Hackers claim they can make a HERF (High Energy Radio Frequency) gun for $300. p151
Instruction manuals show how to penetrate a company's PBX telephone system of voice mail system and make free long distance calls; how to hack into computer systems from outside a building, using what is known as the Williams Van Eck system. p159
In a startling investigation into the vulnerability of FLAG, writers Neal Stephenson and Peter Leyden of Wired discovered that FLAG and four other truck cables, SEA-ME-WE 1,2 and 3, and AFRICA 1, will eevntually pass through a dilapidated old building within a stone's throw of the site of the Great Library of Alexandria. Clearly a strategically placed bomb could cause havoc with global communications. It is to be hoped that backup and redundancy will minimize the future threat. p173
In 1994 the New York Stock Exchange asked a German hacker to demonstrate how an attack could affect its systems. To its amazement, it was not the Exchange's "secure" systems he tried to invade, but the computers that controlled the air conditioning in the system's rooms. Having gained control of those he then had the power to raise the temperature to the point where machines would start to crash and the trading systems fail. p175
Tuesday 27 January 2009
Monday 26 January 2009
The Poverty of Historicism - Karl Popper
Thus in order to understand social life, we must go beyond the mere analysis of factual causes and effects, i.e. of motives, interests, and reactions caused by actions: we have to understand every event as playing a certain characteristic part within the whole. The event gains its significance from its influence upon the whole, and its significance is therefore in part determined by the whole.
p19
But can there be a law of evolution? Can these be a scientific law in the sense intended by T.H. Huxley when he wrote : "... he must be a half-hearted philosopher who ... doubts that science will sooner or later ... become possessed of the law of evolution of organic forms - of the unvarying order of that great chain of modern causes and effects of which all organic forms, ancient and modern, are the links ..."?
I believe that the answer to this question must be "No", and that the search for the law of the "unvarying order" in evolution cannot possibly fall within the scope of scientific method, whether in biology or in sociology. My reasons are very simple. The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a unique historical process. Such a process, we may assume, proceeds in accordance with all kinds of causal laws, for example the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of heredity and segregation, of natural selection, etc. Its description, however is not a law, but only a singular historical statement.
p98-99.
while we may base scientific predictions on laws, we cannot (as every cautious statistician knows) base them merely on the existence of trends. A trend (we may again take population growth as an example) which has persisted for hundreds or even thousands of years may change within a decade, or even more rapidly than that.
p106.
The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination. The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems that the historicist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change.
p120
What the "sociology of knowledge" overlooks is just the sociology of knowledge - the social or public character of science. It overlooks the fact that it is the public character of science and of its institutions which impose a mental discipline upon the individual scientist, and which preserves the objectivity of science and its tradition of critically discussing new ideas.
p144 (rubbish)
p19
But can there be a law of evolution? Can these be a scientific law in the sense intended by T.H. Huxley when he wrote : "... he must be a half-hearted philosopher who ... doubts that science will sooner or later ... become possessed of the law of evolution of organic forms - of the unvarying order of that great chain of modern causes and effects of which all organic forms, ancient and modern, are the links ..."?
I believe that the answer to this question must be "No", and that the search for the law of the "unvarying order" in evolution cannot possibly fall within the scope of scientific method, whether in biology or in sociology. My reasons are very simple. The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a unique historical process. Such a process, we may assume, proceeds in accordance with all kinds of causal laws, for example the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of heredity and segregation, of natural selection, etc. Its description, however is not a law, but only a singular historical statement.
p98-99.
while we may base scientific predictions on laws, we cannot (as every cautious statistician knows) base them merely on the existence of trends. A trend (we may again take population growth as an example) which has persisted for hundreds or even thousands of years may change within a decade, or even more rapidly than that.
p106.
The poverty of historicism, we might say, is a poverty of imagination. The historicist continuously upbraids those who cannot imagine a change in their little worlds; yet it seems that the historicist is himself deficient in imagination, for he cannot imagine a change in the conditions of change.
p120
What the "sociology of knowledge" overlooks is just the sociology of knowledge - the social or public character of science. It overlooks the fact that it is the public character of science and of its institutions which impose a mental discipline upon the individual scientist, and which preserves the objectivity of science and its tradition of critically discussing new ideas.
p144 (rubbish)
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