000 men with hundreds of thousands of more reserve troops. Military service was obligatory. A special defensive line, known as the Krali Marko defensive line, was constructed along the entire border with Turkey. It was heavily fortified with concrete walls and turrets of T-34, Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks.
The army was involved in a number of border skirmishes from 1948 to 1952, repulsing several Greek attacks, and took part in the suppression of the Prague Spring events. In the meantime, during the rule of Todor Zhivkov, a significant military-industrial complex was established, capable of producing armored vehicles, self-propelled artillery, small arms and ammunition, as well as aircraft engines and spare parts. Bulgaria provided weapons and military expertise to Algeria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Nicaragua, Egypt and Syria. Some military and medical aid was also supplied to North Korea and North Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1970s the Air Force was at the apogee of its power, possessing at least 500 modern combat aircraft in its inventory. Training in the Bulgarian People's Army was exhaustive even by Soviet standards; however, it was never seen as a major force within the Warsaw Pact. In 1989, when the Cold War was coming to its end, the army (the combined number of ground, air and naval forces) numbered about 120,000 men, most of them conscripts. There were, however, a number of services which, while falling outside of Ministry of Defense jurisdiction in peacetime, were considered part of the armed forces. These were foremost the Labour Troops (construction forces), the People's Militia (the police forces of the country, which fell under Ministry of the Interior jurisdiction, but the ministry was itself a militarized structure) and, more importantly, its Interior Troops, the Border Troops—which in different periods fell under either Ministry of Defense or Ministry of the Interior control—Civil Defense Service, the Signals Troops (government communications) and the Transport Troops (mostly railway infrastructure maintenance), which were two separate services under the Postal and Communications Committee (a ministry), etc. The combined strength of the Bulgarian People's Army and all those services reached well over 325,000 troops.
Modern era
With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria could no longer support a vast military. A rapid reduction in personnel and active equipment was to be carried out in parallel with a general re-alignment of strategic interests. In 1990, Bulgaria had a total of more than 2,400 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, 2,500 large caliber artillery systems, 300 fighter and bomber aircraft, 100 trainer aircraft, more than 40 combat and 40 transport helicopters, 4 submarines, 6 fast missile craft, 2 frigates, 5 corvettes, 6 torpedo boats, 9 patrol craft, 30 minesweepers and 21 transport vessels. Due to the economic crisis that affected most former Eastern bloc countries, a steady reform in the military could not be carried out; much of the equipment fell into disrepair and some of it was smuggled and sold to the international black market. Inadequate payments, fuel and spare part shortages and the disbandment of many capable units led to an overall drop in combat readiness, morale and discipline.
After partially recovering from the 1990s crisis, the Bulgarian military became a part of the collective defensive system of NATO. As a member, Bulgaria sent a total of 485 soldiers to Iraq (2003–2008) as a participant in the Iraq War, and currently maintains a 608-strong force in Afghanistan as part of ISAF. Bulgaria had a significant missile arsenal, including 67 SCUD-B, 50 FROG-7 and 24 SS-23 ballistic missiles. In 2002, Bulgaria disbanded the Rocket Forces despite nationwide protests, and has disbanded its submarine component. Bulgaria is to have 27,000 standing troops by 2014, consisting of 14,310 troops in the land forces, 6,750 in the air force, 3,510 in the navy and 2,420 in the joint command. In 2018, the Bulgarian Armed Forces numbers around 33,150 soldiers, 73 aircraft, 2234 vehicles including 531 tanks, and 29 naval assets.
Organization
Defence Staff
The Bulgarian Armed Forces are headquartered in Sofia, where most of the Defence staff is based. Until recently the supreme military institution was the General Staff and the most senior military officer was known as the Chief of the General Staff. After the latest military reform has been implemented the General Staff became a department within the Ministry of Defence and for that matter its name had to be changed to match the new situation. For that reason the former GS became the Defence Staff and the supreme military commander became the Chief of Defence. Currently headed by Chief of Defence admiral Emil Eftimov, the Defence Staff is responsible for operational command of the Bulgarian Army and its three major branches. Deputies: Vice Admiral Petar Petrov, General Atanas Zaprianov, General Dimitar Zekhtinov.
General rank positions in the Bulgarian Army:
Ministry of Defence
Defense Staff
Chief of Defence - General/ Admiral
Deputy Chief of Defence - Lieutenant-General/ Vice-Admiral
Deputy Chief of Defence - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Director, "Operations and Readiness" Directorate - Brigade General/ Commodore
Director, "Strategical Planning" Directorate - Brigade General/ Commodore
Director, "Communication and Information Systems" Directorate - Brigade General/ Commodore
Director, "Logistics" Directorate - Brigade General/ Commodore
Joint Forces Command
Commander, Joint Forces Command – Lieutenant-General/ Vice-Admiral
Deputy Commander, Joint Forces Command – Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Chief of Staff, Joint Forces Command – Brigade General/ Commodore
Land Forces
Commander, Land Forces - Major-General
Deputy Commander, Land Forces - Brigade General
Chief of Staff, Land Forces – Brigade General
Commander, 2nd Mechanised Brigade – Brigade General
Commander, 61st Mechanised Brigade – Brigade General
Air Forces
Commander, Air Forces - Major-General
Deputy Commander, Air Forces - Brigade General
Commander, 3rd Air Base – Brigade General
Commander, 24th Air Base – Brigade General
Navy
Commander, Naval Forces - Rear-Admiral
Deputy Commander, Naval Forces - Commodore
Commander Naval Base - Commodore
Military Police Service, directly subordinated to the Minister of Defense
Director, Military Police Service - Brigade General/ Commodore
Military Intelligence Service, directly subordinated to the Minister of Defense
Director, Military Intelligence Service - civil servant, equal in rank to a Brigade General/ Commodore
Military education institutions, directly subordinated to the Minister of Defense
Chief of the "Georgy Stoykov Rakovski" Military Academy - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Chief of the Military Medical Academy and the Armed Forces Medical Service - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Chief of the "Vasil Levski" National Military University - Brigade General
Other positions at the Ministry of Defense
Military Advisor on Military Security Matters to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, the President of the Republic of Bulgaria - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Military Representative of the Chief of Defense at the NATO Military Committee and at the EU Military Committee - Lieutenant-General/ Vice-Admiral
Director of the Cooperation and Regional Security Directorate at the NATO Military Committee - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Deputy Commander of the NATO Rapid Deployment Corps - Greece (Thessaloniki) - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
National Military Representative at the NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
In addition to the aforementioned positions, there are general rank positions in the National Intelligence Service and the National Close Protection Service (the bodyguard service to high-ranking officials and visiting dignitaries). These two services are considered part of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Bulgaria, but are directly subordinated to the President of Bulgaria and fall out of the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense.
National Intelligence Service
Director, National Intelligence Service - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Deputy Director, National Intelligence Service - Brigade General/ Commodore
National Close Protection Service
Director, National Close Protection Service - Major-General/ Rear-Admiral
Deputy Director, National Close Protection Service - Brigade General/ Commodore
With the establishment of the State Agency for National Security - SANS (Bulgarian: Darzhavna Agentsiya za Natsionalna Sigurnost - DANS, Държавна агенция за национална сигурност - ДАНС) part of the military security personnel came under its authority. Before that the security aspects of the armed forces were handled by a unified organisation under the General Staff - the "Military Service of Security and Military Police". After the formation of SANS the service was split, with the military counter-intelligence personnel entering the newly formed structure and the military police personnel staying under Ministry of Defense subordination. While technically civilian servants not part of the armed forces, the military counter-intelligence personnel of the State Agency of National Security retain their military ranks.
Ministry of Defence
Ministry of Defence
The organisation of the Ministry of Defence includes:
General Administration
Specialised Administration
Inspectorate of the Ministry of Defence
Protocol Unit of the Ministry of Defence
Financial Control and Material Accountability Unit
Internal Audit Directorate of the Ministry of Defence
Information Security Directorate of the Ministry of Defence
Defence Staff
Structures directly subordinated to the Ministry of Defence include:
Military Information Service, Sofia (commanded by a Major-General/ Rear-Admiral)
Director
Directorate
Information Division
Analysis Division
Resources Supply Division
Military Police Service, Sofia (commanded by a Brigade General/ Commodore)
Military Police Command
Military Police Operational Company (MRAV Sand Cat)
Regional Military Police Service Sofia
Regional Military Police Service Plovdiv
Regional Military Police Service Pleven
Regional Military Police Service Varna
Regional Military Police Service Sliven
Military Police Service Logistics and Training Centre, Sofia
Military Geographical Service
MGS Headquarters
Geographical Information Support Centre
Geodesic Observatory (GPS Observatory)
Military Geographical Centre
Information Security Unit
Financial Comptroller
Stationary Communications and Information System
Communications and Information Centre
Government Communications Support Centre,
Operational Centres
Engineering and CIS recovery Centre
Stationary Communications Network
National Guards Unit, Sofia (commanded by a Colonel)
Headquarters
1st Guards Battalion
2nd Mixed Guards Battalion
National Guards Unit Representative Military Band
Armed Forces Representative Dance Company
Guardsmen Training Centre
Logistics Support Company
Military Medical Academy, Sofia (commanded by a Major-General/ Rear-Admiral)
Chief of the MMA, Chief of the MATH - Sofia and General Surgeon of the Bulgarian Armed Forces
Deputy Chief for Diagnostics and Medical Treatment Activities
Deputy Chief for Education and Scientific Activities
Deputy Chief for Medical Support of Military Units and Overseas Military Missions
Multiprofile Active Treatment Hospital - Sofia
Multiprofile Active Treatment Hospital (informally known as the Naval Hospital)- Varna
Multiprofile Active Treatment Hospital - Plovdiv
Multiprofile Active Treatment Hospital - Sliven
Multiprofile Active Treatment Hospital - Pleven
Follow-up Long-term Treatment and Rehabilitation Hospital "Saint George the Victorious" - Pomorie
Follow-up Long-term Treatment and Rehabilitation Hospital "Caleroya" - Hisar
Follow-up Long-term Treatment and Rehabilitation Hospital - Bankya
Military Medical Quick Reaction Force (expeditionary disaster and crisis relief unit)
Psychological Health and Prevention Centre
Scientific and Application Centre for Military Medical Expertise and Aviation and Seaborne Medicine
Scientific and Application Centre for Military Epidemiology and Hygiene
Military Academy "Georgi Stoykov Rakovski", Sofia (commanded by a Major-General/ Rear-Admiral)
Command
Commandant of the Military Academy
Deputy Chief for Study and Scientific Activities
Deputy Chief for Administrative Activities and Logistics
Administrative Units
Personnel and Administrative Support Department
Logistics Department
Study and Scientific Activities Department
Financial Department
Library and Publishing Activities Sector
Public Relations, International Activities and Protocol Sector
Training Units
National Security and Defence College
Command Staff College
Peacekeeping Operations and Computer Simulations Sector
Foreign Languages Studies Department
Perspective Defence Research Institute
National Military University "Vasil Levski", Veliko Tarnovo (commanded by a Brigade General)
Combined Arms Education Department, Veliko Tarnovo
Artillery and Communication Systems Education Department, Shumen
NCO School, Veliko Tarnovo
Foreign Languages and Computer Systems Education Department, Shumen
Higher Air Force School "Georgi Benkovski", Dolna Mitropoliya (commanded by a Brigade General, temporarily a faculty of the NMU, reinstated on January 20, 2020)
Higher Naval School "Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov", Varna (commanded by a Commodore)
Chief of the Higher Naval Officer School
Deputy Chief for Administration and Logistics
Deputy Chief for Studies and Schience Activities
Navigation Department
Engineering Department
Post-Graduate Qualification Department
Professional Petty Officers College
Defence Institute, Sofia
The Defence Institute is the research and development administration of the MoD. It includes the:
Administration and Financial Management Department
Military Standardisation, Quality and Certification Department
Armament, Equipment and Materials Development Department
Armament, Equipment and Materials Testing and Control Department
C4I Systems Development Department
Commandment Service of the Ministry of Defence, Sofia
The Commandment Service is an institution in charge of real estate management, transportation, library services, documentation publishing and communications support for the central administration of the MoD, transportation support to the immediate MoD personnel, classified information, cryptographic and perimeter security for the MoD administration buildings.
Director
Deputy Director
Chief Legal Advisor
Financial Comptroler
Administrative Department
Financial Department
Business Department
Transportation Support Department
Support Department
CIS Support Department
Technical Centre for Armed Forces Information Security
Executive Agency for the Military Clubs and Recreational Activities, Sofia
National Museum of Military History, Sofia
Defence Staff
The Defence Staff, formerly called the General Staff of the Bulgarian Army, is the supreme professional institution for military expertise and command and supervision of the armed forces under the Ministry of Defence umbrella. It includes:
Operations and Preparedness Directorate
Logistics Directorate
Strategical Planning Directorate
Communication and Information Systems Directorate
Office of the Cabinet of the Chief of Defence
Office for Joint Military Installations
Joint Forces Command
Land Forces Command
Air Forces Command
Naval Forces Command
Joint Forces Command
In 2010 the Ministry of Defence completed a thorough study of the defence policy and issued a White Book, or a White Paper on Defence, calling for a major overhaul of the structure of Defence Forces. According to the document the military of the Republic of Bulgaria should include two mechanized brigades, four regiments (Logistics, Artillery, Engineering, SpecOps), four battalions (Reconnaissance, Mechanized, NBC, psychological operations) in the Land Forces; two air bases, SAM air defense base and Air force training base in the Air Force; and one naval base consisting of two homeports in the Navy. There are seven brigade level formations, including the two mechanised brigades and the special forces brigade of the army, the two air bases of the air force, the naval base and the logistical brigade of the JOC. Currently deployed units are as follows:
Joint Forces Command
Military Command Centre
Centre for Radiological, Chemical, Biological and Ecological Environment Monitoring and Control
Support Centre of the JFC
Mobile Communication and Information System
Logistics Brigade
Brigade Headquarters
1st Transport Battalion, Sofia
2nd Transport Battalion, Burgas
Central Supply Base, Negushevo
repair and maintenance bases
depots, storage facilities and technical inspection units
Movement Control Headquarters
Centre for Documentation Support of the JFC
Operational Archive of the Bulgarian Army
Joint Forces Training Range "Novo Selo"
National Military Study Complex "Charalitsa"
The three armed services of the Bulgarian Army - the Land, Air and Naval Forces are subordinated to the recently formed Joint Forces Command:
Land Forces Command
Naval Forces Command
Air Forces Command
The previous 62nd Signals Brigade at Gorna Malina was responsible for maintaining the higher military communication lines. Next to the functions of the Signals Regiment in the Sofia suburb of Suhodol, the brigade had at least three dispersed signals regiments for government communications, such as the 75th Signals Regiment (Lovech), the 65th Signals Regiment (Nova Zagora) and at least one additional unknown Signals Regiment in the Rila-Pirin mountain massif. The modern successor of the 62nd Signals Brigade are the Stationary Communication and Information System (Стационарна Комуникационна Информационна Система (СКИС)) of the Defence Staff (which fulfills also the tasks of SIGINT and Cyber Defence next to its strategic communications mission) and the Mobile Communication and Information System (Мобилна Комуникационна Информационна Система (МКИС)) of the Joint Forces Command.
Joint Special Operations Command
The 68th Special Forces Brigade left the Land Forces on 1 February 2017, de facto becoming the country's fourth combat service. Unlike Bulgaria's Land, Air and Naval Forces however it fell outside of the Joint Forces Command structure, having been assigned directly under the authority of the Chief of Defence. The brigade was transformed into the JSOC, taking effect on November 1, 2019 and its commander, Brigade General Yavor Mateev was promoted to a major general as the chief of the new command.
Personnel and education
Bulgaria's total military personnel as of 2014 is 37,100, of which 30,400 (80.1%) are active military personnel and 8,100 (11.9%) are civilian personnel. The Land Forces are the largest branch, with at least 18,000 men serving there. In terms of percentage, 53% of all Army personnel are in the Land Forces, 25% are in the Air Force, 13% are in the Navy and 9% are in the Joint Forces Command. Annual spending per soldier amounts to 30,000 leva (~ 15,000 euro) and is scheduled to increase to 43,600 leva by 2014.
Unlike many former Soviet bloc militaries, discipline and morale problems are not common. During the Communist era, the army members enjoyed extensive social privileges. After the fall of Communism and Bulgaria's transition to a market economy, wages fell severely. For almost a decade social benefits were virtually non-existent, and some of them have been restored but recently. Nikolai Tsonev, defence minister under the 2005–2009 cabinet, undertook steps to provide the members of the military and their families with certain privileges in terms of healthcare and education, and to improve living conditions.
Military education in Bulgaria is provided in military universities and academies. Due to cuts in spending and manpower some universities have been disbanded and their campuses were included as faculties of other, larger educational entities. The largest institutions of military education in Bulgaria are:
Vasil Levski National Military University
Rakovski Defence and Staff College
Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy
Military Medical Academy – a mixed military academy/hospital institution
Training
The Land Forces practice extensive year-round military training in various conditions. Cooperative drills with the United States are very common, the last series of them conducted in 2008. Bulgaria's most recent full-scale exercise simulating a foreign invasion was carried out in 2009. It was conducted at the Koren range, and included some 1,700 personnel with tanks, ATGMs, attack aircraft, AA guns and armored vehicles. The combat skills of individual soldiers are on a very high level, on par with troops of the U.S. Army.
Until recent years the Air Force suffered somewhat from fuel shortages; a problem which was overcome in 2008. Fighter pilots have year-round flights, but gunship pilots do not fly often due to the yet unfulfilled modernization of the Mi-24 gunships. Due to financial difficulties fighter pilots have 60 hours of flying time per year, only a third of the national norm of 180 hours.
The Navy also has some fuel shortage problems, but military training is still effective. The most recent overseas operation of the Navy was along the coast of Libya as part of Operation Unified Protector.
Budget
After the collapse of the Warsaw pact, Bulgaria lost the ability to acquire cheap fuel and spares for its military. A large portion of its nearly 2,000 T-55 tanks fell into disrepair, and eventually almost all of them were scrapped or sold to other countries. In the early 1990s the budget was so small, that regulars only received token-value payments. Many educated and well-trained officers lost the opportunity to educate younger soldiers, as the necessary equipment and basis lacked adequate funding. Military spending increased gradually, especially in the last 10 years. As of 2005, the budget was no more than $400 mln., while military spending for 2009 amounted to more than $1.3 bln. – almost a triple increase for 4 years. Despite this growth, the military still does not receive sufficient funds for modernisation. An example of bad spending plans is the large-scale purchasing of transport aircraft, while the Air Force has a severe need of new fighters (the MiG-29s, even though modernised, are nearing their operational limits). The planned procurement of 2–4 Gowind class corvettes has been cancelled. As of 2009, military spending was about 1.98% of GDP. In 2010 the budget is to be only 1.3% due to the international financial crisis.
Land Forces
The Land Forces are functionally divided into Deployable and Reserve Forces. Their main functions include deterrence, defence, peace support and crisis management, humanitarian and rescue missions, as well as social functions within Bulgarian society. Active troops in the land forces number about 18,000 men, and reserve troops number about 13,000.
The equipment of the land forces is impressive in terms of numbers, but most of it is nonoperational and scheduled to be scrapped or refurbished and exported to other nations. Bulgaria has a military stockpile of about 5,000,000 small arms, models ranging from World War II-era MP 40 machine pistols to modern Steyr AUG, AK-74, HK MP5, HK416 and AR-M12F assault rifles.
National guard unit
The National Guard of Bulgaria, founded in 1879, is the successor to the personal guards of Knyaz Alexander I. On 12 July of that year, the guards escorted the Bulgarian knyaz for the first time; today the official holiday of the National Guard is celebrated on 12 July. Throughout the years the structure of the guards has evolved, going from convoy to squadron, to regiment and, subsequent to 1942, to division. Today it includes military units for army salute and wind orchestra duties.
In 2001, the National Guard unit was designated an official military unit of the Bulgarian army and one of the symbols of state authority, along with the flag, the coat of arms and the national anthem. It is a formation, directly subordinate to the Minister of Defence and while legally part of the armed forces, it is totally independent from the Defence Staff.
Statistics and equipment
Note: This table shows combined active and reserve force.Most are listed here.
In 2019 what remained from the scrapping of the previous new equipment some but not all of the T-72 Main battle tanks were sent for mechanical service for the first time in years.
Most of the equipment that should be battle ready is in dire condition, old, rusty or non-functional, the rest about 50,000 tons of what was sold as scrap" can be found in some of the scrap depots near the railroad in Sofia including battle tanks, artillery, and other battle soviet era equipment.
Navy
The Navy has traditionally been the smallest component of the Bulgarian military. Established almost simultaneously with the Ground forces in 1879, initially it consisted of a small fleet of boats on the Danube river. Bulgaria has a coastline of about 354 kilometres – thus, naval warfare is not considered a priority.
After the downturn in 1990, the Navy was largely overlooked and received almost no funding. No projects for modernisation were carried out until 2005, when a Wielingen class frigate (F912 Wandelaar) was acquired from Belgium. By 2009, Bulgaria acquired two more frigates of the same class. The first of them was renamed 41 Drazki and took part in several operations and exercises, most notably the UNIFIL Maritime Patrol along the coast of Lebanon in 2006, and Operation Active Endeavour. It also participated in the enforcement of the naval blockade against Muammar Gaddafi's regime off the coast of Libya from 2011 until 2012.
The equipment is typical for a small navy, consisting mostly of light multi-purpose vessels – four frigates, three corvettes, five minesweepers, three fast missile craft and two landing ships. Other equipment includes a coastal defence missile battalion armed with locally modified P-15 Termit missiles, a coastal artillery battery, a naval helicopter airbase and a marine special forces unit.
The Bulgarian Navy is centered in two main bases – in Varna and in Burgas.
Air Force
In the past decade Bulgaria has been trying actively to restructure its army as a whole and a lot of attention has been placed on keeping the aging Russian aircraft operational. Currently the attack and defence branches of the Bulgarian air force are mainly MiG-29s and Su-25s. About 15 MiG-29 fighters have been modernised in order to meet NATO standards. The first aircraft arrived on 29 November 2007 and final delivery was due in 03/09. In 2006 the Bulgarian government signed a contract with Alenia Aeronautica for the delivery of five C-27J Spartan transport aircraft in order to replace the Soviet made An-24 and An-26, although the contract was later changed to only three aircraft. Modern EU-made transport helicopters were purchased in 2005 and a total of 12 Eurocopter Cougar have been delivered (eight transport and four CSAR).Three Eurocopter AS565 Panther for the Bulgarian Navy in 2016.
Branches of the Air Force include: fighter aviation, assault aviation, intelligence aviation and transportation aviation, aid defence troops, radio-technical troops, communications troops, radio-technical support troops, logistics and medical troops.
The Bulgarian Ministry of Defense has announced plans to withdraw and replace the MiG-29 fighters with new F-16V Fighting Falcon by 2025–2026.
Aircraft inventory
With the exception of the Navy's small helicopter fleet, the Air Forces are responsible for all military aircraft in Bulgaria. The Air Forces' inventory numbers <50 aircraft, including combat jets and helicopters. Aircraft of western origin have only begun to enter the fleet, numbering of the total in service.Most is unusable, old and inactive
Bulgarian-American cooperation
The Bulgarian-American Joint Military Facilities were established by a Defence Cooperation Agreement signed by the United States and Bulgaria in April 2006. Under the agreement, U.S. forces can conduct training at several bases in the country, which remain under Bulgarian command and under the Bulgarian flag. Under the agreement, no more than 2,500 U.S. military personnel can be located at the joint military facilities.
Foreign Policy magazine lists Bezmer Air Base as one of the six most important overseas facilities used by the USAF.
Deployments
Both during Communist rule and after, Bulgaria has deployed troops with different tasks in various countries. The table below lists Bulgarian military deployments in foreign countries. Active missions are shown in bold.
See also
Defense industry of Bulgaria
Bulgaria and weapons of mass destruction
Medieval Bulgarian Army
References
Sources
Бяла книга на Въоръжените сили (White Paper of the Armed Forces), Ministry of Defence of Bulgaria, 2011.
Wikisource:Great Battles of Bulgaria
Bibliography
External links
Ministry of Defence of Bulgaria
Equipment holdings in 1996
https://web.archive.org/web/20110528070137/http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2007/10/07SOFIA1271.html – U.S. Embassy Sofia views via United States diplomatic cables leak on appropriate future equipment purchases, 2007
http://www.mediafire.com/download/heyrxhrnpqx06mz/Bulgarian_Military.docx and http://www.mediafire.com/download/ba571l7jiid2tf8/Bulgarian+Military.pdf - Download the word file and a pdf file for the Bulgarian Military's equipment list and specific details.
Military of Bulgaria
Permanent Structured Cooperation |
1552884 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector | Cylinder-head-sector | Cylinder-head-sector (CHS) is an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive.
It is a 3D-coordinate system made out of a vertical coordinate head, a horizontal (or radial) coordinate cylinder, and an angular coordinate sector. Head selects a circular surface: a platter in the disk (and one of its two sides). Cylinder is a cylindrical intersection through the stack of platters in a disk, centered around the disk's spindle. Combined, cylinder and head intersect to a circular line, or more precisely: a circular strip of physical data blocks called track. Sector finally selects which data block in this track is to be addressed, and can be viewed as a sort of angular component – a slice of the tracks, or in this coordinate system, the part of a particular track within a particular slice.
CHS addresses were exposed, instead of simple linear addresses (going from 0 to the total block count on disk - 1), because early hard drives didn't come with an embedded disk controller, that would hide the physical layout. A separate generic controller card was used, so that the operating system had to know the exact physical "geometry" of the specific drive attached to the controller, to correctly address data blocks. In tradition， (512 bytes/sector)×(63 sectors/track)×(255 heads (tracks/cylinder))×(1024 cylinders)=8032.5 MB， but a physical sector sizes of 128, 256, 512 and 1024，4096 bytes, 512 bytes per physical sector is dominant，Newer 4096 bytes per physical sector.
As the geometry became more complicated (for example, with the introduction of zone bit recording) and drive sizes grew over time, the CHS addressing method became restrictive. Since the late 1980s, hard drives began shipping with an embedded disk controller that had good knowledge of the physical geometry; they would however report a false geometry to the computer, e.g., a larger number of heads than actually present, to gain more addressable space. These logical CHS values would be translated by the controller, thus CHS addressing no longer corresponded to any physical attributes of the drive.
By the mid 1990s, hard drive interfaces replaced the CHS scheme with logical block addressing (LBA), but many tools for manipulating the master boot record (MBR) partition table still aligned partitions to cylinder boundaries; thus, artifacts of CHS addressing were still seen in partitioning software by the late 2000s.
In the early 2010s, the disk size limitations imposed by MBR became problematic and the GUID Partition Table (GPT) was designed as a replacement; modern computers using UEFI firmware without MBR support no longer use any notions from CHS addressing.
Definitions
CHS addressing is the process of identifying individual sectors (aka. physical block of data) on a disk by their position in a track, where the track is determined by the head and cylinder numbers. The terms are explained bottom up, for disk addressing the sector is the smallest unit. Disk controllers can introduce address translations to map logical to physical positions, e.g., zone bit recording stores fewer sectors in shorter (inner) tracks, physical disk formats are not necessarily cylindrical, and sector numbers in a track can be skewed.
Sectors
Floppy disks and controllers use physical sector sizes of 128, 256, 512 and 1024 bytes (e.g., PC/AX), whereby formats with 512 bytes per physical sector became dominant in the 1980s.
The most common physical sector size for hard disks today is 512 bytes, but there have been hard disks with 520 bytes per sector as well for non-IBM compatible machines. In 2005 some Seagate custom hard disks used sector sizes of 1024 bytes per sector. Advanced Format hard disks use 4096 bytes per physical sector (4Kn) since 2010, but will also be able to emulate 512 byte sectors (512e) for a transitional period.
Magneto-optical drives use sector sizes of 512 and 1024 bytes on 5.25-inch drives and 512 and 2048 bytes on 3.5-inch drives.
In CHS addressing the sector numbers always start at 1, there is no sector 0, which can lead to confusion since logical sector addressing schemes typically start counting with 0, e.g., logical block addressing (LBA), or "relative sector addressing" used in DOS.
For physical disk geometries the maximal sector number is determined by the low level format of the disk. However, for disk access with the BIOS of IBM-PC compatible machines, the sector number was encoded in six bits, resulting in a maximal number of 111111 (63) sectors per track. This maximum is still in use for virtual CHS geometries.
Tracks
The tracks are the thin concentric circular strips of sectors. At least one head is required to read a single track. With respect to disk geometries the terms track and cylinder are closely related. For a single or double sided floppy disk track is the common term; and for more than two heads cylinder is the common term. Strictly speaking a track is a given CH combination consisting ofSPT sectors, while a cylinder consists ofSPT×H sectors.
Cylinders
A cylinder is a division of data in a disk drive, as used in the CHS addressing mode of a Fixed Block Architecture disk or the cylinder–head–record (CCHHR) addressing mode of a CKD disk.
The concept is concentric, hollow, cylindrical slices through the physical disks (platters), collecting the respective circular tracks aligned through the stack of platters. The number of cylinders of a disk drive exactly equals the number of tracks on a single surface in the drive. It comprises the same track number on each platter, spanning all such tracks across each platter surface that is able to store data (without regard to whether or not the track is "bad"). Cylinders are vertically formed by tracks. In other words, track 12 on platter 0 plus track 12 on platter 1 etc. is cylinder 12.
Other forms of Direct Access Storage Device (DASD), such as drum memory devices or the IBM 2321 Data Cell, might give blocks addresses that include a cylinder address, although the cylinder address doesn't select a (geometric) cylindrical slice of the device.
Heads
A device called a head reads and writes data in a hard drive by manipulating the magnetic medium that composes the surface of an associated disk platter. Naturally, a platter has 2 sides and thus 2 surfaces on which data can be manipulated; usually there are 2 heads per platter, one per side. (Sometimes the term side is substituted for head, since platters might be separated from their head assemblies, as with the removable media of a floppy drive.)
The CHS addressing supported in IBM-PC compatible BIOSes code used eight bits for - theoretically up to 256 heads counted as head 0 up to 255 (FFh). However, a bug in all versions of Microsoft DOS/IBM PC DOS up to and including 7.10 will cause these operating systems to crash on boot when encountering volumes with 256 heads. Therefore, all compatible BIOSes will use mappings with up to 255 heads (00h..FEh) only, including in virtual 255×63 geometries.
This historical oddity can affect the maximum disk size in old BIOS INT 13h code as well as old PC DOS or similar operating systems:
(512 bytes/sector)×(63 sectors/track)×(255 heads (tracks/cylinder))×(1024 cylinders)=8032.5 MB, but actually 512×63×256×1024=8064 MB yields what is known as 8 GB limit. In this context relevant definition of 8 GB = 8192 MB is another incorrect limit, because it would require CHS 512×64×256 with 64 sectors per track.
Tracks and cylinders are counted from 0, i.e., track 0 is the first (outer-most) track on floppy or other cylindrical disks. Old BIOS code supported ten bits in CHS addressing with up to 1024 cylinders (1024=210). Adding six bits for sectors and eight bits for heads results in the 24 bits supported by BIOS interrupt 13h. Subtracting the disallowed sector number 0 in 1024×256 tracks corresponds to 128 MB for a sector size of 512 bytes (128 MB=1024×256×(512 byte/sector)); and 8192-128=8064 confirms the (roughly) 8 GB limit.
CHS addressing starts at 0/0/1 with a maximal value 1023/255/63 for 24=10+8+6 bits, or 1023/254/63 for 24 bits limited to 255 heads. CHS values used to specify the geometry of a disk have to count cylinder 0 and head 0 resulting in
a maximum (1024/256/63 or) 1024/255/63 for 24 bits with (256 or) 255 heads. In CHS tuples specifying a geometry S actually means sectors per track, and where the (virtual) geometry still matches the capacity the disk contains C×H×S sectors. As larger hard disks have come into use, a cylinder has become also a logical disk structure, standardised at 16 065 sectors (16065=255×63).
CHS addressing with 28 bits (EIDE and ATA-2) permits eight bits for sectors still starting at 1, i.e., sectors 1...255, four bits for heads 0...15, and sixteen bits for cylinders 0...65535. This results in a roughly 128 GB limit; actually 65536×16×255=267386880 sectors corresponding to 130560 MB for a sector size of 512 bytes. The 28=16+4+8 bits in the ATA-2 specification are also covered by Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, and an old working draft of this now expired standard was published.
With an old BIOS limit of 1024 cylinders and the ATA limit of 16 heads the combined effect was 1024×16×63=1032192 sectors, i.e., a 504 MB limit for sector size 512. BIOS translation schemes known as ECHS and revised ECHS mitigated this limitation by using 128 or 240 instead of 16 heads, simultaneously reducing the numbers of cylinders and sectors to fit into 1024/128/63 (ECHS limit: 4032 MB) or 1024/240/63 (revised ECHS limit: 7560 MB) for the given total number of sectors on a disk.
Blocks and clusters
The Unix communities employ the term block to refer to a sector or group of sectors. For example, the Linux fdisk utility, before version 2.25, displayed partition sizes using 1024-byte blocks.
Clusters are allocation units for data on various file systems (FAT, NTFS, etc.), where data mainly consists of files. Clusters are not directly affected by the physical or virtual geometry of the disk, i.e., a cluster can begin at a sector near the end of a given CH track, and end in a sector on the physically or logically next CH track.
CHS to LBA mapping
In 2002 the ATA-6 specification introduced an optional 48 bits Logical Block Addressing and declared CHS addressing as obsolete, but still allowed to implement the ATA-5 translations. Unsurprisingly the CHS to LBA translation formula given below also matches the last ATA-5 CHS translation. In the ATA-5 specification CHS support was mandatory for up to 16 514 064 sectors and optional for larger disks. The ATA-5 limit corresponds to CHS 16383 16 63 or equivalent disk capacities (16514064 = 16383×16×63 = 1032×254×63), and requires 24 = 14+4+6 bits (16383 + 1 = 214).
CHS tuples can be mapped onto LBA addresses using the following formula:
A = (c ⋅ Nheads + h) ⋅ Nsectors + (s − 1),
where A is the LBA address, Nheads is the number of heads on the disk, Nsectors is the maximum number of sectors per track, and (c, h, s) is the CHS address.
A Logical Sector Number formula in the ECMA-107 and ISO/IEC 9293:1994 (superseding ISO 9293:1987) standards for FAT file systems matches exactly the LBA formula given above: Logical Block Address and Logical Sector Number (LSN) are synonyms. The formula does not use the number of cylinders, but requires the number of heads and the number of sectors per track in the disk geometry, because the same CHS tuple addresses different logical sector numbers depending on the geometry. Examples:
For geometry 1020 16 63 of a disk with 1028160 sectors, CHS 3 2 1 is LBA 3150=((3× 16)+2)× 63 + (1-1)
For geometry 1008 4 255 of a disk with 1028160 sectors, CHS 3 2 1 is LBA 3570=((3× 4)+2)×255 + (1-1)
For geometry 64 255 63 of a disk with 1028160 sectors, CHS 3 2 1 is LBA 48321=((3×255)+2)× 63 + (1-1)
For geometry 2142 15 32 of a disk with 1028160 sectors, CHS 3 2 1 is LBA 1504=((3× 15)+2)× 32 + (1-1)
To help visualize the sequencing of sectors into a linear LBA model, note that:
The first LBA sector is sector # zero, the same sector in a CHS model is called sector # one.
All the sectors of each head/track get counted before incrementing to the next head/track.
All the heads/tracks of the same cylinder get counted before incrementing to the next cylinder.
The outside half of a whole Hard Drive would be the first half of the drive.
History
Cylinder Head Record format has been used by Count Key Data (CKD) hard disks on IBM mainframes since at least the 1960s. This is largely comparable to the Cylinder Head Sector format used by PCs, save that the sector size was not fixed but could vary from track to track based on the needs of each application. In contemporary use, the disk geometry presented to the mainframe is emulated by the storage firmware, and no longer has any relation to physical disk geometry.
Earlier hard drives used in the PC, such as MFM and RLL drives, divided each cylinder into an equal number of sectors, so the CHS values matched the physical properties of the drive. A drive with a CHS tuple of 500 4 32 would have 500 tracks per side on each platter, two platters (4 heads), and 32 sectors per track, with a total of 32 768 000 bytes (31.25 MiB).
ATA/IDE drives were much more efficient at storing data and have replaced the now archaic MFM and RLL drives. They use zone bit recording (ZBR), where the number of sectors dividing each track varies with the location of groups of tracks on the surface of the platter. Tracks nearer to the edge of the platter contain more blocks of data than tracks close to the spindle, because there is more physical space within a given track near the edge of the platter. Thus, the CHS addressing scheme cannot correspond directly with the physical geometry of such drives, due to the varying number of sectors per track for different regions on a platter. Because of this, many drives still have a surplus of sectors (less than 1 cylinder in size) at the end of the drive, since the total number of sectors rarely, if ever, ends on a cylinder boundary.
An ATA/IDE drive can be set in the system BIOS with any configuration of cylinders, heads and sectors that do not exceed the capacity of the drive (or the BIOS), since the drive will convert any given CHS value into an actual address for its specific hardware configuration. This however can cause compatibility problems.
For operating systems such as Microsoft DOS or older version of Windows, each partition must start and end at a cylinder boundary. Only some of the most modern operating systems (Windows XP included) may disregard this rule, but doing so can still cause some compatibility issues, especially if the user wants to perform dual booting on the same drive. Microsoft does not follow this rule with internal disk partition tools since Windows Vista.
See also
CD-ROM format
Block (data storage)
Disk storage
Disk formatting
File Allocation Table
Disk partitioning
References
Notes
1.This rule is true at least for all formats where the physical sectors are named 1 upwards. However, there are a few odd floppy formats (e.g., the 640 KB format used by BBC Master 512 with DOS Plus 2.1), where the first sector in a track is named "0" not "1".
2.While computers begin counting at 0, DOS would begin counting at 1. In order to do this, DOS would add a 1 to the head count before displaying it on the screen. However, instead of converting the 8-bit unsigned integer to a larger size (such as a 16-bit integer) first, DOS just added the 1. This would overflow a head count of 255 (0xFF) into 0 (0x100 & 0xFF = 0x00) instead of the 256 that would be expected. This was fixed with DOS 8, but by then, it had become a de facto standard to not use a head value of 255.
AT Attachment
BIOS
Computer file systems
Hard disk computer storage
Rotating disc computer storage media
Computer storage devices
IBM storage devices |
40952958 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marais%20des%20Cygnes%20Valley%20High%20School | Marais des Cygnes Valley High School | Marais des Cygnes Valley High School is a fully accredited public high school located in Melvern, Kansas, in the Marais des Cygnes Valley USD 456 school district, serving students in grades 6-12. Marais des Cygnes Valley has an enrollment of approximately 108 students. The principal is Ben Gordon. The school mascot is the Trojans and the school colors are orange and blue.
Extracurricular Activities
The Trojans compete in the Lyon County League. The KSHSAA classification switches between 2A and 1A, the two lowest classes according to KSHSAA. The school also has a variety of organizations for the students to participate in.
Athletics
The Trojans compete in the Lyon County League and are classified as either 2A or 1A, two of the lowest classifications in Kansas according to KSHSAA. A majority of the sports are coached by the same coaches. Marais des Cygnes Valley High School offers the following sports:
Fall Sports
Cheerleading
Cross Country
Football
Volleyball
Winter
Boys' Basketball
Girls' Basketball
Cheerleading
Spring
Boys' Track and Field
Girls' Track and Field
Baseball
Softball
Organizations
Future Business Leaders of America
Family, Careers, and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA)
Future Farmers of America (FFA)
National Honor Society
Student Council StuCo)
See also
List of high schools in Kansas
List of unified school districts in Kansas
References
External links
School
School Website
District Website
Maps
Melvern City Map, KDOT
Osage County Map, KDOT
Public high schools in Kansas
Public middle schools in Kansas
Education in Osage County, Kansas |
606960 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion%20%28software%29 | Motion (software) | Motion is a software application produced by Apple Inc. for their macOS operating system. It is used to create and edit motion graphics, titling for video production and film production, and 2D and 3D compositing for visual effects.
History
The original product, codenamed "Molokini," was previewed at a NAB event on April 19, 2004.
Version 1.0 was made available on August 11, 2004.
At a pre-NAB event in April 2005, Apple released Motion 2 along with new revisions of the other Pro applications, optimised for the Power Mac G5 and Mac OS X 10.4.
Features introduced in Motion 2:
32-bit Rendering
Replicators
New filters
MIDI behavior
After Effects integration
In January 2006 Apple stopped selling Motion as a stand-alone product. Introduced at NAB in Las Vegas on April 15, 2007, Motion 3 was included as part of the Final Cut Studio 2 suite.
Features introduced in Motion 3:
3D multiplane environment - 2.5D compositing
3D text behaviors
Vector-based paint strokes
Point tracking and match moving
Image stabilization and SmoothCam
Synchronized Audio behavior
Dynamic retiming behaviors
Advanced Keyframe Editor - keyframe pen tool, transform box
Final Cut Pro integration - Motion 3 master templates
Motion 4 was introduced on July 23, 2009.
New features included:
3D Shadows
3D Reflections
Depth of Field
Credit Rolls
Adjust Glyph tool
Parameter Link behavior
Camera framing
Improved Sequence Text behavior, plus new presets
New text generators
New graphics generators
New filters
Multi-touch gesture support
ProRes 4444 support
Background export
Motion 5 was introduced on June 21, 2011. Motion 5 was once again sold as a stand-alone product. It is available through the Mac App Store at a reduced price of $49.99.
New features:
Final Cut Pro X plugin generation
Parameter rigs
New keyer
64-bit architecture
Motion 5.2 was released on April 13, 2015.
New features:
3D text
New generators
Improved shapes
Improved keyframing
Motion 5.3 was released on October 27, 2016.
Wide colour
Improved Link parameter behavior
New Align To behavior
Improved 3D text
Motion 5.4 was released on December 14, 2017, with new features:
360 VR motion graphics support
The ability to switch a current Motion document to be a Motion project, Final Cut Pro generator, Final Cut Pro title, Final Cut Pro effect, or Final Cut Pro transition
New Overshoot animation behavior
New filters for different photographic looks
Import, playback, and editing of HEVC video clips and HEIF photos.
Faster optical flow analysis
Motion 5.4.1 was released on April 9, 2018.
New feature:
ProRes RAW
Bug fixes
Motion 5.4.2 was released on November 15, 2018.
New features:
Advanced color grading
Comic filter
Tiny Planet filter - for displaying 360° spherical video in non-360° projects
Bug fixes - including use of Core Text engine for improved display of non-roman text
Motion 5.4.3 was released on March 21, 2019.
New feature:
Post-macOS Mojave media compatibility checker
Motion 5.4.4 was released on October 7, 2019.
New Metal-based processing engine improves playback and accelerates graphics tasks including rendering, compositing, real-time effects, exporting, and more
Enhances graphics performance with support for multiple GPUs including Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo on Mac Pro
Optimizes CPU performance with support for up to 28 CPU cores on Mac Pro
Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW playback when using the Afterburner card on Mac Pro
View, composite, grade, and deliver stunning HDR video on Pro Display XDR
View High Dynamic Range video tone-mapped to compatible Standard Dynamic Range displays when using Motion on macOS Catalina
Improved load balancing of graphics processing across multiple GPUs
Motion 5.4.6 was released on August 25, 2020.
3D object support
Add 3D objects as elements in Title, Generator, Effect and Transition templates
Animate a 3D object's position, rotation, and scale using keyframes
Use behaviors to easily add realistic and complex animations to 3D objects
Use 3D objects with tools like replicators, emitters, lights or cameras
Use a collection of 60 premade 3D objects in the Motion library
Import USDZ objects from third-party websites and developers
Adjust 3D object environment lighting in the project inspector
Motion 5.5.1 was released on March 4, 2021.
Adds a new Auto-Shrink option to the Text Layout tab of the Inspector to automatically reduce text size to fit in a paragraph, scroll, or crawl layout
Includes UI refinements for macOS Big Sur
Includes stability and reliability improvements
See also a release history in context with the rest of Final Cut Studio.
Market position
Motion is a motion graphics and compositing application similar in some ways to After Effects and Nuke. With version 3, Apple added 3D compositing, vector paint, and motion tracking to Motion's toolbox. This added power, plus the GPU accelerated nature of Motion, allows it to be seen as an alternative to those packages for titling and simple animation projects.
Features
Features of Motion include the ability to create custom particle effects (as well as using pre-built ones) and to add filters, effects and animations in real time. Motion has the ability to address up to 32 GB of RAM and GPU acceleration at 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit float color depths. Motion 2 can also integrate with a MIDI keyboard, so that parameters can be controlled by keys or faders; this opens up the possibility of real time parameter input into Motion. In addition Motion 3 now allows for complete 2D and 3D compositing in a multiplane environment.
Behaviors
As well as supporting traditional keyframe animation, Motion introduced a system of pre-set 'behaviors' which can be combined to create realistic animations. For instance, the 'throw' behaviour will move an object across the screen. Combined with the 'gravity' behavior, it will simulate a realistic arc of motion. The effects can be tweaked utilizing various parameters, varying the strength of the bounces, the amount of gravity to apply and so on.
This is very different from traditional animation software, which requires the use of keyframes to determine the position of an object at any given time. Such software then automatically creates motion to fill the spaces between the keyframes. This makes it easy to know exactly where objects are on the screen at any given time, but it is considerably more difficult to create realistic animations that build up on different, conflicting forces.
The Replicator and Particle Emitters
In Version 2 a new 'replicator' function was introduced, which allows an object to be replicated to create a repeating pattern of a specified size and shape. With this tool, it is possible to create animations in which the elements of a replicated pattern move in sequence.
'Particle emitters' allow the user to set a pre-drawn shape to rapidly generate copies of itself and emit them across the screen. The direction and intensity can be adjusted, and combined with behaviors to create very complex animations quickly and easily. For example, a particle emitter used in conjunction with a star shape and the 'vortex' behaviour would animate a circle of swirling stars.
The H.U.D.
Motion features a floating semi-transparent window ("heads-up display", or HUD) which displays the most commonly altered parameters of the object or effect currently selected. This allows the user to make quick adjustments without having to search through palettes and menus. However, exact numerical values cannot be entered in this window. For more precise editing, consult the Inspector window.
Tools
Motion has the following tools available for the creation or manipulation of graphics on the canvas:
Anchor point - each object has an 'anchor point' that acts as the centre of rotation or enlargement.
Shear mapping
Drop shadow
Four Corner, which changes the perspective of objects.
Crop
Bézier curve adjustment
Rectangle, ellipse, Bézier curve and B-spline creation tools.
The text tool.
Rectangle, ellipse, Bézier and B-spline masking tools (which define the part of an object that is visible).
These tools can be accessed from the toolbar at the top of the screen or with keyboard commands.
Recording
Recording is used for adjusting an object over a specific amount of time by placing and manipulating keyframes. The recording button is a red dot button adjacent to the play/pause features. When the button is selected, it lights up red and the dot turns white. Any adjustments made when the button is selected are saved as keyframes. Keyframes act as placeholders that solidify an object's characteristics at a single frame (anything from position and rotation to cropping and size). Using multiple recordings, an object shall reorient itself between the two keyframes to match each set characteristics. Recording can act as an alternative to movement behaviors that allow more in-depth adjustments.
How Motion works
Motion uses pixel shaders which move the processing of video effects to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a modern graphics card. Motion is also compatible with Apple's Core Image technology, allowing one to use the Image Units that come standard with Mac OS X Tiger. Like pixel shaders, Core Image 'stacks' various effects, allowing a number of effects to be combined without slow-down. A faster graphics card improves performance. Motion is also the first Pro App to introduce FxPlug Apple's plug-in architecture that allows for GPU acceleration.
In Motion, users import their own graphics files and use pre-prepared graphics such as text and shapes. Objects can be grouped into layers, but they always retain their own distinct identity. These various parts are then grouped into a single layer. Selecting that layer permits moving all of the objects as a single body...
Similar products
Nuke – The Foundry
Combustion, Toxik and Smoke – Autodesk
Adobe After Effects
VSDC Free Video Editor
Fusion – Blackmagic Design
Boris RED – Boris FX
Natron
Cavalry
While not dedicated to compositing, the open source software Blender contains a limited node-based compositing feature which, among other things is capable of basic keying and blurring effects.
References
Wiggins, P. (August 2004). Motion 1. First review of Motion".
Lindsay, A. (November 2004). Motion. DV, 12, 54 – 58.
External links
Official website
MacOS-only software made by Apple Inc.
Video editing software
Compositing software |
38336626 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network%20interface%20layer%20security | Network interface layer security | The network interface layer, also commonly referred to as the data link layer or link layer, is the lowest layer in the TCP/IP model. This particular layer has several unique security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a determined adversary.
Network interface layer
The network interface layer, commonly referred to as the data link layer, is the physical interface between the host system and the network hardware. It defines how data packets are to be formatted for transmission and routings. Some common link layer protocols include IEEE 802.2 and X.25.
The data link layer and its associated protocols govern the physical interface between the host computer and the network hardware. The goal of this layer is to provide reliable communications between hosts connected on a network. Some of the services provided by this layer of the network stack include:
Data Framing - Breaking up the data stream into individual frames or packets.
Checksums - Sending checksum data for each frame to enable the receiving node to determine whether or not the frame was received error-free.
Acknowledgment - Sending either a positive (data was received) or negative (data was not received but expected) acknowledgement from receiver to sender to ensure reliable data transmission.
Flow Control - Buffering data transmissions to ensure that a fast sender does not overwhelm a slower receiver.
Vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies
Wired networks
Content Address Memory (CAM) table exhaustion attack
The data link layer addresses data packets based on the destination hardware's physical Media Access Control (MAC) address. Switches within the network maintain Content Address Tables (CAMs) that maps the switch's ports to specific MAC addresses. These tables allow the switch to securely deliver the packet to its intended physical address only. Using the switch to connect only the systems that are communicating provides much greater security than a network hub, which broadcasts all traffic over all ports, allowing an eavesdropper to intercept and monitor all network traffic.
A CAM Table Exhaustion Attack basically turns a switch into a hub. The attacker floods the CAM table with new MAC-to-port mappings until the table's fixed memory allotment is full. At this point the switch no longer knows how to deliver traffic based on a MAC-to-port mapping, and defaults to broadcasting traffic over all ports. An adversary is then able to intercept and monitor all network traffic traversing the switch to include passwords, emails, instant messages, etc.
The CAM table-overflow attack can be mitigated by configuring port security on the switch. This option provides for either the specification of the MAC addresses on a particular switch port or the specification of the number of MAC addresses that can be learned by a switch port. When an invalid MAC address is detected on the port, the switch can either block the offending MAC address or shut down the port.
Address Routing Protocol (ARP) spoofing
At the data link layer a logical IP address assigned by the network layer is translated into a physical MAC address. In order to ensure reliable data communications all switches in the network must maintain up-to-date tables for mapping logical (IP) to physical (MAC) addresses. If a client or switch is unsure of the IP-to-MAC mapping of a data packet it receives it will send an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) message to the nearest switch asking for the MAC address associated with the particular IP address. Once this is accomplished the client or switch will update its table to reflect the new mapping. In an ARP spoofing attack the adversary broadcasts the IP address of the machine to be attacked along with its own MAC address. All neighboring switches will then update their mapping tables and begin transmitting data destined to the attacked system's IP address to the attacker's MAC address. Such an attack is commonly referred to as a "man in the middle" attack.
Defenses against ARP spoofing generally rely on some form of certification or cross-checking of ARP responses. Uncertified ARP responses are blocked. These techniques may be integrated with the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server so that both dynamic and static IP addresses are certified. This capability may also be implemented in individual hosts or may be integrated into Ethernet switches or other network equipment.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) starvation
When a client system without an IP address enters a network it will request an IP address from the resident DHCP server. The DHCP server will reserve an IP address (so anyone else asking for one is not granted this one) and it will send that IP address to the device along with a lease identifying how long the address will be valid. Normally, from this point, the device will respond by confirming the IP address with the DHCP server and the DHCP server finally responds with an acknowledgement.
In a DHCP starvation attack, once the adversary receives the IP address and the lease period from the DHCP server, the adversary does not respond with the confirmation. Instead, the adversary floods the DHCP server with IP address requests until all addresses within the server's address space have been reserved (exhausted). At this point, any hosts wishing to join the network will be denied access, resulting in a denial of service. The adversary can then set up a rogue DHCP server so that clients receive incorrect network settings and as a result transmit data to an attacker's machine.
One method for mitigating this type of attack is to use the IP source guard feature available on many ethernet switches. The IP guard initially blocks all traffic except DHCP packets. When a client receives a valid IP address from the DHCP server the IP address and switch port relationship are bound in an Access Control List (ACL). The ACL then restricts traffic only to those IP addresses configured in the binding.
Wireless networks
Hidden node attack
In a wireless network many hosts or nodes are sharing a common medium. If nodes A and B are both wireless laptop computers communicating in an office environment their physical separation may require that they communicate through a wireless access point. But only one device can transmit at a time in order to avoid packet collisions. Prior to transmitting, Node A sends out a Ready to Send (RTS) signal. If it is not receiving any other traffic the access point will broadcast a Clear to Send (CTS) signal over the network. Node A will then begin transmitting while Node B knows to hold off transmitting its data for the time being. Even though it cannot directly communicate with Node A, i.e. Node A is hidden, it knows to wait based on its communication with the access point. An attacker can exploit this functionality by flooding the network with CTS messages. Then every node assumes there is a hidden node trying to transmit and will hold its own transmissions, resulting in a denial of service.
Preventing hidden node attacks requires a network tool such as NetEqualizer. Such a tool monitors access point traffic and develops a baseline level of traffic. Any spikes in CTS/RTS signals are assumed to be the result of a hidden node attack and are subsequently blocked.
De-auth (de-authentication) attack
Any client entering a wireless network must first authenticate with an access point (AP) and is thereafter associated with that access point. When the client leaves it sends a deauthentication, or deauth, message to disassociate itself with the access point. An attacker can send deauth messages to an access point tied to client IP addresses thereby knocking the users off-line and requiring continued re-authenticate, giving the attacker valuable insight into the reauthentication handshaking that occurs.
To mitigate this attack, the access point can be set up to delay the effects of deauthentication or disassociation requests (e.g., by queuing such requests for 5–10 seconds) thereby giving the access point an opportunity to observe subsequent packets from the client. If a data packet arrives after a deauthentication or disassociation request is queued, that request is discarded since a legitimate client would never generate packets in that order.
References
Computer network security
Link protocols |
635876 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel%20Walker | Herschel Walker | Herschel Walker (born March 3, 1962) is a former American football running back, bobsledder, and mixed martial artist. He played college football for the University of Georgia, earned consensus All-American honors three times and won the 1982 Heisman Trophy. He is considered to be one of the greatest college football players of all time, ranked No. 1 by Bleacher Report, 247sports, and Sporting News, and No. 2 by ESPN. Walker began his professional football career with the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), before joining the National Football League (NFL), initially with the Dallas Cowboys. He was the focus of a huge 1989 trade to the Minnesota Vikings, and later played for the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999.
Walker currently serves as a co-chair of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, having been appointed to the position by President Trump and continuing under President Biden. He is running for the Republican nomination in the 2022 United States Senate election in Georgia, and has been endorsed by Trump and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Early life
Walker was born in Augusta, Georgia, to parents Willis and Christine Walker. He was raised in Wrightsville, Georgia. He was one of seven children in a blue collar family. Walker said that as a child he was overweight and struggled with stuttering. Walker's mother taught him not to use these problems as excuses in life.
High school career
Walker attended Johnson County High School in Wrightsville, where he played football, basketball, and competed in track. He played for the Johnson County Trojans high school football team from 1976 to 1979. In his senior year, he rushed for 3,167 yards, helping the Trojans win their first state championship. He was awarded the inaugural Dial Award as 1979 national high school scholar-athlete of the year.
Walker was selected as Athlete-Scholar delegate by the American Academy of Achievement in June 1980 and received the Academy's Golden Plate Award from Council member Coach Tom Landry at a ceremony in 1981.
On July 4, 2017, during Wrightsville's annual Fourth of July celebration and parade, Trojan Way, the street where Johnson County High School resides, was officially renamed Herschel Walker Drive.
Track and field
Also a standout athlete, Walker competed on the Trojans track and field team in events ranging from the 100-yard dash to the shot put. He won the shot put (16.56m/54 ft 4in), 100-yard dash (9.5s), and 220-yard dash (21.5s) events at the GHSA Class A State T&F Championships. He also anchored the 4x400 team to victory, with a time of 3:24.01 minutes.
Walker also competed as a sprinter at the University of Georgia, where he was a two-time All-American selection. He was All-American in 1981 on the 4x100 m relay and again in 1982 in the indoor 60 yard dash. He was a member of the SEC champion 4 × 100 m relay squad in 1981. He ran the 100 meters in a PR of 10.23 seconds in 1982 and also ran 10.10 seconds wind-assisted. He improved his high school 100-yard dash time of 9.5 to 9.3 seconds. He also competed in the 55-meter dash in 1983, recording a time of 6.11 seconds.
College career
After graduating from high school as the valedictorian, Walker played running back and ran on the track and field team for the University of Georgia, where he was a three-time All-American (football and track) and winner of the 1982 Heisman Trophy and Maxwell Award. He is the first NCAA player who played only three years to finish in the top 10 in rushing yards, a mark later tied by Jonathan Taylor. During his freshman season in 1980, Walker set the NCAA freshman rushing record (later broken by Jonathan Taylor) and finished third in Heisman voting. Walker was the first "true freshman" to become a first-team All-American.
He played a major role in helping Georgia avoid defeat that year and win the national championship with a victory over Notre Dame in the 1981 Sugar Bowl. He won the Heisman as a junior. In 1999, Walker was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame and is considered one of college football's greatest players.
1980 season
Walker, listed as a 6-foot 2-inch 222-pound running back, was the most sought after high school football player in the nation, signed a national letter of intent to play for the University of Georgia Bulldogs on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1980. Mike Cavan helped provide head coach Vince Dooley with his prized recruit.
The season began with sophomore Carnie Norris starting ahead of Walker at tailback as the Bulldogs faced the University of Tennessee on September 6 in Knoxville. With Tennessee gaining a 9–0 lead early in the 2nd quarter, coach Dooley told his offensive coordinator, "I'm putting Herschel in...Don't be afraid to let him carry the ball."
Tennessee held a 15–2 advantage late in the third quarter when Walker changed the momentum of the game. Late in the third quarter, Walker scored on a counter from 16 yards out, where he ran over safety and future Dallas Cowboys teammate Bill Bates near the goal line. Walker scored again five minutes later on a 9-yard touchdown run as Georgia went on to win the game, 16–15.
A week later, Georgia faced Texas A&M at home and Walker finished with 21 carries for 145 yards and 3 touchdowns. Quarterback Buck Belue complemented Walker's ground game by going 6 of 13 for 147 passing yards during the contest. The Bulldogs had a 28–0 lead by halftime. With four minutes left in the third quarter, Walker broke off a 76-yard touchdown run.
In the games that followed, Georgia raced to a 6–0 start by knocking off Clemson (20–16), TCU (34–3), Ole Miss (28–21), and Vanderbilt (41–0). Walker ran for 121 yards against Clemson and 69 more versus TCU—including a 41-yard run. He missed much of the Ole Miss game with an injury. In the Vandy game on October 18, Walker had 23 rushes for a career-high 283 yards, scoring on long touchdown runs of 80, 48, and 53 yards.
The special teams and defense gave Georgia the upper hand in the two weekends that followed and helped the Bulldogs get past Kentucky (27–0) and South Carolina (13–10). The win in Athens, Georgia over South Carolina on November 1 featured Walker and the Gamecock's soon-to-be 1980 Heisman Trophy winner, George Rogers. Walker rushed 43 times for 219 yards, while Rogers had 168 yards on 35 carries. Georgia got out to a strong 10–0 lead after a 76-yard touchdown run by Walker. By the 3rd quarter, the Bulldogs were up 13-0 and held on to beat the Gamecocks 13–10.
Georgia was 8–0 and now coach Vince Dooley's Bulldogs faced their most daunting task all year. The second-ranked Bulldogs faced a 6–1 Florida Gators team in Jacksonville on November 8. Walker carried Georgia's offense, rushing 37 times for 238 yards against the Gators.He started things off early in the 1st quarter by taking a toss sweep to the right and running 72 yards for the Dawgs first touchdown. Georgia extended its lead to 20–10 late in the 3rd quarter before Florida began to mount its comeback. The Gators scored 11 unanswered points and took the lead 21–20. With less than a minute and a half left in the 4th quarter, Georgia was 3rd-and-11 on their own 7 1/2-yard line. QB Buck Belue dropped back to pass and found WR Lindsay Scott who outran the Gator defense for a 93-yard touchdown, giving Georgia the win, 26–21. The game would be affectionately referred to as the "Miracle on Duval Street".
Georgia clinched the SEC Championship on November 15 by taking out Auburn on the road, 31–21. Walker did most of the work by rushing 27 times for 84 yards, including an 18-yard touchdown. Two weeks later, Walker ended the regular season with an exclamation point by scoring on touchdown runs of 1, 23, and 65 yards as Georgia defeated in-state rival Georgia Tech, 38–20. Walker rushed 25 times for 205 yards against the Ramblin' Wreck.
The Bulldogs were ranked No. 1 at 11–0 as they were invited to play a traditional football power, coach Dan Devine's Notre Dame Fighting Irish (9–1–1) in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, La. on January 1, 1981.Walker, who suffered a dislocated left shoulder very early in the game, managed to rush 36 times for 150 yards, including a longest run of 23 yards.With the score tied 3–3, Notre Dame failed to properly field a kickoff. Two plays later, Walker dove over the top for a 1-yard touchdown run to give UGA a 10–3 lead. He took advantage of more Irish misfortune as a Notre Dame fumble set Georgia up at the Irish 22-yard line. Three plays later, Walker was in the end zone again for a 17–3 lead. Georgia held on to win, 17–10.
At the season's conclusion, Walker helped his Georgia Bulldogs complete a 12–0 record as the Associated Press voted the University of Georgia No. 1 with 58½ first-place votes to Pittsburgh's 3½. Walker and his teammates were also voted No. 1 by the United Press International Poll—which listed Georgia with 36 first-place votes to Pitt's three.
1981 season
The momentum of the 1980 season continued into September 1981 for the Georgia Bulldogs as Walker and company took control early in the season by scoring early and often in wins against Tennessee (44–0) and the Cal Golden Bears (27–13). Against the Volunteers, Walker rushed for 161 yards on 30 carries. Walker pounded California by rushing 35 times for 167 yards on September 12.
After hitting a dip in the season, losing 13–3 to eventual national champion Clemson, Georgia regained its focus and won out to get to 10–1 by the regular season's end. Even though Walker was able to push, shove, and get through Clemson's defense by rushing 28 times for 111 yards, it wasn't enough to overcome 9 turnovers (including 2 by Walker) by the Bulldogs in the loss to the Tigers. Georgia rebounded by blanking South Carolina, 24–0, on September 26 as the sophomore Walker ran for 176 yards on 36 carries. Georgia led just 3–0 at the half, and Walker opened things up for the Bulldogs in the third quarter by scoring on touchdown runs of 3 and 8 yards to put the Gamecocks away.
The Bulldogs reeled off solid wins—all in October—over Ole Miss (37–7), Vanderbilt (53–21), Kentucky (21–0), and Temple (49–3). Walker rushed for a season-high 265 yards on 41 attempts and a touchdown against Ole Miss on October 10. A week later, Walker rushed 39 times for 188 yards and 2 touchdowns versus Vanderbilt. Against Temple, he scored a career-high 4 touchdowns while rushing 23 times for 112 yards.
On November 7, seventh-ranked Georgia and Walker got behind, 14–0 in Jacksonville, to the Florida Gators, but came back to win in a repeat score of last season's game, 26–21. Walker rushed a career-high 47 times for 192 yards while scoring four touchdowns.
The Bulldogs finished out the regular season at home against nearby rivals: the Auburn Tigers (November 14) and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (December 5). The 24–13 win over coach Pat Dye's Tigers clinched another SEC championship. Walker pounded out 165 yards on 37 rushes during the contest. In the third quarter, Walker's 2-yard touchdown run gave the Bulldogs a commanding 24–7 lead. Against Georgia Tech, Walker finished with 36 rushes for 225 yards and 4 touchdowns in the rivalry matchup. The Bulldogs got out to a 34–0 halftime lead. Walker scored three touchdowns in the first half. He added a 1-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter as Georgia cruised past the Yellow Jackets, 44–7.
Riding an 8-game winning streak, Georgia (10–1) was ranked No. 2 in the country when they faced Pittsburgh (also 10–1, ranked No. 10) in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. The Bulldogs came up short in the loss, 20–24. Walker finished with 25 rushes for 84 yards and led UGA in receptions with 3 catches for 53 yards. He made his presence felt early as he bolted 8 yards for a touchdown in the 2nd quarter giving Georgia a 7–0 lead. After a 30-yard, Dan Marino touchdown pass lifted Pitt to a 10–7 lead in the third quarter, Walker answered, scoring from 10 yards out to give Georgia a 14–10 lead going into the 4th quarter. With Georgia clinging to a 20–17 lead late in the game, Marino found Pittsburgh's receiver John Brown for a 33-yard touchdown pass with 0:35 left in the game.
1982 season
With the season opener against defending national champion Clemson looming, the Bulldogs received bad news when Walker suffered a fractured right thumb in practice on August 21, 1982. He was expected to be out of action for 3–6 weeks. When the two teams met on September 6, Walker wore a bulky, padded cast on his right thumb. In this tight game, Walker was used primarily as a decoy and rushed 11 times for 20 yards. The Georgia defense made up for its injured star by shutting down Clemson, limiting the Tigers to 249 total yards of offense as the Bulldogs prevailed, 13–7.
Georgia next faced a tough test in Brigham Young at home on September 9. Walker, coming back from the thumb injury, rushed 31 times for 124 yards against the Cougars. BYU's Steve Young connected with Scott Collie on a 21-yard touchdown pass in the 3rd quarter to give Brigham Young a 14–7 lead going into the final period. However, Walker rallied the Bulldogs as he led them on two scoring drives that gave Georgia the win, 17–14. He scored on a 1-yard touchdown run late to tie the game. Later still, Walker converted on a huge 4th-and-1 that enabled Georgia kicker Kevin Butler to make a 44-yard field goal in the game's closing seconds. Walker's game-winning drive of 40 yards to set up Butler's kick covered three minutes in all, and was keyed by his 23-yard breakaway run.
After the tough win against BYU, Walker and company won out to finish the regular season. After getting past South Dakota 34–18 on September 25, Georgia rolled during the month of October. Walker's performance against the Gamecocks was modest by his standards (32 rushes, 143 yards, and 1 touchdown), but he ran hard while still wearing his cast.
In October, Georgia faced Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and Memphis State. The Bulldogs slipped past Mississippi St., 29–22, as Walker rushed 39 times for 215 yards and a touchdown. Next, Georgia overwhelmed Ole Miss, 33–10, as Walker rushed 24 times for 149 yards and 3 touchdowns. On October 16, Georgia got past Vanderbilt 27–13. Against the Commodores, Walker ran for 172 yards and a touchdown on 38 carries.
Georgia finished October by knocking off Kentucky (27–14) and Florida State (34–3) to push its record to 8–0 going into the Florida game in Jacksonville. Walker maintained a heavy load, rushing 34 times against Kentucky for 152 yards. The Wildcats led 10–3 in the second quarter when Walker raced 64 yards to paydirt on a screen pass, cutting the deficit to 14–10. Walker finished with 79 receiving yards on 3 catches. In Georgia's matchup with Memphis St., Walker shattered the SEC career scoring record as his third-ranked Bulldogs swept past the Tigers by 31 points. He ran for a season-high 219 yards on 33 carries and 2 touchdowns, extending Memphis St.'s losing streak to 15 games.
Georgia took control against tough opposition during the month of November. They got past Florida, Auburn, and Georgia Tech to complete a perfect 11–0 regular season, and were the No. 1 ranked team in the country. Walker dismantled Florida by scoring three touchdowns in a 44–0 Georgia rout. He rushed 35 times for 219 yards during this dominating win. "We were ready for this game," Walker said. "We were more fired up than Florida."
Georgia faced the Auburn Tigers on November 13 at Jordan–Hare Stadium in a slugfest. Walker scored on a 20-yard touchdown run within the 4th quarter to give UGA a 19–14 lead. Georgia hung on to win and Walker finished with 31 rushes for 177 yards, including a 47-yard run, and 2 touchdowns.
In the last regular-season game of Walker's career at the University of Georgia, the Yellow Jackets were no match as Georgia raced to a 38–18 win. Walker broke five tackles and sprinted 59 yards for a score in the first quarter. The Bulldogs scored 17 points in the 3rd quarter which included a 1-yard touchdown run by Walker. He finished with 27 rushes for 162 yards against the Rambling Wreck. The victory pitted the No. 1 ranked Georgia Bulldogs against the No. 2 ranked Penn State Nittany Lions in the Sugar Bowl on January 1, 1983.
Walker led the way as Georgia wrapped up its third SEC Championship in as many seasons. On December 4, 1982, Walker was awarded the Heisman Trophy. He was accompanied to the ceremony by the University of Georgia's beloved English Bulldog mascot, Uga IV.
Walker scored one last time in his UGA career as he fell into the end zone from 1 yard out with 10:37 remaining in the third quarter. That touchdown cut the Penn State lead to three at 20–17. Penn State answered 21 seconds later as quarterback Todd Blackledge completed a 46-yard touchdown pass to wideout Gregg Garrity. Penn State held on to win 27–23, and won the national championship by a unanimous vote in both the AP and UPI polls. Walker rushed 28 times for 102 yards and caught a pass for 15 yards against the Mark Robinson-led PSU defense.
College statistics
Professional career
United States Football League
United States Football League rules (unlike the NFL at the time) allowed athletes to turn professional after their junior seasons rather than wait for their collegiate class to graduate a year later. Further, the rules allowed him to choose where to play, allowing him to maximize his endorsement income. He stated, "I don't know if I would want to play in the NFL unless it was for the two New York teams or the Dallas Cowboys." Walker signed with the New Jersey Generals in 1983, owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, who after the 1983 season sold the team to Donald Trump. Walker attracted only one major promotional offer, a joint project of McDonald's and Adidas.
The USFL had initially followed the NFL and banned underclassmen. However, league officials concluded the rule would never stand up in court, and discarded it. To circumvent the league's $1.8-million salary cap, Walker signed a personal services contract with Duncan (later transferred to Trump). Similar arrangements were later made with other college stars. Although this move was challenged in court, Walker and the USFL prevailed.
Walker won the USFL rushing title in 1983 and 1985. He set the professional football record for single-season rushing yards with 2,411 yards in 1985, averaging 5.50 yards per attempt in 18 games. Over the course of his USFL career, Walker had 5,562 yards rushing in 1,143 carries, averaging 4.87 yards. In 1983, he rushed for 1,812 yards in 18 games. In his second season, his rushing yardage dropped to 1,339, but he caught passes for more than 500 yards giving him over 1,800 yards in total offense.
National Football League
Dallas Cowboys (first stint)
The Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League, who were well aware of Walker's earlier interest in playing for them and suspected that the United States Football League (USFL) was not going to last, acquired Walker's NFL rights by selecting him in the fifth round (114th overall) of the 1985 NFL Draft. The USFL eventually succumbed after its technically successful but financially fruitless antitrust suit against the NFL.
In 1986, he was signed by the Cowboys and moved to fullback, so he could share backfield duties with Tony Dorsett, becoming the second Heisman backfield tandem in NFL history, after George Rogers and Earl Campbell teamed with the 1984 New Orleans Saints. This move created tension, as it would limit Dorsett's playing time, and because Walker's $5 million five-year contract exceeded his $4.5 million five-year contract. Walker rushed for the game-winning touchdown with a minute to play in the 31–28 victory against the New York Giants in the season opener. In the week 15 game against the Philadelphia Eagles, he had a franchise-record 292 yards of total offense, including the NFL's longest run of the year with an 84-yarder for a touchdown and an 84-yard touchdown reception.
In 1987, Walker complained to Cowboys management that he was being moved around between three different positions (running back, fullback, wide receiver) and that Dorsett had more carries. He would take over as the team's main running back, playing in 12 games (11 starts), while registering 891 rushing yards, 715 receiving yards, and 8 touchdowns. Dorsett played in 12 games (6 starts) and had two healthy DNP (Did Not Play), which would make him demand a trade that would send him to the Denver Broncos.
Walker established himself as a premier NFL running back in 1988, becoming a one-man offense, reaching his NFL career highs of 1,514 rushing yards and 505 receiving yards, while playing seven positions: halfback, fullback, tight end, H-back, wide receiver, both in the slot and as a flanker. He became just the 10th player in NFL history to amass more than 2,000 combined rushing and receiving yards in a season. In the process he achieved two consecutive Pro Bowls (1987 and 1988).
In 1989, at the height of his NFL career, the Cowboys traded Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for a total of five players (linebacker Jesse Solomon, defensive back Issiac Holt, running back Darrin Nelson, linebacker David Howard, defensive end Alex Stewart) and six future draft picks. The five players were tied to potential draft picks Minnesota would give Dallas if a player was cut (which led to Emmitt Smith, Russell Maryland, Kevin Smith, and Darren Woodson). This was claimed to be a turning point in the rise of the Cowboys to the NFL's top echelon.
Minnesota Vikings
Nicknamed the "HWT" (Herschel Walker trade), Walker's trade to Minnesota was initially considered by many as supplying the Vikings with the "missing piece" for a Super Bowl run; however, over time, as the Cowboys' fortunes soared and the Vikings' waned, it became viewed as, perhaps, the most lopsided trade in NFL history. From the moment he arrived in Minneapolis, "Herschel Mania" erupted. After a single 2½ hour practice where he studied only 12 offensive plays, Walker had a strong debut against the Green Bay Packers. He produced the best rushing game by a Viking back since 1983 and the first over-100 yard rushing performance by a Viking since 1987, gaining 148 yards on 18 carries.
He received three standing ovations from the record Metrodome crowd of 62,075, producing a Vikings win after four successive losses and 14 of the prior 18 games with the Packers. He joined the bobsled program of the United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation, earning a berth in the 1992 Winter Olympics. Scout.com says, "Walker was never used properly by the coaching brain trust." "Herschel the Turkey", a mock honor given out by the Star Tribune newspaper to inept Minnesota sports personalities, is named for him. Walker played for the Vikings for two and a half years.
Philadelphia Eagles
After three seasons in Minnesota, the Philadelphia Eagles signed Walker in 1992 hoping he would be the final ingredient they needed to reach the Super Bowl. That year, he enjoyed his best season as a pro since 1988, rushing for 1,070 yards. In 1994 he became the first NFL player to have one-play gains of 90 or more yards rushing, receiving and kick-returning in a single season. He spent three seasons in Philadelphia, leaving after the Eagles signed free agent Ricky Watters.
New York Giants
The New York Giants signed Walker in 1995 to a three-year contract worth $4.8 million as a third-down back, but soon discovered that Walker wasn't elusive enough for the role. He couldn't play fullback either, because of limited blocking skills. Walker led the Giants with 45 kick returns at 21.5 yards per return in 1995, his only season with the team.
Dallas Cowboys (second stint)
Walker finished his football career with the team that he started his NFL career with, the Cowboys. In 1996, he rejoined the team as a kickoff return specialist and third-down back. He also played fullback, but primarily as a ball-handler instead of a blocker out of I-Form and pro-sets. Walker retired at the end of the 1997 season.
Career statistics
USFL statistics
NFL statistics
Football legacy
Walker rushed for 5,562 yards in his USFL career. His combined rushing numbers for the USFL and the NFL (13,787 yards) would place him 7th all-time on the NFL's career rushing list. His combined all-purpose yards for the USFL and the NFL (25,283 all-purpose yards) would place him 1st All-Time on the NFL's list and 2nd in Pro Football behind Henry "Gizmo" Williams (25,571 all-purpose yards), who played in the CFL, NFL, and USFL. In 12 NFL seasons, Walker gained 8,225 rushing yards, 4,859 receiving yards, and 5,084 kickoff-return yards. for 18,168 total combined net yards, ranking him second among the NFL's all-time leaders in total yardage as of his retirement; as of the start of the 2007 NFL season, ten years later, he still ranked eighth. He scored 84 touchdowns: 61 rushing, 21 receiving and returned two kick-offs for touchdowns. Walker is the only other player besides Derrick Mason to have 10,000+ yards from scrimmage and 5,000+ return yards (all of which were on kickoff returns).
Walker is the only player to gain 4,000 yards three different ways: rushing, receiving and kickoff returns. He is one of several players to exceed 60 touchdowns rushing and 20 touchdowns receiving. He is the only NFL player with a 90+ yard reception, 90+ yard run and a 90+ yard kickoff return in one season (1994). He is the only player to record an 84+ yard touchdown run and an 84+ yard touchdown reception in the same game (December 14, 1986). He had 100 yards rushing and 100 yards receiving that day.
Walker is regarded as one of the top college running backs of all time. In 1999, he was selected to Sports Illustrated's NCAA Football All-Century Team. On the Fox Sports Net show Sports List, Walker was named the best college football running back of all time and was selected as the third greatest player in college football history by ESPN. Georgia retired Walker's number "34".
While Walker had a successful NFL career, he never played on a championship team. The move to Minnesota was the turning point in his NFL tenure. In 2008, the trade was selected by SI.com as the worst sports trade of all time. It was the subject of an episode of ESPN Classic's The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame.... In 2003 Johnson County High School named its football field in his honor. Walker was a popular and visible personality, even in his college days, as evidenced by the fact that both a thoroughbred and a standardbred race horse were named after him, the former while he was still in college. He made several appearances in the sports documentary Damn Good Dog (2004).
On January 29, 2011, Walker announced that he was considering a return to the NFL. "I've told everyone that at 50 I might try football again to show people I can do that," Walker said. "I want to be the George Foreman of football, come back and do that one more time... The two teams I would come back to play for are Minnesota or Atlanta. It would probably be Atlanta because that's home for me." According to Walker, his mixed martial arts training made him, "a much better-conditioned athlete now than when I was playing football. I'm 48 and in better shape now than I was when I was in my early 20s, playing football."
Sporting life outside football
Walker has participated in a variety of sports besides football, including mixed martial arts, Olympic bobsledding, track and field, taekwondo, and ballet dancing.
Olympic bobsleigh
While still an active NFL player, Walker competed in the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, as a member of the United States' bobsleigh team. Originally selected for the four-man team, he eventually competed as the brakeman, or pusher, in the two-man competition. Walker and his teammate Brian Shimer placed seventh; see complete results in bobsleigh at the 1992 Winter Olympics.
Mixed martial arts career
In November 2007, Walker appeared on the HDNet show Inside MMA as a guest. He indicated that he would take part in a mixed martial arts reality show in the near future (along with José Canseco) and that he would have an official MMA fight at the conclusion of the show. In September 2009, it was announced that Walker had been signed by MMA promotion company Strikeforce to compete in their heavyweight division at the age of 47.
He began a 12-week training camp with trainer "Crazy" Bob Cook at the AKA American Kickboxing Academy in October 2009 in San Jose, California. In his MMA debut on January 30, 2010, Walker defeated Greg Nagy via technical knock-out due to strikes at Strikeforce: Miami. According to Scott Coker, the Strikeforce CEO, Walker pledged to donate his fight purse to charity. Scott Coker announced Walker would fight again on December 4, 2010, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Strikeforce confirmed that Walker would face former WEC fighter Scott Carson when he made his second appearance in the Strikeforce cage. Walker was forced off the Strikeforce card on December 4 due to a cut suffered in training that required seven stitches. They fought instead on January 29, 2011, and Walker defeated Carson via TKO (strikes) at 3:13 of round 1.
Walker donated his winnings to charity.
Mixed martial arts record
|-
| Win
| align=center | 2–0
| Scott Carson
| TKO (punches)
| Strikeforce: Diaz vs. Cyborg
|
| align=center | 1
| align=center | 3:13
| San Jose, California, United States
|
|-
| Win
| align=center | 1–0
| Greg Nagy
| TKO (punches)
| Strikeforce: Miami
|
| align=center | 3
| align=center | 2:17
| Sunrise, Florida, United States
|
Other athletic involvement
Walker has a fifth-degree black belt in taekwondo.
In 1988, while a member of the Dallas Cowboys, he danced with the Fort Worth Ballet for a single performance. He won back-to-back American Superstars competitions in 1987 and 1988.
Renaissance Man Food Services
In 1999, Walker created Renaissance Man Food Services, which distributes chicken products. Originally his producer was Sysco following a casual conversation with a Sysco Corp vice-president who asked him to provide some chicken-breading recipes from his mom. Production later shifted to Tyson Foods for 5 years until Walker built his own chicken plant. In 2008, Walker said that the company had more than 100 employees and achieved $70 million in annual sales and was one of the largest minority-owned meat processors in the nation. Walker stated in a court case that the company averaged about $1.5 million year in profit from 2008 and 2017. In 2004, Renaissance Man Food Services was the nation's largest minority-owned chicken supplier.
Following the start of the COVID-19 recession, Walker said that it had resulted in a 50% loss in business at RMFS. After there was no guarantee that Walker's employees would receive loan money from the Payment Protection Program, Walker offered to trim his own salary if necessary. When the company applied for Paycheck Protection loan in 2020, the company reported that it had eight employees.
Political activities
Walker is a Republican. In 2014, Walker appeared in a commercial paid for by the United States Chamber of Commerce supporting Jack Kingston's bid in the Republican primary election for the 2014 U.S. Senate election in Georgia. In 2018, Walker endorsed Secretary of State Brian Kemp for Governor in the state's gubernatorial election.
Walker supported Donald Trump in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and spoke on Trump's behalf at the 2020 Republican National Convention. In 2018, Trump appointed Walker to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, a special Government employee position; Trump reappointed him to another two year-term on December 17, 2020. In 2020, Walker endorsed U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler, serving as an honorary co-chair of her campaign.
After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Walker tweeted a video supporting Trump's efforts to overturn the election results. Walker has spread many conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. He claimed that Biden "didn't get 50 million" votes. Biden received over 80 million votes. Walker alleged that there was "country wide election fraud", urging Trump and "true patriots" to carry out "total cleansing". He urged re-votes in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Walker also spread a conspiracy theory about the 2021 United States Capitol attack, suggesting that it was a "well planned" distraction from election fraud. The event was actually orchestrated by Trump supporters.
2022 United States Senate election in Georgia
In 2021, Trump encouraged Walker to run for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, although Walker lived in Texas and needed to re-establish residency in Georgia. In August 2021, Walker announced his run for the Senate against Raphael Warnock. Walker's contemplation of entering the race "froze" the Republican field, because other prospective candidates for the nomination waited for his decision. In June 2021, Walker published a video on Twitter entitled "Georgia on my mind", in which he showcased a car with a Georgia license plate, intimating that he would run. Also that month, Trump said that Walker told him he was going to run for the Senate.
In July 2021, Fox News reported that some Georgia Republicans were not sure how effective a candidate Walker would be, citing the fact that his positions on issues of importance to Republican voters were unknown. Walker officially entered the race in August 2021. In October 2021, Walker's candidacy was endorsed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a sign that the Republican establishment was aligning behind him. That month, The Washington Post reported that Republicans were coalescing behind Walker's candidacy. Politico reported that Walker began his campaign with high favorability ratings and support from self-identified moderate Republicans, and that despite past news coverage of domestic violence allegations and his business career, he had become the clear front-runner in the Republican primary.
In December 2021, Walker's campaign deleted a false claim that he had graduated from the University of Georgia several hours after it was posted on a campaign website and after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution inquired about the claim.
Personal life
Walker married his college sweetheart, Cindy DeAngelis Grossman, in 1983. They have a son named Christian. After 19 years of marriage, they divorced in 2002. In filing for divorce the year before, Grossman accused Walker of "physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior." After the divorce, she told the media that, during their marriage, Walker pointed a pistol at her head and said: "I'm going to blow your f'ing brains out." She also said he had used knives to threaten her. In 2005, a restraining order was imposed on Walker regarding Grossman, after Grossman's sister stated in an affidavit that Walker told her "unequivocally that he was going to shoot my sister Cindy and her [new] boyfriend in the head." As a result, a temporary gun-owning ban was also issued to Walker by a judge. Walker attributed his aberrant behavior with his wife and others to his dissociative identity disorder for which he was diagnosed in 2001.
Walker has worked with numerous charitable and educational organizations. He was an Academy of Achievement honor student and later was the recipient of its Golden Plate Award.
Walker lived in Westlake, Texas, before moving to the Buckhead district of Atlanta prior to running for Senate. He formerly lived in the Las Colinas area of Irving, Texas.
Training and diet
Walker is known for his unorthodox training and dieting methods. Walker sleeps five hours a night and eats only one meal a day (skipping breakfast and lunch). Walker's diet is made up mostly of soup, bread, and salads. Instead of lifting weights, he has a daily regimen of 750 to 1,500 push-ups and 2,000 sit-ups. He has been using the same routine since high school.
Mental health issues and advocacy
Walker has spoken publicly about being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and has served as spokesperson for a mental health treatment program for veterans. He wrote the 2008 book Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder to help dispel myths about mental illness and to help others.
In the book, Walker wrote that he had a dozen distinct identities, or alters. According to Walker, some of his alters did many good things, but other alters exhibited extreme and violent behavior, which Walker said he mostly could not remember. A competitive alter caused him to play Russian roulette in 1991, as he saw "mortality as the ultimate challenge", he wrote. He was officially diagnosed with the disorder in 2001, after he sought professional help for being tempted to murder a man who was late in delivering a car to him.
Walker attributed his divorce to his behavior caused by the disorder. According to Walker's ex-wife, for the first 16 years of their marriage, Walker's alters were somehow controlled, and she had no idea that he had any disorder. Grossman said that the situation greatly deteriorated once Walker was diagnosed, after which he began to exhibit either "very sweet" alters or "very violent" alters who looked "evil". She said that in one situation where Walker exhibited two alters, she was in bed when he held a straight razor to her throat and repeatedly stated that he would kill her. Walker did not deny Grossman's account, saying that he did not remember it, because blackouts were a symptom of the disorder.
Reality television
Walker won season 3 of Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off (2014), a reality TV cooking show on the Food Network.
He was a contestant in the second season of the reality television show The Celebrity Apprentice (2009). Although he owns a food service company, he was fired during the 8th episode for failing as Project Manager on a task to create a new meal for Schwan's LiveSmart frozen food line. Throughout the season, each celebrity raised money for a charity of his or her choice; Walker selected "Alternative Community Development Services."
See also
List of Strikeforce alumni
Black conservatism in the United States
Notes
References
External links
1962 births
Living people
African-American Christians
African-American male track and field athletes
African-American mixed martial artists
African-American players of American football
All-American college football players
American male bobsledders
American football running backs
American football return specialists
American male mixed martial artists
Mixed martial artists utilizing taekwondo
Mixed martial artists utilizing boxing
American male taekwondo practitioners
Georgia (U.S. state) Republicans
Bobsledders at the 1992 Winter Olympics
Black conservatism in the United States
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Cowboys players
Maxwell Award winners
Georgia Bulldogs football players
Georgia Bulldogs track and field athletes
Heavyweight mixed martial artists
Heisman Trophy winners
Minnesota Vikings players
National Conference Pro Bowl players
New Jersey Generals players
New York Giants players
Olympic bobsledders of the National Football League
Olympic bobsledders of the United States
Participants in American reality television series
People from Johnson County, Georgia
People with dissociative identity disorder
Philadelphia Eagles players
Players of American football from Georgia (U.S. state)
Texas Republicans
The Apprentice (franchise) contestants
Track and field athletes from Georgia (U.S. state)
United States Football League MVPs
21st-century African-American people
20th-century African-American sportspeople |
825043 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARNet | AARNet | AARNet (Australian Academic and Research Network) provides Internet services to the Australian education and research communities and their research partners.
AARNet built the Internet in Australia. In 1995, the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) transferred AARNet1 as a going concern to Telstra who then operated it as the initial Telstra Internet. Today, AARNet is Australia's National research and education network (NREN). It forms the Australian component of the global advanced research and education Internet network.
AARNet Pty Ltd, which owns and operates the AARNet, is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 38 Australian universities and the Australian CSIRO. AARNet's services in addition to Internet connectivity include Eduroam, voice, video and data storage services and a content mirror.
History
AARNet was initially built between the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, where the international Internet feed initially landed, and university and CSIRO facilities in all Australian state capital cities and the Australian National University in Canberra. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC).
In 1989, Kevin Robert Elz established the first permanent Internet feed to Australia, at the University of Melbourne. Until this time, researchers within Australia had limited access to the ARPANET, due to the high expense of providing communications between Australia and the United States. The national network infrastructure generally consisted of groups of hosts connected throughout the country exchanging mail and files on a periodic schedule using the SUN3 software and protocols, with several international dial-up links around the country exchanging this information where required.
AARNet was initially built as a multi-protocol network, comprising Internet Protocol (IP) as well as DECnet and X.25 so as to accommodate pre-existing ACSnet and SPEARnet systems then in current use. With the rapid subsequent growth in popularity of the Internet, AARNet soon evolved into an IP-only network. In 1988, there were a number of popular network protocols, such as IBM's SNA and the CCITT's X.25, and the ARPANET's IP protocol was only beginning to become favoured. Australian National University staff members Geoff Huston and Peter Elford were seconded by the AVCC in 1989 and tasked with technical management and build of the new network.
AARNet introduced its 'value added reseller' program to allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to use its network, the first being Connect.com.au in May 1994. AARNet gradually became a wholesale backbone ISP, serving over 300 smaller ISPs by June 1995. At that point, about 20% of total AARNet traffic was from these other users, and AVCC decided to sell the AARNet commercial assets to Telstra, who currently operates it under the name Telstra Internet.
In early 1997, AARNet2 went into service, a network that used ATM links and Internet services under a contract with Cable & Wireless Optus (CWO), now Optus. AARNet became a separate company from the AVCC in 1999.
In 2001 AARNet deployed its own international capacity by acquiring 310 Mbit/s of capacity from Sydney via Hawaii to Seattle. As of 2006, the current network is known as AARNet3, and the backbone uses a dark fibre network provided by Nextgen Networks.
Chronology
Major milestones in the development of AARNet include:
Pre-AARNet – Pre-internet
1963: CSIRONET established by the CSIRO's Division of Computing Research
1976: CSIRONET had grown to connect more than 50 computers spanning from Townsville to Hobart to Perth via a combination of dial-up and low speed leased line connections
1979: ACSnet formed – used MHSnet to transfer files, email and newsgroups between computers in Australian universities and to the USA via low speed dialup connections
1986: South Pacific Education and Research Network (SPEARnet) formed – used X.25-based Coloured Book protocols to interconnect 22 Australian and New Zealand universities
1989: Internet brought to Australia via a NASA-subsidized 56 kbit/s dedicated satellite circuit between the University of Melbourne and the University of Hawaii
The early years – building the Internet in Australia
1989: AARNet established by the AVCC
1990: AARNet national backbone network built from Brisbane to Perth, each link initially at 48 kbit/s capacity, starring from a hub at the international Internet landing point at the University of Melbourne. AARNet national network was initially built as a multi-protocol layer 3 network, comprising Internet Protocol (IP) as well as DECnet and X.25 so as to accommodate the pre-existing ACSnet and SPEARnet networks. Connections to around 40 universities and CSIRO sites commissioned.
1990–92: International capacity increased in several rapid increments from 56 kbit/s to 1.5 Mbit/s, at an average 6 month doubling rate. In 1991, the national backbone links were upgraded to 2 Mbit/s. By 1992, AARNet connected 40,000 computers.
1991: 'Affiliate membership' programme and Acceptable use policy (AUP) established for government and research groups to join the network. By the end of 1993, AARNet provided services to over 300 government agencies and companies, including early Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Connect.com.au, Pegasus Networks and Internode.
1993: Local links to major customer sites progressively upgraded from low capacity carrier leased lines to microwave links for more capacity, typically 10 Mbit/s, at lower costs
1994: 'Value-Added Reseller' programme established and AARNet's AUP broadened to accommodate growing demand for Internet access from a wider range of users, including ISPs OzEmail and iiNet
1995: The AVCC sold the then entire Australian Internet (AARNet1) as a going concern to Telstra, including staff, infrastructure (routers, etc.), intellectual property and the entire commercial customer base. Telstra then took over operating AARNet1 as its initial Telstra Internet.
1996: AARNet2 tender awarded to Optus, accelerating the build of Optus' Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Internet infrastructure, capabilities and services
1997: AARNet2 ATM-based national network commissioned
Building the present AARNet
1998: AARNet Mirror site commissioned
1998: AARNet Pty Ltd established as a separate company
1999: Ownership of AARNet Pty Ltd transferred from the AVCC to Australia's universities and CSIRO
1999: AARNet's VoIP service commissioned
2000: AARNet telecommunications carrier license granted by ACA
2001: AARNet became the first research and education network to operate its own trans-oceanic optical-fibre capacity, initially comprising dual 155 Mbit/s links to Canada's CANARIE network
2002: GrangeNet built as a separate demonstration next generation network, through which various in the sector obtained their first exposure to then next generation gigabit Ethernet and long-haul optical fibre transmission systems. Later, when user institutions had operational need to interconnect their AARNet and GrangeNet services they also gained experience with the complexities of asymmetric routing.
2003: AARNet negotiated purchase from Southern Cross Cable of multi-gigabit 'SXTransPORT' trans-Pacific links via diverse paths
2003: AARNet buys into Nextgen Networks ensuring its survival as an independent long-haul optical-fibre infrastructure provider
2004: Dual 10 Gbit/s and dual 622 Mbit/s SXTransPORT trans-Pacific links commissioned
2006: AARNet3 national network commissioned
Up to the present
2007: Layer 1 point-to-point 1 Gbit/s transmission services ('EN4R') introduced for high-end research data transfer applications between points reached by the AARNet3 national network
2008: Direct link to Asia upgraded to 1 Gbit/s via diverse routes between Perth and Singapore, reducing latency (delay) to Asia, cf much commercial Internet traffic between Australia and Asia still traverses the Pacific Ocean twice via the USA.
2011: High-capacity Wave-division multiplexing (WDM) link built from Perth via Geraldton to the Australian site of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), and the various telescope facilities at the MRO in particular the initial Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope array at the site.
2011: Second optical fibre path to Asia commissioned, from Sydney to Singapore via Guam, increasing AARNet's direct capacity to Asia to 1.2 Gbit/s
2012: International capacity increased to a total of 90 Gbit/s trans-Pacific plus a further 3.1 Gbit/s in two diverse routes to Asia
2013: AARNet4 announced, which is upgrading the AARNet WDM national network capacity to multiple parallel 100 Gbit/s channels, ultimately 80 channels (total 8 Tbit/s).
AARNet generations
AARNet1 (1989–1997): Australia's first Internet:
AARNet-operated layer 3 routers; one PoP per capital city
national backbone: carrier-provided (Telstra) inter-PoP transmission capacity
carrier-provided trans-Pacific transmission capacity
AARNet1 sold to Telstra in 1995
AARNet2 (1997–2006): Fostered the building of Optus' ATM and Optus' Internet networks:
AARNet-operated layer 3 routers; one PoP per capital city
national backbone: carrier-provided (Optus) inter-PoP ATM transmission capacity
carrier-provided trans-Pacific transmission capacity
AARNet3 (2006–2013): The AARNet optical network:
AARNet-operated layer 3 routers; two physically-diverse PoPs in each capital city
national backbone: AARNet-operated optical fibre transmission capacity
AARNet-operated international fibre transmission capacity
Also delivers enduser Layer 1 optical transmission and Layer 2 VLAN switching services
AARNet4 (2013–present): The AARNet optical network grows:
entirely AARNet-operated
national optical backbone: optical fibre transmission capacity ultimately 80 wavelengths each at 100 Gbit/s (total 8 Tbit/s)
national IP network: 100 Gbit/s layer 3 routed network via diverse paths
international connectivity: 240 Gbit/s of optical fibre transmission capacity, via six network interconnect points in USA and one in Singapore
enduser services: layer 1 point-to-point optical transmission; layer 2 metro-Ethernet VLAN; layer 2 and layer 3 MPLS-based VPN services; high performance layer 3 routed access to global research and education (R&E) networks and the public Internet
AARNet Pty Ltd
AARNet was established in 1989 originally as an activity under the auspices of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC).
AARNet was formed into a separate company on 22 December 1998.
AARNet Pty Ltd, ACN 084540518, ABN 54 084 540 518, is a not-for-profit company limited by shares.
The shareholders are 38 of Australia's universities and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
AARNet Pty Ltd became a licensed telecommunications carrier (Telco) under the Australian Telecommunications Act on 27 November 2000, becoming Australian carrier number 61.
National network
The AARNet4 national network comprises high capacity optical fibre transmission paths between switching centres in major cities from Cairns to Perth as well as branch lines to Darwin, Hobart and several other locations. Because optical fibre repair times are long, the backbone network follows two physically diverse paths. As at late 2013, capacity on each leg of the routed network was between 10 and 100 gigabit per second (Gbit/s). Starting with only 48 kbit/s national backbone capacity in 1990, this reflects a similarly rapid exponential growth rate as for AARNet's international capacity.
The Network peers with external content providers and ISPs to increase performance and availability of the network. The organisation has a selective peering policy for peering with other providers. This policy applies to all requests for settlement-free interconnection with AARNet, either via dedicated connections or traffic via public internet exchanges.
AARNet provides the Internet to several million end-user devices at Australian universities, CSIRO, various other research and educational institutions, and some hospitals. Customer site connections are mostly at 1 to 10 Gbit/s rates, with most end-user Ethernet services at 1 Gbit/s, and Eduroam services at available Wi-Fi performance levels.
AARNet's layer 3 services are usually delivered at the AARNet PoP sites. With the introduction of the AARNet3 optical fibre network (i.e. from 2006 onwards) AARNet progressively developed capability to extend services to customer sites in some locations, as well as providing layer 1 and layer 2 inter-campus connections in those areas. Prior to that, and at other locations, it is end-customer institutions' responsibility to extend services to site and to provision their own inter-campus network links. These are either operated directly by AARNet such as in Queensland or provided by companion networks such as SABRENet in South Australia and VERNet in Victoria.
Summary of AARNet national IP network performance levels as at 2013:
National backbone links: mostly 10 to 100 Gbit/s
Customer site connections: mostly 1 to 10 Gbit/s
End-user services: mostly 1 Gbit/s Ethernet and available Wi-Fi rates
Continues to sustain traffic growth rates of 50% per annum year on year over the preceding decade
International connectivity
AARNet provides the Australian component of the global advanced Research and Education Internet network. AARNet has high capacity interconnections with North American (Internet2),
European (GÉANT) and Asian (TEIN3) components of the global network.
As at late 2014, AARNet operated a total capacity of 120 Gbit/s to North America and a further 5 Gbit/s to Asia. This equates to a 2.2 million-fold increase over AARNet's initial trans-Pacific capacity of 56 kbit/s in 1990 and represents an average doubling time of aggregate international capacity of only 14 months over the entire history of AARNet (cf. Moore's Law).
Application services
In addition to providing high capacity Internet transmission and routing services and a comprehensive range of core Internet services including BGP, DNS, NTP and IPv6, AARNet also provides a variety of higher-layer network services including:
Eduroam global federated authentication service, most often appearing as Eduroam Wi-Fi services on-campus and at associated locations
VoIP IP telephony services
AUCX unified voice and video communications exchange
Cloud services including CloudStor file storage service
AARNet mirror site to reduce load on international links due to repeated downloads of the same material.
To further optimise network traffic loads, AARNet operates high capacity peering links with various major content providers including the Australian ABC, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
Supporting big science
Throughout their life, a major driver for the very high capacities of advanced Research and Education Internet networks including AARNet has been to meet the needs of data-intensive research across a wide range of research disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities. For example, to interconnect major research instruments such as synchrotrons and telescopes in remote locations to high performance computer systems and researchers around the world, such as astronomers in Europe viewing the southern sky using telescopes in Australia or high resolution realtime video links between remote locations.
Most recently, AARNet has built a 100 Gbit/s WDM optical fibre transmission system from Perth to Geraldton and on to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia in support of Australia's component of the international Square Kilometre Array project and the initial ASKAP telescope array at the MRO.
References
External links
AARNet
AARNet mirror site
Education in Australia
Internet in Australia
Internet mirror services
Internet service providers of Australia
National research and education networks
Scientific organisations based in Australia
Technology companies established in 1998
1998 establishments in Australia |
2004121 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpress | Softpress | Softpress Systems is a software publisher with its headquarters in Witney in Oxfordshire, UK. The company was founded in 1993. Originally the developers of a print-publishing application called Uniqorn. Development of Uniqorn ended after Apple discontinued printing support for its QuickDraw GX component.
The company initiated the development of Freeway (currently version 7) in 1996, a DTP (Desktop publishing)-style website creation program. Freeway was an HTML generator, as opposed to an HTML editor, allowing users to design in similar ways to DTP applications rather than work directly with code. There was a Pro – professional – version and Express version – focused towards home and small business users. Softpress also developed Exhibeo, for creating web galleries and showcases.
Softpress Systems was managed by Joe Billings (managing director), Richard Logan (financial director), and Stewart Fellows (technical director).
Closure/resurrection
On 4 July 2016 Softpress announced that it had ceased trading, saying that "current revenue and new product development, are insufficient to sustain the company as a viable entity going forward’.
On 1 February 2017 the Softpress website stated "We missed you! We’ve returned from the netherworld..."
In October 2019, Softpress announced the upcoming release of Xway, "an entirely new 64-bit (Swift/Cocoa) application that has been written using modern development tools.” Softpress also expressed a philosophy behind Xway to be “Like Freeway but better”, and that they would be releasing a beta version of Xway soon thereafter. On 5 November 2019 Softpress released Xway (beta) as a free download to acclimate Freeway Pro users to this new web designing tool for macOS, citing: "Xway will run on Apple’s latest version of macOS and on earlier versions of macOS going back to 10.13 (High Sierra)."
References
External links
www.softpress.com
Software companies of the United Kingdom
1993 establishments in the United Kingdom
Companies based in Oxfordshire |
27080717 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open%20Environment%20Corporation | Open Environment Corporation | Open Environment Corporation (OEC) was founded by John J. Donovan in 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. OEC develops, markets and supports software that enables companies to create applications for distributed, client/server computing systems. OEC pioneered a three-tiered software architecture that allows customer to rapidly develop, deploy and manage software applications to access critical information quickly on an enterprise-wide basis.
OEC was bought out by Borland in 1996.
History
In 1992, Open Environment Corporation was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) by John J. Donovan, former chairman, pioneering three-tiered architecture. It was initially founded as a division of Cambridge Technology Group, and then spun-out in 1992.
On February 10, 1995 OEC completed its initial public offering on NASDAQ under ticker OPEN.
On August 31, 1995 OEC bought Jarrah Technologies Pty. Limited in a stock-swap.
In 1996 OEC was bought out by Borland.
Products
OEC Toolkit is a set of client/server application development software. OEC sold and marketed this product jointly with IBM. The product, which eventually would become known as Entera, was the first middleware product sold as a best-of-breed application server platform and pioneered the three-tiered client/server development model.
Notes
Software companies based in Massachusetts
Software companies of the United States
1996 mergers and acquisitions
1995 initial public offerings |
67318086 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed%20Rafiquzzaman | Mohamed Rafiquzzaman | Mohamed Rafiquzzaman is a computer scientist, electrical engineer, academic and author. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a Founder and President of Rafi Systems Inc., California a manufacturer of Intraocular (Cataract) lenses.
Rafiquzzaman has published over 40 papers. He has focused his research on microprocessor and microcontroller-based applications. He has also authored 18 books on digital logic, microcontrollers, and microprocessors, which have been translated into Russian, Chinese, and Spanish.
Rafiquzzaman is a chartered member of the 'Sixth Ring' of the US Olympic committee, and served as a manager of the Olympic Swimming, Diving and Synchronized Swimming events in Los Angeles in 1984. He has also served as a Co-chair of The President's Forum for the state of California, as an advisor to the US House Policy Committee's Technology Board, and as Computer advisor to the President of Bangladesh. From 2004 till 2008, he was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's economic recovery team for California.
Education
Rafiquzzaman received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 1969. He then moved to Canada and earned his Master's and Doctoral Degree from University of Windsor in 1972 and 1974, respectively.
Career
Rafiquzzaman is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona since 1978. Along with this appointment, he also served as Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Southern California from 1982 till 1987. In 1985, he was appointed as a Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at California State Polytechnic University.
In 70's, he worked for ESSO (EXXON) and Bell Northern Research. During 80's, he held appointment as Vice President of New Bedford Panaromex Corporation, and was also involved in the Space Shuttle project, and designing microprocessor-based Airport Remote Maintenance system for Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He is the Founder and President of Rafi Systems Inc. since 1989.
Research
Rafiquzzaman has worked extensively on microprocessor and microcontroller-based applications. He has authored 18 books on digital logic, microcontrollers, and microprocessors which have been translated into Russian, Chinese, and Spanish.
In his book entitled Preparing for an Outstanding Career in Computers, Rafiquzzaman has focused on the principles and basic tools to design typical digital systems such as microcomputers. He has also studied digital logic, computer architecture, and microprocessor-based system design. He based his book upon his previous book entitled Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microcomputer Design.
Rafiquzzaman has authored a book entitled Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microcomputer Design, currently in its 5th edition, and discussed computer design at three levels: the device level, the logic level, and the system level. He has also focused his book on system design features regarding popular microprocessors from Intel and Motorola, microcomputer organization, programming concepts, and future plans in context of microprocessor development.
Rafiquzzaman authored Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microcontrollers in 2014, which focuses on basic concepts regarding CPLDs and FPGAs. In his book, he has provided a tutorial in terms of compiling and debugging a C-Program using the MPLAB.
Awards and honors
1984 - Certificate of Appreciation for extraordinary Service, California State Polytechnic University
Selected books
Preparing for an Outstanding Career in Computers (2002) ISBN 9780966498042
Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microcomputer Design, 5th Edition (2005) ISBN 9780471727842
Microprocessor Theory and Applications with 68000/68020 and Pentium (2008) ISBN 9780470380314
Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microcontrollers (2014) ISBN 9781118969304
Microcontroller Theory and Applications with the PIC18F, 2nd Edition (2018) ISBN 9781119448419
References
Computer scientists
California Polytechnic State University faculty
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology alumni
University of Windsor alumni
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people) |
21063711 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%20Oregon%20State%20Beavers%20football%20team | 2009 Oregon State Beavers football team | The 2009 Oregon State Beavers football team represented Oregon State University in the 2009 NCAA Division I FBS football season. The team's head coach was Mike Riley, in his seventh straight season and ninth overall. Home games were played on campus at Reser Stadium in Corvallis. The Beavers finished the season 8–5, 6–3 in Pac-10 play, and lost the Maaco Bowl Las Vegas 20–44 vs BYU.
Schedule
Roster
Game summaries
Portland State
at Reser Stadium, Corvallis, Oregon
Game time: 2:30 PM EDT
Game weather: 60 °F (Overcast)
Game attendance: 41,679
TV Coverage: FSN Northwest
Oregon State faced Portland State for the third time in history, first since 2005, which the Beavers won 41–14. The Beavers also won the first meeting in 1983, 51–14.
Behind the legs of Jacquizz Rodgers, the Beavers thumped the in-state Vikings 34–7. Oregon State scored on their first play from scrimmage, an 87-yard touchdown from Sean Canfield to James Rodgers. Quizz ran for 103 yards and three touchdowns.
UNLV
The fifth all-time meeting between Oregon State and UNLV will be an early road test for the Beavers. The Rebels own the series between the two, 3–1. The last time the two teams met was in 2002, in which Oregon State won 47–17.
Jacquizz Rodgers ran for 166 yards and a score and also led the team in receiving with 10 catches for 65 yards. UNLV led a 4th Quarter rally in which they went from being down 20–7 to up 21–20. Sean Canfield then executed a 2-minute drill (helped by a pass interference call on 3rd and 26) that set up the winning 33-yard field goal by Justin Kahut. The win was Mike Riley's first road win in the month of September.
Cincinnati
In 2007, Oregon State traveled to Cincinnati and turned the ball over 7 times in the Bearcats 34–3 victory. They will be looking for revenge as the Bearcats come to Reser. This game will be a signature game early in the season for both teams.
Arizona
Once upon a time, the Wildcats owned Oregon State. They won 19 of 22 from 1966 to 1998. But those days are gone. Since 1999, the Beavers have won 9 of 10, including last season's 19–17 effort in Tucson.
Arizona State
The Beavers haven't won at Tempe since 1969, a span of 16 games. They will be looking to break the streak as the Beavers face the Sun Devils and former coach, Dennis Erickson.
The Beavers got hot early and the Sun Devils were never able to recover. An early miscue by the Sun Devils punter, gave Oregon State the ball on the Arizona State 17. A few plays and Jacquizz Rodgers punched it in. Another stop by the Beavs defense resulted in another punt, this one got off cleanly. A great return by James Rodgers set up a nice 32-yard rush by Quizz for another touchdown. ASU drove down the field and was forced to settle for a short field goal. The Beavers third score came on an amazing 25-yard reception from Canfield to Rodgers. James juggled it for the first nine yards in the endzone, but recovered in time to get his foot in the last yard for the score. Arizona State came out pretty sharp as they scored on their first possession. The Beavs came out and scored on a drive with three huge plays. Most notably a long pass to James Rodgers which set up an easy score from Sean Canfield to Damola Adeniji from the 2. Arizona took too long on their next drive, trailing 28–10. It took them over 6 minutes as they finally scored with :11 seconds left. A Sun Devil failed onside kick gave the Beavers the ball. Canfield took the kneeldown and the Beavs got their first win in Tempe in 40 years.
Stanford
Stanford shocked the Beavers in the opening game of the season last year. A late OSU rally came up short when WR Darell Catchings fumbles out of the end zone for a touchback while trying to extend for a touchdown. The Cardinal won the game 36–28.
Oregon State jumped to a quick start as Jacquizz Rodgers scored the first three touchdowns in the game, giving the Beavers a 21–0 lead early in the 2nd quarter. Witt the Beavers up by 24 at the half, Stanford had to focus on moving the ball quickly with the passing game, which took running back Toby Gerhart out of the spotlight. The Beavers won 38–28.
USC
In 2008, the #1 Trojans came to Corvallis and were upset 27–21. It was the second straight trip to Corvallis for USC that resulted in defeat. JacQuizz Rodgers ran for 187 yards on 37 carries and two touchdowns in the win. This year, Oregon State will attempt to win in the Coliseum for the first time since 1960. Oregon State is the second Pac-10 Conference school to have beaten USC twice during the Pete Carroll era, having done so in 2006 and 2008 (Stanford was first with victories in 2001 and 2007 and would do so again later in the 2009 season).
The last time Oregon State won against USC in the Coliseum was when Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President of the United States.
USC quarterback Matt Barkley passed to Anthony McCoy for an 8-yard touchdown to give the Trojans the early lead in the first quarter. The Beavers got on the scoreboard with two field goal kicks from Justin Kahut (both 48 yards). In the second quarter, Matt Barkley completed a pass to Ronald Johnson for a 22 yards touchdown. On second and goal, Barkley rushed for a 1-yard touchdown for the Trojans. Kahut kicked a 33-yard field goal for Oregon State just before the half.
In the third quarter, Sean Canfield passed to Jacquizz Rodgers for a 6-yard touchdown for the Beavers on a 3:06-drive that took 8 plays for 61 yards. The Trojans countered with a 7-play drive for 70 yards with Allen Bradford rushing for 2 yards for a touchdown. Canfield narrowed Oregon State's gap by completing a 15-yard scoring pass to Damola Adeniji. USC answered with Allen Bradford scoring a 43-yard touchdown.
Oregon State became the first team to score more than 10 points on the Trojans in their last ten home games (though Stanford and Arizona would both do so in their victories over USC in the Coliseum later in the season, with 55 points and 21 points, respectively).
UCLA
Justin Kahut kicked two field goals, 48 yards and 42 yards, to give the Beavers a 6-point lead. Oregon State increased its lead to 13 when Jacquizz Rodgers passed to Brady Camp for a 14-yard touchdown. Kahut's third field goal gave the Beavers a 16–0 lead at the half.
In the third quarter, Kai Forbath kicked a 24-yard field goal for the Bruins. Kahut kicked his fourth field goal (31 yards) in the fourth quarter to give the Beavers a 19–3 lead. A 58-yard pass to Nelson Rosario from Kevin Prince, combined with a 2-point conversion to Rosario, put UCLA back in the game, behind by only 8 points. Then Taylor Embree caught a touchdown pass from Prince and Johnathan Franklin caught a conversion pass to tie the game for the Bruins with 2 minutes left. But James Rodgers ran into the end zone for an Oregon State touchdown on a drive of 7 plays and 70 yards. UCLA took over the ball with 44 seconds remaining in the game and failed to make a complete comeback, losing their fifth game in a row.
California
Scoring in every quarter, the Beavers defeated the Bears for the fifth consecutive time at Cal, 31–14. Cal running back Jahvid Best left the game with a concussion in the second quarter. Sean Canfield threw 29 completions for 342 yards, most of them to Jacquizz Rodgers (9), James Rodges (6) and Joe Halahunt (6). Cal, after getting back in the Top 25 after four weeks, has given up more than 300 passing yards in each of the last three games.
Washington
Oregon State has won 5 straight against the Huskies, including a 34–13 victory in Seattle last year. Oregon State will be celebrating Dad's Weekend as the Beavers will try to keep there very slim Rose Bowl chances alive. Washington quarterback Jake Locker will make his return to Corvallis after leaving the field on a stretcher in 2007.
Oregon State won for the sixth straight time as Sean Canfield passed for four touchdowns and Jacquizz Rodgers added 159 yards rushing and two touchdowns. The other half of the Rodgers Brothers, James caught two touchdown passes and ran the opening second half kickoff to the one-yard line that really put the game away. Jake Locker passed for three touchdowns for the Huskies.
Washington State
Oregon State has beat up on the Cougars the last two years winning by scores of 52–17 and 66–13, respectively. The Beavers will look to continue that success while Washington State will look to stop that success at home.
Oregon State beat Washington State for the third straight year. Quizz ran for 165 yards and two scores and Sean Canfield passed for 2312 yards and two scores in the victory.
Oregon
Oregon crushed the Rose Bowl dreams of Oregon State last year in its 65–38 drubbing of the Beavers in Reser Stadium. This year the "Civil War" game will determine the Pac-10 representative to the 2010 Rose Bowl. Oregon State won the last meeting in Autzen, 38–31 in overtime. This is the first time in the series' 112–year history that the winner gets an automatic bid to the Rose Bowl. Oregon is the heavy favorite to win the game.
For the second straight season the Oregon Ducks denied the Oregon State Beavers a trip to Pasadena to play in the Rose Bowl. This year, however, with the win the Ducks go to the Rose Bowl to play the Ohio State Buckeyes. This Civil War was a see saw battle that was exciting from the opening kick-off. LaMichael James ran for 166 yards on 25 carries that included 3 touchdowns. Jacquizz Rodgers had 64 yards rushing and 73 yards receiving and a touchdown as the two featured backs didn't disappoint. LeGarrette Blount made his return from suspension in the 3rd Quarter sparking the Ducks offense. He finished with 51 yards on 9 carries and a touchdown. The turning point in the game was a critical decision when Mike Riley opted to go for it on 4th and 15 from the Ducks 27-yard line. The pass was incomplete and the Ducks took over. The Ducks ran out the remainder of the clock after converting 2 4th down plays on the drive sealing their ticket to Pasadena. The Beavers fell all the way to the Las Vegas Bowl to play BYU.
Rankings
Statistics
Team
Scores by quarter
References
Oregon State
Oregon State Beavers football seasons
Oregon State Beavers football |
43829949 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20D.%20Gannon | John D. Gannon | John D. Gannon (1948 – June 12, 1999) was a prominent Computer Scientist, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science University of Maryland, at College Park. Gannon was a leading researcher in software engineering, specifically the specification, analysis, and testing of software systems.
Career
Gannon earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1975 after which he became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland that same year. In 1980, he became Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and full Professor in 1988. In 1995, he became Chair of the Computer Science Department.
He served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association and was Chairman of the Board for the Graduate Record Examination computer science committee.
He was the Program Director for Software Engineering for the National Science Foundation and served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM Computing Surveys.
Awards
1993 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, University of Maryland
1999 Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery
Legacy
In October 1999, his wife, Nancy Garrison and brother, Rickard Gannon, established the John D. Gannon Memorial Scholarship "in recognition of his many contributions and achievements as a teacher, researcher and professional in the field of computer science."
External links
John D. Gannon Memorial Scholarship
References
American computer scientists
1948 births
1999 deaths
University of Toronto alumni
University of Maryland, College Park faculty
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Brown University alumni |
39593891 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visma%20Solutions | Visma Solutions | Visma Solutions is a Finnish joint stock company, which offers SaaS business software for companies. The company produces professional services automation software, E-accounting software, budgeting and forecasting software, e-invoicing service software, and an online signature service. Visma Solutions is part of the Visma group.
History
Visma Severa was founded in 2004 by Ari-Pekka Salovaara and Jari Kärkkäinen, who were studying at Lappeenranta University of Technology at the time. In 2010 company was acquired by Visma and from 2013 on has been part of Visma Solutions.
Visma Solutions was founded in the end of year 2012, when former joint stock company called Netvisor was named as Visma Solutions. Netvisor was founded by Markku Nylund, while he studied at Lappeenranta University of Technology. In 2000 Netvisor was merged with Bittivisio and the first version of the software was launched in 2002. Two later Cap Gemini Ernst & Young bought Bittivisio, but sold Netvisor’s business already in 2005 to Solanum Networks Economic Administration. From 2011 on Netvisor has been part of Visma group and in the end of 2012 the company’s name was changed to Visma Solutions.
In November 2020, Visma acquired Danish software company Ditmer.
Products
Visma Severa PSA software, which is optimized for organizations such as PR, advertising, design, IT, engineering, law, architecture and accounting firms.
Visma Netvisor is e-accounting software. The software has been developed over 10 years and it is one of the pioneers in the field of e-accounting and SaaS software.
Maventa is an e-invoicing service suitable for SME’s to multinational corporations.
ValueFrame is a PSA software suited for architects, advertising and communication agencies and consultants.
Visma Sign is a legally binding online signature service. Visma Sign can be integrated to online forms for immediate signing, or used to send signing invitations via email and text messages.
References
External links
Visma Severa website
Netvisor website (in Finnish)
Cloud computing providers
Business software companies |
67112321 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIN7 | FIN7 | FIN7, also associated with GOLD NIAGARA, ITG14, and Carbon Spider, is a Russian criminal advanced persistent threat group that has primarily targeted the U.S. retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors since mid-2015. A portion of FIN7 is run out of the front company Combi Security. It has been called one of the most successful criminal hacking groups in the world.
History
In March 2017 FIN7 engaged in a spearfishing campaign of company employees involved with SEC filings.
In August 2018 three members of FIN7 were charged by the United States Department of Justice for cybercrimes impacted more than 100 U.S. companies.
In November 2018 it was reported that FIN7 were behind data breaches of Red Robin, Chili's, Arby's, Burgerville, Omni Hotels and Saks Fifth Avenue.
In March 2020 it was reported that FIN7 were engaged in BadUSB attacks.
In December 2020 it was reported that FIN7 may be a close collaborator of Ryuk.
In April 2021 a "high-level manager" of FIN7 Fedir Hladyr from Ukraine was sentenced to 10 years of prison in the United States after he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking.
References
Russian advanced persistent threat groups
Criminal advanced persistent threat groups |
19713403 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian%20Linux%20Motivator%20Foundation | Indonesian Linux Motivator Foundation | Yayasan Penggerak Linux Indonesia (YPLI), or the Indonesian Linux Motivator Foundation, is a non-profit organization that develops Linux and other Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) software and human resources in Indonesia, including profession certification.
YPLI activities
Other activities include providing advocation, seminar speakers and documents in Indonesian regarding Linux/FOSS. A YPLI product is the BlankOn Linux distribution (GNU GPL licensed). BlankOn's first releases (version 1.0 and 1.1) were Fedora based distros. BlankOn version 2 (Konde), 3 (Lontara), etc. are Ubuntu based. BlankOn 8 (Rote) is Debian Based.
YPLI, with its BlankOn, has been a case study of UNDP and UNESCO as a successful example of FOSS implementation in the world. A complete PDF file of the book Breaking Barriers, The Potential of Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Human Development. A Compilation of Case Studies from Across the World can be found here (around 900 KB).
YPLI founders and management
Founders: I Made Wiryana, Mario Alisjahbana, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim, Rusmanto Maryanto, Effendy Kho, Resza Ciptadi, Firdaus Tjahyadi, Trias Adijaya, Erwien Samantha, M. Gani Salman, M. Aulia Adnan, PY Adi Prasaja, Mohammad DAMT, M. Zen Muttaqien, Ahmad Sofyan, Yulian F. Hendriyana, Dicky WP, Eko Kurniawan, Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo.
Advisors: Mario Alisjahbana, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim, PY Adi Prasaja, M. Aulia Adnan
Comptrollers: M. Zen Muttaqien, Ahmad Sofyan, Mohammad DAMT
Executives: Rusmanto Maryanto (Chairman), Resza Ciptadi (Secretary), Effendy Kho (Treasurer).
YPLI partners
YPLI is working closely with several institutions, such as:
UNESCO
INDOGLOBAL
RIMBALINUX
INFOLINUX
DIAN RAKYAT
LINUXINDO
PADINET
NURULFIKRI
and other parties who support or share the spirit to use, develop, and promote Linux/FOSS in the world, especially in Indonesia.
External links
YPLI official website
BlankOn Linux official website
BlankOn's page at Distrowatch.com
Linux Foundation
Foundations based in Indonesia |
60420419 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%20Thacker | Robert Thacker | Robert Thacker may refer to:
Robert J. Thacker, Canadian professor and astronomer
Robert E. Thacker (1918-2020), United States Air Force test pilot |
2438952 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik%20Bloodaxe%20%28hacker%29 | Erik Bloodaxe (hacker) | Chris Goggans, who used the name Erik Bloodaxe in honor of the Viking king Eric I of Norway, is an American hacker, founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack magazine. Loyd Blankenship, aka The Mentor, described Goggans/Bloodaxe as "the best hacker I ever met".
Security career
Around 1990-1991 Goggans and some other Legion members set up a computer security firm, Comsec, which went out of business by 1992. He later became a senior network security engineer for WheelGroup, a network security group.
In closing remarks at a 1995 conference, Goggans remarked that the global hacker community was disorganized and uncoordinated, suggesting that they focus an attack on some foreign country, such as France.
According to Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner in their 1995 book Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, Goggans was in the process of establishing his own computer security company in Texas in 1990. They claim he planned to recruit companies as clients by hacking them and showing how vulnerable their systems were to other hackers.
, Goggans is an internationally recognized expert on information security. He has performed network security assessments for some of the world's largest corporations, including all facets of critical infrastructure, with work spanning 22 countries across four continents. Chris has worked with US Federal law-enforcement agencies on some of America's most notorious computer crime cases. His work has been referenced in publications such as Time, Newsweek and Computerworld, and on networks such as CNN and CNBC.
He is a frequent lecturer on computer security and has held training seminars in nine countries for clients such as NATO, the United States Department of Defense, and Federal Law Enforcement agencies as well as numerous corporate entities. He has been asked to present at major conferences as COMDEX, CSI, ISACA, INFOWARCON, and the Black Hat Briefings. He has also co-authored numerous books including Implementing Internet Security, Internet Security Professional Reference, Windows NT Security, and The Complete Internet Business Toolkit.
During the summer of 2003, Goggans was invited to become an associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Center for Collaborative Research. During the winter of 2008, Chris Goggans was in India for the ClubHack hacker convention.
Currently, Goggans is president of SDI, Inc., a Virginia-based corporation providing information security consulting.
Issues with law enforcement
Goggans was raided by the US Secret Service on March 1, 1990, but was not charged.
In a 1994 interview he claimed he had never engaged in malicious hacking, explaining:
Malicious hacking pretty much stands against everything that I adhere to. You always hear people talking about this so called hacker ethic and I really do believe that. I would never wipe anything out. I would never take a system down and delete anything off of a system. Any time I was ever in a system, I'd look around the system, I'd see how the system was architectured, see how the directory structures differed from different types of other operating systems, make notes about this command being similar to that command on a different type of system, so it made it easier for me to learn that operating system.
"Sure, I was in The Legion of Doom. I have been in everybody's system. But I have never been arrested. I have never broken anything, I have never done anything really, really, criminally bad.”
However, in a phone call intercepted by the Australian Federal Police as part of an investigation into Australian hacker Phoenix (Nahshon Even-Chaim) Goggans was heard planning a raid in which the pair would steal source code and developmental software from Execucom, an Austin, Texas, software and technology company, and sell it to the company's rivals.
In the call, recorded on February 22, 1990 and later presented in the County Court of Victoria as evidence against Even-Chaim, Goggans and Even-Chaim canvassed how much money they could make from such a venture and how they would split fees from Execucom's competitors. During the call Goggans provided Even-Chaim with a number of dial-up access numbers to Execom's computers, commenting: "There are serious things I want to do at that place", and "There’s stuff that needs to happen to Execucom.". While there is no evidence that Goggans and Even-Chaim acted on this discussion, Goggans' statement of his intentions calls into question the nobility of his hacking ethics.
References
External links
Interview with Erik Bloodaxe
BLOODAXE COMES OUT SWINGING - Phrack editor Chris Goggans on Masters Of Deception Retrieved from the Archive on 2006-11-21
Gang War In Cyperspace
Legion of Doom (hacker group)
Living people
1970 births |
18092406 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob%20Kling | Rob Kling | Rob Kling (August 1944–15 May 2003) was a North American professor of Information Systems and Information science at the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, Indiana University, United States. He directed the interdisciplinary Center for Social Informatics (CSI), at Indiana University. He is considered to have been a key founder of social analyses of computing and a leading expert on the study of social informatics.
Bibliography (2000 to 2004)
Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2000). Students’ distress with a web-based distance education course. Information, Communication & Society, 3(4), 557-579.
Kling, R. (2000). Information technologies and the strategic reconfiguration of libraries in communication networks (No. WP-00-04). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R. (2000). Learning about information technologies and social change: The contribution of social informatics. The Information Society, 16(3), 217-232.
Kling, R. (2000). Letter from the editor-in-chief. The Information Society, 16(1), 1-3.
Kling, R. (2000). Letter from the editor-in-chief. The Information Society, 16(3), 167-168.
Kling, R. (2000). Social informatics: A new perspective on social research about information and communication technologies. Prometheus, 18(3), 245-264.
Kling, R., & Hara, N. (2000). Students’ distress with a web-based distance education course: An ethnographic study of participants’ experiences (No. WP 00-01-B1). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & McKim, G. (2000). Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1306-1320.
King, A. B., & Kling, R. (2001). Valuing technology: Organizations, culture, and change. American Journal of Sociology, 107(2), 533-535.
Kling, R. (2001). The internet and the strategic reconfiguration of libraries. Library Administration and Management, 15(3), 16-23.
Kling, R., & Callahan, E. (2001). Electronic journals, the internet, and scholarly communication (No. WP- 01-04). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., Fortuna, J., & King, A. (2001). The remarkable transformation of E-Biomed into PubMed central (No. WP- 01-03). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., Kraemer, K. L., Allen, J. P., Bakos, Y., Gurbaxani, V., & Elliott, M. (2001). Transforming coordination: The promise and problems of information technology in coordination. In T. Malone, G. Olson & J. Smith (Eds.), Coordination theory and collaboration technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kling, R., & Iacono, S. (2001). Computerization movements: The rise of the internet and distant forms of work. In J. Yates & J. V. Maanan (Eds.), Information technology and organizational transformation: History, rhetoric, and practice (pp. 93–136). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications.
Kling, R., McKim, G., & King, A. (2001). A bit more to it: Scholarly communication forums as socio-technical interaction networks (No. WP-01-02). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Hara, N. & Kling, R. (2002). Communities of practice with and without information technology. In E.M. Rasmussen, & E. Toms, American Society of Information Science and Technology 2002: Information, connections and community (Philadelphia, PA; November 18–21, 2002), 39, 338-349. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Kling, R. (2002). Critical professional discourses about information and communications technologies and social life in the U.S. In K. Brunnstein & J. Berleur (Eds.), Human choice and computers: Issues of choice and quality of life in the information society: International Federation for Information Processing 17th world computer conference (Montreal, Quebec; August 25–30, 2002), 1-20. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kling, R. (2002). Critical professional education about information and communications technologies and social life (No. WP-02-06). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R. (2002). The internet galaxy: Reflections on the internet, business, and society. Academe-Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 88(4), 66-68.
Kling, R. (2002). Untitled. The Information Society, 18(1), I-II.
Kling, R. (2002). Untitled. The Information Society, 18(3), 147-149.
Kling, R., & Courtright, C. (2002). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A socio-technical approach (No. WP- 02-09). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & Hara, N. (2002). Informatics and distributed learning (No. WP- 02-05). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & Hara, N. (2002). IT supports for communities of practice: An empirically-based framework (No. WP- 02-02). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & Lamb, R. (2002). From users to social actors: Reconceptualizing socially rich interaction through information and communication technology (No. WP- 02-11). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & Meyer, E. T. (2002). Leveling the playing field, or expanding the bleachers? Socio-technical interaction networks and arXiv.org (No. WP- 02-10). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., & Spector, L. (2002). Academic rewards for scholarly research communication via electronic publishing (No. WP- 02-13). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., Spector, L., & McKim, G. (2002). Locally controlled scholarly publishing via the internet: The guild model. In E.M. Rasmussen, & E. Toms, American Society of Information Science and Technology 2002: Information, connections and community (Philadelphia, PA; November 18–21, 2002). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Kling, R., Spector, L., & McKim, G. (2002). Locally controlled scholarly publishing via the internet: The guild model (No. WP- 02-01). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R., Spector, L., & McKim, G. (2002). Locally controlled scholarly publishing via the internet: The guild model. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 8(1).
Kling, R., & Swygard-Hobaugh, A. J. (2002). The internet and the velocity of scholarly journal publishing (No. WP- 02-12). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R. (2003). Critical professional education about information and communications technologies and social life. Information Technology & People, 16(4), 394-418.
Kling, R. (2003). The internet and unrefereed scholarly publishing (No. WP- 03-01). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R. (2003). Power issues in knowledge management (No. WP- 03-02). Bloomington, IN: Center for Social Informatics.
Kling, R. (2003). Social informatics. In A. Kent, H. Lancour, W. Z. Nasri & J. E. Daily (Eds.), Encyclopedia of library and information science. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc.
Kling, R., & Callahan, E. (2003). Electronic journals, the internet, and scholarly communication. In B. Cronin & D. Shaw (Eds.), Annual review of information science and technology, 37, 127-177. Medford, NJ: InformationToday, Inc.
Kling, R., & Courtright, C. (2003). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A Socio-technical approach. In S. Barab & R. Kling (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kling, R., & Courtright, C. (2003). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A sociotechnical approach. The Information Society, 19(3), 221-235.
Kling, R., & Kraemer, K. L. (2003). Letter from the Editor-in-Chief [Special issue: Globalization of electronic commerce]. The Information Society, 19(1), 1-3.
Kling, R., McKim, G., & King, A. (2003). A bit more to it: Scholarly communication forums as socio-technical interaction networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 47-67.
Lamb, R., King, J. L., & Kling, R. (2003). Informational environments: Organizational contexts of online information use. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(2), 97-114.
Lamb, R., & Kling, R. (2003). Reconceptualizing users as social actors in information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 27(2), 197-235.
Barab, S., Kling, R., & Gray, J. (2004). Building online communities in the service of learning. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kling, R., Spector, L. B., & Fortuna, J. (2004). The real stakes of virtual publishing: The transformation of E-Biomed into PubMed central. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(2), 127-148.
References
1944 births
2003 deaths
American information theorists
Information systems researchers
Columbia University alumni |
22063657 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiFi | MiFi | MiFi is a brand name used to describe a wireless router that acts as a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot. In many countries, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Inseego Corp (previously known as Novatel Wireless) owns a registered trademark on the "MiFi" brand name; in the United Kingdom, mobile operator Hutchison 3G owns the "MiFi" trademark. Novatel Wireless has never offered an official explanation for the origin of the name "MiFi"; it is believed to be short for "My Wi-Fi". In September 2016 Novatel Wireless announced that it agreed to sell the MiFi brand to TCL Industries Holdings of Hong Kong. The sale was expected to close in early 2017, pending approval from shareholders and regulators.
A MiFi device can be connected to a cellular network and provide Internet access for up to ten devices. Novatel Wireless introduced the first MiFi device in the United States, in May 2009. In the UK, 3's "MiFi" is a similar product from Huawei with the same name.
MiFi brand name
Novatel Wireless owns a registered trademark on the "MiFi" brand name in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico), and a number of countries worldwide: Bahrain, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, and Thailand.
The notable exception is in the UK where mobile operator 3 owns the "MiFi" trademark. In India the Mi-Fi trademark is owned by Mi-Fi Networks Private Limited
Devices
Novatel Wireless MiFi 2200
Limited to five Wi-Fi clients such as laptops, cameras, gaming devices, and multimedia players; with the exception of manually editing the device’s config file to allow more clients.
May be connected to a computer via a Micro-USB connection, though doing so disables the Wi-Fi networking, converting the device into a traditional single-client modem. (However, CNET has introduced a tweak to charge the device over USB while maintaining its functionality.)
Includes GPS unit, which is usable on some networks like Virgin Mobile and not on others like Verizon.
Uses 3G data network (CDMA 1xEVDO RevA).
Novatel Wireless MiFi 23xx series
Same functionality as 2200, plus:
Accepts SD card for in-device shared media storage.
Uses 3G data network (Mini 2352: SUPRA/PATHS 900/1900/2100 MHz, MiFi 2372: SUPRA/PATHS 850/1900/2100 MHz; both support GARS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz).
Novatel Wireless MiFi 33xx series
Same functionality as 23xx series, plus:
Linux-based MiFi OS with widgets:
Messages: perform SMS-based messaging actions such as reading, writing, sending, and receiving SMS messages
Data usage: track MiFi data usage in home and roaming networks
GeoSearch: leverage the GPS functionality of the MiFi to display a map of the local area, search the local area, display the search results on the map
Weather: fetch weather data for the current and defined locations
MiFi DLNA Server: start, stop, and configure the MiFi DLNA server
4G mobile hotspot devices
The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show 2011 saw the introduction of two new 4G-capable MiFi devices from Novatel:
Verizon Wireless featured the 4510L model, which will connect to Verizon's LTE 4G network, expected to support 5–12 Mbps download and 2–5 Mbit/s upload.
Sprint featured the MiFi 4082, a WiMAX version.
Both devices maintain backward compatibility with existing 3G networks. Other features include:
MiFiOS with widget support
MicroSD card slot
GPS receiver
Four-hour battery life
Front panel status display using E Ink technology. The front panel display shows battery, signal strength, and number of connected devices. The difficulty of viewing such information was seen as a major shortcoming of earlier MiFi devices.
5G mobile hotspot devices
In November 2019, Vodafone Qatar and Inseego Corp. together launched the Gulf region’s first commercially available 5G mobile hotspot, 5G MiFi M1100.
Connects up to 16 devices simultaneously (15 by Wi-Fi plus one by USB or Ethernet)
Power optimization features Quick Charge technology and high-capacity battery
Non-Novatel wireless devices
A number of providers other than Novatel provide personal hotspot, "MiFi"-like services:
Alcatel One Touch Link Y800 sold through EE in the UK
Dongler DL9255 - supports GSM and WiFi-Bridging connectivity
D-Link DIR-457/MyPocket
Freedom Spot Personal Hotspot
Goodspeed mobile hotspot supports 3G/3.5G
Huawei E5 E5830 (Series), E585, E586 with HSPA+ and Chinese market E5805 using CDMA2000 and ET536 using TD-SCDMA
mifi LTE nyx mobile is a mobile router 3G + 4G (LTE) launched by nyx mobile for Telcel. It is built using Qualcomm technology and is expected to support up to 100 Mbps download. (Announced by June 2013 for México
Netgear AirCard 781S (Sold under the name Zing by Sprint)
Option GlobeSurfer III
Packet One Networks MF230 (offered as part of their P1 ToGo plan)
Sierra Wireless Overdrive (Note: 4G capable; available only in the United States through Sprint)
tp-link M7450
ZTE MF60, MF80
JioFi is a mobile router 4G (LTE) launched in India.
Alternatives
Mobile phones with an Internet connection can often be turned into Wi-Fi hotspots using a process called "tethering", which is similar to using dedicated MiFi devices.
The following phone families have built-in features to create Wi-Fi access point:
Android phones running Android 2.2 or later
BlackBerry devices running OS 7.1 or later
iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 or later, and all iPhones on Verizon Wireless (initially released with iOS 4.2.5)
Palm Pixi Plus and Pre Plus on Verizon Wireless, with a 5GB cap
Windows Phone devices running OS 7.5 or later (and if allowed by operator)
For other phones there are third-party applications to allow this:
Android running Android 2.1 or under – Wireless Tether
iPhone 3G and later – requires jailbreak).
PiFi – Personal WiFi Device
S60 phones and Nokia N900 – JoikuSpot
Windows Mobile – WMWifiRouter
Awards
Novatel MiFi 2200:
Mobile Village "Mobile Star" (Portable Remote Connectivity Gear): "Superstar" Award (2009)
Laptop Magazine Editor's Choice (2009)
PC World "Gear of the Year" (2009)
Mobile News "Most Innovative Product (non-handset)" (2010)
Novatel MiFi 2352:
Plus X Award in Technology (2009)
CTIA Emerging Technology Award (Fashion & Lifestyle Products), 1st Place (2009)
CTIA "Hot for the Holidays" (Mobile Internet Device or Netbook) Award (2009)
CES Innovations Award (Enabling Technologies) Winner (2010)
Mobile World Congress "Global Mobile" Award: Best Mobile Connected Device (2010)
Novatel 4G MiFi
Consumer Electronics Show 2011, Notebook Accessories Category: Best in Show
2010 World Communication Award (WCA) for Best Mobile Device Strategy
Mobile Village Mobile Star Award for Best Laptop or Tablet Accessory
MiFi in the news
Security Issues
In January 2010, two major security holes were discovered with the Novatel MiFi 2200 which, if properly exploited, could allow a malicious user to obtain the device's current GPS location and security keys. If the malicious user were physically close enough to use the device's Wi-Fi signal, this could give access to the MiFi's 3G connection as well as any other connected devices. Novatel responded that a security patch would be available in February 2010.
The popularity of MiFi devices can also be problematic for corporate network security. Corporations generally expect to control on-site Internet access: many use firewalls to reduce the risk of malware, and some enforce restrictions aimed at employee productivity. Personal mobile hotspots may provide a "back door" by which employees can circumvent these precautions.
Recall
In May 2010, the Mifi 2372 was recalled in Canada by Bell Mobility and Rogers Communications. In two documented cases, difficulty of opening the MiFi battery compartment had caused customers to use levels of force that caused physical damage to the batteries, which subsequently overheated. Novatel replaced the recalled units with a type that featured an easier-to-open battery compartment.
Customers were sent prepaid courier envelopes and instructed to send back their MiFi units for replacement of the battery and battery compartment cover. Customers were notified that Novatel would return the serviced units within six to eight weeks of their return. Bell customers were provided with cellular Internet access via Novatel U998 USB sticks, which were provided as temporary replacements by Bell.
Radio interference at trade shows
At two major trade shows in 2010—Google's first public demo of Google TV and the iPhone 4 demonstrations at the 2010 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference—keynote presentations using available Wi-Fi connectivity were disrupted by network unreliability. The problem was traced to massive radio interference, caused by the popularity of MiFi and similar devices for "liveblogging" from the trade show floor. In the case of the Apple conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated that 570 different Wi-Fi networks ("several hundred" being MiFis) were operating simultaneously in the exhibit hall.
See also
References
Mobile hotspots
Mobile telecommunications user equipment
Wi-Fi |
11474616 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPL%20Tables | TPL Tables | TPL Tables is a cross tabulation system used to generate statistical tables for analysis or publication.
Background / history
TPL Tables has its roots in the Table Producing Language (TPL) system, developed at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the 1970s and early 1980s to run on IBM mainframes.
It was one of the first software languages that was task oriented rather than procedure oriented. To create a table in TPL, the user needed to specify his data and describe what his table should look like. He did not need to write procedures to create the table. This was in sharp contrast to the Cobol and PL/1 programs people were using at BLS to create tables before TPL. When statistical offices began moving to databases, TPL extended its non-procedural model to database access
The mainframe software gained international popularity during its time, particularly in government statistical offices, but at a substantial number of other sites as well. The BLS version of TPL was distributed by the United Nations. When TPL evolved into a commercial product, the UN connections remained. This led to such diverse customers as the census of the Comoros Islands [Population 600,000] and the census of the People's Republic of China [Population > 1,000,000,000]
BLS ceased major software development of the software in the early to mid-1980s. At that time, two developers of the mainframe product founded QQQ Software, Inc. and began development of TPL Tables, rewriting the system for PCs and Unix systems. The first version of TPL Tables was released in 1987. The current version is 7.0.
Uses
TPL Tables is used with many different types of data, from small surveys or other datasets to national level censuses. Its many formatting features allow creation of publication quality output that can be published on paper or on the web.
Text or interactive mode
TPL Tables has a language for specifying tabulations and controlling format details. This language is the same for both Windows and Unix versions of the software. The Windows version also has an interactive interface that can access most features and includes Ted, an editor used to display PostScript tables on the screen and edit them interactively.
Tabulation Features
TPL Tables can process an unlimited amount of data and produce tables that range in size from a few lines to hundreds of pages. Subsets of the data can be selected and new variables can be computed from incoming data or from tabulated values. Alternate computations can be performed depending on specified conditions being met. New variables can also be defined by recoding or grouping values of other variables. Table rows can be ordered (ranked) according to the values in a selected column. Other computational features include percent distributions, maximums, minimums, medians and other quantiles. Weighted values can be tabulated.
Inputs
TPL Tables can read files with data in fixed columns or delimited file types such as CSV Comma Separated Values . TPL-SQL, an optional add-on feature, provides direct access from TPL Tables to SQL databases produced by products such as Sybase and Oracle. In the Windows version, TPL-SQL can access databases for which there are ODBC drivers.
Outputs
TPL Tables automatically formats table output according to the table specification, available names and labels, and default settings. Tables can be created in PostScript or as text. Additional format features allow control of such things as page size, table orientation and column widths Rows or columns can be deleted, and labels and titles can be replaced. Display formats for data values can include alignment specifications and addition of special characters such as % and $. Footnotes can be included for both labels and data values. PostScript tables can contain proportional fonts in various styles and sizes.
Exports
Tables can be exported as PDF, HTML, or CSV. The Windows version also allows tables to be exported for use as input to PC-Axis .
Notes
External links
Home page for QQQ Software, Inc. and TPL Tables
QQQ Software, Inc. download page . Contains various documentation files, including the TPL Tables, Version 7.0 User Manual in PDF format.
References
Mendelssohn, Rudolph C., The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Table Producing Language (TPL), ACM Press, New York, NY, 1974
Survey Data Processing: A Review of Issues and Procedures, United Nations Department of Technical Co-operation for Development and Statistical Office, New York, 1982
Statistical software |
14972 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence | Idempotence | Idempotence (, ) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. The concept of idempotence arises in a number of places in abstract algebra (in particular, in the theory of projectors and closure operators) and functional programming (in which it is connected to the property of referential transparency).
The term was introduced by Benjamin Peirce in the context of elements of algebras that remain invariant when raised to a positive integer power, and literally means "(the quality of having) the same power", from + potence (same + power).
Definition
An element of a set equipped with a binary operator is said to be idempotent under if
.
The binary operation is said to be idempotent if
.
Examples
In the monoid of the natural numbers with multiplication, only 0 and 1 are idempotent. Indeed, and , which does not hold for other natural numbers.
In a magma , an identity element or an absorbing element , if it exists, is idempotent. Indeed, and .
In a group , the identity element is the only idempotent element. Indeed, if is an element of such that , then and finally by multiplying on the left by the inverse element of .
In the monoids and of the power set of the set with set union and set intersection respectively, and are idempotent. Indeed, , and .
In the monoids and of the Boolean domain with logical disjunction and logical conjunction respectively, and are idempotent. Indeed, , and .
In a Boolean ring, multiplication is idempotent.
In a Tropical semiring, addition is idempotent.
Idempotent functions
In the monoid of the functions from a set to itself with function composition , idempotent elements are the functions such that , that is such that (in other words, the image of each element is a fixed point of ). For example:
the absolute value is idempotent. Indeed, , that is ;
constant functions are idempotent;
the identity function is idempotent;
the floor, ceiling and fractional part functions are idempotent;
the subgroup generated function from the power set of a group to itself is idempotent;
the convex hull function from the power set of an affine space over the reals to itself is idempotent;
the closure and interior functions of the power set of a topological space to itself are idempotent;
the Kleene star and Kleene plus functions of the power set of a monoid to itself are idempotent;
the idempotent endomorphisms of a vector space are its projections.
If the set has elements, we can partition it into chosen fixed points and non-fixed points under , and then is the number of different idempotent functions. Hence, taking into account all possible partitions,
is the total number of possible idempotent functions on the set. The integer sequence of the number of idempotent functions as given by the sum above for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ... starts with 1, 1, 3, 10, 41, 196, 1057, 6322, 41393, ... .
Neither the property of being idempotent nor that of being not is preserved under function composition. As an example for the former, mod 3 and are both idempotent, but is not, although happens to be. As an example for the latter, the negation function on the Boolean domain is not idempotent, but is. Similarly, unary negation of real numbers is not idempotent, but is. In both cases, the composition is simply the identity function, which is idempotent.
Computer science meaning
In computer science, the term idempotence may have a different meaning depending on the context in which it is applied:
in imperative programming, a subroutine with side effects is idempotent if multiple calls to the subroutine have the same effect on the system state as a single call, in other words if the function from the system state space to itself associated with the subroutine is idempotent in the mathematical sense given in the definition;
in functional programming, a pure function is idempotent if it is idempotent in the mathematical sense given in the definition.
This is a very useful property in many situations, as it means that an operation can be repeated or retried as often as necessary without causing unintended effects. With non-idempotent operations, the algorithm may have to keep track of whether the operation was already performed or not.
Computer science examples
A function looking up a customer's name and address in a database is typically idempotent, since this will not cause the database to change. Similarly, a request for changing a customer's address to XYZ is typically idempotent, because the final address will be the same no matter how many times the request is submitted. However, a customer request for placing an order is typically not idempotent since multiple requests will lead to multiple orders being placed. A request for canceling a particular order is idempotent because no matter how many requests are made the order remains canceled.
A sequence of idempotent subroutines where at least one subroutine is different from the others, however, is not necessarily idempotent if a later subroutine in the sequence changes a value that an earlier subroutine depends on—idempotence is not closed under sequential composition. For example, suppose the initial value of a variable is 3 and there is a subroutine sequence that reads the variable, then changes it to 5, and then reads it again. Each step in the sequence is idempotent: both steps reading the variable have no side effects and the step changing the variable to 5 will always have the same effect no matter how many times it is executed. Nonetheless, executing the entire sequence once produces the output (3, 5), but executing it a second time produces the output (5, 5), so the sequence is not idempotent.
int x = 3;
void read() { printf("%d\n", x); }
void change() { x = 5; }
void sequence() { read(); change(); read(); }
int main() {
sequence(); // prints "3\n5\n"
sequence(); // prints "5\n5\n"
return 0;
}
In the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), idempotence and safety are the major attributes that separate HTTP methods. Of the major HTTP methods, GET, PUT, and DELETE should be implemented in an idempotent manner according to the standard, but POST doesn't need to be. GET retrieves the state of a resource; PUT updates the state of a resource; and DELETE deletes a resource. As in the example above, reading data usually has no side effects, so it is idempotent (in fact nullipotent). Updating and deleting a given data are each usually idempotent as long as the request uniquely identifies the resource and only that resource again in the future. PUT and DELETE with unique identifiers reduce to the simple case of assignment to a variable of either a value or the null-value, respectively, and are idempotent for the same reason; the end result is always the same as the result of the initial execution, even if the response differs.
Violation of the unique identification requirement in storage or deletion typically causes violation of idempotence. For example, storing or deleting a given set of content without specifying a unique identifier: POST requests, which do not need to be idempotent, often do not contain unique identifiers, so the creation of the identifier is delegated to the receiving system which then creates a corresponding new record. Similarly, PUT and DELETE requests with nonspecific criteria may result in different outcomes depending on the state of the system - for example, a request to delete the most recent record. In each case, subsequent executions will further modify the state of the system, so they are not idempotent.
In Event stream processing, idempotence refers to the ability of a system to produce the same outcome, even if the same file, event or message is received more than once.
In a load–store architecture, instructions that might possibly cause a page fault are idempotent. So if a page fault occurs, the operating system can load the page from disk and then simply re-execute the faulted instruction. In a processor where such instructions are not idempotent, dealing with page faults is much more complex.
When reformatting output, pretty-printing is expected to be idempotent. In other words, if the output is already "pretty", there should be nothing to do for the pretty-printer.
In service-oriented architecture (SOA), a multiple-step orchestration process composed entirely of idempotent steps can be replayed without side-effects if any part of that process fails.
Many operations that are idempotent often have ways to "resume" a process if it is interrupted ways that finish much faster than starting all over from the beginning. For example, resuming a file transfer,
synchronizing files, creating a software build, installing an application and all of its dependencies with a package manager, etc.
Applied examples
Applied examples that many people could encounter in their day-to-day lives include elevator call buttons and crosswalk buttons. The initial activation of the button moves the system into a requesting state, until the request is satisfied. Subsequent activations of the button between the initial activation and the request being satisfied have no effect, unless the system is designed to adjust the time for satisfying the request based on the number of activations.
See also
Biordered set
Closure operator
Fixed point (mathematics)
Idempotent of a code
Idempotent analysis
Idempotent matrix
Idempotent relation a generalization of idempotence to binary relations
Involution (mathematics)
Iterated function
List of matrices
Nilpotent
Pure function
Referential transparency
References
Further reading
"idempotent" at FOLDOC
p. 443
Peirce, Benjamin. Linear Associative Algebra 1870.
Properties of binary operations
Algebraic properties of elements
Closure operators
Mathematical relations
Theoretical computer science |
54207703 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%203D%20Realms%20games | List of 3D Realms games | 3D Realms is an American video game publisher and developer based in Garland, Texas. It was founded in 1987 as Apogee Software by Scott Miller to publish his game Kingdom of Kroz. Prior to Apogee's founding, Miller had released a few games he had developed himself, as well as a couple "packs" of games developed by himself and others, under a shareware distribution model whereby the games were distributed for free in return for donations. These games were inconsistently marketed under the name Apogee Software Productions, though after the company was founded they were sold under the Apogee Software name. Miller found that the standard shareware model was not viable for his games such as Beyond the Titanic (1986) and Supernova (1987), and beginning with Kroz the company pioneered the "Apogee model" of shareware distribution, wherein games were broken up into segments with the first part released for free to drive interest in the other monetized portions.
Soon after its founding, Apogee began publishing titles by other developers in addition to titles by Miller; these developers were often companies composed of a single designer. As Apogee expanded to include more people, some of these designers, such as George Broussard (Micro F/X Software) and Todd Replogle (Scenario Software), joined Apogee as employees and designed its later titles; Broussard joined the company in 1991 as a co-owner. In the 1990s, Apogee was best known for popularizing its shareware model and as the creator of franchises for MS-DOS on the personal computer such as Duke Nukem and as the publisher of games such as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D.
In 1994, Apogee decided to launch different brand names for each genre of games they published; it created 3D Realms for 3D games, publishing Terminal Velocity in 1995 and developing the 1996 Duke Nukem 3D under the name, with the other titles released in those years still under Apogee. In late 1996, however, Apogee renamed the company itself to 3D Realms to associate their brand with newer, 3D titles. 3D Realms launched a brand for pinball games, Pinball Wizards, in February 1997, but only published Balls of Steel (1997) under the name. Also beginning in 1997, with their licensed Duke Nukem sequels, 3D Realms shifted from episodic MS-DOS titles to non-episodic console and personal computer games. In the process it abandoned the shareware model in favor of a traditional publishing model; it also largely ceased its activities as a developer that same year, releasing only Shadow Warrior (1997). The sole exceptions were Prey (2006), which stayed in development until 2001 when it was transferred to another studio, and Duke Nukem Forever (2011), which famously stayed in development at 3D Realms as vaporware until 2009.
In July 2008, 3D Realms licensed the Apogee name to the newly formed Apogee Software, which publishes both older Apogee titles and new games. In 2009, financial issues drove 3D Realms to shut down their development department and publishing operations, canceling Duke Nukem Forever and its publishing involvement in the already announced Earth No More and Prey 2. In 2014, 3D Realms itself, then focusing on licensing its franchises to other developers, was sold to the investment firm backing Interceptor Entertainment, one of those developers; since then it has published two titles for Interceptor and has two more planned under its new name of Slipgate Ironworks. In 2017, 3D Realms announced a return to development with a partnership for Shadow Stalkers, expected in 2018 but later canceled. 3D Realms has since published several titles, and is involved in the development of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. During its history, 3D Realms has developed or published over 50 games, and granted licenses for 10 more. At least 25 games that 3D Realms was involved with were canceled, with some going on to be finished by other companies.
Video games
Many of the games published under the Apogee name were released as a set of separate episodes, which were purchasable and playable separately or as a group. Titles are listed for games that gave individual names to their episodes instead of episode numbers.
Games licensed by 3D Realms
Several spinoff games and remakes, especially in the Duke Nukem series, have been created with 3D Realms granting a license but without serving as the developer or publisher.
Canceled games
Several game projects were begun and abandoned before completion that had Apogee/3D Realms as the developer or publisher. Some of these were later completed by another developer or publisher, though many were not. In addition to these games, there are projects that were conceived but never began development, such as Dino Days (1991) and Commander Keen: The Universe is Toast! (1992), and titles which had preliminary agreements or offers for 3D Realms to publish where a final agreement was never reached either because the project was canceled or another publisher was chosen instead.
Notes
References
External links
3D Realms |